Chapter Four
“Let’s go for a nice walk,” I said to the kids on the way back to the camp. We agreed to climb to the top of Bury Ditches, the hill fort, which was the highest point for miles around. With no phone, no Internet, no TV access—nothing but static on the radio—I needed to get a wider view. Joni was drumming her fingers again, staring out of the passenger-side window; the kids were hyperactive with tension. Maggie and Billy fought over elbow room and traded bizarre insults, while Charlie and Peter, hidden by the bulk of Horatio, sang “Dumb Ways to Die” in falsetto, until Lola screamed at them to stop. Everyone—even Maggie and Billy—shut up until we got to the fort.
As usual, the older ones ran ahead up the path, and, as usual, I had to carry Billy. Joni plagued me with questions, but there was both too much and nothing to say. Yes, there were three D-E-A-D people and more inside the pub and cars. No, I couldn’t tell how they’d . . . passed away. No, there was no B-L-O-O-D, nothing to suggest V-I-O-L-E-N-C-E. Lola started sniveling, and Joni walked with her, holding her round the shoulders in an awkward moving bear hug.
I was glad to stop talking as I lugged Billy along the earthworks to the summit. The ground tumbled away down the ramparts, which had been built with unimaginable industry eons ago, and left us in a bleak but lofty position that seemed both exposed and protected. Shropshire rolled out ahead of us; Wales lay out behind. The kids clambered over a cairn, while Joni and I tried to decipher the view with her map and compass. I looked east, toward home, but saw only hills, fields, more hills, and more fields. Some kind of castle. A road: a black river in the sunlight. Charlie dragged me over to the cairn, informed me there was an orientation plaque that told us what we could see. Now the hills had names, the fields were populated with barrows and flint factories and standing stones, and the settlements became real once I could pinpoint them on the map. Charlie prattled on about ancient forests and Stone Age tribes, and I snapped that I could read the tourist information board myself if I wanted to. He trotted off to inspect the defenses, leaping about in a jubilant display of not having hurt feelings. I picked at a scabby skin tag behind my ear, dabbing the blood onto my tongue, savoring the metallic taste of myself.
“We need to go home,” said Joni.
We could talk now that the kids were upwind, but it was so quiet; it seemed the world had been put on mute. The absence of sound felt anything but peaceful: it declared the presence of nothing.
“If the Druids or Romans marched up here today, it’d look the same as they left it.”
“I said, we need to go home. I want to get to a computer or a landline, try and call David. He’s supposed to fly back from New York today. It is Sunday, right?”
Was it still Sunday? I hadn’t had a moment to think about Julian—the frenetic tedium of feeding and refereeing the kids had forced my brain into standby—and I’d been grateful for the emotional oblivion. As happened during my business trips, I’d settled into a new persona so distinct from myself that even strangers reacted differently: hotel staff more deferential, men lingering over eye contact, women more wary. Sneaking glances at photos of the kids on my phone would ground me again, stop me from floating away. But I still had stabbing moments of clarity when I understood how people could up and leave their home, their family, their friends without a qualm. In fact, I reasoned, they probably didn’t leave—it was something more passive—they simply woke up one morning, distracted, and their old life had receded like a tide. Then later: “Oh, my husband and children? Why, yes, I simply forgot all about them. How remiss of me.”
But the top of the Bury Ditches, with the wind snapping its fingers in my face, was as sobering as seeing my own front door from the taxi. The tide rushed in, bringing with it Julian and his brother, David; I turned as though I might see their heads bob up over the ramparts. I half expected to hear Julian’s forced laughter, gabbling about some bullshit venture so that David couldn’t ruin his fun with practical questions.
“I can’t remember the last time I saw a plane,” Joni was saying. “Like Saturday morning maybe? Or Friday?”
And that was it. The eerie silence had a prosaic explanation: there were no planes. Joni and I watched the sky, but there were none of the vapor trails that usually carve up our congested airspace and, so obvious now, no persistent background drone from high-altitude aircraft.
“You don’t notice until it’s gone,” I said.
“How’s David going to get home?”
We went over our timeline, trying to piece together when we last heard cars, when we last saw someone, when the dog arrived, when we spotted the cows. All the clues we had missed. I remembered that I’d deleted a couple of messages from Julian. I found his e-mails in the trash folder on my phone. Both sent late on Friday:
Call me—urgent!
Can’t get through. Pls call.
“You’re right,” I said. “We need to go home.”
But Joni was leaking into a tissue, and I looked around for Lola to come and give her a hug.
“What if it’s not just here?” Joni sniveled.
I stared at her, incredulous. If it were “just here,” the village would be crawling with emergency services. The police would answer a 999 call. There would be planes in the sky. “Of course it’s not just here, you—”
Before I could finish my point, an almighty boom surged across the landscape, ricocheting off hillsides and gathering momentum as the initial blast was joined by a further barrage of cracks and bangs. I spun round to look dead north, where flames and a column of smoke rose from some far-off industrial buildings. We gathered together on the edge of the earthworks and watched a factory explode and burn, long after the heat went out of the day, and long after the kids stopped asking questions about it.
Once upon a time, I made a rule never to start drinking before I’d finished cooking. But, “We’re on holiday, right?” I said to Joni while she rooted through the cooler, and I chugged back a warm can of gin and tonic. She looked at me sideways and said a pointed nothing, but accepted a can nonetheless. Then she put it to one side, unopened.
We decided to sleep at the camp again rather than drive back to the city at night, not knowing what we might stumble upon in the dark. Bodies seemed likely, maybe lots of bodies. Or chaos, looting, unrest. I’d been in London for a night during the riots; it didn’t take much to set people off, especially under cover of darkness. So I wanted to see what we were facing.
Peter was worried about his mum and asked if we could phone her. He wanted to climb to the top of a tree to get a signal, because all the phone towers were up high, so obviously the signal was up high, if only he could climb up: Could he, could he, could he? He could not.
Joni gathered him into a stifling embrace and told him a long story about a coyote who lost his mom in a canyon, and she got all the way to the end of the saga, some fifteen minutes of it, before Maggie piped up with, “But what’s a coyote, and what’s a canyon?” and I snorted into my third can. It was late before we got them settled and then only by putting them down top to tail in the yurt. I crammed my mattress in, too, but Horatio would have to brave the night alone in the other tent.
Not long after we bedded down, Billy sought me out and rolled over to lie with his back pressed into my stomach, head tucked under my chin. We lay there, in a human Zz. I found myself shushing under my breath like I did when he was a baby, and his hand found mine in the dark and gripped one finger. I don’t know how long I slept, but I woke with twitchy legs and brain.
I extricated myself from Billy, rolled over, and pulled my phone from my bag. Facing away from the others to shield them from the light, I opened up a new page in Notes, a to-do list: self-soothing for insomniacs. Pack up camp, find police station, contact Peter’s mother, find Horatio’s owner. I hit done, but knew I wasn’t. My legs still fizzled. Contact Julian. That should be top of my list, even if I wasn’t top of his. In the darkness, Joni smacked her lips. I reopened Notes, added Contact David and Check on intl flights. Then a second wave came, and I let practicalities distract me: shelter, food, fuel. On and on, I emptied my brain until the red battery told me the phone was going to die. I wasn’t about to creep into the night to put the phone on charge in the car, so just after 3:00 a.m. it shut down. I lay back. Still couldn’t close my eyes. Deep inside my bag I found a notepad and a stub of pencil. I scribbled until I punched a hole through the thin paper. I screwed up the sheet and stabbed it again and again onto the floor with the pencil, punching a hole right through the ground sheet and pounding the scrap into the soft earth, covering it over with a blanket, and dropping back onto the pillow.
My head was leaden, aching like my thighs after an especially masochistic run. I rested my eyes, and sleep wafted in and out on the breeze. I woke once to footsteps outside the yurt. A cold rush of air told me the flap was open. I laid a heavy hand on Billy’s leg in the sleeping bag next to me. He was fine. My body was mattress thick with fatigue. Another stumble in the leaves outside and the sound of liquid splashing. A whimper, distinctly in fear and recognizable as Peter. He shouldn’t be out there alone in the night, I thought, as my eyes closed again.
Gray light and bird calls, and Billy’s face against mine woke me again. “Awake, Mum-may,” he told me and rapped his knuckles on my forehead. I tried to pull him back down for a cuddle, but he was having none of it, and when I realized that Joni was already up and brewing tea, I let him go. I tried to sit up, but dizziness forced me back down. A cough dredged up something from my lungs that had to be swallowed. I held out a hand and saw it tremble. Then I was fully awake, scrabbling around in the bedding for socks, jeans. I was a bloody idiot to get as close as I had to those bodies—whatever killed them had to be contagious. And I’d spent the whole night pressed against Billy, breathing it over him. Over everyone in the yurt. I should get away from them.
I bolted out of the tent straight into Joni, who was coming my way with a cup of livid-green tea.
“So you are living and breathing,” she said.
“Why, what’s wrong with me?”
“You look like shit.” She thrust the cup into my hand, stumped off. “Not surprising, after finishing all the gin and pissing around in the dark all night.”
I didn’t feel so dizzy now that I was up. The weird tea seemed to settle my stomach. And I was ravenous. It could just be a hangover.
“I was making a list,” I said.
I heard her mutter “fricking brainstorming” as she carried the cooler down the slope to the car. I went back into the yurt to pack, but ended up sitting down again, watching the trees play shadow puppets through the canvas. Maggie scurried across to lie beside me.
“Are you scared, Mummy?”
“No, love.”
She put her arm around my shoulders, pulling me awkwardly down to her level. “It’s okay, Mummy. You can be scared.”
I lay there with my head on my seven-year-old’s chest. No, I thought. I can’t be scared.
Joni was bandaging Peter’s latest injury. I was wrestling the inflatable mattress into its bag. Charlie was supposed to be holding it open for me, but kept wilting. I snarled at him to concentrate. Maggie eyed the cooler in the back of the Beast.
“There’s nothing in it, Maggie,” I called out to her. “I’ll get you a drink in a minute.” She pulled out a bag of dirty clothes, emptied them all into the mud, and abandoned everything when she found no drinks.
“Maggie! Leave things alone. Hold up the bag, Charlie, for God’s sake.”
The mattress was mostly in. I heard a scraping thump and a scream. Maggie was prostrate, pinned down by the cooler she’d pulled on top of herself. I pressed my fingertips into my eye sockets until I saw stars, dragging in a long breath that whistled through my hands. They were pressed together in a prayer gesture. “Give me strength,” I whispered. Next to me, Joni tossed the grill into the remains of the fire.
“Let’s just leave the fricking camp.” She held her arms out like a cormorant, cooling herself.
Lola stopped untying the yurt cover and watched us both for confirmation. My niece gave a little cough and said, “It might be wise to have a place of refuge.”
I shrugged in agreement and watched her retie the canvas with prim double bows. I picked up the biggest torch—hefty enough to function as a makeshift weapon if necessary—as I walked to the car and bundled everyone in.
“Bye-bye, camp,” we singsonged as we powered up the dirt path across the field. “Bye-bye, wabbits,” I encouraged them to silliness. Bye-bye, (massive, flesh-eating) birdies. Bye-bye, (mastitis-doomed) moo cows.
“Bye-bye, Bury Ditches,” said Maggie as we passed the hill fort.
“Buh-bye, buried witches,” echoed Billy.
Joni and Lola managed to keep up in their car all the way to Wodebury, where I cruised past the now-familiar church, houses, and school, confirming that nothing was changed by the arrival of Monday morning, the day we should get back to normal: there were no children raging around the playground, no mothers one-upping each other at the gate. I didn’t need to see the pub to know that the bodies were still in the street, and there were no police making notes and scratching their heads and taking statements. In fact, judging by the long expanse of empty road that streamed over the hill before us, we might have been the only remaining statements.
After a few miles, we approached the motorway roundabout. Although the road was still clear, we stopped. Perched on the vantage point of a grassy mound was an armored vehicle, the kind you see on the news, its desert camouflage conspicuous against a sky washed out by rain clouds. Unease circled the inside of our car like a chill breeze that made us draw closer together.
“Mummy?” Charlie said. The windows of the armored vehicle were too dark to see if there was any movement inside, any response to our approach.
“Must be a monument,” I said. “Maybe there’s an army base nearby.” But as we set off along the motorway, my lie was exposed by a second military vehicle embedded in the central reservation. Tanks on the streets? I wondered if I should have left the kids in the safety of the camp and gone back to the city alone.
Back on cruise control, the car barreled down the middle lane into the city, doing a little over eighty miles per hour at rush hour on a Monday morning. I glanced in the rearview mirror and realized that the children were not asleep, but staring out the window with cement eyes. Even Charlie, who was in the front to make space for the dog in the back, only blinked occasionally, his eyelashes wilting down over his cheeks. I checked that Joni’s car was still in sight and returned my attention to the road ahead, just as we passed yet another crashed car on the opposite carriageway. This latest wreck was a silver sedan, the first nonmilitary vehicle we’d seen on the ninety-minute drive between the camp and the city. It made me wonder: Dead or alive, where is everyone? Charlie raised himself a fraction to see the upturned car before letting his head loll onto the seat belt. I went back to counting lampposts, my thumb tapping a rhythm on the steering wheel with each one we passed: lamppost, tap, lamppost, tap, two lampposts together, tap tap.
But as we swooped under a bridge, my thumbs fell silent. In the mirror, I saw a line of cars clogged nose to tail along the elevated road. A few doors had been flung open, but there was no movement. Buzzards perched on the parapet.
“Hospital,” said Charlie.
“What?”
“The road sign says ‘University Hospital.’ That’s where they were going.”
For a long stretch after that, I saw nothing unusual. Not even buzzards. It started to feel normal, like any long drive where the car would fall quiet after the kids and even Julian went to sleep. Eventually, a blue sign warned that our exit was coming up, and I indicated out of habit. I took the bend too fast and had to brake in jerks, shuddering over the rumble strip. I rolled to a stop on the summit of the overpass and surveyed a service station below. A plume of smoke rose from scorched restaurant buildings; frames of cars could be seen beneath the collapsed roof of the petrol forecourt; a coach lay on its side with wheels burnt to the rims. But no emergency vehicles in sight. I glanced around the car: the kids had nodded off. Even Charlie. That was a blessing. I slipped the Beast into drive and headed into the city.
We breezed through the outer suburbs of Birmingham, where the windows of the bookies, Cash Converters, and kebab shops were murky. With no delays from old ladies at crossings or delivery vans performing illegal maneuvers, we soon turned onto a high street riddled with charity shops and estate agents. At the touch of a button, my window slid down to let in the incongruous city air: as silent as our camp, and with an unexpected pall reminiscent of the campfire. The car bumped over something in the road, and I saw in the mirror a fireman’s hose, abandoned on the street. We drifted past the burnt-out remains of the police station, the entrails of its gracious Victorian building still smoldering, sunlight streaming through its collapsed roof. My wheels crunched over glass, and I steered around a brickwork drift from the front wall of a house that had partially collapsed. It looked like a picture from the Blitz. Scorched interior revealed, original fireplaces, remains of a sofa facing onto the street. You just don’t expect it, do you? Not when you’ve invested in heritage paint.
At the curry house on the corner, I turned onto Joni’s terraced street and drifted along the tight middle lane between parked cars. After the carnage of the high street, the sense of normalcy was unsettling, as though I’d walked onto a stage. Maybe if I turned around, they’d all be watching me from the cheap seats, all the missing people. Again, I wondered, where is everyone? I stopped outside Joni’s green door, engine running. She parked behind me, and in a second, she was out and trotting up to my window, tapping even as it was winding down. Lola joined her, fingers interlocked across her stomach.
“What do you think?” Joni said, sucking on a lump of her hair.
“There are fewer walking, talking human beings than I’d hoped to see,” I said.
She stared at her front door, sucking away. After a few seconds, she spat out the strand of hair, and her eyes returned to mine. “Thing is, we should stick together. I’m going to check my e-mail and try the home phone, okay? See if there’s a message from David.”
I asked if she wanted me to come in with her, and Lola could stay with the sleeping kids, but she said she’d be okay. She squeezed herself between two parked cars and up the tiled steps to the front door, leaving it ajar when she disappeared inside. Lola waited beside my open window, staring down the road as though she could see more than a row of tatty cars and feral rosebushes and litter.
I got out, too. The wind picked up my hair and slapped it across my face—a mischievous squall racing between cars, whistling like a child trying to hide its loneliness. I stepped up to the porch outside Joni’s front door. There was a sheet of paper inside a plastic sleeve that Joni had tacked to the wood. Take What You Need, the paper offered in a cheery font, and underneath were tear-off strips printed with inspiring words. No doubt Lola and David would each have selected a word that they knew would please Joni—something like serenity for Lola and fortitude for David—and not even have rolled their eyes. Most of the strips had already been taken, leaving me with a choice between faith and patience. I had no belief in the former and no time for the latter. One strip was caught up behind the sheet, though—I untucked it with my little finger: healing. In the circumstances, it seemed churlish not to take it. I tore off the strip and tucked it into my pocket, then turned back to the car to say something reassuring to Lola about her dad, but Joni was already coming out behind me.
“Can’t turn on the computer, there’s no power, and the phone’s dead, so I guess I’m done here.”
She held a small pile of books. The top one was A Complete Guide to Foraging for Food. I was tempted to say that I’d be sure to pick up my copy of Roadkill for Dummies, but Joni was talking to me again.
“On the calendar it says David was due to land last night, direct flight from JFK. So I guess he’s still there.” She reached out to Lola, who took her mother’s hand in both of hers.
“Don’t worry, Mom, Papa will call when things get fixed up.” They nodded rapidly at each other.
“Shall we track down the other husband?” I said, and Joni jumped like she’d been electrified. She prattled about how poor Julian must be desperate for news.
“We don’t even know if poor Julian is at home,” I said, and waved her toward the car so we could set off again. We looped back to the main road and turned uphill for a mile until we entered the next district, but the deli and bakery and florist were empty of the usual Bugaboo crew. At the park, I turned onto my road, where long blank windows of double-fronted houses surveyed the green with doleful spaniel eyes. There were two permit-protected spaces right outside my front door, and we both pulled in and switched off the engines, climbing out onto the pavement.
The chunky thud of my car door echoed across the park. A rope on the kids’ climbing wall slapped in the wind. On the far side of the common, a pair of foxes stopped to watch us before trotting on their way. Joni said she would watch the sleeping kids; we agreed she would take them over to the playground if they woke up. I stepped up the box-bordered path and scratched the key into the lock.
The heavy door opened with a dry suck of air and swung back to reveal the hallway and its curving mahogany staircase. The scene perfectly resembled my house: everything in the right place, but too quiet, too shiny. A facsimile of home. An elaborate trick. My keys clattered onto their hook, the sound magnified by silence, and I trailed my fingers over the back of my silver Burmese Nat, a figurine of a spirit that writhed across the console with sword in hand to protect the household. I stroked his smooth back, tarnished from years of devotion, and the habit brought me home again.
“Julian?”
My voice didn’t carry far, the heavy curtains and rugs doing their job. All I could make out was a buzzing, like the inside of my head when I wore earplugs to get to sleep. I called again, but it was obvious Julian wasn’t home. I opened the cupboard under the stairs, and there were his boots and shoes, lined up on his red shelf above my yellow one, and the kids’ stuff arranged on their painted shelves: blue for Charlie, pink for Maggie, and green for Billy. Julian’s coats were still there, too, although the suitcases were gone. Curiouser and curiouser.
I moved down the hall toward the kitchen, noticing there was no post in the tray. The buzzing seemed to be getting louder, like a metallic humming. The door to the kids’ playroom was open, revealing the devastation of a toy bomb. Either the cleaner had not come on Friday, or I would find in the kitchen one of her terse Eastern European notes: House too dirty to clean. I pushed on into the kitchen. The buzz was loudest here, and I wondered for a moment if it was the fridge, but it couldn’t be—the light switch and the stench of rotten food told me there was no power. I hardly needed lights anyway as the room was greenhouse warm from the sun glaring through the glass roof, illuminating the island workspace and the family area in front of the foldaway doors that led to the garden.
My eyes settled on the sofa. It seemed to be covered with a shiny-black blanket that I couldn’t place. On the rug, a jumble of fallen cushions and Julian’s Converse shoes. On the arm of the sofa, a mobile phone with a leather cover; it was his, Julian’s. I took a step toward it, but the strange onyx blanket that stretched along the seat caught my attention again. It shimmered and seemed to heave slightly, like an oil spill. The buzz was intense now; I could feel it as well as hear it. I took another step forward, and just as I realized that the blanket was not a single entity but a writhing mass of living creatures, the flies broke away from the body beneath and rose up, meaty bluebottles engulfing me in a roiling bombardment of filth that enveloped my head even as I ran from the room and fell face down onto the hallway rug with my hands clamped over my mouth and nose to keep them out. The furious cloud lifted away, and the buzz faded back into the kitchen, leaving a couple of languid stragglers to fly a torpid circuit of the stairwell before heading back to the feast.
I drew myself into the recovery position and then onto my hands and knees. The buzz. My guts kicked once, and I vomited onto the rug. I waited to see if there was any more: had an irrelevant thought about staining the sisal. I spat out bits and sat back on my heels. I could still hear the buzz. I forced myself to my feet and dashed across the tiles to pull closed the kitchen door. It had to be Julian in there. His shoes on the floor. His phone on the sofa. His body covered in flies. The source of that sickeningly sweet smell.
He’d never left. Or maybe he’d died before he had the chance. Either way, that was my husband. Hidden under that . . . filth. That buzz.
A dry heave caught me unawares, bending me double like a fist in the belly. I stayed down for a long moment. I had to make sure Joni kept the kids away, from the horror and—I looked at the brass doorknob I had just turned—the contamination. I turned back to the console table, opening and closing drawers to find my stash of disinfectant wipes. I scrubbed my hands, working a cloth under the nails, and threw the dirty wipe away. Then I grabbed another and wiped it over my face, across the back of my neck, in my ears, inside my mouth. That buzz was everywhere, on my skin, inside my skin. I wiped and wiped until the packet was empty and my mouth was stinging with chemicals.
In the cupboard under the stairs, I rooted out some giant plastic boxes, looking for heavy boots. In the last one, I found them: snow boots that Julian had made me buy for one of our extravagant “date weekends” in the Alps, which he had organized in the belief that hedonism could be a substitute for actual pleasure. I don’t think I ever wore the boots. It had been too late in the season for snow.
I kicked away my tennis shoes and hauled the boots on. Then I picked my keys off the hook and strode out the front door, slamming it so hard the knocker cackled behind me.