‘Anyone in contact with an infected person may be contaminated and contagious without displaying symptoms for up to two days.’
He turns off the radio, suddenly feeling that the woman competes with him for valuable air.
By the time his tank is down to a third, he’s no closer to the cottage than two hours earlier. He has been spending as much time going backwards or sideways as he does going forwards, constantly persecuted by the petrol needle and its leftwards lurches. The sun-baked tarmac, the thirst – he will die of heatstroke. The abandoned cars by the roadside become reminders that petrol can, and will, run out.
He counts miles and usage, puts hope in the car running on dregs. The inside of his mouth feels like damp cloth. He sees himself standing in the flat six hours earlier and dismissing the idea of taking some water. Who was that fool in the kitchen? What madness possessed him? He has been thinking about the wine in the boot, that it’s a liquid after all, his body will know what to do with it, when he remembers the tinned peaches he packed. He stops the car, right there, in the middle of a field. He steels himself against the sweetness, but when the juice hits his tongue he realises it doesn’t matter, he loves it, gooey sugar and all. The peaches slither into his mouth, and when he’s drained the last drop he searches the boot, hoping against hope, for another tin.
After that he drives unhindered for some seventy miles, not quite believing his luck, all the way to Totnes, a mere twenty-five miles from the cottage. But there, the petrol needle, after magically not moving for nearly an hour, suddenly takes a plunge leftwards into the red, and stays there, so that when he approaches another roadblock – an overturned lorry – he is desperate enough to consider checking the abandoned cars for petrol canisters.
He takes in the family hatchbacks, the dusty Alfa. Is it worth the risk? Contamination with whatever everyone is fleeing from, against the slim chance that these cars did not end up here precisely because they ran out of petrol. He turns around in the car, scrutinises the road behind him. He leans over the dashboard and looks at the sky. It is awful, to be so afraid without even knowing what to watch out for.
He is still debating the matter with himself when he sees movement in the rear-view mirror. A young man, wearing only red football shorts, darts out from the roadside.
Harry’s confusion lasts long enough for the man to reach Harry’s car and fling the passenger door open, and when Harry finally steps on the gas the man clings to the door, slams into the chassis with it but somehow manages to hold on, and then to make a lunge at Harry through the window. A flash of steel, but the door swings open again and he drops a knife inside the car. Harry accelerates, and the car obeys with a screech. For a few horrible seconds the man is dragged along.
What hell is this? Miles later, still shaking, soaked in sweat, he stops in the middle of the empty road. He opens the door and in a frenzy throws the kitchen knife out of the car. Then he crosses over to the passenger seat, stumbles out that side and staggers a few feet away. He fastens the scarf behind his head, then stands looking at the car with its wide open doors, hoping that it will air, somehow, hoping that whatever it was that the man had was wiped off the car by the wind.
The whisky bottles! He rushes to the boot, fishes a bottle out and proceeds to spill it over the door handle that wretch had grabbed. Afterwards he washes his hands with it, hesitates with what’s left of the liquid over whether to wash his face. How much alcohol should disinfectant have – are his hands clean now? He decides against it.
He gets back into the car. Another roadblock and he will run out of petrol, he’ll have to continue on foot. Except he won’t, he will not dare leave the car before the cottage. He’ll either drive home or he’ll die in this car.
He’s just east of the cottage. East of the cottage, he’s sure, it’s all flat farmland for miles and miles. He takes a sharp turn left, careers off the road and on to the grass. Maybe the way to avoid roadblocks is to avoid roads.
3
It is dusk when he crosses over from a wheat field on to the road that leads up to his cottage. He eases the car to a halt on the gravel in front of his garden.
His legs are tired, his eyes are tired. He’s past feeling relief.
It’s thirst that finally makes him leave the car. Once he gets out, he takes his clothes off, everything in a pile on the gravel, until there’s only the pants and the scarf left. The house key is under the stone by the rose bush. He enters the cottage.
Just within the front door he stops, a little hunched, vulnerable in his nakedness and the nearly total dark. He listens for noises again. Finally he dares remove the scarf, and the first breath he takes is wonderful, just wonderful. And the cottage smells empty and unaired; he can be sure that no one is lurking in wait.
He does a perfunctory tour, tests the lights in each room. There’s no electricity here either.
He runs the kitchen taps, which give off a gurgle before water starts pouring out. He lets the water run over his hands, washes his hands with soap, washes his arms, his face, exercises more self-control than he thought he was capable of and puts a large pot of water on the stove. He finds some herbal tea in the cupboard, and then he sits in front of the stove, willing the water to boil faster. He drops the teabags in but doesn’t have the patience to wait for the tea to cool; he pours the water from one pot to another a few times, until it’s no longer scalding, and then he drinks it all.
Sweat dripping off him, he climbs into bed.
‘Anyone in contact with a contagious person may be infected without displaying symptoms for up to two days.’ This is his first thought of the morning, and when he opens his eyes he’s afraid to move and discover some ache. He sits up in bed, takes a deep breath.
He goes straight to the bathroom and washes himself pink, carefully scrubs all of himself, washes his hair. Afterwards he remembers he touched switches and door handles last night, and so he goes round the house and wipes them all off with soapy water. When he finally steps outside, he gives the car a wide berth: he should unpack his things, store supplies, but he doesn’t dare go near the car yet, not even to kick shut the door he left open last night. Instead, he walks to the little stream downhill and satisfies himself that it’s still there, that he will have drinking water should the taps go dry. He never wants to suffer thirst again.
The sky is the same clear blue as yesterday, the heat oppressive.
Back in the kitchen he turns on the small radio. Only white noise, not even that recorded emergency message, but he patiently turns the full circle, anxiety rising in him. He fiddles vainly with the gadget for minutes, takes out the batteries and puts them back in. Nothing.
The radio, Cyclops-like with a flat line under the round speaker, keeps him silent company while he goes about preparing a brunch of tinned tuna and cereal bar.
‘There’s no bread,’ he explains to himself.
His voice sounds ominous in the quiet of the cottage.
Throughout the morning, he moves slowly and deliberately. There’s the heat to slow him down, but also a sense that rushing about will upset a fragile mental balance. He thought he had been afraid all along, since the first inklings of disaster in London, but now it becomes clear he had no idea, none whatsoever. This new fear is a separate presence in the soul, like having a thug – hulking, sober, malevolent – suddenly move in with him.
‘So this is what it feels like,’ he mutters to himself, feigning scientific interest.
He tiptoes around the rooms. He forgets to eat. He breathes purposefully, pays exaggerated attention to every mechanical task. He tries to find his way back to a place where he’s not terrified. In the afternoon, lying in bed, he hears distant noises like engines misfiring, or fireworks. He mistrusts his senses: would he recognise gunshots? He struggles to remember if there’s ever been hunting in the area.
He spends the rest of the day either asleep, or washing obsessively.
He wakes up often during the second night, each time with something rese
mbling relief: still no symptoms of illness. He dares hope that maybe he’ll be fine, and as soon as the sun is up he is pottering around the house. He boils enough water to last him two, three days. He finally unloads the car, meticulously packs drawers and cupboards. He collects his clothes from where he dropped them when he arrived, and from the back pocket of his trousers he fishes out the green scratch card, the winning one: he had taken it with him to the shops yesterday, had meant to cash it in. He’d forgotten all about it. He is happy now to find the card has travelled with him, and he fastens the little green paper to the fridge with a magnet.
Later, he gets into the boiling car and moves it into the shade. Simple successful actions, the fact that some things conform to expectations, bring him pleasure.
When he gets out of the car he definitely feels different, better than yesterday. In the tree-shade, arms akimbo, he takes deep, noisy breaths; tests his lungs.
‘Just fine,’ he says.
He decides to do a food inventory. An hour later he has emptied shelves and cupboards of everything he had carefully packed in the morning, and stacked it on the kitchen table next to the stuff that was already at the cottage. He considers the piled-up food, reckons it will last him at least a month, longer if he rations himself. He checks the gas cylinder by the stove: it is half full and there’s a spare one in the broom cupboard. Afterwards he goes into the shed. There’s the axe, the gardening tools, a small pile of firewood left over from the last winter he spent at the cottage. Best of all: a full canister that smells very much like petrol. He doesn’t remember either buying it or putting it there. Maybe it belongs to the previous owners.
He goes to the garden and stands looking at the patchwork fields in the distance. With this petrol, he could get as far north as Nottingham. Maybe farther. The way he feels now, he’s confident that he could be practical, that he’s capable of thinking ahead, of building large useful things out of small useless ones. Should it be required of him.
In the afternoon he turns the radio on a few times, always with the same result. Annoyed, he opens a bottle of red earlier than is his custom, and wine in hand he strikes a deal with the radio: he’ll give it five days off, then he’ll switch it on again. There will have to be news, good news, after five whole days. He can already see himself driving back to London on a packed M5, railing at nothing more grievous than the government’s incompetence.
The little radio sits there, smiles its deadpan smile.
In the drawer under the washbasin he counts three loo rolls. He finds a bucket he can use to carry water from the stream. On the edge of the bathtub there’s a furrowed, dried bar of soap. After each meal he strikes the item he has eaten off the inventory. He keeps boiling his drinking water. He doesn’t let his mind wander; instead, he talks to himself, long monologues carried out in a soft and soothing voice. He touches the green scratch card whenever he’s passing the fridge. He is surprised at how quickly the abnormal becomes normal.
He thinks of the radio as a scab that he is itching to tear. Is it over, has everything healed? Dare he test it?
On walks he confines himself to the immediate surroundings of the cottage. He wears a scarf around his mouth and nose, and is watchful. The couple of times he hears those distant noises again, the suspect gunshots, he heads back home.
All that time he’s outside he doesn’t see a single aeroplane.
Every so often he gets the urge to create, and he spends whole mornings or afternoons in front of his sketchbook. He should be doing sketches of Tim, planning how to proceed with the painting back in London. That’s what his hand means to do when he brings it to the paper, but somehow what comes out is a portrait of Twenty-Two.
One sunny day follows another.
Fishing down by the stream one afternoon, he hears a cow lowing, and decides he’d love some fresh milk. He follows the sound and comes out of the forest some way behind the cottage, on a lane among cornfields. He is fretting about how to persuade the cow to follow him to the cottage, so the last thing he expects is for the animal to hurl herself through the corn towards him, emitting these unsettling sounds; her mooing is angry, he realises, distressed in some way. She shakes her horns at him, eyes glistening, her enormous udder dangling from side to side. He backs off into the forest, but the cow pursues him. It is absurd, the cow is the one chasing him, but it is not funny, the animal is huge and there’s something plainly awful about her mooing. He only gets away from her by cutting through brambles, and then climbing up a hill. The mooing rings out long after he is at the cottage, and has given up any thought of ever catching a cow.
In a moment of weakness, he breaks his deal with the radio, only for the white noise to bring him to his knees by the kitchen table. So upsetting is this that he decides to restart the day-count, gives the radio a whole extra week.
Half of a sunny day he spends going through the bookshelves in the little hallway, choosing which titles to sacrifice for the loo. The previous owners left behind all the furniture and quite a lot of what might be called ornaments (a carnival mask trailing some disgusting hair, an azure Asian-looking lion), as well as these psychology textbooks and magazines with unhelpfully glossy paper. He settles on Dance Movement Therapy, volumes I and II, as the ones with the least offensive texture.
He notices small changes in the seemingly unchanging days. All of nature takes on a brittle, papery quality. Leaves fall. There is less movement, fewer birds. The little stream is a little more sluggish, and every day it gives up an inch or so of dry land on each side.
It’s in the middle of the night when it comes to him: cows have to be milked. The anguished lowing, the enormous udder, the fact that she persisted in following him. The poor beast was in pain, she wanted him to milk her.
Isn’t he just terrible at this?
During the hottest hours of the day he sits in the shade in the garden and draws. He had forgotten what a clear, happy thing light is here, what a difference to the grainy London air. He keeps drawing Twenty-Two. He hopes she is well, and he draws her in the banal, mundane situations that he wishes for her: sitting on an armchair, chin on knee, painting a toenail. Her reflection in the lift mirror, a look in her eye as though she just remembered something funny. Stretched out on a bed, nakedness protesting against the heat. Relaxed in the bathtub with a glass of red, admiring her freshly painted toenails. There’s that deep, mysterious truth to a good piece of art, and he puts down line after line in the hope that this art-truth will drag reality along, cancel that last distressed image he had of her.
Dark, narrow cracks open up in the garden soil. The dirt has changed colour, it is a parched sandy brown.
He is on one of his walks, he’s walked farther than usual, when there’s a bang, so loud and near it feels as though it’s coming from inside him. A small explosion in the grass. He freezes on the spot. He doesn’t know where to turn, where to look, then another shot sends him to the ground. He covers his head, tries to make himself small. It is awful, shocking, to be lying face down on the ground.
He waits. There are no more shots. He raises his head. About a hundred yards away, two figures swim before his eyes, but they’re so blurry he thinks he’s been hit, and brings a hand to his head. It’s just dizziness from straining his neck. He blinks, trying to clear the image. The one pointing the shotgun has some sort of cloth wrapped around his face, bandit-style. The other, just a boy, is hanging back a little, holding a gas mask to his face with both hands. He recognises the two. It’s the neighbouring farmer and his son.
The farmer makes a sideways gesture with the shotgun, as though to shoo him away.
‘It’s Harry! It’s me!’ he shouts at them.
Another bang; another explosion in the grass.
He scrambles to his feet, takes a few steps backwards, then he runs off. Stumbles, falls over again, clings to a tree to stand back up. He runs the wrong way, turns left behind a hillock to get out of range. He stays clear of cottages and farms, experiences a spasm of terror w
hen he rushes out into a clearing and finds himself unexpectedly in front of a farmhouse. It takes him hours to get home.
He is still shaking when he gets back, and he has a cut on his right palm. He scrubs at the wound until the bar of soap is a transparent sliver. Blood is ringing in his ears. He should have made more of an effort to speak, he thinks, told them he is fine. They know each other.
He can’t believe the man shot at him.
Afterwards he drinks half a bottle of wine in one go, and before he climbs into bed he checks the door lock and the windows. He lies in bed, eyes open, sweat-soaked sheet crumpled at his feet. He feels crushed. He thought that the worst would be over by now. What could have made the man act like this? Is it really just the fear of infection? Should he arm himself too? With what?
Hours and hours of this torment, until he can’t take it any more. He gets up and stumbles in the dark to the shed. Back in bed, he finally dozes off with the axe resting on the side where girlfriends sleep.
It’s like this for a few days; he’s on edge. He seeks refuge in practical things. In lists: of things to eat once his supplies run out, of things that might work as weapons, of things to draw on once he runs out of paper. He goes into no more detail than ‘birds’ eggs, squirrels, sheep’, but each completed list gives him a small sense of achievement. He puts together menus for several days in advance, and frets about varying his diet. A tree in the garden grows small, hard apples that he decides to supplement his breakfast with, and for a whole day he has painful diarrhoea that leaves him weak and shivery.
The heat has long moved into the cottage. His clothes stick to his skin. He takes to walking around in an old dressing gown, takes absurd comfort in its lustrous burgundy silk.
He falls into extremes: one moment he can be in full survivalist mode, the next he feels disgusted with himself for living like an animal, for being so eager to concern himself with trivial things. How can he spend hours busying himself with loo roll? In that mood, he drops whatever he is doing and picks up the sketchbook. He has been drawing her over and over again. He doesn’t know what to make of it. He’s an artist who will soon run out of paper and all he’ll have is three dozen portraits of his neighbour.
Under the Blue Page 4
