by Meg Mundell
All this required careful answers, but it was firmer territory. And the recent bad news had put things on a more equal footing: You lost one too. Someone died on your watch.
It was a relief when they dropped the medical stuff and brought up Cleary’s name.
‘I understand you’ve been granted interim custody of the boy?’ asked the judge.
‘I requested it. He’s a good kid. I nursed his mother. He’s been alone since she got sick.’
The judge shot her a quick smile, a switch flicked on and off. ‘And it seems you’ve taken good care of him. The wellbeing team commends your efforts.’
Harper spoke up. ‘Although we are aware of a recent incident where the boy engaged in some risky behaviour. Sustained injuries. Almost drowned, in fact. You were sleeping at the time, is that correct?’
Billie swallowed a surge of guilt. ‘No. Your people had me working, checking over the medical records. Cleary snuck out. He’s desperate to see his ma.’ No bones broken, but the bruise went deep. His limp a constant reminder of her negligence. He refused to discuss the incident, said he couldn’t recall how or why he’d ended up in the water.
That’s when they sprang the clip on her. A screen lit up: they had obtained some footage, which they’d like to share with her. An overcast sky, a glimpse of mast. People scattered across the deck.
Zooming in: two figures sitting cross-legged, in plain view. Billie stage right, Cleary facing her, their hands in motion, cutting shapes and scooting through the air. Signing to each other, taking turns. Saying nothing. A charade for all to see.
‘You speak sign language?’ asked Harper.
Her voice was small in the stillness of the room. ‘A little. I’m not fluent.’
‘And this footage: is this Irish Sign Language the two of you are speaking here?’
She could have said no, claimed this mime show as their own private language, home signs they had invented, gestures Cleary had taught her. But that would contradict what she’d told other officials: that she and the child shared a formal vocabulary, a fluency that bound them as a unit. A harmless lie, a bid to place herself between them and the boy, protect him.
Blindsided again, she stuck with the falsehood: yes, it was Irish Sign Language. At once the vidscreen went black.
The judge looked past Billie, beckoned to someone. In the doorway stood Cleary, an official at his side. The boy’s eyes darted around the room, returning to Billie after each pass, his one familiar reference point. She attempted a jolly wave, but it didn’t feel convincing.
She’d known Cleary would be questioned; been told that as his interim guardian, she’d be present to provide ‘assistance and support’, whatever that meant. But now his keeper was steering him to a separate table, away from Billie. As the boy lurched towards his seat, clumsy on his crutches, she fought the urge to rush over and reclaim him.
‘Ms Galloway?’ Harper now. ‘We’ve located a fluent ISL speaker. She’s reviewed this footage, and raised doubts about your claims to signing expertise. She will act as Cleary’s interpreter at this hearing.’
Harper and the judge turned to Cleary, their expressions suffused with a new warmth.
Now the judge spoke with expert kindness. ‘Hello, Cleary. I’m Caroline, and this is Mike. You can take your mask off. We’d like to ask you some questions about what happened on the ship. Would that be okay?’
The official beside Cleary touched his shoulder, turned him towards her and began to sign, her gloved hands cutting the air quick and sure, deft as birds. The boy frowned.
Cleary looked Billie’s way. She gave the smallest nod, enough to reassure him. To make it seem that they remained a team; that they had any choice in all of this.
TOM
It began as a joke, my prison-style countdown, the struck-out days in blocks of five taped to the wall. But three weeks in, the joke had soured. Boredom buzzed, aimless as a blowfly.
We now had a lounge area: wipe-down sofas (white, of course), exercise machines, a vidstream full of flicks. No news channels, no outside contact. But it beat staring at the walls.
An exercise physiologist had been assigned to us, an earnest young woman who specialised in post-viral rehabilitation and bright lycra. Her presence a bid to reverse the damage done by forced idleness, to recondition our wasted bodies.
‘What are we getting fit for?’ I asked, gyrating like a breathless hamster in the grips of the machine. ‘A Houdini job? A mass escape?’ Fishing for information, but she wouldn’t take the bait.
‘Just life,’ she answered sweetly. ‘Let’s get your heart rate up a bit.’
‘They’re bulking us up,’ called Max from the sofa. ‘They’re gonna eat us!’
Mia, watching pop clips, looked up alarmed.
‘I’m joking, pet,’ Max reassured her. ‘We’re safe in here, nobody’s going to hurt us.’
The image was hard to shake: animals on a treadmill, livestock being put through its paces. But my body no longer felt like a casualty of war. And I’d noticed a curious side-effect. Something was missing: that constant hum of worry, the grey dog that had shadowed me so long.
In its place was a steady, galvanising anger. Against those who’d cut us off from our families, kept us in the dark, deprived of information. Those power-tripping cops, playing head-games. Anger at whoever let this happen – promised us zero risk, a clean journey; then let people die, left children bereaved. Treated us like units of exchange, damaged goods. Anger, too, at all the unknowns we still faced: the buried information, the rumours.
Anger is a dangerous emotion, so the experts say: too often misdirected, too easily turned inward. But surely there are times when it’s the only just and right response.
Cate kept demanding to see her son, alternately haranguing and pleading with the doctors, not taking no for an answer. But that’s the only answer they would give her.
Not everyone was coping with confinement. One man let loose at the nurses: It’s like a fooking morgue in here! Take those screens down for godsake, open a window. I can’t breathe! I heard the sounds of a brief scuffle, the pop and splash of breaking glass, then silence: a quick chemical cosh administered, no doubt.
The nosy official came back. She made no secret of digging for info this time, but still branded it as a ‘chat’. A chat, she breezily noted, that would inform the official inquiry into ‘the incident’. A woefully tame euphemism for all that death and suffering.
Her questions took a peculiar slant. She asked about odd moments from the journey, things I might have witnessed: a crate transferred mid-ocean from a passing ship. That decomposed body again – the nightmare thing we saw floating in a rubbish island near the equator. This time I was polite and helpful. Anything to keep those grim coppers at bay.
At last a ‘personal’ message was sent to my family back home, a three-minute vid. Hi Mum, hi Dad, hi Rosa! Please don’t worry: see, I’m almost upright! Propped up in bed, hair combed for the camera, I did my best to assure them I was okay: I’m still alive, I said, unless the boredom kills me. That crack got cut: content was heavily vetted. Five takes before we had a clip the gov-reps deemed acceptable, by which stage I was racking my brains for variations on bland platitudes: The nurses are great. We’re being looked after very well. I love you all very much. Hostage-speak.
Info lockdown was still in force, but talk was impossible to quarantine. Ally said we’d sparked a full-blown panic in our host country, brought the Fear across the seas with us. The population was up in arms. There’d be no hiding now, no chance to fly beneath the radar, keep the BIM program low-profile. The cover had blown off; the story was streaming wild.
We were a threat, the enemy. They wanted to send us home.
~
This afternoon, lost in thought, I opened the bathroom door – and, bang, there he was.
My handsome Scotsman, washing his
hands in the sink.
So close to my old flame, I couldn’t keep pretending. ‘Stewart,’ I said, closing the door behind me. ‘How are you?’
He froze, then went back to washing his hands. Rubbing his palms together like an OCD case, water hissing in the sink.
The words spilt out before my brain, or pride, could intervene. ‘Please, look at me.’
I took a step forward. The room was narrow, no space to manoeuvre.
He shut off the tap and stood there, wet hands clenched at his sides. We were so close I could hear him breathing. The ceiling light fizzed and flickered.
‘How are you?’ I asked again. It came out slightly aggressive, not what I’d intended.
His pupils were huge, black and empty. An unnerving sight, like staring into a well. Get me a priest! Up close, alone with him at last, it struck me: he was afraid.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘You’ve been ignoring me.’ I heard the whine in my voice, that jilted intonation, like a sulky teenager. Was unable to check it. ‘All this time, not a single word. Why?’
He stared at my hand, which I now realised was splayed flat against the opposite wall, my arm blocking his exit. ‘Get out of my way,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t speak to you.’ Fists clenched, ready for trouble.
‘I just want to know if you’re alright,’ I said, dropping my arm, all trace of bravado gone. He brushed past and left me standing there, the taste of shame in my mouth.
~
At last some possible bright news arrived: a hint we might soon be declared fit for release. Ally promised nothing specific – she’d warned me our conversations might be monitored.
‘You’ll want to get out of those baggy-arsed pyjamas soon,’ she said, with a meaningful look.
‘Why? You find them too alluring?’ One of our running jokes: she knew which team I batted for.
‘You’ll give the public a heart attack walking around like that,’ she said, waggling her eyebrows, a pantomime conspirator. Hardly subtle, but I was slow to catch on.
‘The public’s safe from the sight of my baggy arse. Nobody’s mentioned a release date.’
‘Well, I’m guessing your baggy arse is about due for some fresh air.’ She gave a smirk, a wink.
Now I’d caught her drift, and played along. ‘But I’m contaminated. Riddled with bugs, a walking epidemic.’
‘You seem fine to me,’ she said. ‘Same for this whole ward, bunch of bloody malingerers. You’re all the picture of health. Be glad to see the back of you.’
I hoped she was right. If I didn’t see the sky soon, I feared I might implode.
12
CLEARY
He was in the kitchenette, inching the peel off an orange in one long unbroken spiral, when Billie appeared in the doorway. It struck him at once: her face was bare, her mask gone. She knelt before him, holding up a piece of paper: the words he had been waiting for.
Your ma. She’s back. Quarantine’s over – the patients are out.
Cleary rose too fast, pain shooting through his knee, let Billie half carry him into the bunk room where he fumbled with his laces – Hurry! Hurry! – as she tied his other shoe. She shouldered his bag, hauled him to his feet and led him out into the sunlight. Lurching along behind her – too slow, his crutches not cooperating – he saw more bare faces: the spooks and bananas were gone, replaced by strangers in tidy grey uniforms. Passengers and crew had also re-appeared, their mouths now visible again.
He followed Billie around corners, down a tricky set of stairs. Past a red sticking plaster dangling from a wall, a sign they were nearing a crew-only area; sick with expectation, he gave it no more than a glance. Along an unfamiliar passageway, past a sign: Officers’ Quarters.
At last they stopped at a pale blue door, half ajar, marked with the number eight. Sunlight was visible in the room beyond, and an familiar pair of shoes lay discarded on the floor. Billie knocked then swung the door wide.
His mother lay beneath an open porthole, illuminated like a person in a painting. Cleary flung himself upon her, their faces meeting in a bright band of sunlight; he burrowed into her, inhaling her scent. The smell of safety, of home, faint but still discernible beneath the hospital vapours. Through her nightdress he could feel the hard outlines of her ribs, like the frets of a kitchen chair. But her grip was strong, the hug tight.
You smell like oranges, she signed, grinning down at him. I might just eat you up.
He lay in her lap, gazing up at her. Flooded with light her skin was almost transparent, her features sharper, the shape of her skull now visible. Her hair had been chopped short, giving her head a girlish cast, but there were new lines around her eyes, purple smudges below the sockets. She bent to kiss his face, and Cleary let his head rest in her arms, cradled like some precious object; content to stay like this forever, to never leave this sunlit room.
After a while he felt her exploring the tiny bump on his upper arm, the spot where the needle had gone in. Cleary mimed an injection, wincing. His ma nodded. She reached for his hand, ran his fingertips over her own arm: a matching bump.
Then, with great care, she unrolled the bandage to expose his injured knee, laid her cool hand on the damage: the joint still puffy, the bruise a vivid mauve stain.
What happened?
Cleary mimed a clumsy stick-man tripping over nothing, colliding with the ship’s rail, tumbling overboard; a puppet-show she made him repeat several times, watching him steadily, before finally bandaging the knee back up.
It hurts?
A bit, he admitted. His crutches lay forgotten on the floor. Without them he was reduced to a kind of artless hop-and-stagger, a gait both inefficient and painful. The kind of thing a predator could spot a mile off.
He clasped her wrist, his thumb and forefinger almost meeting around the bone: Skinny Minnie. A joke to cover his shock at the damage, how cruelly the bug had reduced her: all bones now, the padding gone. The gauntness did not suit her, made her look like someone else.
His mother pulled free of his grasp and tickled him, the laughter spilling out of him unbidden. Not caring, this time, who might overhear these strange noises he was making.
They lay together until darkness fell. The room had two narrow beds, and a faintly male smell: aftershave, sweat, musty socks. When the deck lights flickered on outside they knelt at the porthole and took turns with Cleary’s binoculars, scanning the shoreline, pointing out dim landmarks and lighted windows, trying to fix the moon in their sights. Imagining the day they’d finally step ashore, wriggle their toes in the sand, wander that green expanse.
Dinner came on a trolley, and they ate in bed. Then they locked the door, nestled close and drifted off together into sleep.
~
They found the bird the next day, nailed to their cabin door. Its fragile body impaled on a long silver spike, dark feathers splayed in a parody of flight, a line of blood trailing towards the floor. His ma drew back, tried to block Cleary’s view, as if the thing was dangerous. But it was too late.
Taking in those crumpled wings, that tiny body stilled forever, he read the threat for what it was. Registered his own response, as if from far away – terror, pity and disgust, all churned up together. He had no doubt who’d done this.
An officer was notified, a sailor dispatched. The man pried the corpse off the nail and disposed of it, without ceremony or comment, as if this was an everyday event. The nail remained; so did the blood, still wet but thickening. Cleary scrubbed at it with a wad of tissue but the shadow of the stain persisted. He washed his hands then held them to his nose, sniffed: that faint scent, sweetly metallic.
His ma was plainly troubled, but had no inkling of the danger they were in. He must not leave her alone. Must make sure the cabin door was locked securely from the inside. Stay vigilant, alert for the worst. And now there was no question: he nee
ded a weapon, a sharp knife or a hammer, something easy to conceal.
It was a land bird – the kind of dark-feathered creature that nested in treetops, not rocky cliffs or sand dunes. A bird that had no business being on a ship. Where had it come from? How had its life ended? Not with a nail through the heart, surely. An accident, perhaps – a burst of flight, a closed porthole, a broken neck. Something quick and final. The body a chance discovery, put to sinister use.
Extracting a promise that his ma would not leave him alone in the women’s bathroom, not for a moment, he locked himself in a wash cube, cranked the water up so hot his chest and shoulders flushed crimson, and lathered himself from head to foot, trying to scrub away the fearful stink of death.
BILLIE
Without the respirator Doctor Hart was younger than she’d sounded, while Sullivan was grizzled, worn around the edges. Anonymous officials on both ships had been replaced by individual people in neat grey uniforms, their features exposed and strangely vulnerable. Sullivan was gruff as ever but minus the hazmat Billie thought she detected a sheepish note. He’d offered them coffee and dialled down the officious tone. You lost one too, she thought. Not so easy, was it?
‘A huge relief,’ he was saying. ‘We weren’t sure we’d be able to contain it, let alone deactivate the thing.’
‘We want to thank you all for the way you’ve handled this whole situation,’ said Hart.
Billie gave her a puzzled look. ‘Handled …?’ Realised this was code for being cooperative.
