Summer of '26

2041

My footsteps echo throughout the cold, metal tunnel. It’s been a long day. I pass one of my neighbours, presumably heading out to his overnight shift at the food distribution centre. We nod at each other in acknowledgement, but say nothing. People tend to keep to themselves down here. Each man for himself. I reach the door to our unit and let myself in.

“Daddy!” Amaya runs up to me, her arms outstretched. I pick her up and swing her around.

“How was school today?” I ask, as we both head into the kitchen. Yasmin is standing over the stove, stirring something in a wok. I kiss her on the cheek in greeting. Amaya is pulling at my arm, dragging me towards the kitchen table.

“School?” I prompt, sitting down on one of the rickety wooden chairs.

“School was fine,” she says dismissively, flapping a piece of paper in front of my face. “Look at my drawing.”

An orange scribble with two black eyes and a smile has been drawn on the paper. “It’s lovely,” I tell her. “Is it a cat?”

Amaya looks horrified. “A cat? No, it’s not a cat. It’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

Ah. I’d found a stack of Roald Dahl books in the library and had been reading them to Amaya each night before bed. We’d just finished Fantastic Mr. Fox, which had turned out to be a strong contender for her favourite book.

“Dinner is almost ready,” Yasmin announces. “Amaya, please can you put your crayons away and set the table?”

We sit down to a chicken stir-fry. The vegetables are tinned, but Yasmin has added a generous amount of seasoning to make them taste a little better. The meat, of course, is lab-grown. I’ve sort of gotten used to it, but it does leave behind a strange aftertaste.

We eat to live now, rather than living to eat. I think wistfully of when food was fun. I reminisce about Sunday mornings in coffee shops, starting the day with cappuccinos and croissants.

Going out for pizza and ordering dessert, even though I was full. Being on holiday and eating gelato in the sun.

How lucky Amaya is that she never experienced life as we knew it before. You can’t miss what you never had.

At bedtime, we start reading Matilda.

“What’s a car?” Amaya asks, as we learn about Mr. Wormwood, Matilda’s sleazy used car salesman father.

I pause. “Well, it was a way people got around, in the old days. Like a kind of transport, when places were too far to walk.”

She looks thoughtful. “Do you think there’s still people up there? On the surface?”

I close the book. “I’m not sure, sweetheart. I hope not. Lights out now. We can read more tomorrow.”

“Okay. Goodnight, Daddy.”

“Goodnight, Amaya.”

After a quick shower and brushing my teeth, it’s my bedtime too. I have an early shift at the clinic tomorrow. I find Yasmin sitting up in bed, reading a book.

“You’ve been quiet tonight,” she observes.

“Have I?” I reply.

“Yes, you seem sort of distracted. Is work stressing you out?”

“Well, not any more than usual. You know, I think it’s Amaya’s drawing.”

“What drawing?”

“The drawing of the fox. It reminds me of something. But I can’t think what.”

I’m still pondering this as I lie awake an hour later, finding it difficult to drift off. As exhaustion takes over and my eyes begin to droop, I suddenly remember. A summer day, fifteen years ago…

2026

I had worked a twelve-hour shift, plus four hours of unpaid overtime. The hospitals were overrun as usual. Everyone was particularly irritable because of the heat. Our hospital did not have air conditioning, and the temperature on the wards must have been in the low thirties. An email had been sent out to all the staff the previous morning, acknowledging the red weather warning and informing us to “drink water to stay hydrated” and “take regular breaks”. Great advice. They knew we didn’t have time to take breaks, and drinking water is all well and good until you need the toilet, something else we barely have time for.

I changed out of my scrubs into a t-shirt and shorts and retrieved my backpack, eagerly awaiting my hard-earned forty-eight hours off. I was tying my shoe laces when a colleague of mine, Dr. Theo Wilson, came into the locker room.

“Hey, Samir,” Theo greeted me. “Are you coming in or heading out?”

“Heading out,” I replied.

“Lucky you. How’s it been today?”

“Hellish. And hot.”

“This weather’s killing me. The country’s not built for it. Prime Minister’s resigned, did you hear?”

“Yep. There goes another one.”

“Doubt the next one will be any better.” Theo had already changed into his scrubs over the course of our short conversation, and was drinking from an icy two-litre bottle of water, condensation dripping down the sides. Drink water to stay hydrated.

“Have a good one,” I told him as I made my way out.

The streets were crowded as I made the ten-minute journey walk from the hospital to the tube station.

A group of men were gathered outside a pub, waving England flags and shouting incoherently. I wasn’t sure if they were football fans or protestors (or possibly both), and I didn’t want to hang around long enough to find out. I had to walk past them to get to the station, so I lowered my head and took quick steps. One of them, a stocky guy with a shaved head, kept his gaze on me a second too long, taking in my light brown skin, my dark hair. Despite being born in the UK, I’d noticed a worrying increase in the dirty looks and verbal abuse I got in public in recent years. It wasn’t exactly a nice feeling to have to walk down the street and have people stare at you, the cogs in their brain whirring, trying to figure out if I was ‘really British’.

Thankfully, I got past them and to the safety of the underground without any trouble.

Stepping onto the tube was like diving head first into an oven. Breathing felt like trying to breathe underwater. A woman with short pink hair waved a paper fan in front of her face. A tourist family wearing hats and dark sunglasses examined the tube map, looking bewildered. A younger man in a puffy blue jacket leaned casually against the doors, seemingly unaffected by the weather. The twenty-minute journey felt endless, as though we were on the underground to Hell, rather than Zone 4.

My flat was only on the first floor, thankfully. I couldn’t imagine how unbearably warm it got right at the top, ten floors up.

Despite the exhaustion that lay deep in my bones, sleep was difficult. My bedroom was overwhelmingly stuffy and humid, giving me a headache. The red numbers on my bedside alarm clock read 01:34. I gave up and went into the living room, where it was slightly cooler. I threw all the windows open and stood in front of the fridge, half searching for a late-night snack, half just enjoying the cool air.

An odd noise from outside startled me, a strange combination of a meow and a yelp. A cat? I peered out the window, looking down into the building’s small car park. It wasn’t a cat. It was a fox, and although I was a doctor and not a vet, I could tell it didn’t look well - it was lying on its side, panting, with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. I filled a bowl with water and rushed downstairs. When I put the water in front of the fox, it looked up at me, but didn't move.

“Go on,” I said gently. “Drink.”

The fox slowly got to its feet and weakly started lapping the water. Once it had finished, I firmly told it to stay where it was and ran upstairs, taking the stairs two at a time. I refilled the bowl and opened the fridge to examine its contents. Two cans of coke, half a lemon, blueberries, and some cheese. Hmm. I put half of the blueberries in another bowl and hurried back to the car park, where the fox waited obediently.

It sniffed the blueberries suspiciously. I nodded at it, trying to look reassuring, and it began to eat. I wondered how many other wild animals were out there without water in this heat. I didn’t think about it for too long, to stop myself from spiralling into a deep depression. I just focused on the fox. After finishing the blueberries and water, it looked right at me. I held its gaze, almost hypnotised by its bright, yellow eyes. It blinked at me, and then ran off into the darkness.

The day of my next shift was even hotter. The news informed us that we had hit another temperature record. There were severe delays on the trains because the tracks were, quite literally, melting. As I walked to the hospital, I noticed the tarmac on the roads was sizzling, like meat in a frying pan.

It was another rough day. Accident & Emergency wait times were the highest I’d ever seen them. The wards continued to heat up as the dusty tower fans simply pushed warm air around.

While I was doing my rounds, I found a patient of mine, a middle-aged man who had recently had a heart attack, watching football on his phone.

“What’s the score?” I asked, as I checked his vitals.

“England are losing 1-0,” he grumbled.

“Oh dear,” I said politely. I wasn’t that much of a football fan really, but I liked to bond with my patients, and I’d quickly learned that this particular patient was far more interested in discussing the World Cup than discussing a healthy cardiac diet.

A flustered looking hospital porter ran into the room, cutting the conversation short.

“Dr Shah, one of the security guards has collapsed,” she blurted out. “Please, come quickly.”

I sprinted down the corridors behind her until we got to the front desk, where one of the nurses had put the security guard in the recovery position.

“He just fell to the ground out of nowhere,” she said. “He’s breathing, but he’s not in a good way.”

I felt his skin, which looked red and irritated. It was hot to the touch, but he wasn’t sweating. Heatstroke.

He was admitted to the hospital and given IV fluids for dehydration. I still needed to finish my rounds, so I ended up staying past the end of my shift, again.

As I was finally leaving, I bumped into the nurse who had been helping the security guard. I knew she worked on the pediatric ward, but I couldn’t remember her name.

“What a day!” she exclaimed, smiling at me. I liked her smile. It had genuine warmth behind it. I liked her big brown eyes, too. Why couldn’t I remember her name?

“I’m Yasmin,” she told me, answering my prayers. “You’re… Dr Shah?”

“Samir,” I replied. “You did a good job with the security guard earlier.”

“Thank you. I hope he’ll be alright.”

“I’m sure he will be. We’ve been getting a fair amount of heatstroke cases this week. I can’t wait for it to cool down.”

Yasmin, as it turned out, was headed for the same tube station as I was. We walked together, and conversation came easily. I didn’t have much time for dating, as a doctor. I didn’t have much time for it as a medical student, either, so I was sort of out of practice when it came to talking to women outside of a work setting. But Yasmin was so easy to talk to, and I found myself wishing our time together would last just a bit longer.

My wish was granted when we arrived at the station to find a huge crowd of people surrounding the ticket barriers. The information board displayed severe delays on every tube line. Great.

“What a nightmare,” Yasmin moaned. “There’s no point trying to get a train now. Shall we go to that pub around the corner, get a drink and wait for it to settle down?”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Are you asking me out?”

She threw her head back and laughed. “Steady on! It’s just a drink. Come on, let’s go.”

We left the station and walked back to the pub. It was packed with people downing beers and loudly singing Oasis songs. England had turned the game around, it seemed.

We found one empty table right at the very back of the beer garden and quickly claimed it. I asked Yasmin what she wanted to drink and went inside to order.

I stood at the bar, red-faced men in football shirts pushing each other to get to the front, and after a long wait, ordered a gin and tonic for Yasmin and a Coke for myself. Navigating my way through the throng of warm bodies back to the beer garden wasn’t easy, and I had to hold the drinks close to my chest to prevent any spillage. A man stumbled out of the toilets into my path and nearly knocked me over.

“Watch it,” he muttered angrily, glaring at me. He had no hair, and the top of his head was sunburned, looking painful. I didn’t bother pointing out that he was the one who walked into me. He looked familiar. My lack of a response seemed to offend him, because he sneered at me and said something that sounded vaguely racist under his breath.

I was hot, and irritated, and sick of being the bigger man all the time. “Oh, fuck off,” I told him, and walked away.

I forgot about him as soon as I was back with Yasmin. We sipped our drinks and talked about work, about where we lived, about the best ways to beat the heat. I told her about the fox, for which I was rewarded with another warm smile. I would have wished that the trains were delayed all night, if it weren’t for my furry friend. I was eager to get back, hoping it’d make another appearance. Maybe I could pick up some more fruit on the way home.

I didn’t see it coming, but Yasmin did, which is why she started screaming. I felt an explosion of pain in the back of my head, and then I was on the floor, surrounded by shards of dark green glass. Blood was dripping down my face into my mouth as the sunburned man repeatedly punched me. Someone else dragged him off me, yelling out to call the police, call an ambulance, and then I lost consciousness.

I was in the hospital for ten days. I had a broken jaw, a severe concussion, two black eyes, and I’d lost four teeth. It was a strange experience, being a patient in the very hospital where I worked. It was also boring. When I saw other doctors doing their rounds, I was almost envious. At least they had something to do. Yasmin visited me every day, bringing me books and magazines. The one good thing that came out of that situation was that it brought the two of us closer together, and we had a pretty impressive first date story to tell people. I brought it up in our wedding speech two years later.

I didn’t see the fox again, unfortunately. But I thought about it often, and when I was discharged from the hospital and returned home, I started putting a fresh bowl of water out in the car park each night. It was always empty when I collected it in the morning.