Under the Blue

by Oana Aristide

  To have a brush, a canvas, paper, paints.

  ‘I wish I had my paints,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’ Jessie asks.

  She is in one of her moods. He pretends he hasn’t heard.

  ‘Is it a stupid question?’ she insists. ‘Why? Why? Why?’

  ‘Art—’ he starts, but Jessie cuts him off.

  ‘Art. What is that essentially? It’s just us thinking that’s a brilliant thing to do. Art is just entertainment for us, like fetching a stick is entertainment for dogs.’

  ‘Dogs!’ he says, but he has no reply beyond that and is quiet.

  Jessie doesn’t stop.

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t see you draw or paint once in weeks at the cottage.’

  It’s funny: at first, he’s surprised that the inside of his mind is so completely unknown to Jessie. It seems impossible that all those times he thought about painting haven’t left some visible mark.

  How can he explain, that he was dying to draw and paint, but couldn’t because he thought they’d seen the portraits he’d drawn of Ash? Jessie waits for him to make some excuse, seems satisfied that her point has been accepted. The unfairness of it all brings up a metallic flavour in his mouth, and then Ash, trying to help, says, ‘Don’t you think he had other things to worry about?’

  The driver’s seat takes on his shape. All three of them have constantly blocked and runny noses from the air-con; for hours at a time the only sound in the car is sniffling.

  ‘Did you have boyfriends, partners, when this happened?’ he asks them one day.

  ‘What now?’ Jessie.

  ‘Just wondering.’

  ‘Yeah, husbands and kids,’ she says. ‘We sent them ahead to wait for us in Africa.’

  ‘It’s not such a strange question,’ he says, but he feels pathetic and lecherous trying to get Ash to talk about men. The whole thing is made worse by the knowledge that he really, really doesn’t want to know about any boyfriends.

  ‘I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time,’ Ash says.

  ‘Could you,’ Jessie says, ‘maybe, if you really make an effort, guess why we don’t feel like talking about anyone?’

  He feels he’s being tricked, that Jessie is using the notion of grief to shut him up, but what can he say to that? There really is grief.

  Only rarely do they find a country road blocked, but he’s still afraid they’ll get stuck somewhere, with too little petrol in the tank to take an alternative route, forced to leave the car, their supplies, and set off on foot. So he keeps an eye on the fuel gauge and stops whenever the tank is less than half full and he spots a car. He uses the hose to siphon petrol from one tank, into a canister, and then into their tank. It means they stop at least once a day for fuel. Progress is slow. The cumbersome meals – wherever they can they make a fire, so as to not use up the gas cartridges for the cooker. They’re still in France, they’ve been in France for five days. Europe seems enormous.

  At night, he dreams of ice and cold.

  Jessie’s trips into houses remain a mystery to him and Ash. She does this almost every day, either for car keys when they need petrol, or for bottled water and food. Nothing ever happens. He and Ash wait outside by the car, accustomed now to the routine, less anxious about traps and whatever else she might run into. When she doesn’t find the door open Harry takes the wheel wrench to a ground-floor window, breaks it open for her. She doesn’t speak about what she sees in there, and they don’t ask. Only once, after returning to the car laden with six large bottles of water and a supermarket shopping bag full of organic corn-cakes, she slumped in the passenger seat and said, ‘A lot of houseplants not being watered.’ Her words sadden him more than if she had unburdened herself by talking of corpses.

  They have stopped wearing masks, stopped disinfecting the stuff they take from houses. The girls don’t really care, and so he stopped nagging. It seems fine.

  He would have lost the bet he proposed at the start of the journey: by the time they pass Lyon they’ve still not met anyone. It could be, he thinks, that survival rates are very uneven, that there are places where the disease hasn’t made inroads, so most people are still fine, and some where everyone succumbed. He knows nothing, and the girls, for all of Jessie’s expertise and certainty, know just as little. If doctors knew much of anything, he and the girls wouldn’t have been here in the first place.

  ‘Could we maybe stop it?’ he bursts out one day. ‘Fix the problem somehow?’

  Maybe that’s what they’re here for, maybe they’re missing the point altogether by trying to escape.

  ‘You’re a nuclear physicist and you didn’t tell us?’ Jessie says.

  ‘We don’t need to be nuclear experts; we just need to find a solution to provide a reactor with cold water. That’s what you said.’

  ‘There’s no time, Harry,’ Ash says. ‘There are hundreds of reactors. How many do you think we can fix in a few weeks?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ Jessie says, ‘even with just one.’

  ‘It’s awful, but there’s really nothing we can do about this,’ Ash says. ‘The only way we can do any good is by surviving. Getting somewhere safe. Then we can help.’

  The last couple of days he has noticed Ash taking an unusual interest in the landscape; he catches her turning back in the car to look at some village or other they pass in the distance. He bites his lip instead of asking what she’s looking for, fearing more of the old paranoia. Then, finally, one morning she leaps up between the front seats, and points at a huge flat building on the left. The man-sized red letters facing the road spell ‘Auchan’.

  ‘That’s a supermarket, isn’t it?’ she says.

  ‘There won’t be any food left,’ Jessie says.

  Ash ignores this.

  ‘Can you stop, please?’ She taps his shoulder.

  He turns left and stops by the front entrance. The glass doors are shattered. The Lioness has hardly come to a standstill when Ash jumps out and runs into the building.

  ‘Such energy,’ Jessie says.

  He shrugs. She might need some women’s stuff, he thinks.

  Ash returns in about ten minutes. He can’t make out what she’s carrying until she gets back into the car and plonks the stuff into his lap.

  ‘Sorry. I was hoping for something more professional.’

  It’s a children’s drawing block, some pencils and a box of crayons.

  It takes him another few moments to realise what she means by that.

  ‘It’s stupid, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Probably worse than not having anything it all.’

  ‘Ah! No, no. Thank you.’

  ‘You can just get rid of it if you want. Really. I thought they’d have some grown-up stuff.’

  ‘Oh, who’s the grown-up?’ Jessie says.

  ‘Ash. Thank you. Really. I’m sure I can draw perfectly well with these.’

  ‘It’s stupid. I thought they’d have something better.’

  She is hiding behind his seat, where he can’t see her, not even in the rear-view mirror. He says ‘thank you’ again, and they’re out of the car park and back on a route communale when his heart catches up with what has happened, does a little mystified gallop.

  Later again, hours later, it hits him. In all his analysing of Ash’s interaction with him, he has failed to notice one thing: she takes him seriously. She will treat the things he says and does as though they are the true outward manifestation of his thoughts and feelings, and then she gives them due care.

  What does that mean, now?

  At times he embarks on long speeches, monologues really, telling the girls random things he remembers, things that no one else knows. He tells them about people he knew, their quirks, tries to put into words things that, in a different time and place, he would have tried to put in painting. At one point, Ash takes a cue and starts talking about a cousin of theirs who always carried a shoulder bag, never put it down, was never seen without it, but after only a few sentences Jessie turns back to her
, gives her a stare. And Ash goes silent. There it is again, the mysterious filament of anger between the sisters. It’s like Jessie doesn’t want to be reminded there was a world once.

  They are in Provence when he realises he has fully let go of the idea of painting Tim. Maybe it’s because he has those crayons and pencils, silly as they are, and in theory he could at least sketch something, make a plan. But the impulse is no longer there. He can’t see now why he ever thought that might have done Tim any good, or how exactly it would have constituted atonement; the whole plan seems self-indulgent and fake. Pompous. Did Jessie get to him with her rant against art? He doesn’t think so. He’d still love to have his paints.

  And he still feels terrible about Tim.

  Every day, they fully intend to spend the coming night outside the car, in the fresh air under the wide sky, and every night they end up in the car, a palm’s width of window left open so they don’t choke to death, his breath already constricted by the useless proximity to Ash. Driven inside by some noise, by the darkness around them that throbs with its own arrangements. They are full of fear by then; afraid even of admitting their fear to each other, so that they make their beds in the car without having formally given up on the notion of sleeping outside. Ash still has nightmares, and her yelping, the little animal screams she lets out through the night, make him freeze. In the mornings it all seems incomprehensible, and they decide again that the next night they’ll sleep outdoors.

  Perhaps it’s sleeplessness that makes Jessie explode one morning at the sight of fresh wounds on Ash’s arm.

  ‘What the fuck! If we’re going to top ourselves, tell me now, I don’t need to go on a fucking road trip first.’

  ‘Give her a break. She can’t help it,’ he says.

  ‘Can’t help it? Yadda yadda yadda about stuff that doesn’t matter any more, now this fucking scratching. What’s the point?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ash says.

  ‘Don’t you apologise for being injured!’ he says.

  ‘Why don’t you tell your friend, then?’ Jessie says. ‘Come on, tell him.’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  Ash goes on trying to get the burner started for coffee.

  ‘Ash. Tell me what?’

  ‘I just want to have my coffee in peace,’ she says.

  When he looks at Jessie, she walks away and hides behind the raised car boot. Afterwards, they seem exhausted by the argument, and tell him again and again to let it rest.

  Jessie has stopped complaining about the size of the Lioness and that she guzzles so much petrol that they have to fill her up every day, or that she’s too old and might break down on them. The first couple of days, the girls had been looking at the abandoned cars they drove past, sometimes wondering out loud if that 4x4 or that Volvo sedan might not last them longer. They stopped doing that. It’s become unthinkable that they might leave the Lioness. The car is no longer a car, it’s a mothership. Unleaveable.

  One night he overrules his fear and decides to sleep outdoors, animal noises be damned. Ash might join him; away from the crowded car, at least, there’s some hope.

  ‘The most incredible weather and the most beautiful night sky,’ he says while taking a blanket from the boot. ‘If this isn’t the time to sleep under the sky, then when?’ He speaks to build up courage for himself as much as to convince Ash. She has made her bed already in the back and is sitting hugging her legs, watching him sceptically.

  Jessie says, ‘Bugs will eat your eyes.’

  He lies down on the ground by the side of the road. It’s hard, but what he has lost in softness he makes up for in space. He can stretch out, his knees won’t bang against any wheel. He likes the smell of the earth, of dry grass. He doesn’t mind the whirring and buzzing around him that he’s sure are just grasshoppers and crickets.

  He tells himself that even if she doesn’t follow him tonight, if tomorrow she sees he’s fine, rested, she might give it a try. And if that happens, she wouldn’t make her bed far from his. They would talk. She’s always attentive towards him, she doesn’t gang up on him with Jessie. She brought him those silly crayons; she likes him.

  A scrabbling sound from the field makes him curl up and pull the blanket over his head, but within a minute it is unbearably hot. He has to uncover himself. He feels unsafe now, worries that if some opportunistic animal tries to eat him, they might not even start at the feet but at his face. He covers himself with the blanket again.

  It’s like a sauna. He pulls off the blanket, squints at the car: no movement.

  Something small darts across the road not far from his feet. He sits up abruptly, pulls in his legs.

  It’s not even been ten minutes. This is ridiculous.

  But he can’t relax, he can’t even think of Ash. He gives up. Returning to the safety of the car with his blanket in tow, he feels like an oversized night-scared toddler.

  At some point they’ll have to get over their phobia of houses. He can’t imagine never sleeping in a bed again. Hotels, he thinks, they ought to be empty of corpses. No one would have stayed in a hotel until the end. He shares this insight with the girls.

  Jessie squints at him suspiciously. ‘Hotels are in cities,’ she says.

  ‘Exactly,’ he says, and then they have an argument about their route: he has realised that Jessie wilfully directs him away from every large human settlement. ‘Cities are cesspits of infections, not just the virus. There was no clean water anywhere; all the canals and waterways became full of sewage, corpses and industrial leakage. Factory and warehouse fires that released toxic chemicals. Believe me, the last thing you want is cities.’

  She says all this, but he feels there’s some other reason, that they’re just making excuses for their paranoia. He challenges her, argues that cities should be no worse than the towns and villages they’ve been through. Jessie sticks to her line, and Ash backs her up. In the middle of the argument he realises he has another motive as well: he wants to see man-made beauty, wants to go once more inside a cathedral. He has seen road signs saying Orleans, Reims and Anjou, and not taken those roads.

  ‘Look, it’s not safe,’ Jessie says. ‘Who’s the doctor here?’

  ‘Clearly not you,’ he says. ‘People needed you.’

  What possesses him to say this, and what possesses him to keep arguing?

  ‘You saved any lives lately, Mr Painter?’

  ‘Yes, yours.’

  ‘Ha! You really have no clue.’

  ‘I took you in.’

  ‘Let’s not,’ Ash tries to calm them.

  ‘Anyway, I can drive wherever I damn well please,’ he says.

  ‘Alone, you can.’

  He is tempted to stop the car and shove the obnoxious brat out, for a moment he can’t imagine a better feeling than being rid of Jessie, but what would Ash do?

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Ash says, and he can’t tell which one of them she’s scolding. ‘You’re both as alone as you could ever wish to be.’

  6

  It is afternoon, and they’re driving through a forest when Jessie alerts him to another blue splash on the map. It looks small, and he doubts there will be any water left, but when he stops the Lioness they see a footpath and the shimmer of a real lake through the foliage.

  The girls throw off shorts and run to the water. He grabs a bottle of wine from the boot and follows them. They badly need a drink, he thinks, a toast to themselves and their sunny, leaden race across Europe.

  There’s some sort of floating wooden jetty just by the water’s edge, and Ash leaps on to it, wobbles for a moment with the contraption that floats free of the shore, then makes a run for the other end. Don’t dive, there might be rocks, he wants to shout; instead, watches her buttocks bounce inside the green bikini. Jessie, still on land, shakes off her flip-flops and steps into the water.

  If he were still an artist, if he still had an audience, he would render this journey in blocks of amber.

  ‘Ash!’

  Jessie�
��s scream is so loud he perceives it like a rent down his visual field. He is nearly by Jessie’s side, and he stops in his tracks, uncomprehending. She is back on land, has fallen to the ground. She rolls on to her side now, holding her right shin. Her foot is covered in a thin film of blackish gunk. He drops the bottle of wine and kneels by her side, sees the blisters that have already formed on her foot, sees a sliver of skin curled up on itself like badly cooked bacon. The lake: it’s not water. It’s some kind of chemical.

  He will have to turn and see if Ash has jumped in. This world, he thinks, is killing me just with what it wants me to consider.

  It all must have taken only a fraction of a moment, because when he looks up, Ash is still at the other end of the jetty, waving her arms about in an effort to regain balance. She rights herself, takes a step backwards. She doesn’t fall in.

  He stands up. The jetty has hardly moved, but the distance to dry land is too wide to jump. Ash has turned towards the shore, taken a step or two, then frozen. But she appears fine. Her feet are dry, the jetty is dry. There’s some black staining at the edges where water, or whatever it is, has splashed on to the surface, but where Ash is standing it looks dry. He tries to calm himself, to make sure he is not missing something like the jetty slowly sinking. No; she is fine for now.

  ‘Don’t move!’ he shouts to her, then returns to Jessie. Her eyes are closed; tears are running down her cheeks.

  ‘She’s OK?’ she says between clenched teeth.

  ‘Yes, yes. Your foot? I can bring water.’

  She nods. ‘And the meds bag.’

  He takes another look at Ash to make sure that neither she nor the jetty are moving, shouts, ‘I’ll be right back,’ and runs to the car.

  Jessie’s foot is burnt, he thinks, some sort of chemical burn. She has stuff for that in her bag, she treated his leg at the cottage. And they will find something to use as a bridge for Ash, or to pull in the jetty. It could have been much worse.

  He fumbles among the bags in the boot. He doesn’t recognise himself in this panic; it’s ages since he did anything in a hurry.