The Quarantined City

by James Everington

  “What’s your name?” Fellows says to the kid, who is clutching the bottle to his chest as if still afraid someone will take it from him.

  “Amit,” the boy says after a pause.

  “You know Georgia, don’t you?”

  “Huh? Who?”

  “The lady in the apartment, who buys this stuff from you.”

  “Oh yeah. Her. Crazy woman.”

  “Give that bottle to her from me; tell her she can’t open it until I come round. Tell her the twat says he’s sorry.”

  With a shrug the boy, who Fellows guesses isn’t called Amit but has just plucked the first false name he can think of from the air of the quarantined city, turns away.

  “Wait, wait,” Fellows says. “What’s your mother do?”

  “Her? A waitress. Some boring café. Hey don’t tell her will you? She thinks I hang around all day waiting for her to come back from work. Nah.”

  “Tell her sorry too,” Fellows says.

  “Crazy,” the boy says under his breath as he walks away.

  ~

  His house is empty when he returns, both from any hint of the supernatural and of the more mundane presence of the cat. He calls for Mogwai for a few times before he shuts the door, but there is no sign of him. He is sure the cat will turn up; they can go a long way from home, he reflects, and still somehow return.

  Fellows goes to pour himself a drink before sitting down to write. As if noticing for the first time, he realises how spartan his abode is: a writing desk, a dining table with one chair, a bed, and piles and piles of books. Like an echo.

  I want you to finish it—he fishes out the story from the inner pocket of his jacket, rolls it as flat as he can. He reads it through; the story is confused with two seemingly contradictory plot-lines, but what did he expect from a first draft? Fellows finds a cheap biro and starts to mark where changes are needed.

  The first thing he does is cross out the name at the top of the first page. After all, this is his story now.

  The Quarantine by Fellows

  “Couldn’t you have picked a better pen name?” Lana said. She was looking out the window at the lights of the ring road, with the city beyond. It was late, there were no other cars around and Fellows just wanted to get home; he increased speed ever so slightly. “I felt so embarrassed everyone calling you that poncey foreign name. I kept forgetting they meant you.”

  “But it fits, don’t you see?” said Fellows, who was having doubts himself. “If you look it up...”

  “Yes, yes,” Lana said, waving a hand in his general direction; she was drunker than he was. Fuck it, he thought, it was a celebration even if I didn’t win. I was on the short list, my story was on the short list. Like somewhere he had been aiming for all his life had finally come onto the horizon, a city of shimmering lights.

  “Want me to call you it tonight?” Lana said giggling. “When we get back and I give you your prize. Boursier, Boursier...” she said in a slurred and geographically uncertain accent, which still turned Fellows on. He turned to grin at her but had to quickly look back at the road.

  They were approaching their turn-off, but as Fellows slowed something didn’t look right to him; it was as if the road layout had been changed overnight. There was no exit where there should be, no sign of road-works or other temporary obstructions; no sign of it at all. What the hell, he thought, what have the local government done now? Annoyed, he sped up again.

  “Fellows what are you doing?” Lana said sleepily. “That was our...”

  “It wasn’t there,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it wasn’t there, didn’t you see?” He looked at Lana, then back to the road quickly. The streetlights seemed harsher than he remembered, illuminating the deserted stretch of road. There were no turnings ahead; a thick white line was painted horizontally across the road, but it made no sense to him even as they crossed it. He didn’t recognise where they were, and he was unsure if the fuzziness in his head was tiredness or if he had drunk more champagne than he’d realised.

  “Of course it was there,” Lana said. “Why are you driving so fast? I just want to go home.” She sounded like a petulant child.

  “Well, if I don’t drive fast we won’t get...”

  “Jesus, Fellows are you on the right side of the road?” Lana shouted, jerking up in her seat. Fellows jumped, turned to her.

  “What are you talking about, of course I’m...”

  Lara wasn’t looking at him but ahead; he saw her scream and throw her hands up in front of her face. His foot was already slamming on the brake as he turned to look forward ...

  He just had time to register that the overly bright mercury lights made the child’s eyes look pure white before there was the sickening sound of collision and the boy vanished from view. Fellows shut his eyes; when he reopened them the car had stopped and in the road ahead he saw the crumpled and unmoving body of a child. As if it had just been lying there all along and he had only just seen it.

  This isn’t happening, he thought, this isn’t happening. The taste of champagne in his mouth had gone stale and he gagged.

  Lana was crying in the seat next to him; she had her hands placed on her flat belly as if protecting something already gone. Even in his fear and apprehension the sight angered Fellows—always bringing their problems into everything; always that problem even though they’d made the decision together.

  “Don’t be hysterical,” he snapped at her, although she wasn’t. “Call an ambulance.” He got out the car onto the oddly-lit road. It was completely silent, with no hum of traffic even in the distance. He shut the car door, not wanting to hear Lana’s spluttering conversation with the emergency services, and walked slowly towards the body.

  The lights and silence combined to make the scene seem unreal, as did the still unmoving body of the boy, which had landed flat on its back, pale arms stretched out like white, featherless wings. This isn’t happening, Fellows thought again; there is a rushing noise in his head like the absent traffic. A part of him distantly wondered how he would describe the scene if it were in a story.

  He knelt by the body of the boy, and ‘body’ seemed the appropriate word for he could see no movement, not even the rise and fall of the chest. He guessed the boy was about seven or eight, although he was not good with kids’ ages. The blank light from above had washed the boy’s face of identifying features other than the bruises, the blood on his scalp. The boy’s eyes were completely white, just like he had hallucinated in the split second before impact. He supposed when he had hit the child the eyes had somehow rolled up in the sockets. He wondered whether he should attempt CPR—Fellows wasn’t sure how, and he told himself this was the reason he didn’t, and not the resurgent nausea he felt at the thought of touching the boy’s skin in the strange blank light.

  The silence was finally broken by the noise of a siren, threatening to bring the enormity of what he has done home to Fellows. He shut his eyes again but the bright mercury lights still cut through...

  Something touched Fellows’s hand.

  His eyes snapped open as he instinctively pulled away, sprawling backwards. He saw the boy’s arm outstretched, broken fingers reaching for him. The rest of the body seemed as immobile as before, although the boy’s head had turned towards Fellows and despite the colourless eyes they seemed to focus on him. Fellows’s body felt like he had touched an exposed wire or something numbing. He tried to right himself and was distantly surprised when he couldn’t. His heart seemed to be beating twice as fast but half as effectually; his lungs seemed unable to draw any oxygen from the pallid white air. The boy reached his hand for Fellows again, and Fellows kicked away whimpering. The whiteness began to fill his vision, from the centre outwards.

  He was vaguely aware of the ambulance screeching to a stop, of Lana crying out, and a faint white noise in his head that sounded almost like a distant sea. He felt a far off, fading sense of surprise when the foggy figures of the paramedics came t
o him first, and not the boy he had hit. They knelt beside him, turned him so he was face up to the pale light overheard.

  So bright, he thought, and he wondered if the light and noise were getting closer; if they were falling upon him or if he were rising...

  Am I being lifted up? he thought.

  And then the whiteness cleared like a blindness healed, and he was somewhere else entirely, with sunlight on his face, and white birds circling above him. He smelt spicy food from somewhere and heard the sounds of rigging in the breeze and men calling from the sea...

  Then a dreadful, wrenching pain in his chest, a yanking back, and he was gasping for air in the back of the ambulance he had been lifted into, Lana weeping, and the paramedics looming over him like some sci-fi vision of the future, ready to give him another shock.

  ~

  Fellows is distracted by Mogwai, nudging the pen in his hand. Everyone’s a critic, Fellows thinks. He doesn’t even remember letting the animal into the house; maybe he found an open window or gap in the crumbling exterior; cats can often find their way in anywhere, he thinks.

  After feeding the cat he looks again at the words of the story, a mixture of him and Boursier. The boy’s not dead, he remembers Boursier saying, but when he writes the tight feeling of an old dread in his chest says different.

  It’s just a story, he thinks, you can change how it goes. That’s the point. It’s a first draft; you can make it good.

  He flexes his cramped hands like a magician about to perform a trick, to make something disappear.

  They are stained with ink.

  ~

  The tips of Fellow’s fingers were stained with ink; why had they needed to take his fingerprints, he had asked them, for a traffic accident? Standard procedure for suspicious deaths, they had said, and left him to stew in a room no one had called a cell—he wasn’t under arrest and the door wasn’t even locked—but which no one had not called a cell, either.

  “Why do you think it was suspicious?” he asked when the two officers came back. “The kid ran out in the middle of the road! I didn’t have a hope of stopping.”

  “And then you had a convenient lapse of consciousness and had to be brought back to life,” said the female officer. “Rushed off before we even arrived. So no breath test. No one even called us until you were gone. And here you are, the next day, fit as a fiddle.”

  “I know that’s... odd, but...” (Fellows thought of white wings) “...but what does this have to do with the accident? He ran out in front of me!”

  “Ran out in front of you. At 2AM. On the ring road,” the officer said flatly.

  “Blame his parents, not me.”

  “We haven’t been able to trace his parents,” the male police-officer cut in; Fellows thought the other hadn’t wanted that revealed yet from the look she gave him.

  “We haven’t got a clue who the kid is. Was.”

  And they still hadn’t hours later. They let Fellows go, as the evidence from the scene and the child’s body hadn’t contradicted his story, nor had Lana’s testimony. He had been driving slightly too fast, but not enough to have made a difference and so not enough for them to prosecute—but just enough, apparently, for Lana to avoid him, for the sound of her crying in the spare room to be as perpetual as the sea. Fellows angrily refused to let her make him feel guilty. But...

  Had he been over the limit? It was as if he could still taste the champagne at the back of his throat. How much had he drunk?

  The sound of a storm blowing in outside had given no answer; Fellows had watched the rain splattering through the open window of their kitchen but could not summon the energy to shut it. He pictured the same rain lashing the road where the accident happened, erasing the black skid marks and dried blood. It’s over, he thought. But the next second the image of the rain and the road washed clean seemed ridiculous; he pictured empty road beyond where he should have turned off, isolated and under separate weather, the evidence of what had really happened preserved in that bubble of bright and silent light.

  He looked at his hands again; no matter how much he had scrubbed at them he hadn’t been able to get the traces of black ink from them. Just then the sound of the storm seemed to increase, as if the front door to their townhouse had opened.

  “Lana?” he called uncertainly. “George?” Had the cat been caught out in the rain and somehow made his way inside?

  He walked out from the kitchen; something brushed against his leg and he looked down to see the cat, just emerged from the lounge where he had no doubt been sleeping. Not George then. The cat walked to the top of the stairs then paused, as if staring down at something below. When Fellows went to look, there was no one in sight, but the front door was wide open.

  Confused, he went downstairs to shut it; the light spilling in from outside seemed too bright, out of synch with the roar of rain persistent as traffic. Fellows noticed the floor was damp with rainwater when he was still a few metres away from the door. He looked out before he shut it, but there was no one.

  Behind him, George shrieked.

  As he turned he was reminded of the accident, for it had the same sense of inevitability about it. He saw the blank, white-eyed face of the boy he had killed, moving towards him too quickly to take in its features. He threw his hands up, and then something translucent was upon him in a blurred and fading rush...

  He felt the briefest touch of something against his face, insubstantial as a draught in the air. Nevertheless he was pushed backwards, he felt his gravity go and the world darken as if tiny hands had just clamped over his eyes...

  Fellows blinked, and he was sitting at a table in a café he had never seen before, but which nonetheless looked familiar. An attractive curly-haired waitress was placing a cup of coffee and black and white newspaper in front of him. The walls were mirrored and he struggled to understand that his reflection was him. He heard the cry of gulls as he reached for his coffee, and noticed his hands were stained with...

  Then he awoke spluttering, to see Lana’s face above him, crying and shrieking. Her hands on his chest felt as much like they were beating him as trying to bring him back to life.

  It kept happening.

  He kept seeing it.

  Kept going there.

  The hospital tests revealed no physical sign of disease, no infection or brain tumour pressing against some vital nerve. Psychosomatic, they said. They talked of what had happened to Fellow’s body—the blackouts, the collapse—and not his experience of a foreign sun on his face, the sound of waves against unknown harbours...

  In their house, Fellows had once set up a digital photo frame that flicked through the best photos of the best holidays he and Lana had taken together: old medieval towns with narrow cobbled roads, seafood stalls right on the quay in France, the imposing white buildings of Mussolini’s Rome, the salmon-topped church in Cork. Each picture encapsulated a weekend or a fortnight, small and private worlds in Fellows’s mind as he watched them flick past. There was no guilt or responsibility in those worlds, he thought. He found himself staring at them often.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Lana shook him. “It’s like you’re in a trance, like you’ve quarantined yourself off! Come back to reality Fellows, you killed a goddamn child and you have to take...”

  “Killed..?” Fellows said vaguely, thinking of the boy’s face, translucent and depersonalised every time he saw it. “The boy’s not dead...”

  “Of course he’s dead! And we’re paying for the funeral you shit!” Lana said. The boy’s family had still not been traced, his identity was still unknown as if unwritten. (Fellows had written nothing since the accident.)

  Walking away from Lana without saying anything, Fellows called a taxi to take him into town. He had panic attacks behind the wheel now but if he closed his eyes and concentrated on the wave-like rhythm of his pulse he could survive a short taxi ride. Once there he went into the first bar he could find, drank Belgian beer, Italian wine, French cassis (anything but champagne)
. Drunk so much he didn’t feel the native chill as he walked back, and so the blurred and doubling city in his vision seemed a new place entirely.

  ~

  He is crossing through almost everything Boursier has written now, for none of it rings true to him. The boy’s not dead—and without that through-line, Boursier’s Quarantine descends into a structureless mess: scenes of alcoholism, arguments, being slapped in the face by the boy’s mother, legal and medical bills for a child who unrealistically survived the accident. And no proper ending; Fellows works hard to put some plot back into The Quarantine. The boy must die and it all needs to lead to the inevitable climax: the night Lana leaves. But not Boursier’s fictitious version of that scene which Fellows has been carrying around in his head; not the lawyer’s phone call where he’d been offered the chance to avoid paying for the crippled boy for the rest of his life... where had that come from? It hadn’t happened like that, or at least that isn’t what he writes down.

  It has been worse than that.

  ~

  The downpour during the walk home wasn’t enough to sober Fellows, despite the length of time it took him to navigate the strange and mutable streets. In his drunkenness he had not been able to visualise the straight route to his house, and so he’d approached it in an elaborate series of zig-zags and loops via the landmarks he could remember. Several taxi cabs slowed upon seeing him trudging through the rain, but his panic attacks had grown too strong for him even to be able to ride in the backseat anymore. And at least the walk gave him time to think.

  Think about getting back together with Lana.

  They’d not officially split but Lana had done little but shriek at him or ignore him since the accident. His anger at her attempts to make him feel guilty when he’d done nothing wrong (even though he felt guilty himself) had given him the confidence to try and chat up both a waitress and a woman obviously with a female partner that night; the confidence but not the ability. As he walked back, the rain washing his face, he had decided it was Lana he really wanted. His plan was pure drunken stupidity. He’d go back and suggest a holiday, a tour round all their favourite places from previous trips. Like in the photo frame. It was so simple, so obviously right that in his head they’d practically made up before he’d got home.