by Louise Welsh
Magnus switched channels, but they were either lost in static, guarded by test cards or running the same footage he had just watched.
‘It’s been like that all morning,’ Jeb said.
Magnus wanted to make a joke about how he would have predicted endless repeats of Frasier or Friends, but he could not trust himself to speak. He lifted the pile of clothes Jeb had brought him and took them into the bathroom, not bothering to ask where they had come from.
Magnus showered with the bathroom door ajar. The water was tepid, but he could feel it restoring him to life. Prison had given him an awareness of walls and corners, he realised, a reluctance to be contained. Perhaps if he survived he would become one of those feral men who lived alone in the outdoors. There had been one of them on Wyre. Their mothers had told them to keep away from him, but one long holiday afternoon Magnus and Hugh had taken the ferry over and ridden their bikes up to the battered caravan where he lived. The man was outside, dressed only in baggy khaki shorts that looked like they had seen good service in the Great War. He looked wild, right enough, a Ben Gunn scarecrow with lunatic grey hair and a beard to match. He had been feeding something to his dogs, but paused to give the boys a gummy smile and then raised a hand and beckoned to them. Magnus had taken a step forward. Hugh grabbed his arm and without saying anything to each other, they had jumped on their bikes and pedalled off, as if the de’il himself was after them.
Hugh had been stupid to kill himself. It was a stupid waste, a stupid, senseless waste. Death would have come around eventually and in the meantime he could have lived.
The mobile phone Jeb had taken from the dead man in the subway carriage was sitting on the bedside table. Magnus wrapped a towel around his waist, sat on the edge of the bed and turned it on. He could hear his mother’s telephone ringing, far away across land and water. For a moment Magnus pictured the old Trimphone that used to sit in the lobby, but it had gone years ago, banished by a cordless phone. His mother might have mislaid the handset. That was the trouble with these cordless numbers: you set them down somewhere and couldn’t put your hands on them when they rang. His mother could be dashing between the kitchen and sitting room right now, looking for it.
The answering service came on. ‘Hello, Mum?’ He hated the question mark in his voice. ‘Hi, it’s me. I hope you and Rhona are okay. There’s been a bit of bother down here, but I’m fine. I’m coming home. I’ll be with you in a couple of —’ The phone beeped, cutting him off. He tried to remember his mother’s mobile number and the number of Rhona’s phones, but they had been programmed into his own device. He had summoned them by typing in their names and had never bothered to commit them to memory.
‘Fuck.’
His mum was probably at Rhona’s right now, the pair of them worrying about him and cursing him in equal measure. Magnus dialled the only other Orkney number he knew by heart, his Aunty Gwen’s, Hugh’s mother. Once again it rang out and he left a brief message. Cordless phones were useless, he consoled himself. If the electricity went down they went with it. His mother would have done better to have stuck with the old Trimphone.
He rang 118 118, thinking he should phone the Snapper Bar, or perhaps even the police or the hospital, but they did not answer either and he switched the mobile off, scared of wasting its battery. Things would be okay, he reassured himself. He would get home to find them all waiting for him.
Jeb was sitting at a low table in the lobby where guests had once enjoyed an aperitif while they waited for cabs to take them to that evening’s destination. There was an unopened bottle of Highland Park and two whisky glasses on the table in front him. Jeb touched the neck of the malt gently with his fingertips as Magnus sat down.
‘I never had a problem with drink, how about you?’
‘I like a drink, if that’s what you mean.’
‘I meant if I open this bottle will you feel obliged to sup it all?’
There had been nights when he had killed a bottle and still been standing straight enough to make an assault on one of its comrades, but Magnus said, ‘I can take a dram and put the cap back on the bottle.’
Jeb broke the seal and poured two measures into the waiting glasses.
‘That’s what we’ll do then.’ He passed one of the charged glasses to Magnus. The malt smelled of snugs and peat fires, of funeral breath and late nights. It smelled unbearably of home and Magnus was forced to look away. He cleared his throat.
‘They made this not far from where I grew up.’ He wondered at his use of the past tense.
Jeb raised his glass. ‘To survival.’
Magnus echoed, ‘Survival.’
They both drank. Jeb nodded, as if reaffirming the toast.
‘When I first saw you, I don’t know why, but I thought you were a soft lad.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe it’s the accent.’
You decided before I opened my mouth, Magnus thought, I saw it in your eyes. He said nothing.
‘We’ve been through a fair bit these last couple of days.’ Jeb swirled the liquid in his glass, molten gold. This was another Jeb, no longer the sullen prison inmate or the crazed escapee armed with a ready chib. The military aspect that Magnus had noticed during their escape had returned. ‘The odds were against us, but here we are.’
‘These last days,’ Magnus said. He took a sip of his dram. The whisky stung his lips but it brightened his perceptions. He could see the five-star hotel for what it was – a folly designed to make those who could afford it feel superior. That kind of swank was in the past; they had entered a new world where the only rank was survival.
Magnus had told Jeb that he could take a measure and put the cap back on the bottle, but he wanted to drink it dry and go into battle. Let whisky be his lieutenant and his linesman. He reached out, topped up his dram and gestured the bottle towards Jeb’s glass. The other man shook his head.
‘I’m not used to it.’
Magnus asked, ‘How long were you inside?’
‘I’d done three years, most of it in solitary.’
‘So you’re either a bad bastard, or an antisocial bastard.’
‘A bit of both.’
The whisky was working on Magnus. He asked, ‘What did you do?’
Jeb’s voice was dangerously even. ‘Like I said before, nothing you need to worry about. I ended up on the wrong side of the law, just like you. That’s all you need to know.’
This was prison morality, Magnus supposed. Torture, robbery, extortion, violence of every stamp was tolerable, as long as the victims were male and overage.
Jeb continued, ‘What I was trying to say is, I can survive on my own—’
‘Me too.’ Magnus tipped back the last of his drink and reached for a refill, but the bottle was gone. His eyes met Jeb’s.
‘We need to stay straight,’ Jeb said.
‘That’s your opinion.’
Jeb shook his head. ‘It’s like you’re determined to make me change my mind. What I was going to say is, I can survive on my own, we both can, but we stand more chance together. At least until we make it out of London and work out what’s going on in the rest of the country.’
‘Going to organise a census, are you?’ The over-patterned lounge seemed to sneer at them. Magnus wanted to take Jeb’s penknife and shred the complacent cushions, tear the curtains, stain the carpets with red wine and worse.
‘You should listen to your friend,’ an American voice said. ‘Two heads are better than one.’
Magnus turned and saw an old man leaning out of a winged armchair.
Jeb had sprung to his feet at the sound of his voice, but the man’s age must have reassured him, because he sank back down into his seat, slowly. ‘How long have you been there?’ he asked.
‘Long enough to know you were both in jail when this kicked off. You missed a time, boys.’ He raised a drink to his mouth and Magnus realised that he was drunk. Not quite fleeing, but most definitely three sheets to the wind. ‘Yes, boys,’ the man repeated softly. ‘You s
urely missed a time.’
Nineteen
The old man’s name was Edgar Prentice, ‘Eddie to my friends’. He was a professor in English Literature at Dartmouth College and lived in Norwich, New Hampshire. ‘A nice town, but sleepy. You want an injection of culture then you get yourself to Boston or New York, Europe if you’re lucky. I thought I was lucky.’ Eddie had brought a loaded martini glass and a cocktail shaker over to their table. He raised his drink to his lips. ‘Except the day before we were due to travel to London, my wife came down with a fever. I was all for cancelling, but Miriam wouldn’t hear of it. She changed her ticket to a later flight, our daughter came to visit and I flew over on my own. Worst decision of my life.’
Magnus asked, ‘How are they?’
The old man knocked back the last of his drink and refreshed his glass from the silver shaker. He was taller than any of the pensioners Magnus had grown up around, but his clothes hung loose on his bones and Magnus guessed that he too had recently lost weight. Eddie said, ‘I anticipate a whole new set of taboos in this brave new world of ours. Asking about a man’s family is going to be one of them.’ He looked Magnus in the eye.
Magnus said, ‘I was hoping immunity might run in families.’
Eddie tipped back his drink again. The electricity had died a few minutes ago and his hair gleamed nicotine yellow against the light of the candles Jeb had lit.
‘Sorry to disappoint you.’
Jeb leaned forward in his chair. He had opened a bottle of San Pellegrino and the bubbles fizzed, straight and pure, in his glass. ‘You stayed in London?’
‘I didn’t want to. It probably sounds lame, but as soon as that flight took off, I felt a sense of foreboding. I wanted to ask the stewardess to get the captain to turn the plane around and let me off. I didn’t of course.’ Eddie gave a sad smile. ‘Just ordered a martini extra dry and found an in-flight movie I could tolerate. Soon as I got to London I phoned home. Jaime said that her mom was a lot better. I wished my girls goodnight and went to bed.
‘The next day the TV news mentioned this new virus, V596, the sweats, but I didn’t pay it any mind. I had tickets for Richard III at the Globe. I didn’t know it, but it was one of their final performances. Richard overplayed his disability, but it was a good production.’ Eddie shook his head. ‘Sorry, old habits die hard. Like Jimmy Durante said, everyone’s a critic.
‘I wasn’t worried when I phoned Miriam at home and on her cell the next day and got no response. I’d forgotten the premonition I had on the plane in my excitement of being back in London. As far as I was concerned, my wife was better. Miriam would be joining me in a day or two and in the meantime she was making the most of a visit from our daughter. Sure, there was mention of the virus on TV, but where I was, in the centre of London, everything looked good. There was nothing to be concerned about. I didn’t even bother to phone later, because of the time difference.’
Somewhere in the hotel a door slammed and footsteps rang out against a tiled floor. Jeb and Magnus turned to look across the dim lobby for the source of the sound, but there was no one there. Eddie said, ‘We’re not the only ones hiding out here. So far most people have kept to themselves, but I’ve seen them at a distance. You’re the first folks I’ve talked to.’
Magnus glanced towards the dark part of the lobby, where elevators waited like upright coffins, ready to ferry guests up or down, to heaven or hell, but there was no one there. ‘Why us?’
Eddie shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe I’m just the right level of drunk. I always got sociable after a couple of martinis. It used to irritate Miriam. She thought I spent too much time talking to strangers and not enough talking to her.’ He sighed. ‘Nice as you fellows are, I’d give a lot to be talking to her instead of you right now.’
Jeb asked, ‘When did you realise how bad things were?’
‘That used to irritate Miriam too, the way I drift on to tangents. She’d say, “Get back on track, old man.” She loved me enough to stay married to me for thirty-five years, but sometimes I drove her crazy.’ Eddie gave a sad smile. His teeth were white and regular enough to be dentures. ‘I’m not exactly sure when I realised things were serious. The hotel staff dwindled over the next couple of days. I was staying somewhere cheaper. Not here.’ He affected an English accent. ‘Even a professor’s salary only stretches so far in jolly old London.’ Eddie sighed and resumed his own voice, dry and slightly slurred at the edges. ‘I noticed there were less people around. The bar was closed, the maid service didn’t freshen my room and there were no cooked breakfasts available, just stale croissants and little packs of cereal. I was irritated, but not worried. Brits have a fun-loving reputation. I thought maybe the hotel staff had had some party, gotten drunk and were sleeping it off. What concerned me was that I still couldn’t get hold of Miriam or Jaime. I tried to get in touch with a colleague at the college, in the hope that she would drive round and check on them, but there was no response from her either. So eventually I called the cops. They told me they had no report of any problems, but said they would drop by the house and check on them. I don’t know whether they did or not, they never phoned me back.’ Eddie took a sip from his almost empty martini. ‘The Internet was still operating. The sweats had gone viral, if you’ll excuse the pun, but my own social media was more or less static. Usually I’m swamped by emails, even during vacation, but my inbox barely rattled.’
‘Didn’t you try to book a flight home?’ Magnus asked.
‘Sure I did. I packed my bags and headed for the airport determined to get myself on the first cancelled seat out of town, no dicking around. I started to cough in the taxi. The driver said he was sorry, but he wasn’t taking any chances, and threw me out. I was beginning to feel bad, but I managed to hail another one and get myself to Heathrow. By the time I got to the checkin desk I must have looked bad too. They rounded me up and delivered me to a quarantine centre.’ Eddie shook his head. ‘They called it a quarantine centre, but it was a games hall with blankets on the floor. It was a place where they sent people to die in the hope that they wouldn’t infect anyone else. I was there for four days. Like Charles Dickens said, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” I was too ill to worry about my family, but the sweats is no joke. There were some good Christian souls who tried to look after us, but I guess they mostly came down with it too. We were laid out in rows, as if we were already in a graveyard. There weren’t enough people to clean us sick folks up, and we weren’t capable of doing it ourselves, so we were left to lie in our own shit and vomit.’ Eddie ran a hand across his forehead. ‘I’m sorry. You boys both have people of your own to mourn. I guess it’s a while since I talked with anyone.’
Magnus said, ‘It’s okay.’ Eddie’s words had conjured the gym hall in his primary school in Kirkwall. How it had looked the night high winds had disrupted their Boys’ Brigade camping trip and the captain had arranged for them to bunk in sleeping bags in the hall instead. He tried not to imagine his mother and Rhona laid out on the hall’s wooden floor, beside their neighbours.
Eddie said, ‘I had weird dreams. Kept thinking I was slammed in the wagon of some overcrowded goods train headed for Auschwitz. Just shows how strongly those images are rooted in popular consciousness.’ Magnus caught a glimpse of the professor the old man had so recently been, and then Eddie looked up and showed a face haggard by illness and grief. ‘I thought God might come back to me. I was religious as a boy. Miriam used to joke that I’d relapse back to the Church on my deathbed, but He paid me the same no-mind He has for the last fifty-plus years.’
Jeb sipped his mineral water. His face was impassive. ‘You didn’t die.’
‘No.’ Eddie tipped the last of the martini from the shaker into his glass. His voice was weary. ‘I didn’t die.’
Magnus heard ice rattling inside the cocktail shaker and wondered that the man could take time to chill his drink when everything was falling apart.
Eddie said, ‘I was in a crash on the interstat
e once, a long time ago. I had a blow-out in the fast lane. My car spun full circle, three hundred and sixty degrees, and crossed the barrier on to the other side of the carriageway. One moment I’m travelling north, the next I’m facing southbound traffic. I felt like I was moving fast as light, but I still had time to think about how much I loved Miriam. Jaime was just a little girl, she must have been around seven years old and I remember thinking what a shame it was that I would never see her grow up.’ Eddie wiped away a tear. ‘Well, at least I got to see her turn into a fine young woman.’ He looked out towards the middle distance at the bar, still decorated with an elaborate flower arrangement as dead as the people in the darkened rooms above them. Magnus thought the old man was about to rise and refill the cocktail shaker, but he sat where he was, his eyes trained on the past. ‘The sweats were in the newspapers and on television, but for a while everything seemed to function as normal. There were deaths in the news, sure, but there were always deaths in the news. I guess it had gotten to seem like death was no big news, just something the media were obliged to report.
‘When I got out of the quarantine centre everything had changed. The city was under martial law. There were curfews at night, looting in the shopping districts, even the occasional dead body in the street.’ He shook his head, as if he still could not believe the events he had witnessed. ‘I don’t know if it was a second wave of the disease or if the sweats just hit some people harder, but the deaths became sudden. I saw a young woman, a girl of about Jaime’s age, drop down dead. One minute she was walking along, short skirt, cute red shoes, the next she was sprawled on the sidewalk. I went to help, but she was beyond help. A man shouted at me to leave her alone if I didn’t want to catch it and so, God help me, I walked away and left her there, face down on the ground, her underwear on display, no dignity, no one to say a few words over her.’
‘What else could you do?’ Magnus thought about the bodies he had left lying on the Underground platform, the girl with long russet hair slumped on the pavement.
