Chapter Nineteen
Back at the mine, the truffling noises of sleeping children echoed down the tunnel from the main chamber. I stayed close to the entrance to unpack the shortwave radio. Willing it to work, to find a signal, scrabbling around to turn down the volume when it crackled into life, then feeding the antenna out through the bars of the locked portcullis gate.
My hand fluttered around the tuner like it was the knob of a closed door, and I wasn’t sure what was on the other side. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the most populated frequencies, though it had been years since I’d tuned in regularly. I started somewhere in the middle. Static. Whistling. Wailing. I had to be patient. I let the sounds squall around me as I started a fingertip search, seeking contact in empty space. Maybe William Moton had been lying—or delusional—maybe there was no one out there after all? I shrugged the negative voice off my shoulder. Fingers back on the dial. A sudden loud click, and a woman’s voice said, “BBC.” It sent a shock through me. I homed in on the signal until the interference receded and her voice came through:
“Emergency broadcast. We will shortly cross live to BBC Broadcasting House”—whiplash of the heart—“for an important announcement. Please stand by.” I stood by, dry-mouthed with hope. My hands hovered over the radio set like a medium conjuring shadows in a crystal ball.
“This is a BBC emergency broadcast. We will shortly cross live to BBC Broadcasting House for an important announcement. Please stand by.” Long empty pause. I descended into the light, a bright filament that zipped across the ether and dropped me, blinking, into a dusky studio, bunker lighting, competent Aunties bustling past in secretary skirts. “This is a BBC emergency broadcast. We will shortly cross live to BBC Broadcasting House for an important—” With a long sigh, I was dragged from this comforting place of stoic women, the dank walls of the mine came back into focus, and I realized the sound was my own breath releasing. My hands stilled as the adrenaline drained; my heart returned to downbeat. After a few seconds the message repeated. I checked my watch: just gone midnight. I listened to her voice every thirty seconds for fifteen minutes: thirty times, the same; thirty times, I stood by. Just as she asked. Of course, we never crossed to BBC Broadcasting House. But the balm of her voice, warm as mother’s milk, was intoxicating. After thirty messages I found the willpower to let her go, and she walked away like my own mother, never looking back.
Farther up the dial, voices looming in the dark. Sounds like dripping water, as though I’d been plunged into the drains. The monotonous rhythm of a foreign language. Then a nasty buzz cleared to a strong signal and a man’s voice: “Good morning.” I sat up straighter, as though he could see me. But then—strange words with the odd English phrase: “stumbling block,” “prime minister,” “half past nine.” Some kind of Pidgin English. I jabbed the dial, punching in frequencies, skipping bands. Sloppy now. I crashed around in the ether until I detected a wavering signal, just clear enough to hear that Radio Revival Sweden was “keeping shortwave alive.” An English-accented newsreader:
“Broadcasting on the half hour, this is The Newsroom. The headlines this morning: The International Rescue Committee has expressed concerns about Portugal’s decision to force a ship carrying asylum seekers back into international waters during a severe storm. All contact with the boat and its estimated five hundred passengers has been lost. The ship was approaching the Azores when it was intercepted and turned away by Portuguese naval patrols. In a statement, the Portuguese government reiterated its sovereign right to close its borders in response to the English Plague. The crew reportedly denied that the boat had sailed from the United Kingdom, claiming instead to be owned by people traffickers before—” A violent wail swept the voice away. I searched above and below the frequency, hands shaking again with the effort of maintaining a false calm—inside my head I picked up the radio set and dashed it on the stones, crushed it with my boots, lifted the iron gate, and smashed the black box to pieces—but I couldn’t find Radio Revival Sweden again.
I spent a long time pacing the frequencies, each click one more step into the wilderness, the blurring static rushing around me like a snowstorm—disorienting—and I started to wonder if the voices I had heard were real at all, or if they were recordings stuck on a loop like the BBC emergency broadcast. Echoes, the light from dead stars. It would help to hear a date or anything that told me it was live, real, coming from the flesh and blood mouths of actual living beings. I tried to visualize lips moving close to a microphone, feel the intimacy of breath on my ear. But all I could feel were the dark mineral walls of the tunnel pressing around me. And anyway, I’d forgotten what the date was, so even if they said it, it could be today or yesterday. The day before. If they were alive then, they could be dead by now.
I pressed on through the storm, until: “Zero, zero, four, zero.” For a beat I thought I’d lost it, but then the recorded voice picked up. “Aviation weather update: Amsterdam, report missing; Dublin, report missing; Shannon, report missing; Prestwick, report missing; London, report missing; Paris, report missing. Atlantic Flight Information Service: report missing. Time, zero, zero—” The signal bled into some kind of old-time jazz. I fine-tuned until I heard the recording again, but it was back to “Prestwick, report missing; London, report missing—”
I turned down the volume and sat with my hand over my mouth. The smell of petrol made me heady.
“What was that?” Joni stood behind me in the tunnel.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” I said.
“Was it flight information?”
“Just a list of airports. Weather updates. I don’t know what it means.”
“It means someone is still checking the weather and broadcasting the reports.” She waved a hand at the volume dial. I edged it up. Static again.
“Maybe they’re trying to resume flights?” She sounded upbeat.
“Well, they can’t if all the information is missing.”
“But they’re trying, right? Keep going, see if we can find the signal again.”
I did as she asked—it was hard to resist her newfound zeal—but I suspected that she just felt buoyed by the American accent, letting it take her home. I didn’t want to hear a long list of “missing” places, a reminder of the state of my country, my people. I let the radio scroll. I couldn’t remember what I did want to hear. It was like walking into a room and forgetting what you came for. With my hands over the radio set again, I had that same sense of it being a crystal ball, but instead of conjuring the outside world in its mists, we were the ones trapped inside, screaming, unheard behind the glass. It was pointless. If they can’t hear us, if they think we’re all dead already, then we might as well be ghosts.
“It’s late, Joni. Let’s get some sleep—”
“Shh!”
A sudden break in the static, like a patch of blue in a cloudy sky, and a male voice, hard American drawl: “I could care less about politics. I don’t know if we should go save these people. But I do know this—I am frightened for their souls.”
Joni huffed in response. “Move on.”
“We brung it on ourselves,” I said, imitating the accent.
“Don’t take the piss. Just move on.”
But I didn’t. I let the fundamentalist rant. It was fine; his fire and brimstone warmed the cockles of my heart.
“And for two generations now,” the voice went on, “these people, these dark-sided people, have never gone to church. I hope you can understand this. God gave them free will. God gave his son so they could live in purity and righteousness—and they turned their back on him. A poll, a recent poll, found that ninety percent of people in the Great British Isles do not go to church. Ninety percent! This is what happens when we turn from the house of God and—what? Worship a boy warlock?” Whoops, screams. “More people read a book about a wizard than they do the book of God. Please—”
“Why are you listening to this horseshit?” said Joni.
I shrugged. “At least they know we’re here.” I clicked the dial and let it scroll. “Maybe you can go home, Joni. If we get ourselves off this godforsaken island.”
I was fast running out of frequency. Bubbling water noises told me we were in the vicinity of scrambled military channels. I turned down the volume as we passed through patches of piercing tone. Then a waft of jazz, like the one we’d heard before, faint and ethereal, as though it were coming not through space but through time, a scratchy gramophone, a man’s thin voice trembling over a piano, “The moment I left, you came home to me.” Grinding interference and another accented voice:
“—systematic abuses of the most basic human rights. Of course we need movement restrictions to ensure public health, but these must be proportional. Mass quarantines must have a legitimate objective and be based on scientific evidence—”
“But Ambassador Nygaard”—another male voice in the deep, soothing tones of a news anchor—“surely the legitimate aim of these measures is to prevent the English Plague from becoming a global pandemic?”
“Naturally, this is desirable—”
“Desirable? Surely vital?”
“Yes, vital, but my point is that the responses of the past week have lacked coordination—and frankly, we still don’t know what kind of atrocities have been sanctioned—”
“Atrocities, Dr. Nygaard, you are using that word?”
“What else shall we call it? The aircraft leaving the UK that were quarantined on the first day, the passengers left to die on the runway or shot dead when they tried to disembark. The other planes that were refused permission to land and turned back—lost—we don’t even know how many.”
I heard Joni shift at the mention of planes, her feet scattering stones. My hand found her arm and squeezed.
“Now, we hear about this ship sunk off the Azores. And the isolation camps—”
“Well, there are many conflicting reports about the existence of these camps—”
“They exist. We are hearing about thousands of survivors, no food or water or medical assistance, children separated from parents, healthy people locked in with the sick—”
“Well, we must leave it there, Dr. Nygaard. The Norwegian ambassador to the United Nations. We can cross live now to our correspondent in New York, Charles Carter, who is at the UN. Charles, is there much sympathy for the Norwegian stance?”
“Well, the secretary-general today praised international efforts to stamp out the virus”—a strain of music stole over the reporter’s excited words—“the unprecedented scale of the”—a languid trumpet shushing him—“new legislative powers”—until the drowsy mood washed his voice into oblivion, as though he, too, had succumbed. I let the music play. In the darkness, a woman’s voice all around, clear and pure and hard as my rocky pillow when I lay back against the wall of the tunnel. Joni joined in when the woman sang “Stormy Weather.” How she and her man weren’t together, while outside the mine, it was raining all the time. The pitter-patter came down like the scutter of lazy drums and, as though hypnotized, I knew the words. In the dark I closed my eyes and sang along.