Under the Blue

by Oana Aristide

  The sun burns his left arm, even with sunscreen, and he has to cover it with a shirt. Jessie approves. ‘Clothes are the best sunscreen,’ she says. ‘No doctor ever tells you this.’

  On the empty roads, he soon realises he really has no use for the rear-view mirror other than to look at Ash.

  The motorways, they learn the first day, are no good. From the beach they head for the A16 towards Paris, and they find the toll gates wide open, a delinquent thrill as they speed through them, but once they’re on the motorway they only advance haltingly. Every so often a speck of something shimmers in the oily distance, and when they come near they find the mangled and charred remnants of crashed cars or overturned lorries blocking most of the road. He has to perform manoeuvres that have more in common with parallel parking than driving on a motorway.

  ‘Good job choosing the widest car in the world,’ Jessie chides him.

  ‘Feel free to walk,’ he says.

  Once they even have to stop and put their shoulders to the burnt skeleton of a sports car. The chassis is still hot, as though the fire is recent, but of course it’s the sun that is burning away. He only notices the mummified remains of the driver when he takes a step back to check whether the Mercedes will fit through the gap. He handles that, refuses to acknowledge the sight, but then he returns to their car and there’s this smell, of sunscreen, hot tarmac and human warmth, the purest smell of holidays, and he has to close his eyes and lean back in his seat, let his heart throw its tantrum.

  For a while after that they are driving with a forest fire raging some way off to their left. There’s no wind, and no smoke blows their way, but the air on that side is hot, swollen like a blister. Within minutes the towel he has draped over his seat is soaked with sweat.

  They give up on the motorways. ‘We want the thin white dotted lines.’ He taps the map in Jessie’s hands. It turns out he’s right. On the small roads, no derelict cars obstruct their passage, and in the narrow lanes, hugged by leafy trees or green fences, dappled light playing on the asphalt, it’s possible to entertain the notion that all is as it should be. They have moved beyond the reach of the fire, but even the summer heat is less forceful here, the ground still has a whiff of humidity. The roads take them through quaint little villages, and here he slows down, impelled to do so by road signs and habit. Ghostly houses and ghostly squares, and an oppressive silence everywhere. The breakdown of civilisation is quiet: no alarms, no engines, no voices.

  ‘Careful,’ Ash says from the back seat. He sees that there’s something wrong with the road ahead, and suddenly they are surrounded by half-grown chickens, thousands and thousands of them, a dirty-white mass emitting a high-pitched noise and a stench of ammonia.

  ‘Do we want a change of diet?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m not wringing any necks,’ Ash says.

  ‘Funny they’re surviving,’ Jessie says.

  He presses the horn, and drives very slowly, checking an urge to speed through the birds. Thousands of stupid chickens, and not a single human being.

  ‘What if they’re hiding?’ he bursts out. ‘The people. We were afraid of others too.’

  The girls protest, but the idea has taken root in him. He won’t let it go. In the next town, he parks on a street of run-down bungalows, and hands the girls each a new gas mask, plastic gloves.

  ‘If the houses are empty, at least we know everyone has left,’ he says before unsealing and putting on his mask, nearly gagging on the smell of hot rubber. He is vaguely aware of exposing everyone to unnecessary risk, but he is fed up with relying on the girls for information. From now on he will see for himself.

  Jessie shakes her masked head at him.

  He picks out a bungalow that looks comparatively well tended: no debris in the front garden and neatly drawn curtains at every window. They have decided that he will go in first, and Jessie will follow just behind with the rifle. Ash has to wait for the all-clear from them before following, the idea being that they don’t all three fall into some trap. No one specifies what on earth Ash should do if the all-clear doesn’t come.

  His heart is in his mouth when he tries the dust-covered front-door handle. It is locked, and they have to climb in through a bay window.

  Sweat drips into his eyes, and it takes him a while to get used to the half-light.

  The bodies are mostly naked, lying on top of bedsheets. A few are stretched out under open windows. One elderly man they find on the floor, an antique shotgun next to him. A grey-brown mess where his head should have been, more of a stain on the floorboards than a wounded human head. Already flattened by time and heat.

  It’s the stuff of his nightmares, and it just goes on: no traps, no devices to keep them out, no desperate holed-up survivors. Just bodies. In two of the houses, the corpses are in the backyard. Desiccated, their skin like a taut membrane that has squeezed the life out of them. He and the girls pass each other in hallways, shaking their heads by way of ‘Checked, don’t enter’. He catches a glimpse of himself in a wall-length mirror: a sweaty, frightened alien, alone with the constricted sound of his breath.

  After seven or eight houses, he signals to the girls to turn back. Ash and Jessie take their masks off as soon as they’re out.

  ‘Enough, all right?’ Jessie says. ‘There’s no point.’

  He doesn’t argue. He wishes they hadn’t gone in.

  *

  From the back seat, Ash tries to make herself useful, and he lets her pamper him. She offers him snacks, makes sure he drinks water. She alerts him to the shifting sun and helps him cover any exposed skin, delicious alarm rising in him as her smooth arm encircles him from behind to drape the towel on his shoulder. He forgets to breathe.

  He could swear Jessie is sniggering. ‘So,’ she says at one point, ‘who’d like to repopulate the Earth?’

  When they stop – out of habit, again, he has parked at a lay-by, even though he could have just killed the engine in the middle of the road – it’s Ash who opens the mackerel tins, and heats their tomato soup on the burner while he jogs to the end of the lay-by to stretch his legs, feeling stiff and bottom-heavy. And when they are done, she takes the empty tins and soup packet to an overflowing bin, carefully perches their garbage on top of the old garbage. He and Jessie exchange glances – no action ever seemed more futile.

  In his mind he lists the many artistic visions of the end of the world. He can’t think of a single one where the sun is shining like this: intensely, endlessly, happily.

  Back in the car, Jessie’s toes wriggle in the corner of his eye; she has reclined her seat and put her horsey, athletic legs up on the dashboard. His eyesight is not what it was, but he thinks the dark streak along the side of her foot, like a waterline, is dirt. He can’t imagine the previous owner of the car allowing anyone’s heels to touch the walnut surface. Then again, the previous owner hadn’t met Jessie.

  ‘Next stop,’ he says defiantly, ‘I want a cigarette.’

  ‘Sunglasses,’ Ash says, and Jessie chimes in, ‘A watermelon. I’d murder for a watermelon.’

  ‘A cold beer,’ he says.

  ‘A bowl of strawberries and a glass of Prosecco by a pool,’ Ash says.

  ‘Have you seen Wild Strawberries?’ When the girls shake their heads, he says, ‘I want someone who has seen Wild Strawberries.’

  They find a CD in the CD-player: Tosca, sung by Maria Callas. They stare at the disc but can’t bring themselves to put it on. Music is somehow unthinkable.

  Here and there they come across stray dogs skulking along the roadside, thin and dishevelled to the point neither he nor the girls can tell their breed. Jessie occasionally grabs the rifle, spooked by something, and then he slows down, ready to intervene and stop her from accidentally shooting a fellow survivor.

  It is tiring to drive without any cars around to distract him, without even the worry of speed limits. The car straddles the middle line, and his eyes are fixed a few feet ahead, the continuous reeling in of the white stripe hypnotic. His
mind drifts. He thinks of people lying dead in their bedrooms below his paintings. Of the vast stretches of time he spent doing nothing. And he becomes absurdly sentimental about the car, this great little miracle of a thing that still works, its solidity and how it radiates a quality of having been loved and tended to. A car for better times; she was never meant to just ferry people along from A to B.

  ‘The Golden Lioness,’ he says, patting the dashboard.

  ‘How specific,’ Jessie says.

  ‘Cars are female,’ he says.

  ‘The Golden Lioness. Taking us to Africa,’ Jessie says. ‘I like that.’

  ‘You’d have hated it a month ago,’ Ash says. She catches his eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘She was fanatical about the environment. Our lioness must be the equivalent of ten normal cars.’

  ‘The end of recycling!’ Jessie announces. ‘We can consume for eight billion.’

  There are many moments like this, the first day: they distance themselves from their predicament, it becomes something to joke about. Layers and layers of words, insulation really, between what has happened and what they feel. Sometimes he rebels against it, feels that he’s being made complicit on the sly, and he becomes petty, comes out with hurtful little reminders, This part of France has always been lovely, or Don’t you wonder about friends?

  ‘We know about friends,’ Jessie cuts him off.

  He thinks how Jessie would have never dwelt on a mistake the way he does, would have just made a decision and moved on, orphaned nephews be damned. But, instead of making him feel comparatively virtuous, that thought briefly allows Jessie inside his head: Fat lot of good a portrait does a dead guy. This Tim business is all about you.

  ‘At least I haven’t given up hope,’ he says out loud.

  ‘At least I’m honest,’ Jessie says.

  What with the many stops and the meandering country lanes, they only make about 80 miles the first day. It’s still dusk when he says, ‘Let’s stop soon.’ He welcomes the chance to sleep and forget, and the knowledge that they’ve only travelled 80 miles becomes a defence against disappointment: did he really think they’d come across healthy communities so soon? Eighty miles is nothing. They will have to search the corners of the Earth.

  Ash is still alert and attentive in the rear-view mirror, looking for a place to stop, and Jessie, after haranguing them all day, is sleepy like a child, like someone who doesn’t have a care in the world. She curls up, her head lolling against the window, her eyes half-shut.

  He is alone with Ash.

  They debate in a whisper where to spend the night, whether to wait until they reach a forest, somewhere more protected. Ash is leaning forwards between the seats, to better see where they are going.

  If he turns his head he’ll be kissing her ear.

  He eventually stops out in the open, fields of wheat or some-such on both sides. They step out of the car. He had a notion that they’d each grab a blanket and sleep outside, and Ash had agreed, but, faced with the actual darkness and raspy noises of night insects and the scraping of small animals, she backtracks. They take in the size of the seats and ways in which they can crowd around Jessie.

  Ash touches his arm, says, ‘Look.’ She means the sky. It’s like no sky he’s seen before. It almost gives him a fright, to look up and find the stars so near, and so many. It’s like turning the light on in a previously dark room and discovering another face an inch from your own. Alarming.

  ‘Christ,’ he says.

  ‘Why didn’t we notice this at the cottage?’

  ‘I suppose we didn’t go out at night. Or it was full moon, and too bright.’

  They are whispering, though they are some way from the car and sleeping Jessie.

  ‘Wish we could have stayed in London,’ he says. ‘I had many more lift chat-up lines. Loads.’

  Why not? he thinks. What else is there? And: is she smiling?

  ‘Yes. It might have been better,’ she says. Then, before he has a chance to react, ‘Do you think there are still people up there? On the International Space Station?’

  ‘Someone will have told them,’ he says.

  ‘It must be even worse for them. Watching everyone die from out there.’

  ‘I’m not dead. You’re not dead.’

  Ash ignores this.

  ‘Imagine, there will be falling stars that will be satellites,’ she says. ‘Thousands of them up there. It’ll look like it’s raining stars. And no one left to see it.’

  ‘We’ll be seeing the same sky once we get to Africa,’ he says. Ash sighs.

  ‘Ah, yes. We’ll hold hands with gorillas on mist-covered mountains.’

  The frivolous tone frightens him, the invitation to admit the implausibility of it all: crossing two continents, the nuclear melt-downs. He wants to have misunderstood.

  ‘It’s your plan,’ he says. ‘It’s why we’re here.’

  ‘Plan. Why we’re here. Big words.’

  She turns and walks to the car.

  He doesn’t understand where this flippancy is coming from, why she’s mocking him. He follows her to the car and wakes Jessie up, brutally, tells her to put the back of her seat up and make room. She wakes with a fright, too confused to protest.

  Ash climbs into the car. She offers an apology, of sorts: ‘Look, I just don’t know what to say any more. Really. I don’t know what to say, all the time.’

  Lying back in his seat, his view a big slice of sky, he feels old, he feels they are all ancient, that they’ve somehow taken on the whole of dying humanity’s age.

  4

  The night is difficult. The intimacy of the car makes him self-conscious about his breathing. The car, though huge, is not so big as to allow him to stretch out properly. Jessie next to him lies on her stomach, Superman-style, one hand on the rifle, and he hasn’t heard Ash move since she curled up on the back seat. He registers the momentary absence of sexual tension with surprise, a note of sadness. Protectiveness is what he feels, an extension of the self to include the souls next to him. More dog than man.

  The noises outside the car – what would have been harmless noises in daylight, not even noticed – keep him in a semi-awake, watchful state. The sound of crickets, the cracking of a twig. Whenever he opens his eyes, there is enough light from the star-studded sky to tempt him to try to see, but he can’t, not really.

  At six, the sun is up and baking the car. Another lesson learned: park the car so there’s shade in the morning.

  The girls wake up, stumble out on to the road. Jessie scans the fields for a place to pee. They look like they’ve had a drunken night out, he realises; crumpled faces, their colouring faded. He can only imagine what he looks like.

  They make a fire in the middle of the road, away from any vegetation.

  After the forced closeness of the night the three of them keep their distance from one another, even while eating, but then Ash asks for the map, wants to find a river or lake where they can wash, and he notices her left forearm: two scratches, two welts with a red line in the middle, from the crook of her arm almost down to her wrist.

  ‘Christ, how did that happen?’ he says.

  Jessie comes over, grabs Ash’s wrist with a doctor’s carelessness.

  ‘Yeah, how did that happen?’

  Ash shrugs, a surprised look on her face, as though she never accepted responsibility for that arm. They don’t get an answer.

  Jessie rummages in her IKEA medicine bag and disinfects the cuts. He can’t watch that, has to turn away, but before they leave he gets on all fours in the back seat and runs his hands over the leather and the car doors, looking for any wires or suchlike that might have snagged her arm. ‘What now?’ Jessie asks, looming over the door, impatient to get out of the sun, but when he explains she looks at him as though he were a slow-witted child.

  ‘Sis had a nightmare,’ she says. ‘It’s cool. Let’s go.’ Nightmare, he thinks, what nightmares are there left for anyone to possibly have?

  Before they set of
f, Jessie studies the map. Then she throws it in his lap.

  ‘We’ve got to do better,’ she says. ‘Eighty miles yesterday. At this rate, it’ll take us four weeks just to get out of Europe. We’ll be toast.’

  His driving is erratic first thing in the morning. He enters curves too fast, brushing against railings. Random things catch his eye, distracting him from the road. The landscape, he realises; it’s strange to think how little it has changed. Nature still gives the impression of being managed, of growing within allotted limits. The farms they occasionally pass have not fallen into disrepair. New roof shingles shine on old houses, hedges still look trimmed. Everywhere, evidence of people’s work and industriousness. Wheat fields, orchards and vines that await the harvest. The whole world, he thinks, is like a room that someone has just left: the imprint of a head on the cushion, the warm, folded clothes on the chair. It could all be fine, he and the girls could be driving into regions where the disease had been contained, where people were going on about their lives, and they wouldn’t spot the difference. He tells himself it’s far more likely that they’ll just stumble upon some woman doing the washing in a river, or cooking for a family, than the crazed ambush that the girls seem to expect.

  At times, he feels the emptiness of the land as an almost physical pain.

  By a farmhouse where they stop to gather some apples he asks the girls, once they are back inside the car, to wait a minute, he needs to pee. He goes back to the courtyard, to a corner where he spotted some squat buckets of white paint. He doesn’t bother with the brushes and roller that are lying nearby: he opens the tub, and, slowly walking backwards, he pours out the white paint in a steady stream, drawing in his wake squiggly, fluid letters almost the size of him.

  ALIVE 09/2020

  Returning to the car he feels immediately better, and also he abandons any intention he had of telling the girls. They would disapprove, he’s sure. In their little democracy of three, he tells himself, he has no choice but to vote in secret.

  He has moments when, despite all that’s happened, he still feels he’s charmed. He has survived when so many others haven’t. Harry’s in luck, once again, a winning scratch card in his back pocket. Such a simple, beautiful explanation. But what about the girls? Did his luck somehow rub off on his next-door neighbour? Before he has a chance to check himself, he has grabbed hold of Jessie’s hand and given it a good squeeze; a coach-like, parental squeeze that Jessie responds to with a sceptical What’s this now? frown.