The Quarantined City

by James Everington

  So he should try and leave the city; how hard can escape be? Fellows walks down towards the harbour, from which he can walk along the sea wall towards the west bay. And then just keep walking? He has never, in all his perambulations around this city reached its edge—what will the border of the quarantine look like? Loops of barbed wire, searchlights, men with dogs and automatic weapons—really? There have been rumours—there are always rumours in the city, and as rumours are stories he supposes he should take them seriously—but how could the unity government keep such a massive undertaking secret? But if not that, what? A ring of weather beaten stones?

  Fireworks start to explode above the city like the start of a war. Where have people got those from? he thinks. The flashes of colour seem to freeze the buildings and streets into place a second at a time, but in the blackness between Fellows can’t be sure things don’t shift. The effect is like being drunk, or maybe he already is drunk, on all that wine at Georgia’s, for his pulsing vision accompanies a rough and painful beat in his head. His mouth feels gritty with the sediment of the cheap red wine and realising this causes him to gag. He leans against a tree at the edge of a normally deserted square, now thronged with people; he watches groggily as a woman hands over every last note she has of the new money to a street gigolo as if it were worthless. As they walk to a nearby alley they both turn their heads in unison to look at him; an explosion above means both sets of eyes are the dead white colour of mercury lamps.

  Fellows is suddenly and messily sick onto the gravel in front of him; I need to get out of here, he thinks. The woman and her paid-for companion have stopped to stare at him, and even though there is a temporary lull in the fireworks their eyes still seem the wrong colour. Fellows edges around the square in the opposite direction to them, and darts down a street which he hopes will take him towards the sea. If only he could travel straight as the crow flies rather than through the city’s twisting streets. As the gull flies even, he thinks, looking up at the white shapes high above him, seemingly unafraid of the fireworks. He has never known gulls to be nocturnal, but then he has never known them to fly in such concentric patterns either, like a bull’s-eye overhead.

  He puts his head down, keeps walking. He can’t be sure, but he thinks people are following him. Each time he glances over his shoulder they look different, but what does that prove? Whoever they are, they don’t close the gap with him, and he can’t tell in his fleeting glimpses if that is because they are limping.

  He leaves the old town behind him but the docks are as busy, full of raucous sailors as drunk as if they are celebrating the first night of shore leave rather than having been marooned here for months. A fire has been lit on the quay next to a pile of abandoned lobster pots, and the shapes of people dancing flicker around it; he hears the sounds of singing, a smashed bottle, someone crying out.

  Fellows walks past the harbour, past the street that curves up to the salmon-topped Mariners’ Church, past the civic park and into the broader, tree-lined streets of the Enclave...

  No, he thinks, this isn’t right. The Enclave should be behind him. He stops and looks around the streets as if doubting their existence, but it is true—as if he has lapped himself he is somehow only a few houses down from the one the protestors had squatted in. He remembers all the times he has become disorientated walking the city streets, remembers all the times he has found himself somewhere unexpected or back where he started... How has he wandered the streets of the quarantined city for six months, often aimlessly, and never once reached a boundary?

  At a loss, Fellows stands in the centre of the street, perhaps even the centre of the city. If its geometry even allows a centre...

  There’s no way out, he thinks, it never ends. You’re as stuck here as Georgia is in her flat. Because despite the sun, the drink and the spicy food, despite Leianna and Gregor, despite the many secondhand books and despite his house that he has no idea how he pays for, the quarantined city is a trap.

  ~

  Fellows sat in the back of the car. The sudden silence after Lana had killed the engine felt oppressive, as if the noise that would break it was bound to be violent. He had shut his eyes to ward off the panic and the memories while Lana had driven round the ring road, and he still hadn’t opened them. She had not told him where they were going, or if she had he hadn’t heard her. His mouth tasted of stale beer and bad breath; a hangover had begun a rough and painful beat in his head.

  Lana had put the child locks on, not trusting him. As she opened the door and let in the outside, visions of the accident, of the child in the road, assailed him. Beneath the empty sky he felt even more vulnerable, exposed to whatever might be hidden in its patterns. And yet he was in a perfectly normal street, and all he saw in front of him was a terraced house, with a small front lawn that needed cutting and a path of uneven slabs leading up to a peeling blue door. Number 6.

  He asked Lana again where she had brought him, and this time she answered him.

  “I can’t go in there,” he said.

  ~

  Fellows feels the desire to leave even more strongly, now he knows he can’t. But he knows the feeling won’t last; if he can’t escape the city soon he’ll have choice but to go back to his house. And tomorrow morning he will visit The Swallow Café, try to catch the eye of the blonde waitress and feel his age if he doesn’t, feel it doubly so if he does. Will he start to forget, is that what happened before? In a few months’ time will he be searching the quarantined city for a reclusive writer who he thinks he has never met?

  People are looking at him, for the crowd has not dispersed, although as he predicted their mood has soured. Most of them are moving normally, although here and there a few stand as still as Fellows. When he moves, they do too, lurching shapes in the uneven gas light. In the corners of his vision they seem too small, reaching out as they stumble, but when he looks them face-on they’re just normal people, oblivious to him.

  I need to get out of here, Fellows thinks, walking hastily away. But how?

  Borders only exist when you let yourself see them, Boursier had said.

  Fellows pictures a rain-lashed perimeter fence with searchlights and guard-towers circling the city... But that picture fades for it is too ridiculous. And instead he sees peeling blue tape on dusty floors, a worn vertical stone in a foggy field.

  And sees his own front door, and remembers how it always seems to stick when he tries to open it.

  ~

  Lana led Fellows up the path towards the door to Number 6; she had her hand on his back as if he were an invalid and that was how he felt, his breath fluttering through him too quickly to grasp in his panic, his whole body tensed as if for collision. The path up to the house was curved rather than straight, and Lana insisted on leading them round it rather than cutting across the unruly grass. They moved from slab to slab, Lana careful not to let either of them step on the cracks between. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, he remembered from childhood, playing in the streets. It had been different then—fewer cars.

  He shook his head to rid it of such pointless distraction and Lana guided him the last few steps to the door. It was just a normal wooden frontier, at one point painted blue, the ‘6’ not quite straight. To one side was a full length pane of frosted glass and on the other, newly fitted, a bar at waist height for disabled access.

  His life felt like a trap that had led him this point with no chance of escape; he was suddenly and messily sick onto the paving slabs.

  “Fuck’s sake Fellows!” Lana yelled, but before either of them could say more they saw a confused shape materialise in the panel of frosted glass. It reached out a distorted arm. When the door opened Fellows flinched, anticipating hatred and even violence, but in front of him was only a middle-aged woman wearing a blank expression of terrible, terrible tiredness. She looked at the two of them, and at the vomit on her pathway, with no surprise.

  The woman gestured for them to come inside.

  It had just started t
o rain.

  ~

  Fellows stands before his front door, studying its peeling paintwork. Sea blue. Has it always been blue? He struggles to remember. He presses his ear to its wood; is the boy on the other side, a nebulous phantom or white-eyed child waiting to touch him with broken hands?

  Fellows starts as something does touch him, looks down and feels a moment’s happiness. Mogwai! “Where have you been?” he murmurs as he bends down to pet the cat. Mogwai circles his legs, impatiently mewing to be let in for food.

  A knot of figures has appeared at the top of Fellows’s street; the same people he had been convinced were following him earlier. The sun is rising, although it is surely only a few hours into the night, and in the bright low light their shadows seem to waver, as if they were shifting in size.

  Fellows glances in the other direction, down the tree-lined street which leads to the Carousel. It is real this place, he thinks, and you might not see it again. Might never eat paprika-flavoured potatoes down by the salt-smelling quay again, listening to the squabble of gulls... The day is already promising to be very hot in the quarantined city, hot under a blank open sky. You could stay..., he thinks.

  Before he can doubt himself further, he tries to open his front door, which has always stuck in the heat. Never more so than now. Heart beating loudly, he puts his shoulder to it, and all at once it seems to give and he stumbles inside before he can stop himself. The cat slips through before the door slams shut behind them. Fellows looks up.

  It is not his house. He turns.

  Behind him, he sees the chaotic shapes of rain against frosted glass.

  ~

  Lana gestured Fellows to cross the threshold first, and the enormity of what she was asking him to do paralysed him for a second. The anger he felt towards her was misplaced—she hadn’t been driving that night—but vivid nonetheless. He had avoided thinking of the accident since it had happened: by drinking, by raging, by dreaming up alternative and soothing versions of what might have happened instead. But now, sober and trembling, he was being asked to see the reality of it: inside the house was his responsibility. The boy whose life he had ruined. Although he should stop thinking of him as ‘the boy’; his name was Lawrence.

  The tired-eyed woman didn’t wait to see if they would follow, but turned into the gloom inside. Reluctantly, Fellows stepped inside and followed her into the lounge. The thick patterned carpet seemed to catch at his sluggish feet; the misaligned wallpaper drew his eye like a glitch in reality. On a coffee table a single mug steamed; the woman picked it up but didn’t drink from it. Her husband, she said, was out, just out and Fellows read between the lines: he was too angry to be here. He imagined the man walking the streets in the rain, stopping for drinks as he does so, eventually finding himself blurry eyed and so far from home he can’t remember how to get back...

  “Fellows!” Lana hissed at him, bringing him back to reality. The woman was speaking to him and he’d missed what she’d said. She was now apologetically explaining they’d had to convert a back room to a new bedroom for Lawrence and it wasn’t finished yet, as if everything were her fault. She gestured towards a door at the back of the lounge.

  Fellows realised she meant for him to go into the room alone.

  The voice in his head urging flight seemed loud with echoes, as if he had been here many times before. But Lana and the woman were both standing directly behind him, and he could still hold it together enough not to turn and barge through them. It will be his eyes, he thought, when you see the boy’s eyes is when you’ll run, for who knew what they might hold?

  ~

  Fellows looks in confusion at the room in front of him. It is a living room that seems at once thrillingly futuristic—it has electric lighting and an impossibly slim TV (and when had he last even thought about television?)—and old-fashioned, with misaligned flock wallpaper and a faded, swirling carpet. No books. A coffee table in the centre of the room has a single mug on it, still steaming.

  “Hello?” he calls out; the only reply is from the rain outside.

  Something brushes past his leg; Mogwai mews up at him, still hungry. For some reason the fact of the cat being here seems more mysterious than his own presence. Was this house in the place of Fellows’s own where the cat has been while missing? Mogwai walks towards an open doorway at the far end of the room, which presumably leads to the kitchen. The cat pauses, looks back and mews again at Fellows, expecting him to follow and feed him. The cat knows this place, Fellows thinks.

  Looking around the strange new room he sees an uncapped biro on the coffee table, and he instinctively looks to his own hands to see if they are ink-stained. Is Boursier still out there in the quarantined city, he thinks, writing about someone with my name...?

  ~

  Fellows took a deep, ragged breath, and pushed open the door.

  For some reason he expected it to stick and he opened it with too much force, causing it to...

  ~

  There is a closed wooden door at the end of the lounge; much to the cat’s disappointment Fellows walks towards it and not the kitchen. He pushes the door open, accidentally causing it to bang against the wall.

  It feels like he is stepping across another boundary for the room is so bright with light streaming in from twin patio doors. Wasn’t it raining here five minutes ago? he thinks. There is an overwhelming smell of new paint and disinfectant. The light makes him blink repeatedly and as he walks in he stumbles against a small walking frame which is propped up against a single bed. Outside, a bird clatters away on heavy wings which slice the light with shadow.

  As such, he is taken by surprise when the boy lurches out of the light to touch him.

  It misses, but not because Fellows was quick enough to dodge away. Instead, something seemed to have restrained it, causing it to fall back. As his eyes adjust he can see the hateful thing is lying on the bed, not strapped in but under sheets and blankets tucked so tightly over its slim body it can’t fully rise. Its arms are free and it had reached for him, but it hadn’t been able to lean far enough forward. Thank god, Fellows thinks.

  His relief soon gives way to despair, a bitter anger. Here? Here, again, in this mysterious and futuristic house, is the fucking crippled ghost boy? What is he to do to escape it; what does the fucking thing want from him? It is propped up against some pillows stuffed behind its back, like someone cared about its comfort; he can hear the curious wet sound of its breathing. Why does the fucking thing need to drag air in and out of its dead lungs? he thinks with something like hatred. Incapacitated like it is, it is the first time he has been able to study its bruised and stained form properly. He can’t think it human. He doesn’t get too close, it is still lunging for him. Its hands dirty with motor oil and blood wave a few inches from his face as it mews and slobbers in excitement before slumping back. Its white eyes never blink, never look away from him.

  Its efforts have dislodged one of the pillows that was propping it up, and it falls near Fellows’s feet. He picks it up, noticing the brown stain where the back of its head had been pressed against it.

  “What do you want from me?” he yells at the ghost in frustration. “How many times? How does this fucking end?” Boursier likes his endings ambiguous, he thinks, but maybe he could do something more definite.

  He hears the ragged but urgent sound of breath from the thing that shouldn’t be breathing, and he looks at the pillow while turning it over in his hands.

  ~

  ...to bang against the wall.

  The light in the room was very bright, coming from a set of patio doors which had obviously been used to access the garden before the room had been converted. A bird clattered away outside; its wings looked pure white. Wasn’t it raining five minutes ago? Fellows thought.

  He stepped inside, smelling new paint and disinfectant. His vision adjusted and he saw the bed and the boy within—Lawrence, he reminded himself. The boy’s head had been completely shaved, and his thin arms which clutched the sheets
up to his face were still bruised. The boy had the sheet pulled up over his nose and his eyes stared at Fellows from above it. They were blank and without expression, without reprieve. Fellows couldn’t meet them.

  His throat was dry with desperation for a drink. Any words he thought he might say died every time he looked at the boy. The silence felt accusatory; he knew Lana and the boy’s mother were just behind, waiting for him to speak.

  He noticed that one of the pillows from the boy’s bed had become dislodged and fallen to the floor; eagerly he bent to pick it up. Turning it over to the clean side in his hands, he moved closer to the bed meaning to urge Lawrence to lean forward so he could add the pillow to those behind him; do him that small kindness.

  But when he approached the boy’s eyes went wide; he lurched away from Fellows, straining against the confining bedding, crying out—wordless cries like from a child years younger. He thrashed against the covers and drew the sheet over his eyes. Fellows wordlessly dropped the pillow and stepped back, shaking.

  The panic that rose in him was almost comforting because it felt like an excuse to flee.

  The boy lowered the sheet and stared at him with eyes that seemed even emptier than before; he remembered the blank white look those eyes had had under the ring road lights.