by E. J. Swift
And people.
I’m here, Ma, she thinks fiercely. And I’m going to get you off there.
32 ¦
WHEN THE GRAVE-WATCHER signs in for his shift, the fifteen or so glass units in the isolation ward are full again. He knows what that means. It means he’s in for another night below.
He changes into his hazard suit, tucking everything in carefully so nothing is exposed. He takes a last gulp of clean air before he puts the mask over his face. He signs out his syringes. They have given him a larger consignment than yesterday. When he says thank you to the nurse she looks at him the way people do sometimes, as though he is something unnatural.
A truck has just come in. After the infected have been sedated, the grave-watcher helps the soldiers carry them down into the sealed basement where he relieves the other guy. It is getting full down here. The smell of death is ripe. He directs the soldiers to lay the new infected on the empty pallets, each of which has a preparatory body bag as an undersheet. The soldiers look spooked, probably because the place is also a mortuary – or was, and will be again, soon enough. You’d think they’d be used to death, but redfleur has that effect: it makes people want to run and hurl themselves into a river or off a cliff. The soldiers have to wait while the grave-watcher logs the new infected. Each case gets a number, an entry time and a date. On the other side, another number will be assigned. An exit time.
The soldiers are impatient: Aren’t we done yet?
That’s it, he says.
They can’t get out quick enough. The basement door clangs shut and he is left in almost darkness with the infected, a case of syringes and a gun.
In the next four hours he does not see anyone except for a doctor who comes to take a blood sample from each of the infected. It is hot tonight, too hot to be here a minute longer than he has to be. The grave-watcher’s feet swell up in his rubber boots and his filter mask itches his face. It feels as though his breath is coagulating in the narrow space between mask and mouth.
He remembers the heat from the last outbreak. That was summer, too. Five years ago. Three and a half thousand dead. The virus is smarter than humans. Every time they find a vaccine, another strain appears.
This job is well paid, but few would want it. Most of the infected are dead within hours of arrival, but some take a long time, gurgling on their own blood, breath rattling away in the almost darkness, moaning softly. Something of the dying must stick to him, because people in the city leave him alone. They veer around him in the street as if he is a rock in the middle of a river. The grave-watcher checks the time, although he doesn’t need a watch; he can tell the hour true to the minute. One after five. Time for the hourly tag. He eases himself up from his chair, his plastic hazard suit crackling, and switches on his torch.
He prefers to remain in the dark, because in the dark you can only hear them. It’s easier to cradle their heads if you can’t see what’s happened to their poor faces. But he needs some semblance of light for this bit. He flashes the light over the chamber. Eight souls, they brought in tonight.
He works along the line. The first is late stages, but still alive. Male, in his thirties, cheap clothes under the sheet, a dribble of blood-flecked saliva down his chin. The peeling is severe. His internal organs will be collapsing soon. The grave-watcher gives him a couple of hours.
He injects a squirt of heroin into the man’s neck. It’s the cheap, nasty stuff that would fell any addict in a matter of months, but it makes little difference to them; they only need it for a few hours. Three days is the longest anyone has lasted.
The man breathes a soft aaaah as the opiate hits.
‘Easy, boy, easy now,’ says the grave-watcher. Often he wonders why they don’t just shoot the infected outright; everyone knows how it ends. And it got to that way, last time, because they were too many. But no, the monitoring must be done. Sometimes the grave-watcher eases them along.
The next one is dead. Cords of the neck rigid in a final contortion, eyelids stretched wide. One eye has imploded. That happens sometimes. The grave-watcher draws up the sides of the body bag and zips it tight. He hauls the corpse to the other end of the basement and puts a fresh bag on the pallet. The burners will be round in a couple of hours for the morning collection.
The girl is young, a teenager with clumps of feathers stuck in her hair. She’s been here a couple of days now. Her clothes are covered in dry blood. It looked like she’d vomited up most of her insides on arrival. Still, she’s hanging on. Strong, this one, but strength means nothing to the redfleur. It makes him sad to see them young. He tries not to linger with her. Quick shot and on.
‘Help me.’
‘I’m coming, boy. I’ll be with you, never you worry.’
‘Help me.’
The same voice again, faint and croaking, but surprisingly clear. They are not normally lucid, or if they are, he gets the heroin quick. You don’t want to be aware of your last hours in this place. He gets a syringe ready.
A hand takes hold of the plastic leg of his suit. The grave-digger jumps and swears.
He swings the torch-light onto the next victim and gets the shock of his life.
A young man is lying there, between the girl he just injected, and another whose face he cannot see, curled on its side with the hands clawed in rigor mortis. He recognizes this man. He was brought in two days ago with the girl. He had all the signs: the bleeding, the vomiting. By yesterday the skin on his hands was beginning to peel. He should be dead by now.
But he is not dead. He is alive, sweating and shivering, and his face is clean, except for a few scabs – scabs! – forming on his cheeks. His eyes are open – swollen, but no blood – and he gazes imploringly at the grave-watcher.
‘Help me,’ he says. ‘Help me get out of here.’
The grave-watcher is frightened. He glances at the long row of the infected. There is no question that they are redfleur victims. The man between them is infected. He must be infected.
‘My name’s Vikram,’ says the young man. ‘Please, help me.’
Enough. Names are bad. The grave-watcher does not want to hear names. He does not want to know who they are. He grabs his syringe and, before the man can protest, he injects him. The man’s eyes fly wide in shock and protest. The grave-watcher wants to switch off his torch but he can’t, he has to stand there watching until those dreadful eyes lose their focus and roll up. The man shudders and goes into that space they go, the last place before the end.
33 ¦
‘RAMONA, THAT SHIP isn’t going anywhere.’
Late into the night, the docks are deserted and the lights are low. The ships and the silent cranes cast long shadows, making the docks a chequered, uncertain ground where it would be easy to creep about unnoticed, flitting between the rows of locked containers. The Polar Star rests between a large Alaskan ship and a smaller Siberian neighbour. A few lights glow from its upper decks. The ships groan faintly with the movement of the tide, and the night is full of unidentified sounds: taps, creaks and murmurs, the hiss of the sea.
Ramona’s eyes are strained from hours of vigil at the window. It’s so hot, and even stripped to her tank top and shorts with the window open wide to let in the sea breeze, she is sweating.
‘What if they leave tonight?’
‘There are two more days of the Exchange. They won’t go anywhere without the rest of the fleet. That never happens. It would draw attention.’
‘They could leave any time. I have to be ready.’
‘Ready for what? To get arrested like you almost did today?’
‘There’s no police in Panama, Félix. They don’t arrest people here.’
‘No, they drive them out into the desert and leave them there. That’s how Panama deals with anyone who interrupts the Exchange. They let you die the slow way. Trust me, I’ve been coming here long enough to know this is a violent place, even if it doesn’t look it.’
She sees something. Movement? No, just the shadow of a crane as i
t shifts in a gust of wind. She rubs her eyes. She is starting to imagine things.
‘I had to ask questions. What else could I do?’
‘I don’t know – how about not talk to anyone related to the Polar Star?’
‘It’s my ma in there, Félix!’
‘And I’ve told you what we should do. We should go to the harbourmaster and ask for an official search.’
‘They won’t find anything.’
The few crewmembers she managed to talk to gave nothing away. The Polar Star’s captain has not been witnessed off the ship since its arrival. Félix is right, she did draw attention to herself. But she has nothing to lose.
One thing she has learned today: the Polar Star has better security than any other in the fleet. Ordinary dock workers morph into security guards the moment you drift near the loading ramp. But there has to be a way on board …
‘Tell me what you’re thinking, Ro.’
She stares fixedly at the isolated lights of the ship.
I can’t tell you, Félix. You can’t come with me. And if it doesn’t work out, someone has to stay behind to tell my story.
He says, ‘You can’t sit there all night.’
‘I can. I have to.’
Félix comes to stand behind her and wraps his arms around her, careful not to squeeze her ribcage. He kisses her neck gently. His hands move over her hips, down to the bare skin of her legs and up, his fingers teasing at the hem of her shorts, then slipping inside. She thinks her mind is too busy for sex, but finds herself turning to kiss him, pushing him back towards the bed, surprised by the sudden leap of desire.
They are tender with one another, Félix attentive of her bruised body. He keeps saying, is this all right, it’s not hurting you? No, she says, don’t stop. She doesn’t want to think. Only this, this feeling, here, now. She comes almost at once, and when he does, inside her, she has a moment of anxiety whether her contraceptive implant has expired, before she remembers she has another six months. Five? Six. Time is like sand, everywhere and nowhere. Félix shifts beneath her, and she lies against him with her head in the crook of his neck and he strokes her hair. She thinks, I must get that implant replaced, and then six months stretches out ahead of her, uneasily, and she wonders, where will I even be in six months?
‘Do you feel any better?’ murmurs Félix.
‘Yes. My body does.’
‘It’s not hurting you? Your ribs?’
She shifts her head to his chest. ‘I’m all right like this.’
Beneath the rise and fall of his chest the beat of his heart thuds against her ear, as loud in this moment as thunder. She listens to its deep beat, the clench and release, and she thinks how strange it is that a sound which is so powerful when heard in another she cannot hear in her own body. But they are suspended together in this rhythm, Ramona and the beat and the warmth of his skin against the side of her face, and she lies half-comatose, not asleep, yet not quite awake, her mind here and elsewhere, wishing she could draw out this moment.
She remembers the machine-checked heartbeat of the boy she took to the medical centre, whose veins now hold cells of her blood.
Knowing he is asleep, she murmurs, ‘I love you, Félix.’
She leaves the room while Félix is still sleeping, careful not to wake him. It is not cool but more so than the draining heat of the day. A small crowd is gathered at the sea wall, pointing at something down in the water. Three large white seabirds spiral overhead, their long wings beating slowly in the morning air currents. The crowd has an air of consternation, shifting uneasily among themselves. A dock officer arrives and moves authoritatively to the waterfront. Ramona wriggles her way through.
On the other side of the sea wall, a body floats face down in the water. The figure is male, dressed in the practical clothing of the stevedores, a smudge of wiry hair, a dark clot of blood at the base of his skull. Ramona’s stomach clenches. There is nothing to identify the man, but even before the dock officer uses a long pole to turn the body over, she knows.
The body in the water was, until yesterday, the dock’s newest stevedore, and the only one to tell Ramona the truth.
The body in the water is a warning.
‘Félix, it was horrible, he was just there, floating – what the fuck have I done—’
‘Hey, hey Ro, it’s not your fault—’
‘Of course it’s my fault, I spoke to him – I got him to tell me which ship it was. All yesterday when I was trying to get on-board, they must have known, and they killed him, Félix. They fucking killed him. Because of me—’
‘Hey, none of that. Did you give the order? Did you tell them to kill him? We don’t even know he was killed. It might have been an accident. He was new: he didn’t know the docks like the others. He could have knocked his head, walking about in the dark.’
‘The back of his head? He was killed. I know it.’
‘You don’t know that, and you don’t know it was your fault. He talked to you – what if he talked to other people as well? We don’t know what he was saying.’
‘I know what you’re trying to do, but there’s no point in pretending, Félix. He’s dead because of me. He’s my soul to carry.’
Félix puts his hands on her shoulders.
‘I’m worried about you,’ he says.
‘They can’t get to me.’
‘Whoever’s behind this, they’ve got reach. If they just killed a stevedore—’
‘That was a warning. Stop looking and go home, that’s what it meant.’
Félix falls quiet and drops his gaze.
‘What, you think that’s what I should do? Just give up?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You were thinking it.’
‘Well what are you going to do, Ramona? What if you can’t rescue Inés? You should go direct to the harbourmaster. Report this. Tell him everything. Get him to act.’
‘Don’t you understand? They’re all in on it. They have to be. That kid was the only one who didn’t know he wasn’t meant to talk – or at least, he didn’t know what the consequences would be. The harbourmaster knows. I’m telling you, he knows.’
‘I can’t believe that. Say you suspect smuggling. Get them to search the Polar Star. I’ll come with you.’
‘What about the radio? The price on my head?’
‘We’ll say you’re my sister.’
She is too frustrated to answer.
‘Ramona?’
‘All right, we can try.’
‘You don’t sound very convinced.’
‘I’m not convinced. That ship will come out clean from any search, I can tell you that now.’
‘I just want you to stay safe.’
‘I know.’ She is shaking. ‘Whatever they want my ma for, it’s nothing good. I keep imagining the most awful things …’
Félix wraps her in a hug and they stay like that, holding each other, until her shivers abate.
She tells the harbourmaster about Gabi. The man at the desalination plant. The dead stevedore. As she speaks, she watches his face intently. The harbourmaster exhibits a professional concern, arms folded, nodding. With each stumbling word Ramona’s courage ebbs away. Félix is talking now. There must be a search, he says. But everything in her gut is telling her: this isn’t right.
The harbourmaster assures them he takes his responsibilities for the docks extremely seriously. He will inspect the ship himself, with a senior officer. Ramona asks if she can go with them. She already knows the answer, and it comes as no surprise when the harbourmaster shakes his head.
‘That would be in breach of the Boreal trade agreement. Believe me, if there is anything amiss, we will find it.’
She exits the offices feeling lightheaded. She is frightened now, very frightened. She cannot shake the sense that she has played right into their hands, and she doesn’t even know who they are, how many, how far their influence extends up the hierarchy of the Exchange.
Félix is pleased with the outco
me.
‘You see? I told you. They’ll find Inés. And then they can drop the kidnapping bastards in the desert. Panama justice. If anyone deserves it, they do.’
She cannot bear his optimism.
‘We’ve made a terrible mistake, Félix.’
‘No, you did the right thing—’
‘And they know us now. I’ve put you in danger too.’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’m crew. I’m protected.’
The inspection of the Polar Star finds nothing.
On the last night of the Exchange they sit up late, talking, with the shutters closed. Félix has a plan. In the morning he will round up the crews of all the Patagonian ships. He will tell them what has been happening. They will get on-board the Boreal ship, by force if necessary. They’ll open every cabin and every container. They’ll check for trapdoors, secret floors and double walls. The Boreals will not be able to stop them.
Ramona agrees listlessly; what else can they do? Félix says he doesn’t want her to do anything stupid.
‘Like what?’
‘Like trying to get on the ship yourself.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘You’re right. I can’t do this on my own. Not any more.’
It is only then that Félix gives her the package. It is a pack of individually wrapped skin patches, numbered one to thirty.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s the medicine.’
‘You got it?’
‘Yes. I asked around. A guy on the docks – all the right people say he’s the real thing. It’s the one-month course, a patch a day. I’ve got to be straight with you, Ro. He said it’s a rough treatment. Not everyone survives it.’
She stares at the innocuous little pack and starts to cry.
‘Félix …’
‘I got it a couple of days ago. But it didn’t seem – I don’t know – it seemed kind of wrong when we were still looking. But I wanted you to have it now. Before we go in. So you know there’s hope for Inés.’
‘What did it cost?’
