Nostalgia, etc etc etc
These outings of ours have kept me sane through the years.
Lisa news to me
paul = sane
Paul The big difference between now and then is that today this low-tech picnic can run for ages.
Lisa the big difference between now and then
talos is working
Paul True. So true.
Lisa don’t u think
getting this right
i mean talos actually working
changes everything
cancels every mistake
makes everything all right again
Paul Ah. My dear multi-talented Lisa, who can get tipsy on virtual champagne.
Lisa what’s the time
i think we have to go back
Paul I hate this part.
4
He waits a few moments, convinces himself that they are alone, then he steps out. He is still holding the axe, and when they see him they stop. They look tired and wary. They look like they expect him to charge at them.
He puts down the axe, leans it against the wall.
The girls make their way to the door.
Twenty-Two says, ‘My sister, Jessie.’
The sister narrows her shoulders, slinks out of the straps and drops her enormous backpack to the ground. She wobbles; for a moment it looks like she’ll be pulled down with the weight.
They stand like that under the blue sky.
‘At least,’ he says, ‘let’s get out of the sun.’
There’s only the one room he can take them to, his bedroom, and afterwards he paces the house, glancing at the shut door.
He falls ill straight away.
Twenty-Two and her sister are in his kitchen, eating and telling him how they ended up at the cottage. He feels absurdly self-conscious, as though he were naked; it’s that awkward to be around people again. Instead of a welcome, he managed to bark at them to go wash their hands first.
Dare he hope that the dreadful thing has blown over, and that’s why they’re so relaxed?
They had tried to go east at first, the girls tell him, ‘along with everyone else’, but they only got as far as Dartford. There were masses of people dying on the road. ‘And the living behaving very badly.’
He holds Twenty-Two’s gaze as she says this, but he’s cheating: he’s trying not to think about what she describes. He realises he feels a bit queasy.
The air in London, Twenty-Two goes on over her tinned fish, had become unbreathable because of the fires. They had almost run out of drinking water. They had to go somewhere safe for a couple of weeks until the roads clear. The first farmhouse they approached, they were shot at. So they came to him.
How unreal, her being here. He remembers their lift in Angel, and him shamelessly dragging his feet behind her to catch a glimpse of her arse before she’d disappear into her flat.
He’s got to take care not to call her Twenty-Two. They were properly introduced in the little hallway. She had poked her head out of the bedroom asking for the toilet and, after explaining about the water in the plastic basin and the psychology literature for loo roll, he had said, ‘Harry.’
‘Ash,’ she’d said.
‘We figured that either you’re dead,’ Jessie says now, ‘and then no one will mind us staying here, or you’re alive and won’t try to kill us.’ The sister is blunt like that, even sarcastic.
He would like to comment, ask questions, but he really feels nauseated now. He holds the wine up to the light, sniffs at the mackerel he has been eating. It smells fine. In the background, Ash speaks of cycling most of the way to the cottage.
‘Could this be off?’ he asks.
He wants to get himself a glass of water but he’s not sure he can stand.
‘Are you OK?’ Ash says.
For weeks he has been in the middle of an epidemic, and yet he can’t quite believe it: he’s feeling very, very ill.
‘This is ridiculous,’ is all he has time to say. He is heaving, he covers his mouth. He makes it to the sink where the fish and wine and yellow gunk come out in a flood. His head has gone ice-cold, and he has to lean on the sink to remain standing.
‘Leave,’ he manages to say. He waves the girls away. ‘You’ve got to get out.’
His legs buckle under him. He has it, there’s no other explanation. How could he have caught it, here in the wilderness? He’s shivering.
Ash puts a glass of water in front of him. ‘Drink.’
‘Go,’ he says weakly. ‘I’ve got it.’
The girls make him drink the water and then they help him to the sofa in the living room.
How can it have got to him so suddenly? He would have fought it, if given a fair chance. But now, there can be no talk of fighting.
He is retching into a bowl the girls are holding by his head; retching and sobbing.
The night is terrible. He feels the girls’ hands on him, sees Jessie looming over him with a syringe. He wants to swear at them, push them away, but he is too weak. It’s as if everything around him were actually very far away.
He is vaguely aware of being helped to the loo.
The whole night, he is tormented by the idea of lying down. He has forgotten about the disease; instead, in a half-awake state, he becomes obsessed with lying perfectly flat, which he just can’t get right. It’s as if there is a more thorough horizontalness than the one he is able to perform, something to slip into like he used to slip into balance when riding a bike. He keeps doing something wrong. The difference between what he is trying to do and what he’s actually doing seems enormous. He presses himself against the fabric of the sofa, he tosses and turns. He’s breathless, near tears with frustration.
When he emerges from the nightmare, the cottage is steeped in light. He sits up, his head suddenly clear. He looks at his hands, touches his stomach. He cannot believe that after feeling so bad, there’s suddenly nothing wrong with him. The elation he feels nearly lifts him off the sofa.
All the windows and doors are open and it smells of cooking. It is still hot.
The girls laugh when he asks if he ‘had it’. He laughs along with them, like a cretin, surprised and exhilarated that Ash didn’t vanish with the fever.
‘You wouldn’t be here if it was that,’ Jessie says. ‘You didn’t have trouble breathing. You had really bad food poisoning. Probably a damaged tin. You were throwing up so badly, I had to inject antibiotics.’
Jessie is a doctor, it turns out. Ash goes into the bedroom and comes out dragging an enormous backpack. ‘Half is food and stuff, half is … this.’ He watches her take out boxes, bags, plastic-sheathed containers. She spreads them out on the table in front of him. Pills of one kind or another, small bottles of liquid. He picks up some of the items. Vitamins, painkillers, antibiotics, insulin injections, emetics, statins, antidepressants, scalpels. Dozens and dozens of small white bottles with printed labels saying ‘KI’.
He can see now the girls are right: whatever he had was not life-threatening. The real disease feels horrifying but remote, even as the girls fill him in on more gruesome details about their journey to the cottage.
‘But what exactly happened?’ he interrupts Ash. ‘How did it come to this?’
‘What do you mean “how did it come to this”?’ Jessie asks. Her voice is deep, for a woman.
‘I missed the beginning, and then … Mayhem.’
‘Weren’t you in London when it started?’ Jessie asks.
‘I wasn’t paying attention. I was working.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘I’ve done it before. It’s always been fine.’
Is he really having this conversation? He feels it slipping away from him. He doesn’t want to be sarcastic.
‘You mean you don’t know anything?’ Ash says. ‘You didn’t talk to anyone? No news? Nothing?’
They stare at him in disbelief, but eventually they tell him. It’s Jessie who sets off in her deep voice as though he knows what
she’s on about, and he has to ask her to start earlier, even earlier, until at last he recognises something: the dead bodies in the Russian tundra.
‘There was a similar case a few years back, an anthrax outbreak caused by reindeer carcasses in the melting permafrost. Global warming, that old hoax,’ Jessie says, mockery in her voice, and he takes her bait: he motions towards the open door, the summer outside.
‘The climate warnings were about floods, storms. Failed crops. Not an epidemic.’
‘Not fair, sis.’ Jessie turns to Ash. ‘Mr Painter here was promised a slow-motion disaster.’
Why did she have to come along? How perverse: there must have been a one-in-a-million chance that Ash would turn up at his cottage. Now that someone went to the trouble of arranging the beautiful little miracle, why mar it by producing a third person?
‘Tell me something useful instead, Jessie,’ he says out loud. ‘What kind of disease? What should I watch out for? Is it everywhere? Are you infected? Will you be the death of me?’
‘Told you already,’ Jessie says. ‘Frozen microbes that survive for tens of thousands of years. Temperatures go up, some ancient carcass is defrosted. A new-old bug on the loose, and no immunity whatsoever. It’s like when Native Americans first came into contact with Europeans. They snuffed it from damn near all of our infectious diseases.’
‘Wait – what about the fires? When I left London, there were fires everywhere.’
Jessie shrugs. ‘Everyone trying to make fires to cook their food and boil their water. In this heat.’
Ash speaks of luck; bad luck.
‘I remember this doctor on TV. He was completely distraught, but not just at what was happening. At how it happened. All those wrong turns. In the Russian village – people died so quickly. They’d all eaten wild mushrooms, and so the doctors thought it was poisoning. The symptoms matched, sort of – all that writhing and pain, and it’s quite common there, apparently, what with people foraging for food. By the time someone in a lab took a good look at blood samples, it was too late. And guess what? The reporting crew who covered the incident for the international media had already flown to the Olympics. Cosmic bad luck.’
‘So it’s anthrax?’ he says.
‘No,’ Jessie says. ‘Some sort of virus. Turns the lungs to mush. The victims feel they are choking, they take their clothes off, they want to go outside, they scratch their chests and necks bloody, they open their mouths so wide they dislocate their jaws. Forty-eight to seventy-two hours between infection and death, twenty-four to twenty-eight hours between symptoms and death.’
‘It’s been almost a day since we got here,’ Ash says. ‘So – to answer your question – if we don’t fall ill within the next twelve hours, we were clean when we arrived.’
She tries to soften Jessie’s words, several times she interrupts her sister’s blunter statements with an excuse, an ‘it’s hard to talk about these things’. He can tell she’s trying to be nice to him. Without make-up and wearing a grey T-shirt and sporty slacks, there’s a lightness to her, a perfectly formed vitality. Jessie is taller than her, and bulkier, athletic. She hasn’t given him a single look that hasn’t been somehow mocking.
In each and every one of his daydreams, Ash came to his cottage alone.
‘But is it over then? Is that why you’re not wearing masks?’
‘It’s almost over,’ Jessie says. ‘As in, there’s hardly anyone left.’
‘We’ve not been in contact with anyone for days,’ Ash again tries to smooth over her sister’s words. ‘You’ve been alone. We’re fine.’
His heart sinks; he must cut a pathetic figure because Jessie pats him on the shoulder, says, ‘From now on, whenever you feel like you need some good news – remember we brought morphine.’
It occurs to him that maybe they are in shock. Jessie’s inexplicable belligerence, her defeatism: after living through these horrors, they must be afraid to hope. Should he enquire about their family, their friends? He suddenly worries about saying the wrong thing.
As if to prove her point, Jessie turns on the radio and lets white noise swarm through the kitchen. Just like that; no ceremony, no nothing.
‘Once upon a time,’ she says, keeps playing with the dial. ‘The end.’
He realises he had been holding his breath.
‘Nonsense,’ he eventually says. ‘I’m still here. You’re still here. Chap next door’s still here. He tried to shoot me only last week.’
‘Half a billion are dead since last week.’
Half a billion? He tries to think in terms of the UK’s population, arrives at more than half, has an inward gasp, then he realises he should be thinking in terms of Chinas, or Indias. Half a China. Half an India.
How can she know this, how can she be sure? Jessie shrugs. ‘I saw the epidemiology models, and the last time we had anything like news, there were four billion dead. Five weeks into the epidemic – there are maybe two dozen million left, mostly in remote locations.’
‘Someone always makes it,’ he says out loud, but he can’t help thinking, curses himself for thinking, that in this scenario Tim would have probably died anyway. However diligent a parent he could have chosen to be, he could not have kept Tim safe from this.
‘Think rabies, Mr Painter. No one, not one soul, has survived rabies without treatment. And there is no treatment.’
He shakes his head at her; she can’t possibly be sure. Me, the two of you, the neighbour and his son: he repeats this to himself, like an incantation, until in his head it drowns out Jessie’s bleak claims.
It’s right after this conversation that he realises he has left his sketchbook on a chair in his bedroom, their bedroom now. A penny drops inside him, red and hot. He closes his eyes, tries to remember if he left it opened. How could he begin to explain?
He gathers himself and knocks on their door, asks Jessie for his sketchbook. When she hands it to him, it is closed, and Jessie’s face doesn’t give anything away.
5
He has a small shock when later he goes into his bedroom to gather some of his things. The girls have been here for only a short while, but already this room is theirs, changed under their different smells and their own strange brand of disorderliness. He has never thought of using window handles as hooks for hanging underwear.
Feeling like an intruder, he hurries to take a T-shirt and trousers, slippers and bathrobe.
They settle into a sort of routine, Jessie and Ash pottering around the house and him busying himself with food and the garden. It takes time getting used to, sharing the cottage, and there are more awkward moments. Gone are the days of walking around half-naked; he has to dress decently and he suffers from the heat. In these last weeks he has made a habit of talking to himself, and the other day he said something when alone in the bathroom, and had to shout ‘Nothing!’ in reply to the alarmed girls. Twice, he bangs his head against the beam in the hallway – he never did that before. Everything strange, he wanders the rooms in an overexcited daze, waiting for Ash to make a sign, reveal the true reason she came to his cottage. The first few nights it somehow makes sense to lie sleepless on the lumpy sofa bed, hoping that Ash will sneak out of the bedroom. He does not think he’s delusional. He’s had students in recent years, younger than her, that he’s had to more or less peel off his frame, remind them of decency and the college’s code of conduct.
He wants to know more about the sisters, but they seem too upset to speak. He learns, at least, that they are twenty-nine and thirty-one years old. That Ash is the youngest; it’s not what he would have expected. That Jessie has a temper.
About his own age, he lies. He can pull it off, he hopes, what with the sun and the forced diet. He needs all the help he can get.
The girls have brought soap, and shampoo. They have filled the cupboards with provisions: more fish tins, beans, tomatoes, flour, sugar, pasta, oil, a whole box of candles, a torch, batteries, a camping cooker, gas. And coffee. He takes everything back out, lays it on the
kitchen table, and adds the new things, item by item, to his old list of provisions; feels his heart swell as he has to turn a third page. A sense of danger averted, of things coming to right. When everything is listed, he spends long minutes staring at the abundance of food.
The epidemic is turning him into an idiot.
For breakfast now all three of them have coffee and a sort of no-name hard, sweet biscuit that Jessie insists is good for them. The sisters bite into their biscuits carelessly; he takes his mug and biscuit to the window, pretends to be looking out. When no one is watching he dips the impossibly hard biscuits into his coffee.
Jessie is taller than Ash, has athletic shiny limbs and the forgetfulness and physical nonchalance of teenage girls. She’ll come and sit on the armchair next to him in just a long Greenpeace T-shirt and tight shorts, put her feet up and display bright pink toenails. He wonders if she is teasing him. He toys with the idea of showing up in similar attire, and slinging pale hairy toes over the armrest. But then there’s Ash, who’s nothing if not decent. She is reserved, cautious, seems to want to stay within known boundaries in every situation. He remembers their flirting in London, and with a pang of disappointment realises that it makes sense: the rules were clear, almost ridiculously so – the thirty seconds in the lift – and so it was fine.
He checks his posture when he walks past the hallway mirror; in front of the girls his back is straighter than it ever was. He plays with a keychain. He is pleased how it gives the impression of excess energy. In the evenings he steals body lotion from their shelf in the bathroom and rubs it on to his dry hands. He has stopped shaving. Every morning nowadays, the rugged face that stares back at him from the bathroom mirror is Hemingway’s, just before he blew his head off.
He dreams Jessie away.
He doesn’t draw or paint. At times he’s sure that it’s just a matter of overcoming an initial awkwardness, that the sisters, even if they flicked through the sketchbook, did not jump to any uncharitable conclusions. But then he asks himself: how could they have challenged him about the portraits, how could they have shown concern, or disgust? With nowhere else to go, what could they do?
Under the Blue Page 7
