by Rhys Thomas
His words resonated around the table. Nobody said anything for a moment. Miriam wondered if everybody else was thinking the same as her. The hairs on her arms were standing on end.
It was Miriam’s mother who finally cut the silence.
‘What do you think it could be? The illness itself. What do you think it is doing to people?’
Father Moore put his hands on the edges of his dessert bowl and twisted it around slightly. ‘I have no idea.’
‘It’s like people’s hope has been blown out.’
They all turned towards Henry’s father.
‘Isn’t that what it seems like?’
Miriam sniffed. Something changed on the surface of her skin. Thoughts and images ran through her head when he said that, like images on a strip of film spliced together. One image recurred: Henry in the rear-view mirror on the road to Cornwall. It flickered between scenes of the man on the bench wearing a T-shirt, the woman sitting on the motorway, those pallid faces in the hospital room, Dorothy sitting on the garden wall. The room was spinning.
All of a sudden she felt everyone’s eyes on her.
‘You OK, Miri?’ said Joseph, across the table.
Miriam brought her wine glass to her lips. Her mouth was dry and the wine tasted good.
‘I keep thinking of a river,’ she whispered. She could hear how slurred her words sounded. ‘I heard a man a few days ago saying that ancient rivers run through us, and it just stuck with me.’ Her face felt warm but she wanted to say this. ‘It runs through all of us and we dangle our feet in it.’ She laughed. ‘It’s like a common bond between us. Like empathy.’ She sensed the awkwardness in the people around the table and blushed. She looked at Henry’s father. ‘Like hope.’
‘Of course, there’s one other thing it might be,’ Father Moore chirped, ignoring her.
Miriam cringed with embarrassment at what she had just said.
‘And I’m sure I’m not the only person to have thought this, even if nobody says it,’ Father Moore went on.
Joseph swung his head drunkenly towards the priest. ‘And what’s that?’
The priest looked at each of the people around the table, and when he looked at Miriam he smiled, but the smile was drunken and crooked.
‘You said it before, Joseph. A retribution.’ His lips curled up into an accidental snarl. The gap between his nose and his mouth fell into shadow.
Joseph lowered his shoulders, bringing his head down towards the table so that he was looking upwards into Father Moore’s eyes.
‘You,’ he started, ‘you’re saying that my brother was being punished?’
The gravity of the sentence folded out like a giant bird unfurling its wings.
The priest stumbled. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
Joseph pointed aggressively. ‘This illness has nothing to do with God, or your “Christian morals”. You understand?’
But Father Moore was not prepared to concede. ‘No.’
Joseph was losing control. His voice became tense and his body seized. There was something savage in the way he leaned forward, his forearm laid at right angles to his chest, his head and neck stretching over. His mind’s machinations were clear on his face. Miriam hadn’t seen until now how deeply Henry’s death had affected him.
‘Joseph,’ said the priest, ‘that’s not what I meant.’
‘That’s what it sounded like to me,’ Joseph slurred.
‘That’s enough, son.’ His father sat up. ‘You’ve had too much to drink.’
Joseph knocked back his glass. ‘I’m just getting started,’ he sneered.
Miriam’s head swirled. ‘I’d better go check on Dora,’ she said, her voice thin and liquid.
‘I’ve just checked on her,’ she heard her mother’s voice say.
Miriam couldn’t look at them. ‘Still.’
She stood and stumbled into the hallway. She didn’t want to be a part of the cosy little dinner party any more. She didn’t want to hear any more opinions.
She went into the dark living room and knelt at Dora’s feet as she always did, as if Dora was a shrine to Henry and if she knelt before it her grief would fade away. The girl’s eyes were open and staring. Her chest still rising was the only sign she was alive. Miriam looked up into her eyes. They were darker still in the amber glow of the night.
The words of Henry’s father had affected her. She desperately didn’t want to think of Henry living his last few days without the buoyancy of hope. She didn’t want Dora to be missing it.
‘How do you feel?’
Dora stared into Miriam, past her skin and flesh and into her centre. She could hear the girl’s breathing.
‘Are you holding on in there? Please try and hold on. I don’t know if you can, but please try.’
Dora shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t. It won’t be long now.’
‘You have to stay though. I promised I would take you with me.’ The room spun with disturbed equilibrium and her body thrummed with the fusion of alcohol and emotion. ‘We’ll be going soon.’
Screaming. Somewhere in the house. Miriam threw off her covers and ran to the door, through the darkness. She heaved it open and went into her children’s room. Both were asleep. Downstairs. It was coming from downstairs. She rushed across the landing and felt her way along the banister. A dry panic crept up her body.
Flicking the light switch on in the living room, she closed her eyes from the brightness. The screaming hurt the high end of her audio. It pierced and frayed.
‘Dora,’ she said.
The girl was sitting on the back rest of the armchair. She had brought her knees up under her chin. Her face was turned to the side and her mouth was agape in scream.
‘Dora, what’s wrong?’ she demanded.
The girl did not stop. She only paused to take air, which she gulped down furiously, her chest slumping down quickly and then rising slowly.
Miriam grabbed her wrists. They were damp with sweat.
‘What is it?’ she pleaded. ‘What’s happened?’
Still the girl screamed. Miriam pulled her arms apart and tried to hug her.
‘Dora, you’re scaring me,’ she said.
The girl’s pale face had turned red in exertion. The bones in her neck stuck out.
‘They’re dead,’ she screamed.
‘Who’s dead?’
And then Dora started to cry. The screams died off and her body relaxed. She slunk down into the seat of the armchair and placed a fist to her lips.
‘Oh God,’ she cried. ‘It came out of the night. From below them. And it lashed through them all. Oh God, oh no.’
‘Dora, did you have another dream?’
The girl put her hands over her face and started to rub up and down against her cheeks.
‘Dora, what’s going on?’
She felt something behind her. A presence.
‘What’s happening? Why is she screaming?’ said Joseph.
‘She won’t tell me.’
‘She’s going to wake up the whole street.’
Miriam ignored him. ‘Dora, tell me what you dreamt.’
There was a secret inside this girl. Miriam knew it. She was still not dead and she said she had fallen ill four days ago and there had to be a reason. She was the pure thing that could not be taken by the monster. There was always something incorruptible somewhere. Dora held the light that would lead them all to safety.
The room started to rumble. Instinctively she looked at the ceiling, upwards.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
Joseph went across to the window.
‘It’s a plane,’ he said, holding the curtain in a bunch. ‘It’s low. Jesus.’ He turned away. The roar crashed into the room, loud and painful. The windows shook as it passed over. ‘What the hell are they doing?’
The roar faded and soon the dawn’s silence had recovered the room. Dora sobbed heavily into her hands.
‘Dora,’ said Miriam, reaching up to the girl
. As her hands touched her skin the girl jerked backwards.
‘Leave her alone,’ said Joseph.
Miriam felt her skin pimple. ‘Jesus, Joseph.’ She turned to face him. ‘You just can’t help yourself, can you? This girl has seen her whole family die and you still can’t feel anything for her?’
‘Everybody’s seen their family die. That’s what you seem unable to understand. Including you and me.’ He paused. ‘All you seem to care about is this girl you don’t even know.’
‘She’s ill.’
‘But you’ve got a family to care for.’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘I just don’t see why—’
‘Because she reminds me of Henry,’ she screamed. Joseph froze. ‘Because I want to look after her. Because,’ she paused for breath, ‘because when it came for Henry I didn’t know what was happening.’ She was almost crying now. ‘I didn’t get to live it,’ she said, as a whisper. ‘I didn’t have the three days.’
Joseph’s expression changed. His shoulders rounded from square. He understood. A common bond so bright and important cut through the murk. It was all that mattered. Nothing else carried the weight of shared loss which, in turn, grew in the relationship like a buttress. It entwined them and bound them together.
‘It came,’ said Dora, slowly. Miriam turned back to her quickly. ‘It came and it took the colours from everyone, from all of them, from every one.’
The old man woke at seven thirty. He had slept lightly and blinked in and out of sleep, but now it was time to leave his bed for another day in the new, hard world. He had taken a glass of water to bed and now brought it to his dry lips.
Before changing he went into his grandchildren’s room and shook their little bodies awake. Together they exchanged their secret codes as they did each morning. He had never been overtly religious, but still, as he left the bedroom with the promise that they would get up, he put his hands together secretly and said thank you under his breath.
He showered and shaved. The razorblade made a crisp scratching sound against his hardened skin. The water was not warm enough really but he didn’t want to waste the hot water in a house that did not belong to him. He returned to his bedroom and put on the same clothes he had worn the day before. Packing had never been his strong point.
He went downstairs and Miriam’s mother made him a bowl of porridge. They switched on the small television set and watched the news. Overnight something had happened in the capital. He watched in silence, they all did, as they learned that the city had woken to find over two-thirds of its people stricken with the illness. The wave of it had washed up in a north-westerly sweep, cutting a swathe like a sword wound. They saw the map of London, the red shadow across it in a diagonal line. Those in that red area were dead, or would be within three days. Those were the rules now.
His son moved about quickly, rushing here and there, trying to use the telephone to no avail. The old man had always held out hope that Joseph would mellow as he got older, find a calm, but it had never come for him. The dog sat at his feet. He tore a piece from his granddaughter’s toast and surreptitiously dropped it on to the floor.
His son needed to collect his van, he said. It was parked in the garage, beneath his apartment block, ready to go. The old man looked at the television screen. The red map of London appeared again. Joseph would have been dead, like Henry, were it not for the fact that he had come to this place to help.
Soon they would be leaving. They had to get to Cornwall. The time for delaying was spent. Joseph needed to get across town to the van first, to the food supplies that he had packed into it. They couldn’t risk taking the kids there now. The old man looked again at the map of London that the television set showed over and over again. Little yellow banners with black capital letters ran along the bottom of the screen, each of them delivering more bad news about some unforeseen disaster in some far-off country. But it was the map of London he was looking at, and the red mark splashed across it in the shape of a fox’s tail. Joseph’s house was in the centre of it.
‘I’m not going with you,’ she said, trying to keep her voice to a level the kids in the living room couldn’t hear. They were standing in the gloomy light of the hallway.
‘We have to get that van,’ he said shortly. ‘It has everything in it.’
‘Jesus, Joseph, why didn’t you bring it when we came here?’
‘I thought we’d be able to pick it up on the way, didn’t I?’ he said. He scrunched his eyes closed and put the ball of his hand to his brow.
‘Well, I can’t go with you.’
‘You have to.’
‘I don’t have to.’ Her voice was gaining volume and she consciously made an effort to change pitch down again. ‘I promised my kids I wouldn’t leave them again.’
‘Miri, listen to me.’ He gripped the tops of her arms with his hands. ‘We have to get that van. If we don’t, we won’t have anything to live off, OK? The shops are empty. There’s no more food.’
She turned her head away from him.
‘You have to do this, Miri. You’re the only one who knows the way back if we get separated. We’ll be in and out, quick as a flash. There won’t be any trouble. All those people who are ill aren’t dangerous. They were only infected a few hours ago. It takes at least a day before people turn violent, and that’s if they turn at all. If we go now we’ll be safe. If we wait any longer, we won’t. We’ll take your car, I’ll get the van, and you can follow me back and we’ll be away. We can get out of London and we’ll be safe. We’ll have food and we can sit this thing out, OK? We just need one final push.’
Everything had changed outside. The level of control that had been in place, holding the seams of normality together, was gone. They could feel it in the air. Along the street several families were loading their cars in preparation for a coming exodus. Some were covering the windows of their houses with large wooden boards. London was evacuating itself.
Miriam, Joseph and his father climbed into Miriam’s car, waved casually goodbye to the kids as if there was nothing to be worried about and pulled out into the street. They headed into the city but it didn’t take long for the traffic to thicken.
It took them an hour to cover a mile. There was a steady increase in the number of cars abandoned at the side of the road. Army wagons had been parked up in lay-bys and soldiers watched the traffic, pretending they had some way of controlling the congestion.
Time passed slowly. Joseph refused to turn off the radio, insisting that the more they knew, the better. Violence had broken out again, they were told, although the reports were unclear as to whether it was being perpetrated by the victims of the illness or by rioters.
Infected people lined the pavements. Here it was now, made real, visible through her own eyes. They passed hundreds of them. They sat on the pavements, or against the walls of the houses and offices and shops, staring for the most part homogenously and blankly ahead at the train of traffic that crawled slowly past them. Some of them were lying down. Some of them were weeping gently into their hands. Others swayed back and forth as if trying to rock themselves to sleep.
‘None of them try to kill themselves,’ she said under her breath.
‘Shit,’ said Joseph, dragging her from her thoughts. ‘Did you hear that?’
He switched off the radio. At first it was just the ticking over of the car engine, the sound of wind against the windows. But then there it was. A few stochastic blasts, sporadic, some in short bursts, others prolonged. When they went away the silence was intense.
‘Is that gunfire?’ said Henry’s father.
Nobody spoke. Sometimes there would be nothing for a few minutes and it made Miriam believe it had gone. But then it would return, louder than before. Each time it came back she would feel the dense ball in her pulsate outwards. It was right at the bottom of her torso now, sitting on top of her hip bone, fusing into it. She could no longer tell if the density was separate from her, or a mere extensi
on.
‘What are we going to do?’ she said.
‘I don’t know.’
There were buildings four or five storeys high to their left and right. It was like being funnelled along a vast concrete channel. Miriam envisaged a gang of violent infected people charging out from between the buildings.
‘It sounds like it’s getting closer,’ said Henry’s father.
Joseph kept his eyes on the road ahead.
From the back seat Miriam could see into the car behind. A man and his wife, about fifty years of age, as directionless as them, with the same quiet desperation on their faces.
‘We’ll get off at the next junction,’ said Joseph in defeat. ‘We’ll have to think of a different way.’
His voice was flat. They all knew that everybody in the surrounding lines of traffic probably had the same idea and that, in truth, they were stuck. But there seemed little else they could do but hope and talk about a plan that might see them clear.
Every action was like an action for action’s sake. Nobody really knew what they were doing or where they were going any more. There had been no government advice that morning because the area around Parliament was in the red zone.
‘Something’s happening,’ said Joseph.
His father leaned towards the windscreen for a better view. ‘Where?’
‘Up there.’
The sound of more machine-gun fire clashed against the sky. This time it was much closer. Car horns rang out.
‘Shit,’ Joseph said under his breath. He unclipped his seatbelt and opened the door. ‘Wait here. I’ll just be a second.’
‘Son, get back in the car.’
‘It’s OK, Dad,’ he said. He ran over to the side of the road and climbed on to a green Electricity Board box. He looked for a moment into the direction they were travelling, and jumped down quickly. He ran back to the car, his head ducking down. Gunfire exploded around him and clattered into the car at his side. He jumped with shock and held his hands over his head as a shield. He reached them and pulled open the front and back doors. ‘Come on. We’re going.’
