The Quarantined City

by James Everington

  ~

  “Fellows what are you doing?” Lana said sleepily. “That was where we were supposed to...”

  “I know, I know, I missed the turning,” he said. “We’ll take the next one.” He shook his head, to bring his vision into focus and rid his mouth of the taste of champagne.

  ~

  Fellows looks up from the page; the boy is approaching the odd lines of blue tape on the floor, and from this perspective Fellows suddenly realises what the semi-circles represent; they are a border around the writing desk. What the hell? he thinks. He looks back to the boy, whose every wrenching, painful (can ghosts feel pain?) step evidences its eagerness to reach him. But the boy’s face darkens and is obscured somehow from sight; the small tottering shadow stretches out towards Fellows as if behind the boy were...

  ~

  The ring road lights seemed harsher than normal, maybe because his heavy eyelids just wanted to close. He thought about pulling over but they were so close to home, and he didn’t want to prolong the drive and risk getting caught by the police. Tonight of all nights! he thought.

  “Why are you driving so fast?” Lana said, her voice seemingly divided from him by something fuzzy that muffled her concern. He felt his eyes start to droop again and when he forced them open it felt like time had passed, although surely...

  ~

  ... behind the boy is a bright, artificial light. It grows brighter as if something were rushing closer, although given the dimensions of Boursier’s apartment nothing can be. The boy pauses, slowly starts to turn his head...

  Boursier is still writing.

  ~

  “Jesus Fellows you’re on the wrong side of the road!”

  ~

  A mercury light obliterates Fellows’s view of Boursier’s flat; all he can see is silhouettes that don’t make sense and deformed shadows straining to reach him. This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, he thinks, blinking rapidly to try to see clearly:

  In time to see the boy knocked off his feet by something vast but invisible in the light; the boy sprawls ungainly across the blue tape border on the floor.

  Fellows sees in the fading light a vision of tall electric lamps and an empty road that seems impossibly wide... and then the vision vanishes, and the boy with it.

  ~

  When Fellows reopened his eyes 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.

  ~

  “What the fuck just happened?” Fellows says; Boursier turns to him and shrugs with that maddening passiveness of his.

  “Borders only exist when you let yourself see them,” he says. Your bloody Buddha-on-the-mountain act, Fellows thinks, remembering the sneering tones of the bookseller. Boursier has already turned back to his writing desk.

  Fellows leaves, nervous thoughts pursuing him all the way down he staircase. He keeps checking over his shoulder to make sure the boy isn’t about to reach out and touch him, but Boursier’s house seems empty of the ghost. But now he has seen that it is not confined to his own house, he wonders if the boy could appear anywhere in the city. He imagines walking the streets, the boy pursuing him, a race he should win but for the fact the city’s layout is so malleable... He could turn a corner, and get caught in a dead-end that shouldn’t exist, the sound of traffic on the other side of the wall, the boy limping towards him in the rain. The city is a trap...

  He rushes out the door to the street, with a desire not just to be away from Boursier’s house but from the whole city, quarantine be damned. The impulse is so strong that he doesn’t ask wherever his change of heart is his own, or something he is seeing through Boursier’s eyes.

  Outside in the old town, people are standing about in the street; pushers and card sharps and drunks and even Guardia stood together. There is a sense of expectation, as if something were about to happen, but also nervousness as if no one knows quite what.

  “What’s going on?” he says to a knot of people in front of the window of the closed liquor shop.

  “Haven’t you heard?” one of them, an ex-sailor staring at the dusty stock inside, says. “They say the quarantine is finally going to be lifted!” He looks around himself as if the quarantine were something visible; he looks to the sky and Fellows looks too and sees the gulls moving in concentric circles like a carousel, like the shapes taped to the floor of Boursier’s apartment. “After all this time!” the man says. “After all this... time,” he repeats, less confidently.

  “Six months,” Fellows says, and the man looks at him oddly, before offering him a slug from a hip flask. Fellows wipes the rim on his sleeve then takes a swig: a vile tasting but familiar spirit which he remembers sharing with Lana one time in a foreign bar, daring and double-daring each other to have another shot.

  “Don’t worry, be able to get the real stuff again soon!” the sailor says, and as he steps forward to reclaim his flask Fellows sees the man has a limp; he looks down and sees a metal brace on the man’s left leg. Feeling uneasy, he nods at the man and walks away.

  As he does so he looks back; it is getting dark now and he sees a bright light spilling from Boursier’s window. He can almost hear the scratching sound of Boursier’s pen, rewriting The Quarantine yet again...

  ~

  “One chance.” Lana said, “you’ve got one more chance if you ever want to see me again, and it means you have to come with me right now. You can either sit around here like you’re in fucking quarantine or something or you can come with me, now.”

  Fellows looked away from her, back to the bottle of imported, tasteless beer he was drinking, which he had got from the new immigrant shop at the end of the street. He didn’t venture any further from home anymore, a shallow-breathed panic took him if he did so, for the city, the world, seemed something so vast and borderless it could only be inimical to him. He remembered when he had been a kid, reading fantasy books with a map of some imaginary realm at the front—a whole world in black and white which you could take in at a glance...

  “Fellows? Are you coming?” Lana said in frustration, interrupting his thoughts.

  He looked fuzzily at the beer in his hand (not his first), convinced something about it looked different to before... The peeling label with the seagull on the front had no words he recognised other than one, tiny and at the bottom: ‘Georgia’. Was he drinking beer all the way from Georgia? It made no sense but then nothing did; how could a world where a child could just appear in your headlights make sense?

  “Fellows!”

  He took a swig from the flat, lifeless beer, looked at Lana unsteadily, then took another. Go with her? He wasn’t sure himself what his decision was going to be.

  ~

  “Fellows!”

  “Georgia,” he says uncomfortably.

  “Fuck Fellows, where have you been? And are you sober? C’mon in, have a drink...” She gestures for him to come inside as if to a lost child stubbornly refusing to come in out of the dark. Her eyes look at his face and then quickly away, over his shoulder. Faintly audible are the sounds of the crowd outside; the muffled hum of the world.

  “Quick, quick,” Georgia says, her red-rimmed eyes focussed on the corridor behind him. Something about her expression he recognises from himself: she is looking to see if anything has changed. He can’t help but look himself; he wonders if he remains in the city whether in a few months he’d be looking at a featureless and peeling magnolia wall with such trepidation too.

  He goes inside, and Georgia closes the door quickly. There is an awkwardness between them not normally present and he doesn’t know what to say. He almost turns and leaves.

  “What are those twats doing out there?” Georgia says; her flat is haunted by the sporadic jeers and catcalls of outside.

  “The quarantine,” Fellows says. “They think it will be lifted soon. Today. I don’t know how they know. But good news for you eh?” he adds in a forced tone of voice.
<
br />   Georgia raises an eyebrow at his words, laughs without humour. Without saying anything, she places two glasses on the table in front of them. The bottle she pours from is familiar but Fellows doesn’t say anything. The red wine is black as ink in the gloomy room, for the curtains are all tightly drawn.

  “Sit down,” Georgia says, “don’t stand on ceremony.”

  “Georgia, I...” Fellows says. “When I was last here...”

  “Oh, come on,” Georgia says. “Are we really going to do this? The whole ‘sorry’ conversation?”

  “But I...” Fellows does want to say sorry, he supposes, to take some responsibility for his actions. But it is a weak urge (after all, what did he do wrong?) and he is unsure how long it will last.

  “Fellows,” Georgia says, taking his free hand. “You’re my only friend in this city, okay? Which basically means, in the entire world. So just hush and sit down and have a bloody drink with me, okay?”

  And Fellows does sit, sinking into the comfortable, sagging sofa as easily as he acquiesces into not mentioning their argument. It is easier. The wine is faintly musty and has more sediment in the bottle than it should have; nevertheless he drinks it gratefully, keeps pace with Georgia. The silence between them becomes companionable, the relaxed and empty silence of not doing anything, like a blank page.

  A thought nags at him, jerks him from his slump. He sits up, puts down his glass on the table (which is stained with interlocking circles from the bottom of countless wine glasses before, like the patterns of the tape on Boursier’s floor or the flight of gulls). Fellows reaches into his jacket, takes out his version of The Quarantine from his inner pocket.

  He attempts to flatten the pages of the rolled up manuscript on the coffee table. Georgia had been sitting almost dozing with her head on his shoulder and her legs tucked beneath her; now she straightens.

  “Well, you always said you wanted to read one of my stories,” Fellows says; Georgia gives him a baffled look.

  All the pages are blank except for the first which just shows the title and a single sentence. Am I being lifted up?

  Fellows drains the wine from his glass.

  “I don’t think I’ll be writing anymore,” he says. “This town aint big enough for the both of us.”

  ~

  Fellows drained the beer to the last dregs (Boursier writes). He didn’t want it to end, for then he’d have to make a decision. He thought again of those fantasy books he’d read as a child; some had let you control the action: turn to page 37 to go with Lana, turn to page 269 to continue drinking. He peered at the empty bottle before putting it down. Either his vision was blurred or it no longer said ‘Georgia’ or anything else he recognised on the label. The creature on the front might not have been a seagull but something else; his muddled and drunken sight made the task of looking as problematic as those pictures that could be a duck or old woman one moment, a rabbit or young girl the next.

  But even in his doubling and underwater vision, the sight of Lana making to turn away, hand raised to hide her tears, was in focus. Fellows made an effort to stand up.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said, surprising himself; seeing himself differently. “I’ll try and come with you.”

  ~

  “What are you going to do,” he says to Georgia, “if they do lift the quarantine? Where will you go?” Although she has never said it, he has always assumed Georgia is like him, not a native of the city but another wanderer who somehow got stuck here. He wonders why Georgia left where she came from.

  Georgia doesn’t reply straight away but picks up the wine bottle to refill their glasses; he goes to put a hand over his but she angrily bats it away. When she pours, he sees her hands are trembling, and drops of wine stain the table.

  “Fellows I can’t even leave my sodding apartment,” she says, not looking at him. She takes a big gulp of wine, licks her lips. “What does it matter to me whether those unity government lunatics impose an official quarantine or not?”

  “I can help you,” Fellows says. “Baby-steps, I’ll go with you outside, just to the corner the first time, then next time down to...”

  “Baby steps, Jesus,” Georgia snaps. “Do I look like I need saving? Don’t answer that.” Her hand is still shaking as she lifts her glass again; when she looks at him her lips are stained red. “But there is a way you can help me; it would help us both I think.”

  “How?” Fellows says, wanting to tell her to wipe her mouth. He jumps at the surprise touch of her hand on his.

  “Stay here. Live here, with me. There’s room. It will be fun,” she continues, seeing his reaction. “We can drink, you can write and go and screw your waitress friend, do whatever you want but come back to me here at night...”

  “Georgia, I don’t think...”

  “Please, Fellows.”

  “I...”

  “I know you’ve always wanted me, Fellows,” Georgia says in a rush as if daring herself. She has leant so close to him he can smell the wine on her breath. “Get me pissed and in the same bed on a cold night and who knows...”

  He stands up to interrupt her, to stop the story she is telling from seeming real, to either of them. But her words have made him ache and he is honestly not sure what his decision will be. Georgia. When he looks at her his vision blurs and for a moment she seems like a woman old before her time, head bent downwards, and not the twenty-something girl looking at him direct. He blinks the doubling away, forces a smile.

  “You don’t even like cock, Georgia,” he says.

  ~

  Fellows walked unsteadily towards the car; he’d not been outside in daylight for days and it felt unnatural, the emptiness of the sky vast with hidden threat. Only Lana’s hand on his back stopped him from bolting back inside.

  When she’d come outside she’d looked left and right, called something softly that she didn’t want him to hear. The name of their missing cat. The cat he’d been against getting; Lana had seen it as a distraction from their problems, from what they didn’t have, but at first he’d only seen it as a reminder. And he’d never told her he’d actually grown affectionate towards George, and so she called his name softly now he had gone missing. How did things get so shitty between us? Fellows thinks.

  Lana unlocked the car on the drive, and his tension increased, felt like all that he was. Shaking and sweaty he closed his eyes so as not to see, and got in the back seat of the car. Like a child. He fumbled the seat-belt on, winced as Lana slammed shut the door.

  “Where are we going?” He didn’t know if he’d said it aloud or not, but there was no reply.

  When Lana started the car it backfired, and Fellows screamed.

  ~

  Georgia doesn’t react to his attempt at a joke.

  “I think I’m going to go now,” Fellows says; from the look on Georgia’s face he knows she realises he means more than from her flat. Her eyes scan his face in the same twitchy, paranoid way they had scanned the corridor outside her door...

  “Fellows,” she says, questioningly.

  “It’s bigger than me, the city,” he says suddenly—the memory of her peering nervously outside has made him think of something; the memory of Georgia lost amid the changing streets of her neighbourhood. Georgia.

  “Well of course it’s bigger, it’s a city”—the opportunity to take the piss allows her to regain some composure.

  “No I mean all of this. It’s always been about more than me, than my stupid story. It’s a whole city, full of people, real people. And you could see it changing too, Georgia. You and that bookseller and maybe even Jaques and... How did you get here?” he adds.

  “Huh?”

  “How did you get to the city? You’re not a native, so how...”

  Georgia goes very still and seems to shrink into herself; her eyes are far away. For a minute she doesn’t speak, then:

  “She hit me Fellows.”

  “Huh?”

  “No, not hit. Just touched, really. Just a touch but she cou
ld hurt so much...”

  “Georgia, who...?”

  She suddenly snaps herself upright, stands from the sofa and comes over to him. Fellows only now realises she is taller than him. She grins, a smile full of old pain, and throws out her arms.

  “Who? Someone who isn’t here, Fellows. Don’t you see? She isn’t fucking here.”

  Fellows looks her in the eyes for a few seconds, nods, and touches her hand briefly.

  “You’re my only friend here too,” he says to her, and knows that the doubling in his vision is this time just the natural result of his tears. He goes to the door and opens it as quickly as he can, cursing as it sticks in the frame. Georgia follows behind almost on tip-toe; she stands at such an angle that she can’t see outside. As he meets her gaze, he knows what her final words to him will be.

  “You’re a twat yourself, Georgia,” he says back to her, then quickly steps outside and shuts the door.

  As he hurries to the escalator his weeping is as rhythmic as the sea.

  ~

  He composes himself before he leaves the apartment block; outside night is starting to fall but there are even more people out in the street, drinking and laughing. On the steps of the apartments opposite a group of men are playing music with accordions and guitars, and the crowd sways slightly in time with their off-key rhythm. But there is an edge to the convivial atmosphere, and the eyes that turn to look at Fellows as he descends the steps to the street are by turns expectant then disappointed. As if I can lift the quarantine, Fellows thought.

  Someone steps from the crowd arms out and Fellows sees the ghost reaching for him with its deadening touch; he blinks and it is just a woman offering him a jug of hooch that is being passed around. She looks offended by his reaction and he mumbles an apology. Not that he hallucinated as such, just saw things differently in that second. The whole city is haunted, he realises. Not by ghosts, but by how things could be other than they are, flickering images of entangled realities, glimpses of other stories that you could almost slip between. The boy’s not dead, he thinks, but the boy is dead, too, here in this city and still reaching for him. Boursier was right, this has gone on long enough—but how long is that? How many dead-end combinations of this game have he and Boursier played out? The sense of repetition, of having done all this before, feels like another ghost dogging his footsteps as he pushes through the crowd of the old town, not looking back at Georgia’s apartment.