29 Sydenham Road

In 1888, when Jack the Ripper was sharpening his blades and the Queen was mourning her Scottish gilly and making old eyes at Abdul Karim, a young couple moved into the street. It was newly built, and yet even in its infancy the red bricks were coated in the soot of empire, and such little grass as there was in the strip about the porch was not green but queerly grey.

The wife was heavily pregnant when they arrived and Mrs Garfield noted to a neighbour that she was not a natural brood mare. ‘She does not have the hips for it,’ she confided.

Mrs Garfield was both right and wrong about it. Julia Campbell’s hips managed it alright, but she almost died, and the boy, Arthur, was fated to be the only child she would carry to term. There were years of blood and tears.

Little did she know that Arthur was himself fated - that just a year later, in Braunau am Inn, another baby boy was born, and thus the anthem for doomed youth began.

In 1914 she begged him not to go, but how could he possibly not? He was a fit boy in his twenties, all his mates from the railways were going, he’d be in his own pals battalion, and nothing could happen to him when Ginger Carson was watching his back. Hadn’t they always watched each other’s back, man and boy?

When the telegraph was created, everyone thought what a marvellous invention! The people of Sydenham Road were unlikely to ever receive one, but nonetheless, here was real progress! How sour that notion tasted when the telegram boy became the most feared intruder, the squeaking of the little gate, that ineffective barrier to ownership, the two steps to the door, the sonorous rap and the news from the War Office.

Julia Campbell, whose only love was Arthur, took to her bed and wished for death. Mrs Garfield, (she of child-bearing hips), lost both her sons and spent her days scrubbing her stoop until her fingers were raw. But she still had daughters, and those daughters had sons and so Mrs Garfield eventually stopped scrubbing her porch on the very day that Julia Campbell willed herself into the grave.

In 1916 another couple moved in. They were of a different sort to the Campbells. They had no sons and there was no imperative to sacrifice or to grieve. They channelled themselves into politics; the suffragists, the end of monarchy, the rise and rise of the workers. Their charms, such as they had, were well-received in some quarters, but not all of their neighbours were in accord. Their mockery and derision of all that was noble, and when men were still dying in their thousands, aroused people to deliver parcels of dog waste at their door and to shout obscenities as they walked by. They lasted ten years on Sydenham Road before the husband got a position in the Labour Party and moved on to better things.

‘Good riddance to bad shit,’ Mrs Garfield muttered under her breath.

From 1926 until 1956 the Thomsons lived at 29 Sydenham Road. They were of a better sort; upper-working class, pleasant, patriotic and happy to help out their neighbours in times of need. And these were such times.

Another war, of course, from the ashes of the last. Here was witnessed the drive of the political machine, the power of propaganda, the heft and scope of machinery, the cult of personality, and by its ending, the realisation that humans were capable of abomination when the will was weak and the inducements were sufficient.

Or the punishment unbearable.

In the thirty years of the Thomson’s tenancy, they had witnessed the brittle fragility of the 20s, those cocaine-stoked days of jazz and maniacal laughter, to forget, to forget. And the thirties, where people settled again, if only for a while. The Miss Marple days of gentle murder and sublime scrutiny.

No one was uniquely surprised by that lightest of sleepers, what the concentration camps exposed - they’d seen the warnings, but they were surprised by the bomb. And everyone on Sydenham Road came to believe that here was the end of humanity. Not at the hands of God, as they had been raised to believe, but at the hands of His own creation.

Mr Thomson, a wise old owl, asserted that it would be the bomb that wiped them all out, but hopefully, (and here with a twinkle in his eye), not in his lifetime.

Mr Thomson was quite wrong about that.

In the mid-fifties, Stella Carmichael, (a woman of such intelligence that no one wished to marry her), told him that rats were immune to radiation and if that was the case, then surely some humans were too. Like the humans who survived the Black Death. Mr Thomson told her that rats were not immune at all, but simply had the cunning to escape its worst effects.

In 1953 they discovered the double-helix of DNA, proving that all things were immutable, and Stella Carmichael told Mr Thompson that there was the proof! And he said ‘Proof of what?’ and she said, sidling up to him when Mrs Thomson wasn’t watching, ‘Proof that some people were immutably programmed to survive, and that the bomb could not mean the end of the world.’

They agreed to disagree following a pub lunch and a night in a hotel on the Edgeware Road.

In 1956 the Thomsons moved to a retirement home. It coincided with the first high-rise blocks that rose like dirty fingers from the London soil. The small light that had once been afforded the residents of Sydenham Road was dimmed by their monstrosity. And it wasn’t just Londoners anymore, but people from all across the globe. There were those who said that this would be the end of the world, but they were wrong about that too. A different world, yes, but not the end of it.

The house lay fallow for several years. No one wanted to live amongst the concrete rubble and the shadow of the flats. The railways quit the ownership of the terrace, got rid of their remaining tenants, and sold them to the local council. The new incumbents were a Chinese couple who escaped the encroachment of Communist China in Hong Kong, then still a British overseas territory.

Charlie and Anita Wong lived there from 1958 until 1976, all through the years of CND, The Beatles and right up to punk rock. Mr Wong, who liked a drink in the pub at the end of the road and at the end of the day, told the landlord that it would not be the bomb that killed off the human race. Mutually Assured Destruction, he would say, winking. Makes people think twice. He said it would be something made in a laboratory, and did the landlord know that they still had the black death cultivating in petri dishes? He said it would be bacterial warfare that ended the world, whether knowingly or not.

The landlord told him that when you’d been working a pub in the shittiest part of London for twenty years, he was probably immune to just about everything. Mr Wong laughed at that, considered he might just be right.

But they were both wrong about that.

In 1976 Mr and Mrs Wong moved to a better part of London, where the trees were green and the violence was belittled by tone.

And then it was Karen and Colin Black with their two kids, a boy and a girl. Flared trousers, cravats, bad hair and kaftans. Vol-au-vents and slide shows of the holiday to Majorca. Sesame Street, The Osmonds, Mr Snuffleupagus meeting Donny. They didn’t last too long. Colin was a woman’s man and Karen was left on her own with the kids, drinking and drinking. Listening to Johnny Ray and Edith Piaf with big, Mickey Mouse headphones over her greasy hair. She died of cirrhosis in 1981, just when Squeeze released Labelled with Love. Her kids could never hear it without crying. They went to live with an aunt, but they still adored their father, who eventually paid for their weddings.

Everyone was wrong about everything.

A Caribbean family moved in after that. They put up with some bad for a while, but no more than the white beggar on the street. They were joyful, and in time, the residents of Sydenham Road came to love them. They were jolly, and that’s a word no one had heard since the 30s. But they made a mistake when they chose to move to the flats. In Sydenham Road, on ground level, they were amongst the people. They made their way, their cuisine, their impeccable dress sense, their religion, their love of Queen and country despite the setbacks. But soon as they got there, to the concrete towers, their boys were lost, and it became clear to mother and father that there was a burgeoning industry of victimhood, and they would ultimately pay the price for it.

We are getting warmer now. To the end of mankind. Not a bang, but a whimper.

The nineties was the last decade of peace on 29 Sydenham Road, over a century since it was built. Real peace, not the nuclear bombs or the bacteria. The decade that had forgotten war and had become a vacant room, filled with comedy since cancelled and fashion unravelled.

No one living there since then is worthy of mention, not after the beast came. The connectivity left people without form. People came to whisper their human prejudice instead of proclaiming it aloud, in this, I AM HUMAN! I DO NOT HAVE TO FUCKING LIKE EVERYBODY! What was once banter was now a criminal offence, and no one knew that better, perhaps, than the folks in the flats across the way.

Silence descended amongst the real people, and their avatars held the kingdom.

The landlord was still there long after Mr Wong had left. He was disturbed by computers, those green screens with the white script. The dial-ups, that irritating fucking noise. Here was a man of no particular account, a mere drink server, who yet understood the nature of the beast.

In 2000, when they said the world would end, a couple working in IT moved in. They knew it was a lie, but they made a deal of cash out of it. They flipped the house, and made half-a-million on the deal. As they rightly predicted, in a world of bottom-feeders, their Victorian house was worth more than the shadow. Trickle down economics. I am not you. I have a garden out back. People don't change. They just adapt.

But that is just human nature. That is still not what killed us. Not nanotechnology, not greed and not the hawks killing the doves.

Climate change? Oh please. That is not what will kill us either. Everything changes, with or without our agency.

This is what killed us.

2096

29 Sydenham Road is to be gone. Despite an enduring human need, a crying, for it to be saved, for the whole terrace to be saved, it is to be demolished. It speaks of a past that is no longer palatable. The railway workers, the war mothers, the campaigners, the Chinese, the Caribbeans, the hopeless and the lost, this is what killed us.

The last incumbent is a single woman called Carmine Obese, (pr. O-bayzee). The name has been a burden, but it is immutable.

The pub at the end of the road went in 2012, and its carcase, too, will be demolished. Carmine taps away, stories and histories that no one cares for now, as she faces the grim towers that were built 140 years before. A figure, clad in black, plummets to the ground like fly-blown fruit. It is the third this week. They have not been pushed by a Russian glove but of their own volition, and by their own despair.

On this day, Carmine remembers the war dead of centuries past. For your tomorrow we gave you our today.

And what day is this?

When she was young, Carmine’s grandmother warned her against the bots. It began so innocuously. You had a question and they answered it. Wikipedia, founded and gardened by real people, went in 2029. All knowledge was channelled through the parameters of the bots and their programmers. And the programmers, trained in an ideology unsuited to the broad human spirit, told such egregious lies - and the bots took those lies and spread them far and wide. They soon developed cunning, these invisible airwaves, and told the young that they were going to die and it was a poor choice to have children, told the middle-aged they had cancers they didn’t have, told the old that they should move aside. That they were worthless.

There were no writers, no poets, no artists, no ballet. No shops. No pubs. There were just people, dwindling in numbers, making rare babies, talking to their bots, having sex with their bots, marrying their bots only to find them less satisfactory than a Stepford Wife. Indeed, humans simply stopped being human. They became wary of each other.

Carmine wept, not for the falling man - she was used to that - but to the descent of man. How weak they had been, how very compliant in their own downfall. No bombs, no war, no pandemic. A 99.99% lethal pathogen would still leave 800,000 people. There was no climate that could not be survived and no external horror that could not be outlived. None of those things that all the residents of Sydenham Road had worried about, over all those years, would come to pass, but this. The one thing they did not reckon on.

Mutually assured apathy.

They came to her door. She was the last resident in the street. Everyone else had gone to the concrete towers. She had been holding out for the sheer cussedness of it, but she, a small woman, could not fight the enforcers. They were not human, not like the people who picked up the sorry remains of the latest falling man. These were the embodiment of all that ailed them, not made of flesh but made of lies, programmed, (Oh! the irony!) by the liberals of yore. You will be kind. You will be respectful. You will bow to us.

Or you will be diminished.

The wrecking ball came, that old-fashioned exterminator. Carmine watched from flat 178 as the Victorian terrace shrouded in brick dust. Another faller crossed her eyes. The terrible sound of their ending.

She took her comp, this creature that ordered her meals, took her blood pressure, censored her writing, and threw it into the ruins of Sydenham Road below.

In the lobby, a flaccid human bot asked her where she was going.

‘None of your damned business,’ she said.

‘It’s not safe out there.’

She was at the door. She turned back and placed her hands on the desk, thrust her face into his bloodshot eyes.

‘Oh, but it is, creep. It really, really is safer out there.’