Back in the cottage, Harry closes his eyes. We need a new word, he thinks, some kind of bottomless compound of fear and grief.
‘Do you play the lottery?’ he asks Ash one day. ‘Do you believe in luck?’
Ash raises an eyebrow. ‘I’m a lawyer,’ she says, as if that settles it. He glances at the green scratch card on the fridge, thinks of laying out the evidence before her, the times he’s won. Show her that statistics is a fickle business, that it’s not a law of nature. That they shouldn’t discount luck.
‘We’ll survive this,’ he says. ‘I mean, humanity. It took everyone by surprise but once people get out of cities they’re fine.’
‘You’re sure.’
He spreads out his arms. ‘Us! There will be others like us.’
Jessie leans over the table and plays with the radio dial. White noise, still. She switches it off, winks at him.
‘Don’t pull that one on me. We’re alive – are we sending any radio signals?’
The solution, he believes, is to stall: something will happen; there will be some news that will render this mad plan of theirs unnecessary.
‘I’m sure we can find some protective clothing. Those yellow things that were all over the news. We can move into a basement, only go out in that outfit. Stock up on food. Wait for a few months. If nothing happens, if nature just goes on, you were wrong. And we haven’t risked our lives trying to get to Africa. We are safe here.’
‘Painter Takes on Gamma Rays,’ Jessie says in a mock voice. ‘What outfit, Harry? A concrete jumpsuit? I don’t know about nuclear reactors but I know about radiation. There’s no outfit that offers the slightest protection. Maybe in Hollywood.’
‘You can make fun all you want, but you’ve still only got a rumour.’
It’s one of those days when Jessie’s scaremongering can’t get to him. He feels serene. The thing about luck is it doesn’t bear scrutiny: it’s like one of those deep-sea creatures on nature shows, shining glorious and bright in the dark, but dissolving to grey mush when dragged into the open. He doesn’t even want to attempt to explain it. He smiles reassuringly at Ash, while Jessie blathers on.
7
The fleas are not going away. Every morning they wake up with more bites. The bugs prefer his legs and the girls’ midriff; the three of them walk, talk and eat while scratching themselves.
‘You and your fucking cat.’
His feet look pockmarked, the bites torn bloody by his scratching. He has had to cut his nails to the quick to stop hurting himself.
‘Don’t be stupid. We’ve got fleas because the cat died, not because I fed it.’
They spend an entire day trying to rid themselves of the bugs. They set it up like a production line: Ash has the idea to heat an old flat iron that was decorating the mantelpiece, and then they iron a fresh change of clothes. They take turns to have a thorough wash at the stream and put on the ironed, bug-free set of clothes. They boil water and put their bedclothes, towels and other items of clothing in the bathtub. They pass the hot iron over their mattresses and scrub the cottage clean. In the evening he itches from all the scrubbing and washing.
Has nothing ever died without causing him grief?
He tries driving a wedge between the sisters, winning Ash over to his side. He hardly dares think it, but he wouldn’t put it past Jessie to leave for Africa on her own. In this reckless mood, one day he catches Ash alone in the garden.
‘So Jessie was working at King’s when all this happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘And she left?’
‘She left? What do you mean?’
‘I mean, they didn’t need doctors any more?’
She straightens up, shades her eyes to look at him. ‘Still not sure what you mean.’
‘Just that she’s very gung-ho for someone who abandoned patients.’
He deserves a slap, he knows it, but Ash turns away, resumes her work. ‘No one was bringing in patients any more,’ she says.
‘Patients?’ Jessie sticks her head out of the kitchen window.
That, he thinks, is his problem: they are never really alone. Ash might behave differently if only they had some space. He puts this idea to the test immediately. He announces the next morning that he is going to top up their firewood stocks, that he’ll need a few hours in the shed. Within twenty minutes he is exhausted, and then he sits dripping sweat on an overturned wheelbarrow for two hours, flies buzzing around his head. Sometimes he hears voices from the house. But no one comes. No Ash, no relief.
‘That took you ages,’ Jessie says when he comes back in. ‘Sis wanted to help but I told her you need to feel the man of the house for a while.’
Ash laughs. ‘Actually, she said you’re having a “macho fit”. Do artists have macho fits?’
‘You kidding me? They’re the worst,’ Jessie says.
That night he can’t sleep. His back was already hurting from sleeping on the living-room sofa, and now also from the wood-chopping marathon. He thinks of Ash naked in his bed, and immediately, involuntarily, of Jessie next to her, all 5 foot 6 inches of brash inconvenience.
They have no bites for a few days. The old scratch marks are beginning to heal, when they start noticing new ones. It’s just a bite here and there for now, but they know what it means.
‘I’ll cry,’ Ash says. ‘I’ll go mad.’
They despair of ever getting rid of the fleas. If what they did three days ago wasn’t enough, what is? They rummage through Jessie’s medicine backpack for some possible treatment, but there’s nothing. They spend hours staring at the white bed-sheets, hoping to catch a flea. They trade vaguely remembered folk remedies.
‘Petrol?’ Ash says. ‘I think petrol is meant to kill the eggs as well.’
He and Ash turn to Jessie. She looks at a loss, for once.
‘I really don’t know if petrol is OK for the skin. It might not be.’
They boil all their clothes again, they nearly melt the bedroom mattress with the flat iron.
‘It’s a war of attrition,’ he tells the girls. ‘Every round will reduce their numbers.’
He lingers in doorways, brushes against her fingers when handing her a glass of water. The heat makes his lust worse. Everything conspires against him: the audible breathing, the shiny sweaty skin, the skimpy clothes. Impending death.
And Jessie is on to him, he’s sure. She watches over Ash like a hawk. The whole thing could be funny; most of the time he sees the situation’s great comic potential.
Other times, he could just murder Jessie.
He regrets not using every last colour in his work. He regrets never having invited Ash to his flat to see his work. He can’t believe he didn’t take a single painting with him. And, most of all, he can’t believe what’s happening. This absurd overkill, this baroque wedding cake of an apocalypse: plague and then nuclear meltdowns. It’s not fair. It’s ugly. He says as much to the girls.
‘Not sure how fair plays into it. We triggered the epidemic ourselves, and we’re one hundred per cent responsible for the nuclear meltdowns,’ Ash says.
‘You looking for the complaints office,’ Jessie says, ‘go look in the mirror.’
*
He can’t not think of the reactors. In his mind, he revisits what must be old footage of Chernobyl. At night he dreams of a cement pool, dull grey and full, the water in that restless state just before boiling. He is standing by the edge, peering below the surface.
Jessie was right: petrol is bad for the skin. He meant to test it first, only apply a drop, but he saw a flea jump off his shin and on to the bed sheet, and then lay still, quite dead, and couldn’t resist applying the petrol all over his legs, below the knees. When Ash sees his shins in the morning, she emits something very like a shriek. He waves a hand.
‘It looks worse than it feels.’
In truth, he is afraid of looking.
‘I’ve got something for burns,’ Jessie says, and brings a tube of a Vaseline-like paste from her me
dicine stash. He is grateful to her for not gloating.
Some days he thinks he can tune in to a remote tick-tock, tick-tock that gives him cold sweats. Lying on the sofa bed scratching himself bloody, he’s somehow not surprised that it’s all come to this hounding by tiny enemies. Fleas, viruses. Gamma rays.
One morning, he wakes up knowing straight away that he’s alone in the cottage. The girls’ absence is so pervasive it’s like an alarm ringing.
He goes to the bedroom, opens the door. Relief washes over him when he sees that their stuff is still there.
He goes down to the river, shouts after them, at first cautiously, then louder. They must have gone for a walk, he thinks. He congratulates himself on having warned them about approaching any houses.
An hour later, they still haven’t returned.
He paces the front of the cottage. Awful scenarios insinuate themselves. Maybe they’ve fallen ill, and left so as not to infect him. He works himself up into a temper. How inconsiderate of them to leave like this. He curses Jessie under his breath: this disappearing act, he’s sure, was her idea. He tells himself that he was alone, up till only recently, and he was fine. There’s no reason why he can’t be alone again.
The thought itself hurts.
He takes a walk down the path leading from the cottage, to where it meets the road. There is nothing along the path, no signs to read, no hint that they might have gone this way. He doesn’t like the idea of shouting, attracting attention to himself this far from the house, but he does that, he shouts, ‘Ash! Jessie!’ in every direction from the top of his lungs.
It must be weeks, months, since he was this far from the cottage. It feels like outer space.
He returns to the cottage and gives the girls half an hour until they return; it is inadmissible that they will not show up after half an hour. Then half an hour again. He repeats this circle of imagined authority and disappointment until it loses all power to soothe him. And every few minutes he has the impulse to just go out and look for them, but he always stops himself. Where would he start looking? What if they get back while he’s gone?
He eats lunch late, in a nervous fit, each mouthful of sardines emphatically not what he wants and needs.
Finally he decides that he has to do something or he will go mad. He puts his boots on, then spins around looking for the axe. Last night he left it leaning by the front door. But it’s not there, and soon he discovers it’s nowhere else he can think of looking.
They’ve taken the axe. He sinks back on to the sofa, head in his hands. Where on earth did they go? He still can’t believe it: they were all fine, only a day ago. Healthy, nothing but flea bites to complain about. Now the girls are gone, and he is roaming the cottage like a madman.
He doesn’t wish Jessie harm. He says it out loud, takes out insurance against future guilt: ‘I never wished Jessie any harm.’
It’s late afternoon, evening almost, when he hears their voices outside. They’re coming up the path. All the anger he felt, gone: he simply feels himself dissolve in relief.
‘You’re not dead,’ he says when they come in, feigning nonchalance. He immediately regrets it when he sees them. They look terrible, dishevelled and dirty. He rushes to Ash. She gives him a tired thumbs-up. Her hands and arms are filthy, as though she has been digging a hole with her bare hands.
‘Funny Mr Painter is being funny,’ Jessie says, dropping a shoulder bag on to the floor. He only now notices the rifle on her back.
‘What’s this? What happened?’
‘The neighbours won’t need anything any more,’ Jessie says.
They ignored his advice and went near houses.
‘I want water,’ Ash says, and makes straight for the kitchen.
‘You could have been shot!’ he says.
‘Well, we weren’t. Your neighbour is dead. And he wasn’t going to post us the rifle.’
‘We fell into some kind of cellar.’ Ash is back, a half-empty bottle in her hands. ‘A trap,’ she goes on. ‘They must’ve been worried about attacks.’
‘Took a while to get out,’ Jessie says. She holds out her arms, pale side up, showing him scratches and bruises.
‘I was worried sick.’ His voice is trembling.
‘Yeah, so were we. It wasn’t fun.’
He stands by as Jessie takes out box after box from the bag and puts them on the table. The boxes are full of bullets. He steps back from the table, from them.
‘I can’t believe you,’ he says. ‘This is all going to be contaminated.’
‘We wore masks,’ Ash says, ‘and we wiped everything we took with disinfectant.’
‘Do you know how to use this?’ Jessie says, pointing at the rifle.
‘You pull the trigger,’ he says.
‘Ha. Does it need stuff? Gunpowder. Stuff.’
‘I miss Google,’ Ash says.
‘This is crazy,’ he says.
‘You’ll feel safer too with a gun,’ Jessie says.
‘You sound like a bloody Texan,’ he says.
They don’t even apologise for what they put him through. They just go for a wash by the stream and when they return they start practising shooting behind the cottage. They’ve placed a coffee mug on a tree stump and take a long time to hit it. But once that first mug is gone, they quickly shoot five more. The whole cottage reeks of gunpowder.
When they come back inside, Ash says, ‘Harry, we really have to leave.’
They pursue him around the house. He tries reason, anger. Ridicule. ‘Heigh-ho, to the Magic Mountain of Africa! Madness.’
The risk of infection is his main argument against leaving. Jessie is dismissive. ‘We’ve got masks, but I’m pretty sure there’s no one left around to infect us. That bug needs living hosts to survive.’
‘Ha! The reindeer that infected everyone were long dead.’
‘The reindeer went into deep freeze right after death. The bug got frozen alive.’
She says that since the three of them are still alive they have probably acquired some form of immunity, she goes on about Regency milkmaids and their immunity to the pox. But mainly they don’t take him seriously: sometimes they answer questions the way they would speak to a child, saying anything just to shut the kid up.
Back in the living room, he lets himself fall on the sofa. He is exhausted. Maybe they’re right, and this horrible thing really is happening. Or maybe it’ll be fine anyway. The people they’ll run into, maybe they’ll know something, maybe they’ll have news that it’s been fixed, taken care of, it was a lie or misunderstanding to begin with. No need to attempt to cross two continents. The girls will calm down, and they’ll find a nice place in France, a cottage like this one, and wait the nightmare out.
It takes Jessie no time at all to smell his defeat. ‘Come on, let’s get packing,’ she says.
Propped up by the passenger seat, the rifle is the first thing to go into the car.
TALOS
Arctic Circle
August 2018
Lisa 2 weeks now
hasn’t bothered to reply to any messages
Paul I see his drones are in London and …
Norilsk?
Lisa yup
that’s in siberia
what can he possibly stare at for 6 days in siberia
Paul Tower blocks and riverbeds mostly, according to the live streaming.
Lisa that’s my point
why would he do that
Paul Hate to say ‘I told you so’ …
Lisa u don’t hate it at all
Paul It was always risky letting him conduct his own research.
Lisa conducting his own research was implicit in letting him have the flybots and senses and instruments, which you supported what else was he going to do with that
Paul I never agreed to letting him go AWOL for weeks and weeks without reporting back.
He might be wasting all this time and resources, and we’ll only know at the end.
Lisa he made a v good cas
e for why he needs to complement the data we give him with his own observations
Paul Showing us instances of bias and errors in research papers doesn’t necessarily add up to letting him run his own show.
Lisa even if it’s a waste of time
it will be part of his learning process
he’ll correct his procedures, and he’ll do better next time
Paul Weren’t you the one complaining two minutes ago?
Lisa just wanted some sympathy
hard being ghosted by a pile of copper
also
apart from everything else
I’m lying to boss
Paul I did not read that.
Lisa technically we’ve lost contact with talos
can’t admit that, can I
Paul What did you tell him?
Lisa I said we’re in touch but we will have a full report
upon the return of the flybots
that he’s taking soil, air samples etc
that need to be analysed in a lab
at which point we will be the fortunate recipients of his conclusions and predictions
boss is very excited
Paul Christ.
Lisa after all the brouhaha about him being potentially dangerous
how do u think this would go down
‘he went on an expedition whose purpose he didn’t disclose, and now he is not communicating at all’
*
Lisa look
talos works, right
we know that he works
it’s just a matter of time until they’ll have smtng so valuable
they’ll forget about their concerns
Paul So, basically, we’re betting the house on having a useful prediction from Talos before the gods above demand any more transcripts?
Paul I have to say I did not expect this.
We were thinking maybe he’d try to take over the world.
Build a gazillion mini-Taloses to implant into human carriers.
Take horrible revenge on his human overlords Lisa and Paul.
Instead, we get radio silence.
The cold shoulder.
Lisa not even a text
Under the Blue Page 10
