The 80s are coming back, we agree with the taxi driver as we are driven out from Liverpool Station. It's going to be terrible. W. lived in Liverpool in the 80s, W. says. He knows what it was like here. He shudders. We're finished. Doomed. How long do you think we have?
W. feels like the boy in Mirror who cannot follow orders. Turn around!, he and the other cadets are told. He turns all the way round, 360 degrees, ending up facing in the opposite direction to his fellow cadets. Why can't you follow orders?, he's asked. You told me to turn, he says. And then, I don't understand, he says. His parents died in the Siege of Leningrad, a voice comes. Another cadet, off camera.
His parents are dead. He's turned right round. Later, we see him walking along, whistling. Whistling and weeping. That's what W. will be doing, he says, walking along like a dazed ox and whistling, tears running down his face … I don't understand, that's all he will say. It's all he will be able to say …
Steel shutters pulled down over shopfronts. Streets boarded up. Whole sections of the city abandoned. A world without pity. Without mercy. Great walls raised against the sea from which the migrants will come (the rest of the world scorched, baked black …)
Then methane will come steaming up from melting permafrost. Then it will come bubbling up, melting, from the ocean floor. Then the Arctic ice will melt away. Then the seas will turn to acid. Then the skies will turn black. Then the lights will go out, and there'll be blackness everywhere. We'll die lingering deaths. We'll die in the sludge, very slowly.
I don't understand, that's what W. will be saying, face down in the sludge. I don't understand.
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