by Rhys Thomas
Miriam liked the surgical dissection of the pods; inserting the knife at the apex and splitting them delicately along their knaps took her mind away from her heart to her body. She worked deliberately slowly, stretching the process out for as long as possible.
Dora watched Miriam’s hands work. The girl had been washed and Miriam’s mother had given her some of her perfume, but her shoulders were still slumped, her eyes still vacant.
‘Can’t you remember where you live?’
Dora shook her head.
‘Did you have any brothers or sisters?’
‘I had a brother.’
‘Wouldn’t you like to see him again? If you tell us where you live we can take you home.’
Dora did not answer.
‘Do you want something to drink?’
‘No.’
‘You should drink something.’
The girl turned her head to one side. Miriam could see the bones in her long neck. The way she reminded her of Henry was eerie. It was like the souls of everybody who had been stricken by the illness had been lined up and when you saw them from a certain angle they merged into one thing.
‘Have you always lived in London?’
Dora didn’t answer.
‘I’ve lived in London all my life,’ said Miriam. ‘Henry was from Cornwall but he acted more like somebody who had grown up in a city. You can always tell the difference with people who grew up outside cities, don’t you think?’
Dora remained silent. Her hands rested on the table.
‘He was my first real boyfriend. My first love.’ She laughed at herself. ‘It’s funny, really, but I’m happy he was the only one. I know it’s old-fashioned but if it feels right . . . that’s what’s important, isn’t it?’
Dora didn’t even look at her as she spoke.
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
The girl did not answer.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Slow,’ she said.
Miriam stopped. ‘Slow?’
‘I feel as if everything has been finished inside me and there’s nothing left to do. A week ago I remember being scared because my brother had caught it.’ Her voice was extremely torpid now, as if the function in her brain that created speech was seizing up. ‘I prayed he wouldn’t die and then I was afraid it would come for me. But when it did come it wasn’t what I thought.’
Miriam placed the knife on the table and dropped the peas she had been shelling into the pot.
‘How did you know it had happened?’
Dora brought her hand slowly to her chest, placing her fist on her ribs in the exact same way as Henry had done.
‘I felt it.’ She looked at Miriam. ‘In here, like a candle being blown out inside me.’
‘Dora, can you tell me where you live?’
Two tears appeared like children’s soap bubbles at her eyes.
‘No. They were all killed.’
Miriam held her breath.
‘It’s funny how I had always wanted to do so much but I don’t feel any of it any more. There is just a void where I used to keep my hopes. It’s right there, in the middle of my heart, empty.’ The tears broke. ‘I’m just –’ she looked at Miriam; her dark eyes were like planets drawing mass into them – ‘all hollowed out.’
Several candles were lit and as Father Moore recounted his own experiences of the illness, Miriam found her mind wandering to the girl in the next room. She knew Dora was there, just feet away from them on the other side of the wall, her life slowly ticking down against the counter. Tick, tick, tick. And as she slowly died, Miriam was eating dinner and drinking wine. An image of the girl came to her, of her walking through a summer garden. Down between the plants she glided, smaller and smaller, evanescent.
‘There’s no way of controlling it,’ said Joseph. He dropped his spoon into his dessert bowl and finished off another glass of wine. ‘There never was. If they don’t know where it came from then they can’t do anything about it. There are too many gates open now – airports, travel, trade routes. And what if birds are bringing it – how do you stop them? Maybe it’s in the cats. Or the dogs. And now that the riots have started . . . it won’t take long before everything falls apart.’
His voice was mildly slurred but not to the extent that the conviction in what he was saying was lost.
‘I’m sure the army will get it under control,’ said Father Moore. ‘This “falling apart” that you talk about,’ and he looked directly at Joseph, ‘it can’t happen in a society like ours.’
Miriam watched Joseph’s face change. He wasn’t accustomed to the priest’s idiosyncrasies. Joseph stared at Father Moore as he dabbed his napkin delicately at the edges of his mouth.
‘Do you want some more wine, Father?’ Miriam said quickly.
She poured a glass. She had to close her left eye slightly to make sure it went in. She hadn’t realized how drunk she was.
‘I’ll just go and check on the kids,’ she said.
‘You stay there.’ Her mother stood up. ‘I’ll go. You relax.’
Miriam smiled, looked at the bottle of wine and agreed. She helped herself. As her mother passed her chair, Miriam leaned back.
‘Don’t forget to check on Dora.’
Her mother brushed Miriam’s shoulder. Joseph’s attention settled and he came back to his thoughts.
‘The army can’t control the riots. They’re understaffed as it is. It said in the papers their troops are already down by twenty per cent. And it’s going to get worse. There’s no food, no medicine, and people are panicking. When people get desperate, well, that’s when you’ll really see what our “society” is.’
‘And what is that?’ said Father Moore.
‘A thin veil we pull over ourselves to try and pretend we’re something other than animals.’
His father leaned across the table and patted Joseph on the arm as he turned towards Father Moore.
‘You’ll have to forgive my son’s verbosity. He’s had a little too much to drink.’
Joseph shook his head. ‘No, no. I’m fine. You’ll see, when people really have their backs against the wall, when they’re hungry and thirsty and there’s nowhere else to turn, they’ll turn on each other.’
Miriam smiled to herself.
Joseph looked at her through bleary eyes. ‘You don’t think so?’
‘You know I don’t. At some point people will rally round and things will get better, even if this Sadness, or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t go away.’
‘You’re naive, that’s all. Misinformed. There’re precedents for it. We just can’t imagine it because we’ve spent our lives wrapped up in our safe little cocoon. Look at all the great civilizations, right? The Mayans, the Romans, the Greeks. What happened to them? One thing they all have in common is that they never saw it coming. They thought their position was unassailable, that they could never go back to what they were in the olden days, but they always did. It’s what happens. The world has a way of bringing things back. It doesn’t matter how high you build, at the end of the day we’re always going to be animals and we’ll always have to obey the same rules of nature.’
‘Everybody helped each other after the war,’ said Henry’s father. ‘Things were tough back then.’
‘That was different.’
His father smiled, humouring his son.
‘It was.’ Joseph took a large mouthful of wine. The low lighting cast black shadows across his face. ‘Everybody had come out of a shared experience after the war and everybody knew who the bad guy was. Not this time though. People have already started hoarding food, including us. Look what happened to you,’ he looked at Miriam, ‘at the hospital, with the medicine. Those who don’t manage to get any food will soon start taking it from people. Mark my words.’
‘You’re acting like it’s the end of the world,’ Father Moore said. A faint smirk crossed his face. Miriam knew that he was close to annoying Joseph. ‘This thing won’t last for ever. In a week’s
time it might be gone.’
‘True. But if not, people won’t help each other; that’s all I’m saying. Look, we’ve become too separated. We’ll do anything we can to avoid eye contact with a stranger, we buy all our things on the internet, we spend our weekends by ourselves or in small groups, shopping or finding quiet corners in restaurants. We’ve gone too far. Community is dead. We’ve spent so long getting away from other people that to be forced back together for the cause of some Greater Good won’t work. We’ve done it to ourselves. The two things: our will to survive, and the death of community, will lead to very bad places.’
‘I think you have too little faith in people, Joseph,’ said Father Moore.
Joseph ran the palm of his hand along the stubble of his jaw line.
‘You’re bound to think that, though, aren’t you? I mean, it’s your job to think like that.’
‘But I see kindness all around me. I don’t have to search for it – it shows itself clearly. Look at this.’
He played his arm over the empty dishes in front of him.
‘Yes, but Miri and her mum aren’t exactly typical people, are they? I wish they were, I really do, but they’re not.’
Miriam looked at Joseph. What he said made her chest lighten. She blinked to focus.
‘You know your problem?’ said Father Moore in a clear tone of reproach. ‘It’s not a great deduction, I know, but the truth is the truth, and you are too cynical.’ The priest leaned back in his chair. ‘You’ve spent too long thinking the world is a terrible place and it’s only because you didn’t get what you wanted from life. I’ve seen it a thousand times before. You’re twisted up inside and it’s skewed your perceptions.’
Joseph stared at the priest calmly. His face was ruddy and his eyes were two dark craters. Miriam sensed the delicate shift in atmosphere as Joseph placed his wine glass on the table with controlled calmness.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘If the infection does just disappear and this is the extent of it, I concede that things will recover to what they were. What I’m talking about is what will happen if the disease carries on unchecked. And that’s how it looks. It’s not going to go away by some miracle.’
‘Well, some might say that that is how it arrived,’ said the priest, quickly.
Joseph went to say something but stopped. An unspoken message passed between them for a moment, like a flash, then it died back down again.
‘You don’t think it’s going to disappear?’ said Miriam.
‘I think that assuming it’s going to get worse before it gets better is prudent,’ said Joseph. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I don’t know.’
Joseph took another swig of wine. ‘You don’t have to worry about it. I’ll look after everything,’ he said sarcastically. There was a down-swell of silence. ‘Because I understand the full extent of what can happen, with people, so we won’t get taken by surprise,’ he said quietly.
Miriam’s mother came back into the room.
‘They’re fine. They’re asleep,’ she said of the children, as she crossed the kitchen floor.
The soles of her shoes peeled away from the linoleum with faint sucking sounds. The room was hot and the wine was making Miriam feel drowsy.
‘What about Dora?’ she said.
‘She’s fine.’
Father Moore leaned forwards.
‘Do you really have such little faith in people, Joseph? I mean, really?’
‘Yes,’ he said without hesitation, and with no further addition.
‘You think we can become like animals? I don’t mean through this illness, I mean hypothetically. Can a society as advanced as ours really fall that far back? That’s what you’re saying, but surely you can’t mean it. You mentioned the Romans and the Mayans, but even you have to admit that our situation is simply not the same. We have better technology, have made medical advances, have more provisions . . .’
‘People think our society is unbreakable but it isn’t. Everything is being held together by the finest of strands but we refuse to believe it. We have this desperate will to fight against what we are but it’s the animal part of us that makes everything so precarious, right? Things can get out of control very quickly if you’re hungry. Civilization, even one as far advanced as our own, is like those weeds that grow on the surface of concrete. They look as if they’ve overrun whatever it is they’re growing on, but pull at them gently and they come away easily, roots and all, as if they’d never been there.’
‘Well I, for one, am not convinced. I like to think we’re a little more civilized than that; that we are more than just animals.’
Joseph forced a smile. ‘It’s easy to say that. We’re still rational at the moment. We don’t know what it’s like for our society to be anything other than it is. We have no reference point.’
‘You seem to find this disaster all very exciting.’ The atmosphere in the room deepened. ‘You just want to see what happens because you think it might validate what you’ve always thought. That’s all.’
Joseph regarded Father Moore with the detached intellectual gaze that Miriam had felt on her so many times in the past.
‘So,’ he said formally, ‘has the Church been given any indication as to what the phenomenon might be?’
‘Indication?’ said the priest, guardedly. He squinted at Joseph through alcohol-hazed eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I thought perhaps the government might have spoken to the Church about it.’
Father Moore laughed. ‘The government doesn’t speak to the Church about such things any longer. And even if they did,’ he smiled to Miriam, ‘they wouldn’t come to me.’
‘So what do you think it is?’
‘I have no idea,’ Father Moore snorted.
‘Do you not have an opinion? I thought you said it was a miracle.’
Joseph’s voice was becoming overly aggressive. The priest stopped smiling. His eyes flicked across uncertainly to Miriam.
‘Well, whatever it is, it’s beating the scientists.’
‘You don’t think the scientists will solve this?’
‘What do you want me to say, Joseph?’
‘I thought the Church would have an answer, that’s all.’ He leaned back in his seat and swirled the wine in his glass.
Father Moore made a decision. ‘Would it be wrong if we did have an answer?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you are not a man of faith then you must be a man of science. Or are you neither?’
Miriam watched Father Moore who, even though not as drunk as Joseph, was still heavily inebriated. The atmosphere in the room was distressed.
‘So why would you be so against a non-scientific explanation, even if it’s the most likely?’ he said.
‘And what explanation would that be?’ coaxed Joseph.
‘What do you want me to say to you, Joseph?’
‘What you believe.’
‘So that you can knock me down? Why should I give you the ammunition?’
‘Because you believe it to be true.’
Father Moore sat up in his chair in a quick, sudden motion. ‘Why should I not believe this thing to be divine?’
Miriam’s attention spiked.
‘Why should I turn my back on my beliefs? Especially now. I’ve given my life to my faith, Joseph. Do you think my dedication was insincere?’
‘I think it was misguided.’
‘And why are you so sure the illness can find its roots in science? Has science provided all the answers in the past? Hmm?’
Joseph lifted his hands in innocence. ‘I was just asking what you thought it might be.’
Father Moore raised his voice for the first time. ‘Forgive me for speaking frankly, but no you didn’t. You want me to tell you that this is Judgement Day. Isn’t that right?’
‘Well isn’t that what you think?’
‘Son,’ said his father. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing.’
Joseph
tapped his middle finger on the table nervously.
‘You are so eager to believe in science that you forgot your basic principles,’ said the priest. ‘Evidence. How old is recorded science? A few hundred years? Maybe less. You think that what has been observed in the past few hundred years covers the entire cornucopia of the natural world? You can dig in the soil and look at the rocks and see back through time but it doesn’t answer any questions about humanity. How can a layer of silt buried in the ocean bed tell us about what happened to our ancestors? Just because you’ve never known an illness like this, that cannot be explained, you assume it has never happened before. The earth is an ancient place, Joseph. Who knows what ill winds have blown across its surface in its past?’
‘Hang on a second – so you think this is something that has happened before, a long time ago, is that what you’re saying? Or are you saying it’s something divine?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe both.’ He stopped, thought about what he was about to say and continued confidently. ‘But there are stories in the Bible that have no basis in science. How can you say for sure that they never happened?’
Joseph laughed. ‘You think Moses parted the Red Sea?’
Father Moore took a moment to think about his answer. ‘I do believe it, yes.’
Silence filled the room.
‘Do you want to mock me now?’
‘I don’t want to mock you.’ He regarded Father Moore coldly. ‘But I do think you’re wrong for believing it.’
‘And I think you’re wrong for not believing it.’
Joseph looked shocked. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Am I not allowed to say that to you? But you are allowed to say it to me? I do believe you should have faith, and not only because I believe it, but because I want you to be saved. I won’t do anything to change your mind, I would never dream of it, but I do believe in the redemptive power of faith. I’m a priest,’ he said with a laugh. ‘What do you expect me to say? There is something happening to the world, the likes of which our living memory has never known. Like the rivers of blood, or the Great Flood. Yes, I believe it is a biblical disaster. I do not believe it can be explained. I do not think it will be explained. These things happened during the ancient times and now they are happening again. If you have any evidence to the contrary I should dearly like to hear it.’
