The Human Condition

but it's all so horrific that I can't stand it. Everything has changed and I don't know how or why. Arthur's body is just in front of me (I can see his feet sticking out from behind the sofa we were looking at buying) and they are all around here. Dark, decaying shadows of people who should be lying dead on the ground. Cold and empty bodies. Thank God there are none of them here in the shop with me. When I look up I can see them through the window, constantly moving up and down the street outside. I don't move so they don't see me, but if I make any noise they stop. I screamed and shouted at them to start with because I thought they'd be able to help me but now I know they can't. When they hear me they stop and stare and bang on the glass, and then more of them come. I'm used to being stared at. I don't move. I don't react. After a couple of hours they start to drift away.

    Arthur brought me here on Tuesday morning to choose a new sofa. Not that he needed me to come. There wasn't any point in my getting involved in the decision. It was down to him to choose one and try it out and decide whether or not we were going to have it. We got here early so that there wouldn't be many people about. If there are too many people then I just feel like I'm in the way. We'd just got through the front door and round to the sofa section when it happened. It got him and everyone else. I watched them all crumble and fall and I wish that it had taken me too. I kept waiting for it to get me, hoping and praying that it would, hoping and praying that it would soon be over. I can't stand being alone like this. It makes me feel more helpless and vulnerable than ever.

    I'm so hungry. And thirsty too. My mouth's dry and I'm so dehydrated that I feel like my tongue's swollen to ten times its normal size. I can't talk properly now, not that there's anyone left here to speak to. I think there must have been a fire near here a couple of days ago. People must have been trapped inside. I smelled the smoke first, then the burning bodies. It was like sitting the middle of a damn barbeque. The whole world stank of roast meat. Every so often I can still smell it. It made the hunger pains immeasurably worse.

    The worst part of all of this is the fact that I haven't got any control over anything. I've not had much control for a long time, but now I don't have any. It hurts more than the fear and the not knowing. I can't do a bloody thing about the situation. I can't do anything to help myself or to bring the end any closer. Help might be just around the corner, but I can't even get myself out of this damn building, never mind get anywhere else. An inch might as well be a hundred bloody miles for all the good it'll do me now.

    Just trying to look up takes so much energy. There are more bodies outside now, gazing at me with their cold, vacant eyes. I feel like a bloody shop window dummy. People always stared at me. You'd think I would have got used to it by now, but I haven't. I've never been able to handle the sideways looks and the glances and the stares and the whispers behind people's hands. Mostly they didn't say anything at all or they'd go completely over the top and patronise me. They made me feel like a freak. They always saw the wheelchair before they saw me sitting in it. I'm paralysed from the neck down, not up. I can't move my body, but that was the only difference between me and everybody else. My arms and legs might be numb and frozen, but I've always been able to feel pain and get scared and panic like everyone else. Christ knows I'm scared now.

    I would have been all right if it hadn't been for him, that stupid bloody husband of mine. If he'd have left me there after the fall I would have been okay. It would have taken time to get well again, but I would have been okay. But no, he knew best, didn't he. It was him trying to move me that did the real damage to my neck. He blamed himself and so did I. And now here I am, trapped in this cold, dark and empty place and starving to death with the rest of the world already dead around me. I can't move an inch, and all I have for company is Arthur's useless corpse. I don't know what I did to deserve this.

    Come on death, hurry up. Enough's enough. I want it to be over now.

    I'm tired of sitting in this bloody chair just waiting...

DAY SEVEN

AMY STEADMAN Part iv

    It is now several days since Amy Steadman's corpse took its first unsteady steps away from the shadows of the building where she