A Lovely Way to Burn

by Louise Welsh

  Somewhere on the other side of the city a pyre of black smoke was reaching into the sky. She watched it for a while and then went to Iqbal’s kitchen and searched through his cupboards. Although they were packed with enough tins and dried goods to keep a family for several weeks, there was no alcohol.

  ‘Stupid.’ She wondered why she hadn’t taken a bottle of malt from Simon’s flat. Why hadn’t it occurred to her that at some point she would need to get drunk? ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid.’ It was becoming a mantra. She went to the desk and looked at the printouts piled next to Simon’s laptop. An envelope neatly labelled with her name lay on top. There was déjà vu in that too. Stevie ripped it open and took out the letter inside.

  Dear Stevie

  Please don’t go upstairs. I have the sweats. I knew from the start that I wanted to have some control over the way I die, and so tea and biscuits weren’t the only things I stockpiled. Meeting you has made these last days better. It also makes leaving harder, but I’ve read how the final stages go. I hope you’ll mourn me a little, but please don’t be too sad. You gave me a wonderful gift. My gift to you is beside the laptop. I think Simon and his team made a genuine mistake, the kind that might happen to anyone. They tried to do something good. I feel jealous of Simon, but you can be proud of him, even though he got some things wrong. It’s the intention behind the act that counts, right?

  I lost my faith a long time ago, but recently I’ve been thinking there might be something beyond all of this after all and that if there is some kind of deity they won’t mind whether we believe in them or not. What they will care about is whether we tried to do good in this world. I’m glad I had the chance to be some help to you before I go. Who knows, it might open a door in the afterlife.

  Please pray for me.

  Iqbal

  Stevie found an unopened bottle of bubblebath at the back of the bathroom cabinet. Its label was decorated with a jolly Santa Claus holding a sprig of holly in his hand. She wondered if it had been a Christmas present and, if so, who had given it to Iqbal. Had he simply never got round to opening it, or kept it for some other reason? She couldn’t find a basin and so she took a large bowl from the kitchen, carried it upstairs to the bathroom and filled it with warm water. She poured a capful of bubblebath into the bowl and splashed a hand around in the water. Foam frothed on its surface, the bubbles horribly festive. A familiar, clean scent rose from it, more suitable to a child’s bathtime than to a corpse’s laying-out.

  Stevie set the warm water at Iqbal’s bedside, soaked a fresh flannel, and began to wipe his body with it. He had asked her to pray for him, but her mother and she had never been churchgoers. She didn’t even know what religion Iqbal had belonged to. In the end she settled for the Lord’s Prayer, stumbling a little over the final lines,

  For thine is the kingdom,

  the power, and the glory,

  for ever and ever.

  Amen.

  When she was finished she patted Iqbal’s skin dry with a towel, and then found a clean sheet and wound him tightly in it. Were it not for the whiteness of the cotton, his body would have resembled a mummy’s, lifted free of its sarcophagus. Stevie had taken a piece of paper and a marker pen from the desk. She wrote his name clearly, IQBAL, and placed the paper on top of the body.

  ‘Not exactly a good send-off, I’m afraid, but the best I can do.’

  Stevie touched her fingers to her lips and placed the kiss she had been too squeamish to give his dead skin, on to Iqbal’s parcelled forehead. She felt calm, as if the act of washing and binding him had soothed her.

  There was a typewritten letter on top of the small pile of pages that Iqbal had left next to Simon’s laptop. Stevie saw a faint reflection of herself in the desk’s glass surface and slid the papers closer, erasing the gaunt face, the ragged hair. She set the letter aside, uncertain that she could survive the sound of Iqbal’s voice in her head again, so soon after reading his suicide note. The rest of the pages looked impersonal, reams of numbers cumulating into calculations. Stevie recognised the layout and realised that Iqbal had printed the data from Simon’s laptop. She worked her way slowly through it, careful to keep the pages in order. Iqbal had highlighted particular numbers and lines of figures, perhaps thinking that would make it easier for a non-statistician to understand. Despite his efforts, Stevie found it impossible to make sense of what was in front of her. She turned to the letter, dread in her belly, but as soon as she started to read, she knew that Iqbal had written it before the sweats had touched him, back when he had thought he might survive. There was no greeting and no leave-taking, no plea for her affection. This was the computer guru and statistician speaking.

  A brief summary of findings

  The research team analysed their original data in the usual way.

  i.e. they attempted to ascertain whether positive results were due to their new treatment, or simply owing to chance. After studying the data, they concluded the possibility that the positive results were mere chance was one in a thousand. Drugs have been licensed on far lower probabilities. It was as close to proof that the treatment was effective as they could have hoped for.

  What I believe Simon eventually realised, and what I discovered when I redid the team’s calculations, was that along the way someone had made a catastrophic statistical error. The error had been absorbed and repeated. There was in fact only a one in ten chance that the treatment had been effective, way below the balance of proof required.

  This appears to have been a genuine mistake, a miscalculation in the figures.

  I was helped in my own calculations by a coded mathematical summary Simon included amongst the documents, a sophisticated text it was a pleasure to grapple with. This suggests to me that he wanted to keep what he had found secret, but detectable to someone who would know how to look for it in the right way.

  Stevie leant back in the chair and looked up at the ceiling. Simon had made a mistake, a costly, devastating mistake, but a mistake all the same.

  She turned on the laptop and scrolled through the documents, searching for something else that might have made the computer a target, but it appeared that Simon had acquired the machine purely for the purpose of storing the drug trial data. The only unrelated document was the photograph of the two of them together in Russell Square,

  Stevie looked up at the ceiling again. A small cobweb she was sure Iqbal would never have allowed hung gossamer-high above her head. She had seen photographs of Chernobyl: abandoned homes, factories and schools that had been overrun by nature until they looked as if they had belonged to some lost civilisation. It was easy to imagine London’s pavements cracked by weeds, colonies of deer roaming Oxford Street, dust gathering on the tables of Caffè Nero and Starbucks, posters for action movies wilting from bill-boards and Underground tunnel walls. She sat up. Those kinds of thoughts had the potential to drag her into the same shadows that had claimed Iqbal.

  Buchanan had insisted that, if Simon had been murdered, then the blame lay with his gambling associates, but the chemist had also been adamant that the treatment was effective. If he was wrong about one, then he might be wrong about the other. The question was, did Buchanan genuinely believe what he had told her, or was he lying?

  She still had Hope’s gun. She could go to the lab, put the barrel to Buchanan’s head and demand that he tell her the truth. Stevie tried to imagine what it would be like to use it and remembered the way Hope’s skull had bloomed red against Simon’s floor. Anyone who pointed a gun must be prepared to fire it.

  Alexander Buchanan had been quick to push himself forward, quick too to provide explanations and offer help, but there had been a third man in the research team. Dr John Ahumibe had been more reticent. He had lost two friends and a work colleague, but Stevie wondered if there had been another dimension to the paediatrician’s reserve and if, behind the quiet façade, lay something he wanted to hide.

  Thirty-Seven

  The streets around Westminster were a jam of cars, abando
ned any-which-way, as if their drivers had not paused to think about how to make their exits. Stevie was forced to park the Jaguar at least a mile from St Thomas’s Hospital and make the rest of her journey on foot. It was eerie, threading a route through the empty vehicles, some with their engines still running, petrol fumes clogging the air. She passed a young man slumped across the steering wheel of a hatchback. His dark hair hung over his features like a curtain, and if it weren’t for his broad shoulders, Stevie might have mistaken him for a girl.

  A week ago she would have wrenched open the door, tried to revive him and called for help. Now she quickened her pace. It was too easy to imagine the youth sitting up, drawing back his hair and reminding her of what death could do to a face.

  The Houses of Parliament still loomed solid and stately by the side of the Thames. Police barriers blocked the roads and pavements around the building, as if to protect the motorcade of some high-risk dignitary, but no officers were in attendance and Stevie slipped between them. Her feet wanted to break into a run, but she forced herself to keep to a steady pace.

  She crossed Westminster Bridge remembering the tourists who had cluttered the pavements on her last visit. The London Eye was stalled, the streets deserted of everyone except her. Union Jack bunting fluttered above the closed door of a souvenir kiosk and postcards rippled on a pavement stand. A handwritten sign declared the postcards: Three for £2.00. Stevie slid a view of St Paul’s from the stand. She had walked past the cathedral countless times, but had never been inside. She wondered if people were gathered there now, praying for relief from the sweats, or if fear of infection had discouraged even the religious from congregating. Big Ben struck the quarter-hour, as if nothing had changed and time still mattered. Stevie slipped the postcard back into the rack.

  Something rumbled loud and mechanical from the river below. She leant against the parapet and saw a lone barge pushing its way through the water towards her, iron and steadfast. Stevie waited until it disappeared from sight beneath the bridge, and then watched it glide away from the city, raising plumes of spume in the oil-black water. The sound of its engines held her. She raised a hand to the vanishing barge, but its captain was busy correcting course to avoid an unmoored tourist ferry and there was no answering wave.

  Stevie wondered if Dr Ahumibe would still be on duty, or if she was walking towards another corpse. Life was a losing race. The trick was to steer a straight path, choose a target and keep making towards it for as long as you could.

  The front of the hospital was a gridlock of army trucks, ambulances and police cars. A group of soldiers stood on the pavement outside the entrance, smoking cigarettes. It was unclear if they were guarding the hospital, or had been ordered to contain infected people inside. They looked up as she passed, their faces grey and battle-weary, and she saw that they were armed. Stevie kept on walking, aware of their eyes on her, glad of her ugly haircut and Simon’s suit. She turned right, skirting the outside of the building. Apart from the soldiers, she had not seen a living soul since she had left the Jaguar. Were it not for the abandoned cars, the streets would be as empty as those of a small town on match day, after their team had unexpectedly made the League. Even if the guards let her through, the thought of the hospital’s foyer, and what she might find there, frightened her.

  Somewhere a woman started to sing. She had a full-throated voice that could hit the high notes and then swoop so deep it might have belonged to a man. The tune sounded familiar, like a song Stevie had known and then forgotten, but the words were in a language she didn’t recognise. It was unsettling, the hidden singer, the lure of her voice, the words that might have been Scandinavian, or Arabic, or a language invented just for this song, gliding through the empty streets.

  St Thomas’s Hospital was even larger than Stevie remembered. She tried a side entrance, but it was locked tight. The door’s glass window had splintered into a web of cracks, as if someone had tried to smash their way through. Stevie peered through the mazed pane, but all she could see was an empty corridor and a sign pointing the way to X-ray. Stevie’s ears strained for the slam of a car door, the sound of footsteps coming towards her, but there was nothing.

  Not everyone had the virus, she reminded herself. She had passed other cars on her way to the hospital, had heard the singer and seen the soldiers, each one unquestionably alive. Dr Ahumibe had looked like a survivor. He would be waiting inside St Thomas’s and she would make him tell her what he knew about Simon’s death.

  The loading bays around the back of the building were on a lower level from the pavement. Stevie kept close to the barrier and peered down into a car park reserved for emergency vehicles. Lines of abandoned ambulances snaked their way from the road to the hospital’s doors. Stevie caught a flash of movement and saw a soldier leaning against one of the vehicles. Even from a distance she could tell that he was sick, but instinct warned her to steer clear of men in uniform. She jogged on, keeping her body low.

  Finally she found what she was looking for. A catering truck had been backed up to a delivery entrance, its rear doors open as if it was in the process of being unloaded. The driver, impatient with opening the delivery door each time he entered with a load, had used a brick to jam it open. A wedge of darkness was visible in the building beyond. Stevie waited for a moment to make sure that the driver wasn’t going to suddenly reappear. Then she stepped into the shadows, took Hope’s gun from her bag and slipped it into the pocket of Simon’s trousers. She had no idea if she would be able to shoot someone, even in self-defence, but it comforted her to know that she was armed.

  Stevie edged slowly into the gloom of a dimly lit corridor, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness, ready to bolt at the first sign of danger. She was glad of the low light. It made her feel safer, her clothes black against the darkness, the gun in her pocket. Stevie took deep breaths, remembering her yoga classes, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth. She could feel the weight of the building above her. The corridor’s low ceiling was lined with exposed pipes and the space hummed with white noise, as if it was the powerhouse of some oversized cruise ship.

  A set of double doors, each fitted with a small porthole, lay ahead. Stevie peered through one of the windows. There was nothing in the corridor beyond, except for a metal trolley that looked as if it was used for ferrying patients’ meals. She slipped into the passageway. The white noise was louder here and Stevie wondered if she was nearing the boiler or some control centre. The thought made her wary. Her object was to get to the upper levels without being waylaid by anyone, and from there to Dr Ahumibe’s ward. She could see other rooms leading off the corridor now, pale doorways shining faintly in the gloom. She upped her pace. It smelt bad down there in the dark, a Third World stink. Stevie slipped her silk scarf from her bag, wrapped it around her nose and mouth, and took the gun from her pocket.

  Something flitted, fast and sure, along the side of the wall and a small scream escaped her. Once she had seen one rat, she saw the others, a swift-moving river of sharp noses, undulating spines and sliding tails. She faltered, her back pressed against the wall, the gun still in her hand. The corridor was filled with the sound of claws scuttling against concrete and it was all she could do to keep her finger from squeezing the trigger. The loading bay was a small scrap of light at the end of the corridor. A rat ran over her foot. Stevie kicked out hard and started to sprint, away from the light and towards the next set of double doors. The rats parted to let her through and for a moment it was as if she was one of them. Stevie felt Simon’s trousers flapping at her ankles and let out a moan, imagining a rat scurrying up her leg. She grappled her phone from her bag, found the flashlight function, and turned it on. The corridor ahead shone with light and the rats seemed to pause for an instant, like an interrupted pulse in an electric current, and then she was through the double doors and into the next section of the building.

  There were creatures there too. Stevie could hear them darting into corners, but she had left the p
ack behind. A set of stairs waited at the end of the corridor. Stevie paused to tuck Simon’s trousers into her socks. Her heart felt as if it was about to batter its way out of her chest.

  ‘Easy, easy, easy, easy.’ Her words were all breath.

  The torch beam juddered against the walls and Stevie realised that her hands were trembling too much to hold the gun safely. She shoved it into her bag, took a deep breath and leant forward, her hands on her knees, gasping for air. Something moved in the dark, she straightened up and the torchlight sprang through an open doorway illuminating the room beyond. Stevie gave a gasp and swung the beam away, but the scene had imprinted itself on her eyes, like a digital photograph, captured in an instant.

  Less than a fortnight ago she had been a presenter for a TV shopping channel. It wasn’t her dream job, but the pay was good, and Stevie had liked it well enough. She had had a boyfriend too, a nice guy, a doctor. He had been a little too inclined towards spontaneity for Stevie to be sure that their relationship would last, but he had been good fun, especially in bed. She knew that if their romance fell apart, she could turn to Joanie, a fine friend who knew what it was like to lose a man, and who would laugh about it with her, because what else could you do? It was gone, all of it, but her losses were nothing compared to what waited in the room ahead.

  Stevie took a deep breath. Then she tracked the beam slowly across the wall of the corridor and through the open door. Bodies stretched all the way from the entrance to the far wall, laid out head to toe; a mosaic of corpses.

  An attempt had been made to preserve the bodies’ dignity. Those at the far end of the room had been covered by sheets, but at some point linen had grown scarce and the people closer to the doorway lay exposed, wearing the clothes they had died in. The humming sound made sense now. Bluebottles battled in a busy haze above the rows of dead.