by Sarah Hall
You looked confused, hadn’t realised your condition.
I need to take these things off.
You raised your backside, and I wrangled the clothing, trying not to look at the contents. It was vile. I turned my head, reared back. The humiliation was too much; your face began to fold and you started crying.
I’m sorry, you whispered. I can do it myself.
No, don’t, it’s OK. Honey, it’s OK.
I lifted the head of the shower down and turned it on.
Can you hold this?
You fumbled and held it loosely while I took the underwear to the kitchen, bagged it in plastic and put it in the bin. My head was full of static, like electrical rain, there were thousands of tiny shocks inside. I washed my hands and returned to you. I tried to heft your weight, soaped, gently rinsed the gullies. Twice more your bowels opened, and I washed the liquid down towards the drain, started the process of washing you again. There was a brutality to the procedure; I was inept, clumsy, you didn’t mean to fight but your efforts to help felt like resistance. I ignored the indignity, tried to talk about other things, then operated in silence. It seemed to take hours, though it must only have been ten or twenty minutes. Finally, some stage passed; you seemed emptied and meeker. I dried you, wrapped you in a blanket, supported you back to bed. The bone of your hip was like a blade in my side.
This was the labour required. It can’t get worse or more dehumanising, I thought. He will do it for me too, and there will be nothing left hidden between us.
Your temperature was rising towards forty. I opened the apartment windows, brought a fan next to the bed. I was desperate to get liquid into you, any way that would not shock your body. I heated a pan of water to room temperature and spooned it into your mouth, one spoon every minute. It seemed to work. Then you gestured for the bucket. If I had had children I might have known better, not been so complacent. I would have put towels on the bed, not new sheets. I learnt the hard way, as parents do, as the nurse in triage does. I rolled you to the side of the bed, took away dirty linen, replaced it. I sponged you clean, put padding between your legs. The fluids became water-based, dregs.
When your temperature ran over forty I called the emergency number, waited for an operator.
He has novavirus. He needs help. I can’t look after him properly.
I sounded pitiful. The voice on the other end was calm, normal. There were no intensive-care beds available, no ward beds, no clinics, what I was doing was correct, the fever had to mount and run its course naturally. If a seizure occurred, I should protect the neck, teeth, tongue and soft tissue in the mouth. I didn’t understand what she was saying.
He needs to go to hospital. He’s incredibly unwell. I’m not a doctor!
Please stay calm. We advise you not to move him.
I wanted to scream at the woman.
You aren’t here, you can’t see him.
I let you down. I know I did. I was scared. Your body was on fire. Red patches formed deep in your skin – the olive tone was gone and you became nationless, just a creature, white and stemless on the bed. Insensate. There was nothing I could do but watch you burn, listen to you mumbling and shouting out. I washed the sheets and hung them in the yard, indelible stains left in the fibres. I brought up a piece of tarpaulin from the studio, placed it under you, a shameful waterproof mat. With every movement it clicked and rustled. I wanted so badly to sleep, just for an hour, but the adrenaline was effervescent in my body, the subconscious images were invasive and awful. I was incinerating your carcass, holding the blowtorch to your rotting face. Something was moving inside you, black and oily inside the cocoon.
I couldn’t leave you for more than a few minutes, to eat, wash my hands, use the bathroom. I knew I couldn’t cope. I saw myself walking through the door, out onto the street. I saw myself walking to the edge of the city, into the fields, down the straight, unerring Roman road, all the way to the lowlands and into the sheltering granite of the mountains. The vision was so clear, so right; it was the easiest of all choices. The choice my father had made. The choice of ancestors crossing the ice, abandonment of burden, leaving behind the limiting needful thing. I rationalised it insanely. Who knew you were here? Not your family. Few of my friends. You were little more than a secret that could be denied. There was flammable material in Burntcoat. Its name was fated; it had waited for this coronation. It plays again and again in my memory, that selfish desire.
A long time later I listened to a Spanish doctor speaking about his work in the critical-care units – one of the many retrospective programmes in the years that followed. He had the cast of an old sobered boxer. Speaking eloquently in English, he described the futility, the useless life support. After a while he shook his head and returned to Spanish. I remember the vivid images of the subtitles.
The bodies were smouldering around me, like embers in a pit. I was not in a hospital, not even in hell. I was sitting at the table playing cards with Death. For each of my patients, flip, flip. Mine, mine. As a doctor you cannot quit that casino. Sometimes Death felt sorry for me, or generous, or he didn’t care and he let me win a few, randomly. That way the game continues.
I read the words and heard his voice crack and I broke down and ran along the river, until my lungs gave in. He knew. He knew exactly.
To talk of being haunted is not right; it describes something insubstantial, untouchable, which might be exorcised. It suggests an alternate world, terror seething in its own dimension or a hand passing through glass. Visitation. Not the collapsing human machine, the putrid, bluish organism being rendered down in the same room.
There was a moment it appeared the fever had broken. I heard the crackling of tarpaulin and came into the bedroom to find you sitting upright, your eyes focused, the delirium lifted.
Hey, how are you feeling?
Yes, you said.
You looked relaxed, strangely lambent. Your lips were thick with dead skin, but your hair was no longer damp. The face when pain has passed is utterly gorgeous; it’s almost possible to think God created it.
Would you like some water?
Yes.
I made to leave.
Hülya nasıl?
Hülya?
What is our little one doing?
Relief swept through me. We were back to our game, our imaginary life.
She’s colouring a butterfly and drinking milk.
Is she sick?
No – Halit. Of course not.
I looked at you. The smile was blissfully drawn; your eyes were glassy, their lenses glinting. Your fingers lifted and gently stroked the air.
I’ll get the water. You must be so thirsty.
Teşekkürler, canım.
When I returned you were asleep again, the momentary bulb extinguished.
Your body argued on for another day, beyond the point of dehydration. It had lost its sheen and become chalk-like. Your throat seemed blocked, the spooned water spilled out. You needed intravenous fluid; I knew. I called for an ambulance. Several times I called the helpline, waited, pleaded for help. At The Anchorman the phone rang with no reply and Kendra’s mobile was off. I went out on the street to find a soldier, someone in charge, a stranger, but the street was empty. It seemed impossible that any of it was happening.
There was the brittle snapping of air passing through your gullet. Your tongue was like wood. I tried to drip water in from a cloth but this time you started to choke; it felt like murder. I was beginning to feel ill too, vague in what I was doing, had forgotten to do. It was not just lack of sleep and exhaustion – there were sores on my hands, a band of pain around my brow. I lay on the floor in the bedroom doorway, where the rising smell didn’t reach me, slept delusively, as if tending a newborn. Sometimes I was not sure if I was asleep or awake.
I didn’t pray. I begged and shouted, but to no one, or at you. There are so many things I don’t believe, though once I believed, so fiercely, that I would hold Naomi in my arms, warm until she was cold. In th
e end I did not even see her body. I shouted and then I was quiet, an observer.
It was night, or nearly dawn, the minutes hung between. I was turning the handle of the coffee grinder. The beans were tumbling and grating through the mill. I kept turning the handle, slowly, purposefully, like you’d shown me, full of dread that it was taking so long, unable to stop. I was out of my mind, I think, and hypnotised by the lustre and tarnish in the old brass casing. Perhaps you called to me, but I never heard. I could feel the strength of the virus, and its purpose. I started talking, making a transaction like a child trying to control the future.
When this is done it will all be over.
When this is done it will all be over.
I stopped the handle, transferred the powder to the pot, lit the stove and waited for the black liquid to rise. I sat and drank. Forgive me.
When I returned, the body was on its back, one hand on the stomach. Its head was tilted, the mouth was open and the eyes had a faint zincing on their surface. Grey-green skin, as if smoked. It radiated nothingness. The entire energy of the room had reversed.
I knelt on the plastic sheet and crawled to where the body lay. I moved the heavy arm and put my head against the wall of the chest, which was cool and silent as mud on the riverbank. Halit had gone and you had come. I let you hold me.
Our bones, our brains and nerves are so well constructed, our lives, ephemera; this is the contradiction, the impossible exchange. The government has apologised and made reparations. There have been mass suits, millions paid out. Like the miners, those poisoned by blood transfusions or incinerated in lethal towers, the damage is unquestionable. Though there was little control over the disease itself, and though the prime minister volunteered for the first vaccine two years later, the administration was obliterated, is known by its black watch.
After the recession, money was paid out to families, to survivors who would die of relapse. Sometimes the payments went into empty accounts. But there is no compensation. A wound to the psyche is incalculable. I can’t say any mishandling mattered in the end. We catch the bus on time and the sinkhole still opens. We fly, and the white, forked tongue catches the aircraft. Our only right is to live in a true world.
The body remained in Burntcoat for several days. Long enough for the muscles to relax again, for the skin to marble, swell, for flies to begin to colonise. I was sick, my instincts were gone, but also I chose – not to let go. I wasn’t afraid, not of that. I’d seen it on the moors. The foddering. Nature is anaerobic, amalgamated, and extraordinary only when sparked. I covered it with the tarpaulin but I kept looking, until the face became too different, no one I could recognise.
I sat nearby with a blanket and the room was empty and inhabited. I couldn’t comprehend yet. Most of my life I’d been waiting; you’d been promised, you’d promised to come. There were so many ways to imagine, forms, cyphers, etched darkly in graveyards, blown in rings of smoke. But you were, you are, beyond imagination.
Eventually I got up. I drank a glass of water, then another. I looked at myself in the mirror, pale, smeared, obviously descending. I held the sink, fought the dizziness. The mirror seemed to shutter, its silver closing and opening, or the air behind me turned to show its hidden side, for just a moment.
I tried to gather myself, found my phone in the mess around the bed. The battery was flat so I plugged it in to charge, and when it switched on there was a message, sent from Halit in a half-lucid moment. An address.
The number he had written down and underlined after calling for medical advice was a registry and removal service. I was entering the serious rise of illness when I rang, could feel it beginning to infiltrate every system, my limbs, stomach, the thoughts strangely fluting inside my skull. There was a patch of light standing beside the window, filled with extraordinary, painful lumens, its nebula almost purple and green. You shed the dull skin coat. The line simply rang until it was answered. The operator asked to use my first name. I was calm, unusually detached. Perhaps he was used to hysteria, last-stage panic; he asked me several times.
Are you sure your partner has passed away?
His accent was familiar. I thought I even recognised the voice, someone from school. Is your name Mark?
There was a pause.
No. It’s Ashley.
He spoke slowly, humanely stewarding, like an undertaker.
Edith, we ask if you could please ensure there is someone at the property until our arrival. We recommend you do not touch the body as it may pose a health hazard. We are very sorry for your loss, Edith.
I thought, they will come immediately, this hour. There could not be so many people waiting. After a while, I assumed they couldn’t find the building. I waited by the studio door, wrapped in a blanket and swept by chills. Then I left the door standing open, came back upstairs, lay on the sofa and fell asleep. When I woke it was dark, my mouth tasted of soil and nausea rushed through me. I stumbled to the bathroom and was sick several times. I dragged myself back to the couch.
Their feet on the floorboards woke me. There were three of them in protective suits and visors, standing in the middle of the room, smooth, white, aliens. I sat up unsteadily, rose to my feet and staggered, then sat again – they did not approach. Two men and a woman; paramedics or army. The woman spoke.
Edith Harkness?
Yes.
You reported a death.
I pointed to the bedroom. The woman went in, and I lay back down, my head spinning. When she returned, no pronouncements were made; the state of the body was obvious. One of the men was carrying a small bag of portable equipment. He and the other went in, bagged it, carried it through the building and down the stairs. They were very quick or I had lost consciousness. The woman was standing beside me. I should cry, I thought, Halit deserves sorrow, but the thought itself was soporific. When I spoke, I made no sense.
Is it still here?
No. My colleagues have completed the removal.
It was in him.
Do you mean the virus? The body is still contagious. It will be handled accordingly.
I opened my eyes again. The white-suited woman was sitting on a chair at the table, writing a form. She asked questions I could barely answer. What was the name of the man? Was this his permanent residence? Did I have any identification for him?
Ms Harkness? Can you tell me who he was?
I pointed at the wallet on the table; she opened it, took out the cards.
Konstadin Konstadinov?
I shook my head, confused.
No.
She repeated the name on the card she was holding, and I remembered.
Yes.
She wrote the certificate, left a copy on the table.
The remains will be kept temporarily by the state. Do you understand what’s happening, Ms Harkness?
She stared at me through the visor; her face clarified, became ageless.
Is there anyone that can help you?
Yes.
Please call them.
She stood, and left.
I was fortunate, though I can’t say I am lucky. To live through the disease was to be in a current so strong and fast the landscape blurred, became unrecognisable. Parts of it I don’t remember at all. The fever came fast, was swifter to peak. I pulled the tarpaulin off the bed and lay on the bare mattress. There was sickness and pain in every inch, every membrane. I woke on the floor, several times, once with my head bleeding profusely. I drank from the old water glasses, the tap, and I filled the sink like a trough. I broke things, shouldering them over, or I smashed them deliberately, in some mysterious violent psychosis – one of Jonah’s photographs, too high on the wall to have been an accident. I left the refrigerator standing open, the ice trays scattered, and placed bloody tissues in a ring, like votives. To live through it was to be an animal in the river, half-drowned, lowing, caught against the few saving branches.
In the height of the fever you were with me. You were blindingly solid, covered by cloth that was sof
t as ash. You took my hand, leaned over me with a canine reek, and said, Stay here.
The otherness of that state. Like being born, feeling a first raw world, an infection soul-deep. I know I wanted Naomi, I heard myself calling for her; she had gone walking and was lost. She could not come back. You were in the cottage garden as I built the boat. You came up behind me and your arms wrapped like eels round my neck and belly, leeched my small bare chest. I wet myself, and the snow around my feet hissed. The sleep was restless and warping – dreams took me to infancy, to the building of the Witch, winching her up on chains above the gorse as the traffic roared past, to the restaurant door where someone I didn’t know was working in the kitchen, to an old age I would never have, my skin wrinkled and slack. And I saw your face. At the summit, in the fit, when I was on fire and still alive, when I knew I would see the other side, you opened the mask. Behind it, appalling, extracting endlessness.
The world doesn’t come back as it was before. The seas and mountains remain, the cities slowly fill up again, jets take off over ochre and turquoise aprons. Finance begins to move. Children are allowed to play together. Humanity is reestablished. There is grief, its long cortège; the whole world joins and walks. Such shock is both disabling and enlivening; everything before was a mistake. We will do it differently; we’ll repent. Consume less, conserve more, make sense of our punishment. It’s been said the virus reached levels of superiority other pathogens never have. Like the vastation of ice ages, and condensed gene pools, language, blood and milk, it will evolve us. Of course, the old ways return. Our substance is the same; even with improving agents. We are our worst tendencies. We remain in our cast.
