The Quarantined City

by James Everington

  Amit’s stomach rumbled.

  There was the sound of footsteps coming towards them from some unseen part of the cottage.

  “Don’t tell the wife,” Bob said. “The boy was mine, just didn’t feel like it to me. Happens sometimes.”

  Before Amit could respond to this—not that he knew how to respond—the door to the hallway opened and an older and greyer haired version of the woman in the photographs burst in; for a second she looked at Amit as if he was unreal. And then she moved to engulf him in a hug, her voice a rush of concern. It made Amit feel uncomfortable (he wasn’t used to such affection) and the heat of her flesh pressed against him, the faint smell of dry herbs or flowers, made him think fleetingly of the plague, of the posies the villagers thought might save them.

  “Heather,” Bob said, “the wife. Happened again,” he added, speaking to Heather. “Found this one wandering near the church. Not sure though.”

  “Oh you poor dear,” Heather said, as Amit pulled away from her embrace. “Are you cold? Have you eaten?”

  “Look, uh,” Amit said, “could you maybe call the police, yeah? I’ve lost my mobile,” he added. He wished he knew his mum’s number off by heart, but he’d never learnt it.

  “Hmmmm,” Bob said.”Well we could try. Reckon Fletch is likely to have shut up shop by this time though.” He spoke as if suggesting that, while Amit could be forgiven for having forgotten, what he said was obvious.

  There was a silence. Amit glanced towards Heather and saw she was staring at the digital photo frame; the white boy licking his fingers slid from view.

  “Um?” he said.

  “Oh. Oh, yes,” Heather said. “Bob you try and call Fletch and we’ll get you nice and warm; what’s your name, dearie?”

  “Amit.” He thought he saw the two of them glance at each other, but what the significance of his name to them could be he didn’t know. Before he could decipher that Heather put her arm around his shoulder and led him though a low-beamed doorway into a small lounge. A real fire was the only source of light and it made everything around it seem as insubstantial as shadows.

  Amit sat in a faded floral armchair, so comfortable it seemed to already know his contours as he sank into it. He felt tired, lulled into closing his eyes by the heat of the room and the dusty, lavender scent.

  “Some food?” he heard Heather say. “Your favourite? Fish-fingers?” and he nodded, forcing his eyes open. His thoughts seemed as flickering and ill-defined as the flames of the fire. His favourite?

  “No reply,” Bob said, coming into the room, the floorboard creaking. Amit sat bolt upright, alert again. What had he just been thinking? Bob stared at him. “We’ll try in the morning lad.”

  “The morning? But my mum will be...” He stopped, unsure how to finish. “Can’t you call the police station back home, my home?” he said.

  “Your parents will be doing that surely?” Bob said; the flickering light from the fire made the expression on his face shift, like those pictures that were two things a once. “Best wait.”

  “And when your mother knows you’re safe she surely won’t come until tomorrow?” Heather said, placing a plate in front of him: fish-fingers, oven chips and peas. “Your favourite,” Heather said again. “So eat this up and then we’ll get you ready for bed.”

  Amit’s stomach gurgled hungrily.

  His bedroom for the night had a sloped ceiling from being built into the eaves, and a small window that seemed to look out onto... nothing. Of course, Amit knew it was just because there weren’t as many streetlights in the stupid countryside, but he still found it disconcerting and was glad when Heather drew the curtains. The curtains, and the bedspread, were decorated with faded patterns of superheroes; a poster of a Spitfire was peeling from the one straight wall. Amit wondered how long ago it had been when Heather and Bob’s son had died.

  He got under the covers of the bed and Heather put the nightlight on, and in the soft glow both Heather and Bob stood looking at him for an uncomfortable amount of time. Bob sighed, the fingers of his hands flexed and released.

  “It will be better in the morning,” Heather said and Amit nodded, even though she wasn’t looking at him.

  “Has he brushed his teeth?” Bob said abruptly, as if to change the subject.

  “No, he’s just...”

  “C’mon lad,” Bob said, ignoring his wife. “You know the routine,” although Amit had never been made to brush his teeth. In the bathroom he had a sudden fear that Bob would make him use the dead son’s toothbrush, but instead Bob took a brand new one still in its packet from a cabinet drawer. Amit noticed there were ten or twelve unopened children’s toothbrushes in the drawer before Bob shut it.

  “When... when did your son die?” he said all of a sudden, and he sensed the man freeze behind him. In the mirror, Amit’s face looked overly pale as he waited to see if Bob would answer.

  “Stephen?” Bob said slowly, as if the word were foreign to his tongue. “Ten years ago. A hit and run,” he added gruffly. “Some drunken twat.”

  So they can’t have kept it the same since he died, Amit thought as Bob ushered him back to the bedroom with a large hand on his shoulder. He didn’t know much about the toys but the games console under the TV was only a few years old.

  Maybe they had a nephew who came to stay?

  The next morning it was as if he were jerked awake from a dream of bright lights on broken glass, his body tight with adrenaline as if he had just been thrown forward. He felt different to the day before, but also as if more than a day had passed; like he had crossed some kind of border in the night. He felt good.

  He dressed with clothes from the chest of drawers—socks from the top, underwear the middle, white shirt the bottom—which all fit him perfectly, as did the trousers and school blazer from the wardrobe. He went downstairs; the kitchen seemed bigger with the sunlight streaming in from the windows and for a moment he didn’t recognise the two pale faces that turned towards him...

  Then his vision adjusted and he saw his mother and father.

  “Morning!” his mum said, greeting him with a familiar hug. “What do you want for breakfast?”

  “Fish fingers!” he said laughing.

  “I know it’s your favourite but you can’t have fish fingers for breakfast!” Their morning joke.

  “Second favourite!”—he continued the routine, while sitting at the table and pouring himself some milk. His pleasure was only dulled by the sense of disapproval from his father who was staring at him intently over the newspaper, and an itchiness to his vision, as if when he rubbed his eyes and reopened them things might look different.

  “Put your tie on for school, lad,” his father said, “you know the routine.”

  “Bob...” said his mother in a pleading tone of voice. As Amit left the room he heard her say, “Not again. I can’t... Not again.”

  “Doesn’t fit. Happens sometimes I guess.”

  “Sometimes!” he heard his mother shout as he ran up to his room. “Sometimes! How many bloody more times?” Their voices continued but he couldn’t hear any more of the words.

  Amit came downstairs a few minutes later, embarrassedly holding a tie limply in his hand.

  “He can’t tie a tie,” his father said flatly to his mother, as if that clinched some dispute between them, and she turned away.

  His father got up to help him, noosing the tie around his neck.

  “You could show him how,” his mother said, but his father ignored her. Amit felt flustered and unsure of himself as the man’s rough hands moved so close to his neck. How could his father’s calloused, pale hands seem at once so familiar and so alien?

  He looked to his left, to where the digital photo-frame could be seen in the hall, flicking through the photos of their holiday to France. He had seen them so many times that even from this distance he could recognise each one—his memories rotating in strict order. But why did he look so sullen in each of them? Afraid even—of his parents? He looked like h
e didn’t belong...

  And for a moment it was like a whole set of other memories was about to overwhelm him, poised like a wave about to break over him. He saw as if through fog a tall blurred building, two figures casting about as if they couldn’t see him, and an old and weather-worn vertical stone.

  But then the picture in the frame switched and it was as if the one in his head did too. This was his favourite photo, where he had been caught slurping grease from his fingers; he had been eating paprika-flavoured potatoes his parents had bought him from the stall at the harbour. The taste had been one he had loved; his parents had teased him every time he’d asked for another taste of them back home in Derbyshire. But he’d had to make do with fish fingers. Sometimes what you had had to be good enough; surely?

  But I don’t even know what paprika tastes like, Amit thought. He blinked, slowly and deliberately, and then jerked away from the man with his hands around his neck.

  The tie slid from Amit’s collar to the stone floor.

  Amit stared at the strange man in front of him, at the strange woman who had begun to cry.

  The man sighed.

  “Maybe next time round,” he said to the woman, and then stepped towards Amit.

  ~

  Fellows quickly shuts the literary journal (it was called QWERTY) as if to pretend he hasn’t just read the story. He feels the vague guilt he always feels whenever his willpower weakens, after drinking too much or masturbating, despite the fact that no one else knew or would care. Why has he read the whole damned thing? What has he done?

  He gets up, looks around the room: the same desk and chairs, the same peeling paintwork and taped partition before the door. The hum of the light, at that same pitch. But the fact that everything between these four walls is the same proves nothing; in fact he would welcome some immediately visible alteration, for what would he care if some interrogation room in the depths of the unity government bureaucracy had changed?

  What if all of the city outside has become something else, become Boursier’s village voluntarily sealing itself off from the plague? Without any windows he is blind. Just a view of the fishing boats moored in the harbour, or the fish-topped spire of the Mariner’s church or, if he was facing the other way, the houses of the Enclave on the hill above the park and old town would have reassured him. He flashes back to the other evening, to Georgia refusing to look at the darkness outside her apartment, fearful all had changed...

  The door to the cell opens and the female Guardia reappears with a smile less vivid than the bags under her eyes. She gestures for him to sit down and then does so next to him. She opens a folder of paperwork and forms on the desk between them, like some collaboration they are working on together. When she meets his eyes she looks exhausted, as if they were both frustrated by the same thing, two travellers enduring the same delay.

  “You’re allowed to go,” she says, “if you can satisfactorily explain the ink on your hands. I hope you can.”

  “The ink...?”

  “Look, they want to arrest the writer behind the all these anti-quarantine pamphlets,” she said. “So tell me why the ink doesn’t make that you. Then we can both get home.”

  “I...” Fellows looks at his hands briefly and sure enough they are still smudged with ink. He remembers the scripted words on Leianna’s palms, but any on his are illegible. It seemed a lot to have just come off a newspaper and he wonders whether the Guardia would believe him. “I’m a writer,” he says instead. Same lie, different day.

  “A writer?” the Guardia says. “Jesus...”

  “Of stories,” he adds quickly. “Not propaganda. That’s why I was at Boursier’s place, I’d gone because, uh, there’s not many writers in the city because of the quarantine...”

  “Careful,” the Guardia says; she is writing down his words on one of the forms, although to Fellows her handwriting is indecipherable.

  “And when I write, the ink from my pen... I write too fast and it’s a cheap pen you see and...”

  “Okay, okay,” the Guardia says. “That will do; it’s good enough even though it’s crap. Just wash your hands the next time you print more of that rubbish, understand? Do the both of us a favour.”

  “No, it’s true...” Fellows starts.

  “Okay, sure, fine. You’re a writer. Look, I’m writing it down. Hey you’re right, I’ve got ink on my fingers too,” she says sarcastically.

  “Am I allowed to go?”

  “Yeah, wait a second, I’ll have to escort you back.” Fellows watches impatiently as the Guardia continues to fill in her forms.

  “Why were you so scared in the car?” she says suddenly.

  “What? I thought you said I could go?”

  “Just asking,” she said. “It’s not going in the report. But Jesus, I thought you were going to have a heart attack on us. Are you well? You should see someone.”

  “I’m fine.” Fellows says stiffly. “Can I please go?”

  The Guardia shrugs and gets up. She leads him from the room and through the maze of corridors. When they reach the demarcation of blue tape, she stops.

  “Aren’t you going to show me the way out?” Fellows says.

  “Too much paperwork,” she says. “You can find your own way from here surely? Just, if you get lost, don’t cross any blue lines.”

  ~

  When Fellows finally emerges from the building, it is not the time of day he is expecting; the sun is seemingly in a different part of the sky than it should be. Maybe it is the tall, angular buildings that make the sun seem lower; there is a triumphant air to the architecture in this part of the city. The buildings are white as bone, picked clean.

  Fellows is disorientated, not knowing which way to walk to head back home. He hopes he doesn’t need to cross the road in front of him; the torrent of traffic flowing through it seems to have widened it, eroding the banks. He tries to picture the route the Guardia must have taken, but his memories of the drive are too shot through with panic to be of use. In the end he picks a direction to walk by looking up, and hoping the direction the gulls in the grey sky are moving in is seaward.

  The pedestrians in this part of the city are presumably all unity government officials and they move with a haste and pushiness that Fellows isn’t used to. His slow and uncertain progress serves to annoy them and they do little to hide that annoyance. There’s a sense of aggression in the air, not helped by the fact that many of the people seem to be talking to themselves, or someone unseen, in a brisk and business-like manner Fellows can’t decipher. No one else around seems to think it madness.

  A man in an angular white suit, matching the buildings above him, stops in front of Fellows and sticks his hand out, yelling for a taxi.

  Twat, Fellows thinks, doesn’t he know that the petrol rationing... His thoughts stutter to a stop as he see a black cab pull up and the man get in. The taxi is the wrong colour and there’s something almost futuristic about its appearance; maybe it is just because Fellows hasn’t seen one for so long. He remembers, vaguely, a period in his life when he had caught taxis almost everyday; but why would that be when he used to drive? The memories are associated with his breakup with Lana, her voice hateful despite tears, and with the taste of stale alcohol and panic in his throat.

  It doesn’t seem like ten years, the bitterness seems closer than that. He deliberately forces away the painful memories of a city other than this one and watches the taxi pull away. The telephone number on its sides is too long for the quarantined city, he thinks, not enough people have telephones here to justify so many digits surely? He tries to memorise the number, thinking perhaps to call it from Georgia’s place when she has forgiven him, but another of the crazed people talking to themselves bumps into him and he loses sight of it. Despite the fact Fellows was standing still the woman swears at him.

  “Sorry about that,” the woman says to whoever she thinks she is talking to, continuing on her way without giving Fellows another glance. “Just some tourist stood gawping at the
cabs.”

  The streets of the old town are a relief when Fellows reaches them, the proportions of the buildings and roads not as daunting, the grubbiness and faint tang of open sewers more human. There are still crazy people here, but crazy in an understandable way; the dipsomaniacs and insomniacs scuttle past the beggars and buskers. Fellows isn’t quite sure what route he took to get here—he had been walking with his head craned upwards to follow the white birds—but made it here he has.

  He walks towards Georgia’s apartment block, stands on the opposite side of the road and counts the windows up six storeys until he finds hers. It would have been quicker just looking for the one with the curtains still drawn. Against the chaos of the city, the changing city, he thinks; poor Georgia. He thinks what a shit friend he has been, so wrapped up in his own problems that he had failed to help her with her own. Just because her problems are all in her mind, unlike his vacant-eyed ghost and Boursier stories, it doesn’t mean they are lesser than his.

  Nevertheless, Georgia had been furious last he saw her, and after his day detained by the Guardia, Fellows is in no mood for further confrontation. He turns and walks away from Georgia’s apartment block without entering.

  At Boursier’s house there is no answer when he knocks. He tries the liquor shop below, but they seem unclear about who he is asking after. He has never met anyone who makes so little impact on those around him than Boursier.

  Fellows stands in the street, debating what to do. The sensible thing would surely be to go home; he is tired despite not being sure what time of day it is. But thinking of home just reminds him of the sound of now audible footsteps tottering towards him, the sound of drool being sucked back into a broken mouth.

  “What do you mean the boy isn’t dead?” Fellows says aloud—the question Boursier never answered. But where is Boursier now? Where else could such a recluse have gone?