heat, the father looked for local news. He got national. All available channels had switched from the Gabon River Fever aboard the refugee ships
drifting off the coast of Italy, and moved away from the new bug in Hong Kong, to continue the summer’s top story: the forest fires. Flashing into the darkness of his room came the onscreen
pictures of the blaze in Spain, Portugal, and France, filmed from as close as safety would allow, and from space, where the smoke was visible as a black cloud over the Mediterranean. Subtitles ran
across the bottom of the screen to tell viewers that more firemen were missing, fifty this time in Spain.
He tried another channel, then another, but similar pictures continued to flicker across the dark walls and ceiling. There were long lines of black rubber sacks in a vast warehouse with grey
walls. People wearing masks walking between the rows of dark lumps, like scientists waiting for pupae to hatch. The caption said Paris.
That summer an expert called the heatstroke a ‘climate holocaust’. Like all bad things the phrase caught on quickly. As the father drove back to Devon two weeks before, he’d
passed refrigerated supermarket trucks, taking their cargo out of Torbay Hospital and up the M5 at night, on their way to the makeshift mortuaries near Taunton. Airport buildings were now being
used. So many had come to the coast to retire, but were retiring from life sooner than they’d anticipated. The care homes were emptier after three months of such heat, or at least the
cash-strapped bedlams were. The refugee camps were not air-conditioned either, and the heat had cut a swathe through their elderly too.
Every second summer now.
There was not much worse than being old, the father had decided long ago. But he still wanted to be old, and when his time came he wanted his daughter to be there and to hold him in her arms
like he was her baby.
The father took the mute off.
Reports cited a death toll of three hundred thousand across Europe, and climbing with the mercury. Old people, refugees, the homeless: the usual suspects. The summer records of ’29 and
’33 had been broken; ’47’s body count was now in sight. The European summer had been set a new challenge of how long it could smother, and of how many it could take away.
Crop losses too of thirty-two billion euros across three months of heat and drought. Atmospheric carbon emissions had leapt again. Another positive feedback: plant stress. Plants and trees were
throwing out what they were supposed to be sucking down. Another loop getting tighter, closer than the air, every second summer. At times, when the father struggled to breathe, he thought he could
sense all of the dry, exhausted trees releasing their last gases like dying breaths.
Pictures of river beds came next. They made him feel worse than the sight of flames shrieking through the tops of trees. Brown trickles in cracked mud: the Rhine, the Po, the Loire. Rainfall
down ten per cent with poisonous algae blooming in depleted lakes. He tried to imagine what the algae looked like but didn’t have the strength. People were being told not to drink the water
or bathe in it to escape the heat.
White smoke above a forest in Germany.
Them too now
. Red coals smouldered beneath the plumes. The trees reminded the father of tall, thin people, all panicking and unable to move their
feet. These pictures made breathing seem more difficult and he thought he could smell smoke again.
An area as big as Denmark was already ash and black bones in southern Europe. People thanked God there wasn’t much wind. A small mercy. A land mass as big as Luxemburg had gone up in
northern Spain a few years back and choked Barcelona. The father only briefly considered what the scorch mark would be like in ten years’ time, by 2063: a black smudge the size of France? No
one could bear to think that way. Guesses and estimates were unwelcome in most company.
Pictures of a rockslide, filmed
drifting off the coast of Italy, and moved away from the new bug in Hong Kong, to continue the summer’s top story: the forest fires. Flashing into the darkness of his room came the onscreen
pictures of the blaze in Spain, Portugal, and France, filmed from as close as safety would allow, and from space, where the smoke was visible as a black cloud over the Mediterranean. Subtitles ran
across the bottom of the screen to tell viewers that more firemen were missing, fifty this time in Spain.
He tried another channel, then another, but similar pictures continued to flicker across the dark walls and ceiling. There were long lines of black rubber sacks in a vast warehouse with grey
walls. People wearing masks walking between the rows of dark lumps, like scientists waiting for pupae to hatch. The caption said Paris.
That summer an expert called the heatstroke a ‘climate holocaust’. Like all bad things the phrase caught on quickly. As the father drove back to Devon two weeks before, he’d
passed refrigerated supermarket trucks, taking their cargo out of Torbay Hospital and up the M5 at night, on their way to the makeshift mortuaries near Taunton. Airport buildings were now being
used. So many had come to the coast to retire, but were retiring from life sooner than they’d anticipated. The care homes were emptier after three months of such heat, or at least the
cash-strapped bedlams were. The refugee camps were not air-conditioned either, and the heat had cut a swathe through their elderly too.
Every second summer now.
There was not much worse than being old, the father had decided long ago. But he still wanted to be old, and when his time came he wanted his daughter to be there and to hold him in her arms
like he was her baby.
The father took the mute off.
Reports cited a death toll of three hundred thousand across Europe, and climbing with the mercury. Old people, refugees, the homeless: the usual suspects. The summer records of ’29 and
’33 had been broken; ’47’s body count was now in sight. The European summer had been set a new challenge of how long it could smother, and of how many it could take away.
Crop losses too of thirty-two billion euros across three months of heat and drought. Atmospheric carbon emissions had leapt again. Another positive feedback: plant stress. Plants and trees were
throwing out what they were supposed to be sucking down. Another loop getting tighter, closer than the air, every second summer. At times, when the father struggled to breathe, he thought he could
sense all of the dry, exhausted trees releasing their last gases like dying breaths.
Pictures of river beds came next. They made him feel worse than the sight of flames shrieking through the tops of trees. Brown trickles in cracked mud: the Rhine, the Po, the Loire. Rainfall
down ten per cent with poisonous algae blooming in depleted lakes. He tried to imagine what the algae looked like but didn’t have the strength. People were being told not to drink the water
or bathe in it to escape the heat.
White smoke above a forest in Germany.
Them too now
. Red coals smouldered beneath the plumes. The trees reminded the father of tall, thin people, all panicking and unable to move their
feet. These pictures made breathing seem more difficult and he thought he could smell smoke again.
An area as big as Denmark was already ash and black bones in southern Europe. People thanked God there wasn’t much wind. A small mercy. A land mass as big as Luxemburg had gone up in
northern Spain a few years back and choked Barcelona. The father only briefly considered what the scorch mark would be like in ten years’ time, by 2063: a black smudge the size of France? No
one could bear to think that way. Guesses and estimates were unwelcome in most company.
Pictures of a rockslide, filmed
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