On impulse, Jesse knocked back one of the honey-colored shots on the table. His throat burned.
He blinked to find the whole group staring at him, stunned. His eyes met George’s, just for a second.
“What?” he said to them all. “Don’t tell me you had me down as straight?”
Alpha Male began chuckling and beating the table with his hand, his laughter rising to a crescendo. “So it’s that kind of film,” he spluttered. “Well, fuck me. Christmas drinks in the Woolmakers descends into gay porno. Fuck me.”
Jesse tried correcting them, but it was no use fighting the current—they wanted him to be a porn star, and so he was, even though he had no answer to Tom’s and Matt’s increasingly explicit questions.
The game moved on to everyone’s porno name, but the mood had shifted. Mouse’s hair tossing stopped. Matt was obviously repulsed by Jesse’s revelation, several times describing something as “gay” and then pointedly apologizing. Alpha Male was so drunk he looked like he wouldn’t care if Jesse had stated a sexual preference for chipmunks. The girls, he guessed, were keen to appear liberal. He could already see them telling the story in years to come: “Remember when we got talking to that gay porn star in the pub?” It was bullshit, of course. He’d barely been skiing. But he needed to know if what he sensed about George was real, or if his brain was addled by alcohol and too much alone time. Straight-seeming jock types had always been his weakness.
George was drinking hard. It looked like he was on a mission. Jesse had seen him finish two pints, a glass of mulled wine, and a bunch of shots, and now he was back from the bar with more beers—one for him, one for Jesse. Everybody else had refused his offer of a final drink.
Camilla returned from the bathroom. “Guys, I’m shattered. Home,” she said firmly, looking at her husband.
“Me, too,” said Mouse.
Alpha Male and Matt both stood, unsteadily. George stayed sitting down. “I’m gonna finish this one. I’ll catch you up,” he said to them, slurring slightly.
“Suit yourself,” said Alpha Male.
“Make sure he gets home safe,” Camilla said to Jesse. She seemed to be Mother Hen already.
“No sexy time,” added Alpha Male, and George gave him the finger. Matt looked appalled.
Now it was just the two of them. George was sitting back in his seat, eyelids drooping.
“Last orders!” shouted the barman.
“They’re closing already?” said Jesse.
“This is Norfolk, mate. You’re not in Manhattan now.”
“L.A. I’m West Coast.”
“Same difference.”
Was he just being a dick, or was it a clumsy attempt at flirting? A ringtone broke the moment, and George reached into his pocket. He looked at the screen for a second, switched it to silent, and let it sit, buzzing, on the table.
“Go ahead,” said Jesse, sipping the cool foam from his fresh pint. He’d nursed the first one for ages, and it had grown warm and stale.
“Nah, I’m leaving it.”
“Your girlfriend?” said Jesse. He’d spent enough time with straight men to read the signs.
“Fiancée.”
“Whoa. Serious.”
“I know. Not entirely sure how it happened, if I’m honest.”
“I’m guessing you put a ring on it?”
George grunted. He was staring at the phone, looking spaced out.
“How long have you guys been together?” said Jesse.
“Six years. Don’t get me wrong, she’s an awesome girl. Hundred percent. But it’s a massive commitment, y’know? There’s still a lot I want to do before I settle down, do the whole two-point-four kids thing. Guess you wouldn’t know.”
“Drink up, boys, we’re closin’,” said a hefty, middle-aged barmaid.
“Where are you staying?” asked George, suddenly.
“The Harbour Hotel.”
“Would the bar be open?”
“Maybe.”
“Quick one there, for the road?”
“Won’t your family wonder where you went?”
“They know I can take care of myself.”
“OK. Sure.”
They walked out into the night.
• 4 •
Christmas Day 2016
Quarantine: Day Three
Olivia
THE WILLOW ROOM, WEYFIELD HALL, 5:30 A.M.
• • •
Haag Blog 10: What Happens in PPE Stays in PPE
So here I am, back on British soil, after three months in Liberia. For the rest of the world it’s Christmas Day, but for me and my colleagues this is another twenty-four hours of quarantine. Twice daily, we must report our temperature to Public Health England. We have been supplied with “emergency Haag response kits,” packed with bleach, rubber gloves, and a mysterious little orange trowel, presumably for some kind of emergency burial . . . With these tangible links to Haag, it’s not easy to switch off and feel festive.
Because it turns out that coming home can be lonely. Friends and family either don’t want to hear about the things you’ve seen, or they don’t ask, for fear of upsetting you. “How was it?” they say. “You know, um, eye-opening,” you reply, groping for some palatable truth. “Of course. Must have been awful,” they say, looking uncomfortable, and somehow, at that point, the conversation always moves on. They mean well. But in trying to spare you, and themselves, they unwittingly make it worse. With no outlet, memories fester like untreated wounds.
There’s another shock in homecoming: the flashback. My colleague, who had more practical experience in treating epidemics than me, used to say, “What happens in PPE stays in PPE,” and I now understand what he meant. Let me explain. The Red Zone, the ward where Haag-positive patients were treated, could only be entered in full PPE. For the uninitiated that’s Personal Protective Equipment; a hazmat suit, goggles, wellies, heavy-duty apron, double rubber gloves. Anything that went into the Red Zone had to be bleached, or incinerated, on exit. We dressed with a buddy, to check—and triple-check—each other’s kit. It took at least twenty minutes. The deeper you both got into your PPE, the harder it became to communicate, until you were two shapeless monsters performing a strange dance of exaggerated thumbs-up gestures. If you’ve ever been scuba diving, you’ll have some idea of the process. And, just like going underwater, PPE muffles the senses. Within minutes your goggles are steamed up, you can’t smell anything but yourself—your own sweat, your own breath. Your hearing is foggy. Touch is blunted. It once took me five minutes to ascertain whether a woman was dead. Out of PPE, it would have taken me five seconds.
Then you enter the Red Zone, and do what you have to do. From inside your bubble you see terrible things. Children, screaming and screaming for their mothers—who are crying because they can’t touch their child. People begging you not to let them die, when all you can offer is a few words of badly accented Kreyol. Patients hemorrhaging so fast that within minutes of changing their sheets their beds are drenched with blood. Corpses lying unmoved for hours because there isn’t time to prioritize the dead over the living. By the time your shift finishes, you are emotionally spent. You and your buddy leave the Red Zone and are immediately sprayed with chlorine solution, before painstakingly doffing your PPE. A chlorine shower follows. Next, you must wash your hands three times, wash the tap you used, change into clean, bleach-mottled scrubs and dry wellies. But during this time, something happens. The hour of ritual undressing, washing, and redressing acts as a buffer between the Red Zone and reality. And the strange thing was, the memories did stay in that underwater PPE world, just as my colleague promised.
Except now, safely home and with time on my hands, the worst things I saw keep resurfacing. They haunt my dreams, and ambush me over family lunches. In Liberia, I slept soundly, lulled by the hum of a generator and the racket of Monrovian streets:
shouting, dogs barking, cockerels crowing. But here, in the quiet of the English countryside, peace is evasive. When I shut my eyes, all I hear is children crying.
I will never forget a man who had recovered from Haag, only to lose his three-year-old son Abu to the virus soon after. I had become too attached to Abu myself—it was impossible not to. Right up until the day when he was fighting for his life, he would grin and offer his little starfish hand for a high five when I did my rounds. I remember, when Abu died, his dad just sat, weeping and rocking, saying that it should have been him, that he didn’t want to live anymore, that he would drive himself off a cliff. I covered Abu’s tiny body in a white cloth and said a prayer while I held his father’s hand. The prayer was for the man’s benefit. It would be difficult to believe in any god that afternoon.
But it is desperate memories like these that make me determined to return to Liberia. Every day that I am doing nothing in England, I am conscious of people dying, whose deaths I could have prevented. At the very least, I might have made their final hours more comfortable. As British aid workers, we are only allowed to treat Haag for twelve weeks. Since most of us volunteers arrived in October, we leave the treatment center dangerously short staffed. What happens in PPE may stay in PPE—at least at first—but our work is by no means finished.
Olivia posted the blog and flopped back on her pillow. It had been cathartic to write, but she longed to credit Sean—to say it was he who had coined the PPE catchphrase, and been her Red Zone buddy. She remembered how the donning and doffing was laced with sexual tension, weeks before anything had happened between them. But she couldn’t risk naming Sean online, now that he was a news story. Their secret crawled under her skin, like goose bumps. Since his diagnosis, checking her temperature had taken on a sharp, adrenaline-spiked significance. Even the normal reading, which she’d taken at 5 a.m., had been small relief—she’d seen plenty of patients develop Haag symptoms without a fever. Now, it was only 6:30 a.m. She had never felt less Christmassy.
Andrew
THE CHINESE ROOM, WEYFIELD HALL, 6:30 A.M.
• • •
Andrew had woken just before five—as so often these days. He wanted to blame the birds, but it was silent outside, and no light penetrated the pond-green drapes around the bed. He had never liked the four-poster they slept in at Weyfield—previously Emma’s parents’—just as he didn’t like Weyfield’s cavernous master bedroom. He had a fear that one day he would be taken ill, and a doctor would arrive and see the eccentric bed and write him off as a kind of squalid, senile lord. It had taken years of complaining about his back just for Emma to replace the horsehair mattress—so soft one longed for a snorkel. There was no way she would ditch the bed itself. Beside him, Emma snored. Years ago, he used to find the sound rather touching. As a young man, he’d felt honored to hear the inner workings of Emma Hartley, who looked like a china doll but snored like a drunk. Now, it was just a cruel reminder that he couldn’t sleep himself. Of course Emma could sleep. Her conscience was as virginal as the day they’d met. Emma never lied, never concealed anything. Perhaps this was why they’d grown apart. He lay looking up at the canopy over the bed, the ebb and flow of Emma’s breath raking at his ears. He tried to picture her snores as three-dimensional objects, thinking it might make a writing exercise. They had jaunty peaks—like meringues, or dog turds. Occasionally, a snore rose to a curly flourish, as if someone were piping it out of an icing bag. He flopped onto his side, his back to her, and savored the cool patch of pillow. The bed was oppressively stuffy. Perhaps she was having a hot flash, for old time’s sake, he thought, as the snores reached an abrupt hiatus. Then they began again, louder than ever.
But it wasn’t the dawn, or the bed, or Emma’s snoring that had woken him. Deleting Jesse’s e-mails hadn’t felt as final as Andrew had hoped. It didn’t change the fact that the man was here, less than a mile away. And Jesse’s voice, calling from Andrew’s past, had unlocked a Pandora’s box in his mind—memories of Beirut he had long buried. Ever since Jesse’s second e-mail, his dreams had echoed with the jabber of gunfire and the crooning call to prayer. He saw things he hadn’t seen for years—smoke mushrooming from rubble, apartment blocks ripped to cross sections, people running from flames, blood-stained pavements. He found himself startled by the rifle-click of Weyfield’s front door latch and sitting with his back to the wall—as if a sniper might be lurking in the larder. Madness. But he could no more help it than expect anyone to understand. He kept seeing the broken body of the child he’d watched flung into the air by an explosion. It was probably for the best that Jesse hadn’t grown up in Lebanon. At least he could destroy Leila’s letter soon. As predicted, Emma had requested a bonfire after a “Boxing Day Sort-Out.” He’d feel better once it was out of the house.
A ringing blasted the darkness, and he jumped. Beside him, he felt Emma fumbling for her alarm clock and getting out of bed. What on earth was she doing? Then he remembered—stockings. Even now, she and Phoebe remained oddly attached to this childhood ritual. “D’you mind if I put the light on?” she said, blinding him with her bedside lamp before he could answer. He watched her crouching over two crammed woolen socks, wearing one of the tent-like nightdresses she now slept in. It was a pity, because she had kept her in-and-out figure, unlike so many of his friends’ wives. But what did it really matter, since he only saw her undressed by accident, and they hadn’t had sex for months. He remembered past Christmases when they had managed a hurried morning encounter while the girls were busy with their stockings. But at some point, years ago now, he had become aware they were having sex because it was an occasion, as if she felt obliged to tick it off the list along with making a perfect Christmas dinner and festooning the house with bits of twig. It was around the same time Emma had had the menopause, and they had taken to sleeping under duvets of different weights. It was a small shift, but it felt symbolic, cocooning them in their discrete shells. He thought back to last Christmas morning, lying in bed, ruefully aware that Phoebe wouldn’t surface for hours and that he and Emma could have had a leisurely shag—if she’d wanted. But Emma had been downstairs, stuffing a whole turkey, just for three.
Emma
THE BACK STAIRS, WEYFIELD HALL, 7:00 A.M.
• • •
Emma had always enjoyed doing her daughters’ stockings. When the girls had been little (well, until they’d been teenagers), she used to creep into the room they shared wearing a special red dressing gown. Laying their stockings at their feet, bending to look at their sleeping faces, she remembered feeling overwhelmed with tenderness. Now that they were grown up they all opened their stockings together, over breakfast. For years, Phoebe had sweetly made stockings for Andrew and Emma, too, so that everybody had one. Emma had gone to extra effort with Olivia’s this year. She had put in several tubes of swanky hand cream, a Georgette Heyer that she thought would make cozy reading, and some leather gloves she grabbed in a kind of daze in John Lewis, after meeting Nicola. When she looked at Olivia’s raw, red hands, she felt that same tenderness flood her—except she knew it wasn’t welcome now. All she could do was try to spoil her and will her to open up. She hoped Phoebe wouldn’t mind that Olivia’s stocking was bigger than hers. Phoebe could be silly in that way. With luck she would appreciate that Olivia had missed out for the past few years.
Emma yawned. It had taken her an age to fall asleep, talking herself down from a ledge of anxiety at 2 a.m. During the day she could banish thoughts of the lump quite successfully, but they lay in wait—pouncing in the horizontal quiet of the night. She’d only been asleep for a couple of hours when her alarm went off. Andrew had already been awake. He slept so badly these days—perhaps it was all the rich food he had to eat. There was a time when she’d have felt duty bound to make love on Christmas morning, but not now. For the past eighteen months Andrew seemed to have stopped even trying. She didn’t particularly mind, in fact it was rather a relief not to be pestered. But it wasn�
��t like him. Funny how the more you went without sex, the less you missed it. She held the rustling, multijointed stockings in her arms like babies, to stop them from stretching all over the place. The stairs by the kitchen smelled of last night’s borscht. She opened the door, and let out a little yelp of surprise. Phoebe was sitting at the table looking at Emma’s iPad, crying. Emma’s first thought was that she’d argued with George. “Phoebs! What’s wrong?”
“You have cancer!” Phoebe was sobbing extravagantly now, her lips turned down like a sad clown’s face.
Emma sat sideways on the bench to hug her, and for a while they rocked together, Phoebe weeping into Emma’s neck. She smelled of sleep and shampoo. Emma’s side was killing her, but Phoebe was clinging to her neck like a toddler.
“I’m OK, darling, I’m OK,” Emma kept saying, until Phoebe emerged.
“I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have read your e-mails, but I was putting out your stocking, and I wanted to check something on that Delling link, so I went to your history and then I saw all the searches. All the Hodgkin lymph stuff. So I looked at your e-mails and I saw one from Nicola. Why didn’t you say, Mummy? Why didn’t you tell us?”
Bother, thought Emma. If only she hadn’t left her iPad lying around.
“I was going to. I was. I was just waiting until this quarantine is over. I wanted us all to have a nice Christmas. No point ruining Christmas!” she said.
“You wouldn’t be ruining it. You can’t keep something like that secret.”
“But I feel fine, sweetheart. This is Olivia’s week.”
Phoebe hiccupped. “Still! What are you going to do?”
“Well, I’m . . . I’m with a very good doctor, angel, the best doctor for these things. I will probably have to have chemotherapy, but he says I should make a full recovery. It’s not a very bad cancer.” She knew this wasn’t quite what Dr. Singer had said, but protecting Phoebe was a reflex. She was still so vulnerable, so young, compared to Olivia.
Seven Days of Us Page 10
