2829 words (11 minute read)

The Great British Museum

The next morning Gale was already into another can of beans when I made my way into the kitchen.

“Morning Honey,” I say lightly. “Have you got my newspaper and coffee ready yet?” My voice is light and I don’t plan on letting gale know the previous night’s talks had bothered me.

“Why certainly Dear, I’ve got your favourite Moca Tomato Beano, and the Daily Darkness just landed on the front steps.” Apparently she was also not going to discuss the previous evening, and I was glad we at least had one thing to agree on.

“What are your plans for the day?” she asks.

“Nothing much, I was planning on scouting out a new house, since this one had been infiltrated and cleared out of almost all my stock.”

“Well, the next house you get to, just remember that people can get through upper windows just as easily as through the front door, so all your booby-traps on the bottom floor are great, but they don’t cover all your bases.”

Ah, I’d wondered how she’d gotten past everything without me noticing anything different. Good to know. “Well next time I’ll lay a welcome mat for you in front of my bedroom window…” I smile a genuine smile at her. “No wait, I forgot you don’t actually need an invitation or welcome to visit.”

She smiles at my joke, but doesn’t offer a response, which I take as her receiving the message that future unwanted visits won’t be as welcome.

“Where are you going from here?” I ask, more to break the silence then real interest. The sooner she was away, the sooner I could secure a new place to stay. If one person is able to find me, others will be able too.

“I’m actually heading to the British museum,” she says, wiping the last bit of tomato sauce from her chin and slamming the empty tin on the marble counter.

“Really? Trying to sharpen up on your knowledge of British history before you go and invade Spain?”

“Actually, I am going in preparation of my trip. A few days before the blackout our class went on a trip to the museum. All the vending machines had been empty, and I remember asking the information lady where everything was, because I had been looking for a packet of Lays and she’d said they had received the wrong order, so they couldn’t pack the new stock in yet. So my guess is, somewhere in the museum is a room filled with delicious salt and vinegar chips, and maybe even some other refreshing items which I would need before I tried head to Española again.”

I thought for a second. I realised I’d gone through almost all the big stadiums and venues in the city looking for food, but at the same time I’d never thought of the museum with any food. It just hadn’t registered in my mind. But of course there would be food. Thousands of tourists must have gone through there per day.

“Tell you what, let me join you on your trip to the library…”

“Museum,” Gale interjects with an expression which clearly added “idiot” to her sentence.

“Museum. Then I can help you carry some stuff back, you know, help you load up properly for your trip, and get you on your way. How does that sound?” This sounded like an ideal time to recover some of the losses I’ve led at the hands of Gail over the past 12 hours. I was quite sure the cans of food I’d seen her consume had only been the tip of the ice berg she’s stowed away in her own bag.

“So you mean you want to partner up?” she says, and I can clearly hear excitement bubbling underneath the surface of her voice.

“Let’s rather say we are two organisms who for a limited time are in a state of symbioses,” I say.

“When were you so hungry you ate your way through a dictionary?” she laughs, and I laugh along with her, excited about the prospect of something other than Heinz to eat, and in my heart of hearts glad that she will be somewhere far away from this city. Somewhere I didn’t have to look after her or anyone else.

XxX

There was a cold wind whistling through the Greek columns of the British Museum. I’d been there once previously. It wasn’t too bad. The place had been crowded with tourists and people taking photos of everything. From the outside of the building to the inside, even the signs indicating which way to the restrooms. People had been everywhere, storming from one great marbled hall to the next, trying to cram thousands of years of history onto a single memory card.

But today wasn’t the same as the last time I’d been here. The iron lattices surrounding the premises had been left unattended. The gates were left wide open, and the most obvious difference: not a single person in sight. The only noise was our soft shuffling feet and the wind blowing around the corners of the great building.

“Do you think we should pay an entrance fee?” Gale mutters.

“You actually want to buy a ticket to get in? I think I’ve got a plan how to keep you out of my houses from now on. I just need to put up a ticket booth,” I whisper back.

“Ha. Ha. Ha. Very funny, but you won’t have to worry, if we find all the food I need I’ll be spending my time tanning in sunny Spain instead of looking for your washed out face.”

We jog up towards the large doorway leading towards the entrance hall. The one massive door on the left is tilted slightly askew, and the other still stands up straight, leaving a small gap at the bottom to crawl into the building. We poke our heads inside the gap, standing on hands and knees with heads together to hear if there are any sounds coming from inside. The great empty echoing hallways hum with the slight stirring of wind making it into the building. After two minutes we decide it’s all clear, and we crawl in, first Gale and then me.

When I stand up in the huge empty space that use to be flooded with thousands of people entering and exiting the building, I suddenly feel extremely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I am but a smear of fleshy, watery tissue, held together with brittle bones and sinews, a full 160 pounds surrounded by tons and tons of rock as hard as iron, as unbreakable as a mountain. The building is too large and imposing for two little humans to be occupying any space in it. I feel like we’re trespassing.

But Gale is already walking off to the first throughway to the left. A sign hanging above the hallway says ‘Medieval Europe’. She walks forward so confidently that I assume she must know where she’s going. I follow her for five minutes, through room upon room of medieval artefacts. Swords, crossbows, armour and stuffed animals line the walls and fill the glass cabinets crammed into every corner of every room. I don’t really take anything in as I’m not really interested in ancient scrap, only food and something to drink. After another five minutes we’d passed into the ancient Orient, and swords and books were exchanged for sharp samurai blades and poems written on papyrus in unrecognizable Chinese.

“Gale,” I whisper, “do you actually know where we’re going, or is this the most quiet tour guide experience ever given in the museum?”

She turns around with her hoody still drawn low, almost covering her eyes and says, “it’s not much further, we just need to get to a service exit which shouldn’t be much further ahead. It’s in the Ancient Egyptian part of the museum.”

Sure enough we soon reach a new exhibition hall that has a fake set of pyramids, miniature rolling sand dunes and sphinxes guarding the entrance. I could see this was a much older part of the museum. The windows in the furthest corner was letting in some light that had struggled its way through the overcast weather outside. It gave the room a greyish tint, making everything look even older then it was.

We walked past continuous glass cases containing everything from Egyptian jewellery, drawings and papyrus scrolls, pieces of clothing and tools that had been used thousands of years ago. There was a doorway that led off to the left where I could see a large black stone box placed on a higher level in the centre of the room. I thought we were going that way, but gale quickly pulled me back and said, “No, not that way. The service door should be in the opposite room.”

She leads me to the opposite room where we immediately turn left, and there is a metal door painted the same colour as the beige wall. She tries the handle and the door opens with a soft metallic click. For some reason I had expected it to be locked, but thinking about it now, I couldn’t see how they could have kept it locked after the electricity had gone out.

We went in and immediately realised the passageway didn’t have any windows, therefore no natural light could get in here. Gale pushed the door closed but left a small gap which provided the last bit of light for us to use, a small dingy strip of second hand light that ran along the left wall. The rest of the space was completely dark and I had no idea what was lying ahead, and the thought made my stomach do a small somersault.

“Gale, I don’t like this… We don’t have an idea what - or who - is in front of us.”

“Relax Shaun, it’s only a bit of darkness. You saw the rest of the museum? It’s completely empty, no one has been in here for months. You can see the spider webs in the corner of the doorframe.” Gale had dropped the hoody and I could just see her stretching her eyes, trying to get them to adapt to the darkness quicker.

I looked up and saw the spider web, but all that told me was that no one had decided to clean here in the past couple of months, but I decided not to share this view with Gale. Instead I said, “Okay, so if you know where to go, lead the way.”

Gale elbowed me in the ribs on her way past me into the darkness, clearly thinking I was only afraid of the dark. We kept our left hands on the left hand side wall, taking slow steps in front of us in the utter darkness. We soon see illuminated green arrows running in the opposite direction from where we came, clearly emergency exit markings. It shed the smallest bit of light, and made it just possible to distinguish the set of stairs we came to leading down into the belly of the museum.

“The storeroom should be just down these stairs. All these bottom storage units are linked to each other and apparently it can be like a maze down there, so try not to get lost.” Gale said the last part over her shoulder, and though I couldn’t see her face, I could hear her facial expression. I wondered at how she knew all this, but remembered that she had always been extremely inquisitive at school, and apparently not only at school.

We keep our hands on the left hand wall, inching our way down every stair. A staircase in absolute darkness is never a very safe place, and twisting an ankle could be very costly these days. I count 10 steps before we reach a landing and the left wall turns us 90 degrees and then 90 degrees again to the right. Gale is only a step ahead of me and suddenly I just hear a small yelp from her. I reach out and manage to grab the back fabric of her hoody and yank her back. I had thought she’d realised it had only been a landing and we were going around towards the second part of the staircase.

“Thanks,” she mutters, and I can hear her breath is racing, the adrenalin already spread through every part of her body. “Just misplaced my foot.” She stood still for another couple of seconds where I could only hear her quick breaths. “You can let go of me know, I’ve got it.” I let go of her and put my hand back on the cool wall, my own breath slowly slowing down as well.

Another 10 small steps and this time we reach the bottom floor. The green fluorescent stickers on the floor aren’t as bright as they were on the upper landing, but they shed enough light so that I could see an open door right in front of us and a hallway stretching away into the darkness on the right, with my left hand still on the bare, solid wall.

Gale turns around towards me with a smirk. “Told you.”

We go through the open door and there we see and feel loads of boxes tacked high, almost touching the low ceiling. Gale heads to the right hand side of the room and I feel my way along the left. I soon stumble across a box which appears to be open. I reach down and inside I feel glorious foil packaging. I lift the package up right in front of my eyes, and stretch my eyes to happily read: “Lay’s Lightly Salted”.

It was probably the flavour I least liked in the world when I was younger, but now it was like manna and I feel joy I haven’t felt for quite a while. This was light weight food, easily stored, kept for days, and helped to fill little holes. But the best thing of all, was if there were boxes of chips, there would be other treats as well, and soon enough gale called me closer in an excited voice to see what she had found.

I made my way over, following the general direction of her voice and found her sitting next to a box which contained 24 plastic bottles. “What did you find here? It looks like you got something a bit nicer then the Lays I found.” I only see the whites of her wide eyes, and strangely her teeth apparently glowing in the darkness. “Yes! I found the most expensive liquid on the planet! Someone had tried hiding it right at the back underneath a bunch of empty cartons…” And sure enough, in her hand she was holding a bottle which she thrust into my face. ‘Pure Still Water.’ I couldn’t believe my eyes, we had found on of the truly scarce resources, one people were willing to kill for, and for which the most died because they couldn’t get enough in time. I’d had canned drinks and beers for weeks, and that was more than most people had these days, but to find water was truly precious.

I grabbed Gale in a tight hug and yanked her onto her feet, laughing and swinging her around. “Gale, have I ever told you that you’re actually not such a bad person to be around?” She doesn’t even respond with an answer but merely laughs and what sounds like sobs as we jump around the room. We go on for probably a minute, when we finally stop and catch our breath, when suddenly a bright light shines into our eyes. I let go of Gale and lift my hand up to shield my eyes from the bright light shining straight into them. Below the light I see four black shadowy legs standing in the doorway.

“My apologies, should we come back at a better time?”

Next Chapter: The Light, the Darkness and the Thoughts