Jessie makes them all eat vitamins. ‘I didn’t raid the hospital supplies for nothing,’ she says. There’s no choice, it seems. He suspects patients were afraid of this young combative doctor, imagines her pacing hospital corridors the same way she walks the small rooms of the cottage: stomping almost, heavily, marking her presence. If she had lived above him in the thin-walled London building, he’d have needed earplugs.
‘But what do we do?’ he says one morning. He woke full of energy, wanting and daring to look ahead. ‘Seriously. What is the plan?’
Jessie gives him a hard stare. ‘The plan is we stay alive.’
‘You’ll see – it will peak, this thing,’ he says. ‘Diseases wear themselves out.’
‘Believe it or not, we have other things to worry about,’ Jessie says.
‘Like what?’
The sisters exchange a glance.
‘What does she mean?’ he insists to Ash.
‘You can’t think of any other trouble, in our situation?’ Jessie says. ‘Everything’s just perfect?’
Something in Jessie’s eyes makes him back off. He tells himself again that they must be in shock, still too on edge to start seeing ways out.
Instead, he tries to tease out more details about what happened in that first week, and Jessie reveals, morosely, that she saw the first UK cases. ‘They brought them to us at King’s. Well, until there were so many they had to spread them round all the hospitals.’ When he asks exactly what sort of bug it is she tells him it’s a virus that has some of the characteristics of bacteria. ‘No one had heard of a virus that kills this quickly, but there are some bacteria that do.’
She is terse, reluctant. Barely moves her lips when she talks. What bacteria, he has to insist.
‘Yersinia pestis. Plague. Patients often die the day the symptoms appear. We’ve forgotten this can happen, what with antibiotics.’ Forgotten? ‘Yeah. Forgotten, literally. Nowadays, if you somehow have the incredible bad luck to catch that bug, you’ll probably die anyway, even though treatment is first-line antibiotics. It’s just that no doctor would think of the plague quickly enough. We’re actually an optimistic bunch.’
‘Nowadays,’ Ash repeats, to no one in particular.
But it’s obvious it pains them to talk about what happened, and they never bring it up themselves, so after the first few days he stops quizzing them, only lets a question fall like something slipped out of a pocket, here and there, when he feels it might be appropriate and Jessie’s in a good mood.
In his mind, the newsreel he saw three weeks ago has expanded to include what the girls have told him. He sees a coroner bending over corpses, the funerals for the dead villagers, mourners falling ill in turn, an aeroplane flying over a sports venue displaying the Olympic rings, people in hazmat suits scrambling in a media room. He thinks how strange it is, to have seen images on TV, from far away in Siberia, and the next thing he knows people are falling ill in London; a virus that travels at the speed of information. How awful. He finds himself trying to fill in the gaps of what he knows. He wants to ask stupid questions. Who died, which celebrities? The Queen comes to mind, of all people, leaving him absurdly saddened.
Their silence about the epidemic and its consequences grows, swallows up more subjects. The same way they come to avoid talking about the epidemic, they tiptoe around the subject of family and close friends. All that has somehow become unmentionable to them. Did Jessie have a partner? Do the girls have parents, other siblings?
It could be that Ash really doesn’t fancy him. In which case the fact that they came here, to a neighbour Ash barely knows, tells him all he needs to know about their family and friends.
‘Don’t go near any houses,’ he remembers to warn them. ‘If you go for a walk.’ He tells them about the farmer and the shooting. They know of that, they say. Everyone was trying to escape to the countryside when the scale of the disaster became clear, and there were rumours that people already there were shooting at refugees.
‘Not a rumour.’ He raises a warning finger.
‘There was one story,’ Jessie says, ‘about a farmer rerouting his cattle fence and rewiring it so it carried twenty thousand volts.’
‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘Just stay put.’ Thankfully the girls don’t seem tempted to risk going anywhere. They are just watchful: they might stand on the doorstep now and again, arms akimbo, and look around, take in deep breaths of air, but they won’t leave the perimeter of the garden. He can’t put his finger on it, but there’s also something odd in the way the sisters interact. They avoid eye contact; there’s a sense of an unspoken argument between them. Once he started thinking about it, he noticed other strange things: they don’t really speak to one another beyond practical, immediate matters. In the evenings, after the three of them have gone to bed, he lies on the living-room sofa and pricks up his ears, listening for sounds from the bedroom. The bed creaks now and again, or he can hear a sheet rustling, the soft patter of bare feet as one of them goes to the loo. But no voices, no whispers. He would expect two young women to talk into the dead of night, for comfort if not for anything else, and thinks it sad that they don’t.
They are probably still too shaken; he puts it down to the gruesome things they must have seen in London before they fled.
Ash, he notes, always puts her hair up in a stubby ponytail before she tackles any physical work. This pulls her eyes up at the corners. In the afternoon, when the light becomes more golden and the colours are more intense, her eyes are indigo. He finds himself wanting to paint that colour so badly he can smell the turpentine. One day he gets as far as to pick up the plastic bag with the many portraits of Ash from where he hid them in the bottom drawer. Then Jessie enters the living room, and he suddenly feels like a criminal revisiting a crime scene.
This is also an excuse not to work; he knows it.
He and Ash haven’t really talked since she arrived. He misses their banter in the lift, and would like to tell her things, harmless things, but all that’s been tainted by the portraits. He doesn’t want to frighten her. He doesn’t give up, though – he can’t. One evening he plonks the remaining two bottles of wine before the sisters, brings glasses, and invents a birthday. Both Jessie and Ash have been reluctant to drink alcohol, blaming the heat, so the lie is necessary. All he means to achieve is a bit of loosening up, and maybe for Jessie to go off to bed before Ash. Something like a normal dinner.
But the girls were right about the heat; after the second glass he feels as though his head has been injected with cement. They sit with him, obediently, Ash even tries to be cheerful, pretend she’s enjoying the lukewarm booze. In the end he’s the one to release everyone from the charade, shoo the girls off his sofa and to sleep.
The girls have brought four packets of coffee. When he makes coffee, he makes it weak, means to make it last as long as possible. Unbelievably, the girls complain. ‘We just have to go into a house, there’ll be plenty,’ Jessie says. ‘We’re going to run out of other things too.’
‘From champagne socialist to espresso refugee,’ he says, but he makes their coffee a little stronger, and waters his down further. ‘Hang on – what do you mean, go into a house?’
‘That’s what it was like in London. The shops had run out of everything.’
‘All that is now in houses,’ Ash says.
‘That’s why you left London?’ he says.
‘No, food wasn’t the issue. The problem was getting fresh water.’
‘So you were going into houses? Wasn’t that risky?’
Jessie goes on, ‘We had run out of ideas by the time sis said let’s go to Devon, I’ve got a friend.’
‘I can’t believe how easy it was to find. You described the place so well.’ Ash smiles at him, and for a moment they are back in the lift, flirting. He lifts the cup to his mouth, hides behind his watery coffee.
Sometimes he wonders if he’s not dead already.
He has gained two holes on his belt, and his forearms are dark f
rom the sun. The days bleed into one another; it could all be just one long day. The light outside is blinding and opaque. When he pulls the curtains in the morning, the first impression of the outdoors is of an arctic landscape; everything burnt white. He used to fret about things like the colour of green leaves in the sun, the exact shade of a puddle at lunchtime, but now the sun seems to want to obliterate all colour and nuance. He finds himself feeling sorry for plants, for the inanimate objects that can’t drag themselves away from that light.
How long have they been at the cottage, cut off from the world? He has lost track of the days, properly, not just a day here or there. When he asks the girls one morning over breakfast, Jessie goes to the yellowed National Trust calendar hanging on the inside of the kitchen door and ticks off 12 July.
She stands back and looks at the calendar. ‘Yeah, feels like a Sunday.’
‘But we’re not in 2008,’ he says.
‘Prove it.’
It’s just a ticked box, a make-believe re-dating, but it feels like an act of vandalism. It sours his morning.
One afternoon the hob won’t come on, even though he’s sure there’s still gas in the canister. They take turns checking the canister’s gauge, fiddling with the greasy oven knobs. They remove the iron hob plates and blow air through the holes, they detach and reattach the hose. It won’t come on. The three of them stand in a half-circle around the stove, and he can suddenly imagine a day when every last thing will be broken.
‘We’ll use the fireplace instead,’ he says, does a mental inventory of the firewood in the shed.
At various times during the days he finds now one girl, now the other, at the door or window, peering down the footpath and at the trees beyond the cottage: it’s like they’re waiting for something. But whenever he asks, they shrug; say they’re just looking.
He starts having an intense craving for fresh food; he is sick of the endless tins and hard biscuits that hurt his gums. Unbelievably, most of all to him, he manages to catch some fish. Not with the improvised rod – he gave up on that after a few tries – but with a net fashioned from the gauzy bedroom curtain. His knees are sore from kneeling on the bank and the fish are tiny, but the satisfaction of fresh food is immense. He grills the fish only at the girls’ insistence: if it were up to his gut and appetite, he would eat them raw.
He has some good moments with Ash, moments that he promptly wastes.
‘But why exactly was blue colour so expensive?’
She is asking this. For once, he is alone with her; Jessie complained of a headache and went to bed early.
‘I know, it seems like nature is full of blue,’ he says. ‘But think about it, almost everything blue is not the sort of thing you can bottle and sell. The sea is blue but water isn’t. The sky is blue but air isn’t. And blue stones are rare. They’re expensive and tricky to turn into pigment.’
‘You’ve always known you wanted to be a painter?’
‘I’ve always wanted to do something creative.’
He remembers now, she was never so interested in him as when the subject of his work came up.
‘What about you? You who wouldn’t mind burning for art.’
She smiles. So she hasn’t forgotten their conversations in the lift.
‘I wouldn’t if I felt I could create something beautiful,’ she says.
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘The wrong idea entirely. As an artist, you start out wanting to capture something beautiful,’ he says. ‘But beauty – the artist can only corner it, never capture it. The artist has to leave it out, and then it’s there.’
He could go on like this for ever, spewing nonsense. He can see he has her full attention: she has the face that people have before something they believe is admirable but far beyond them.
That’s exactly the effect he was after. So why does he suddenly feel like a common crook?
He stands up, bewildered, and then he has to pretend he meant to do something with himself. He leaves the room. In the doorway he turns and says, ‘Look, mostly it’s just work. Whatever else there is to it, it simply becomes accessible through patience and a lot of work.’
It only lasts a second, but as he leaves the room he has the feeling that he just caught a glimpse of a different self.
The heat is relentless. Day after day, in the afternoon, they open all the windows and the doors, but it’s still too hot to move. They sit slouched around the living room in silent admission at their impotence over the heat. Under the lizardy gaze of the jade lion, he’ll flick through the old magazines, Ash might read a book, Jessie will try to sleep. Flies, fat and black, making that strange, tinder-dry buzzing, fly unencumbered around the house. The most any of them can do is follow them with their eyes. ‘Corpses everywhere,’ Jessie mumbles. ‘What’s a fly doing in here?’
They’re there, in the living room, listless and bored one hot afternoon, when Ash asks Jessie, ‘Do you remember, was it ever this hot in Kenshube?’
‘I only remember you made me steal pawpaws for you,’ Jessie says.
‘Kenshube? Where’s that?’ he asks.
‘You paid me in minutes allowed to spend in your company,’ Jessie says, staring into the ceiling.
‘Uganda,’ Ash says.
‘What’s in Uganda?’
‘One pawpaw, one minute.’ Jessie seems to be talking to herself. ‘And I had to hold a huge palm leaf for your shade.’
‘We lived there when we were kids.’
‘Crikey. How come?’
‘Our mum worked there.’ Ash shrugs.
‘So yeah, I guess it was pretty hot,’ Jessie says.
‘Charity work,’ Ash says, and she stands up from the sofa, ends the conversation.
As the days pass, he becomes aware of a contradiction in his mind: as long as he’s allowed to hope that things will get back to normal, he can imagine life at the cottage stretching on into the distant future, for ever even, the three of them preserved in a sort of benevolent, sunny aspic.
His old watch, faded leather strap and mechanical winding, is now the only thing keeping time.
He’s on his way to the stream one morning when he remembers he forgot to bring the shirt he wants to wash. He returns to the cottage, walks in on the girls.
‘He said there’s plenty of petrol,’ Jessie is saying.
The way Jessie tightens her jaw when she notices him – it’s clear they don’t want him to overhear. But Ash is too polite to change the subject.
‘We’re talking about leaving,’ she says. ‘Logistics.’
‘You think it’ll be over soon?’
It comes as a surprise to him: they’re the ones who always mock his optimism.
But no, what they have to tell him has nothing to do with optimism. Ash is hesitant at first – ‘You really didn’t hear any news, any rumours before you came here?’ – then she turns to Jessie, who has curled up on the sofa with a cushion in her arms. They have an infuriatingly concerned look, and he has already decided that whatever it is, they are overreacting.
‘I don’t know how to tell you,’ Ash says.
‘You’ll find a way.’
‘At the beginning of all this,’ Ash said, ‘emergency broadcasts announced that, as a precaution, nuclear power plants all over the world had been turned off.’
He has crossed his arms, looks at Ash with a glance that he hopes communicates sobriety and scepticism.
‘This doesn’t sound familiar at all?’
‘Just go on.’
‘What we later found out, through rumours and the occasional broadcast from what was left of Global Command, is that you can’t really turn off nuclear plants, not in the sense that you stop them and walk away. What they all did is they stopped the nuclear reactions and plunged the fuel in water tanks. I’m not being exact now; I don’t really understand how it works. But this is the idea: they can stop the immediate reaction but the hot fuel rods need to be under running cold water. For decades, until the fuel is depleted. The water is running becau
se of water pumps. If the pumps stop, then the water in the tank will evaporate because the fuel is hot, and then there will be nothing to cool the fuel rods. Nuclear explosion.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he says, but he’s lying. His body has understood. He feels himself reeling.
‘We saw maps – there are more than two hundred nuclear plants in Europe. They’re all over the place. Fifteen in the UK alone. But in Africa there are none. We need to get to Africa, preferably behind a mountain range. Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia.’
‘Africa!’ he manages to say.
Ash goes into the bedroom and returns with the medicine backpack. She shows him that at least half of it is the small bottles labelled ‘KI’. ‘Look, potassium iodine,’ she says. ‘To take in case of radiation exposure.’
He is stunned, but they go on. They tell him that this is why most people went eastwards, to get to the mainland and from there to Africa. That the last info was that European reactors had between two and four months of emergency power left. Some were left with diesel emergency generators, others had solar panels in place. ‘But solar panels get dusty,’ Jessie says. ‘Without maintenance, they stop working. And then there’s winter.’
He slumps on to a chair.
‘Harry, we’ll wait for another few days,’ Ash says, ‘just to make sure that, you know, we won’t get killed en route. But all in all we have about four to five weeks to get as far from Europe as we can.’
‘I …’
But he can’t speak. It’s like he received a blow to the head.
‘Sorry,’ Ash says. ‘We kept putting off telling you. It’s not easy to deliver this kind of news.’
Jessie is looking around the room as though she is about to start packing. This is really happening; they’ll leave with or without him.
TALOS
Arctic Circle
September 2017
Session 1312
Dr Dahlen Do you remember our last conversation?
Talos XI It was about my senses.
Under the Blue Page 8
