Chapter Five
The green refuse bin lay flat on its back in our front garden, offering its “No Hot Ashes” warning to the sky. I crossed the road to the park. The kids had dispersed around the playground. Even Lola was swinging, lying back to let her long hair ripple behind her.
Joni turned to me with pursed lips. “Has he gone?”
I waggled my head from side to side. “Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s there in body, but not in spirit.”
Joni blinked at me.
“He’s dead, Joni.”
We looked at each other for a while. I wanted to put my finger under her chin and close her mouth. She expected me to talk, but there was nothing, nothing in me needing to come out. She launched into a litany of “oh my Gods” and “poor Julians” and “poor everyone elses,” and you’d never know that only twenty-four hours ago she had felt quite strongly that her brother-in-law was an arse. It was like she’d opened a drawer marked “Grief,” and the contents were spilling down her face. Her words of comfort, however much they were intended to help, struck me as so inadequate—belittling almost, in light of what I’d just seen—that I had to turn away. I had that sharp feeling in my fingers again, the one the marriage counselor had told me was a physical manifestation of the way I channeled hurt into anger. “Have you ever noticed that every time you need to cry, you get angry?” She had told me it was a coping mechanism. Well, now more than ever, I needed to cope.
“Stop, Joni, just stop it!”
Surprised, she did.
“We can’t do this now. The kids will start asking questions, and I can’t deal with that on top of everything else. We need to get them away from here,” I started saying. “We can’t risk them seeing—”
“You can’t gloss over finding your husband dead in your home. What happened in there?”
“He was on the sofa. The denim one by the garden doors.” What more did she want me to say? My drawer was firmly shut and was unlikely to open without jimmying. “I didn’t touch him—there were flies. Loads of flies.”
Joni nodded.
“I mean really shitloads of flies. And a buzzing. That’s what the kids can’t see—the fucking buzzing.” I ground my fingertips into my forehead.
“We’ll go back to my place,” she said, “and work out what to do next.”
I thought of all those front doors, cheek by jowl down that sordid little street, a buzz behind each one. “No, we need to get out of the city. There must be bodies everywhere. Every single one of these places”—I jabbed at the gracious, smug, contaminated homes circling the park—“is full of buzz.”
“Where we going to go?”
A desert island, I thought, or a lush valley with a salmon-filled river in perpetual spring, or a Mediterranean village with oranges falling from the trees and a fishing boat sitting atop its own reflection in smooth waters. We could get in the car and drive somewhere like that, through the Channel Tunnel and across to the Continent, just keep going until we got someplace where the living is easy.
“Marlene?”
That was a fantasy. “Back to the camp,” I said. “It’s the only place we know is safe.”
“Mum-may, I’m hungry,” Billy whined. As usual, we didn’t get anywhere fast. I was still revolving on the roundabout in the park, trying to think straight. The other kids climbed on board and surrounded me, their pleading-chick mouths gaping. Joni produced some tiny boxes of raisins, but soon enough they were at it again. I swatted the midges away, hissing that I couldn’t just pluck food out of the air and why can’t they let me concentrate for five minutes? Then Joni remembered that we still had baked beans in the car and stumped off to fetch her tiny gas stove, which she set up in the sandpit. The kids sat cross-legged in the dirt, while Joni settled into a primitive squat to poke at the food cooking over a naked flame.
I walked along the pavement, away from the houses overlooking the park and the dark windows that seemed to be eyeballing us. People could be watching through those windows. Survivors. If we were alive, there could be others. Maybe I’d watched too many TV shows, but I wanted to be away from strangers, at least until we knew more about what had caused this to happen. So I eyed the parked cars. Before we could leave the city, Joni needed a Beast of her own. Something reliable. Her knackered hatchback was kept on the road by the constant attention of a local mechanic, whose magic touch we lacked. The last thing we needed was to break down and get stranded where there might be buzz—or strangers.
I ignored the endless SUVs and coupes and minivans. I knew exactly what I was looking for: the souped-up Land Rover driven by that surgeon who lived on the next street. It would suit us just fine. It would keep us mobile. Just in case.
The vehicle was hulking in its space right outside the surgeon’s house, and I gave it a proprietorial pat on the bonnet as I passed. I rang the doorbell. It chimed. I waited. Rang again. Then I took a step back and shoved the front door with my shoulder. It didn’t budge. I stepped back and kicked at it with the full heft of my new boots, but though it bent in, the lock held. I turned and looked up and down the street for inspiration. The sight of the new Beast drove me on.
Above the door was a portico, decorated with fancy ironwork. I pulled my sleeves down over my hands and jumped up to hang on it. I swung both legs back and, using the momentum, pounded them into the door, which burst open and wedged against a body that was lying at the bottom of the stairs. A frenzy of flies heaved itself from the corpse and swarmed out the door. My fingers failed, and I dropped down into the cloud, my left knee and shoulder taking the brunt of the awkward landing. I scrambled away, squashing bluebottles under my hands as I struggled for purchase on the concrete steps. I fell onto my backside among the purple slate that covered the garden. There wasn’t even any grass to wipe my hands on. I scraped away the guts as best I could on the concrete and got up. I gave the Land Rover one last look, but I wasn’t going anywhere near that body to find the keys. Farther down the street was a cluster of half-decent urban tractors, no doubt tanked with fuel and primed with snacks, ready to tackle the rugged terrain of the school run.
Outside the gray door next to the first vehicle of interest, I pressed my ear to the letter box. No buzz. I lifted it and peered inside. No body. I took a step back and slammed my foot right against the Yale lock. Pilates be praised for flexibility and strength; the door gave and swung open. Gray walls, wood tones. A chalkboard hanging off the banister requested that I wipe my feet. A quick scan showed no obvious place to find car keys. In a closet bathroom under the stairs, I washed my hands in a tiny sink before I went out to the next house and listened at the letter box. A kick and a slam revealed mid-century modern lines, ruined by a toppling pile of clutter on the sideboard. Too messy to know where to start. The third door was deadlocked, and I succeeded only in hurting my hip.
But the fourth door slammed back against a wall of family photos, which started in the hallway and spread back through the generations up the stairs. Funny-face-pulling kids, a mum in her salad days, a glammy granny on a cruise ship—all looked down at me. The buzz was audible behind the closed bedroom doors above, but it seemed to be contained and didn’t bother me as I approached a console table where brown carnations festered in white water, giving off a sleazy smell like bodily fluids, not unlike the one in my kitchen. I picked up a set of car keys and bounced them in my palm. If the residents of number 42 disapproved of my theft, their holiday grins didn’t show it. I gave them a nod, hoping they understood that while I was sorry they didn’t need this car anymore, we did, so I was taking it.
I pressed the button on the key fob. An SUV parked outside flashed a complicit reply. I pulled the front door shut and drove back to the park to present Joni with her new car.
It’s quiet because all the people are inside their houses. They are inside their houses because everyone got sick. No, we can’t go inside to check on them because they might be contagious. Con-tay-jus means that we might get sick, too, so we have to leave now. No, we can’t get the rabbit; we have to leave the rabbit. Yes, we have to leave right now. I’m sorry about the rabbit; I’ll let him out of his cage so he can live in the garden. Look, throwing yourself on the ground won’t change anything.
As soon as we started explaining, I realized we should have split the kids up and told them separately in their own respective languages. Lola knew already, of course. As did Peter, it seemed, who accepted the news with dark eyes and a sangfroid request that I check on his mother and pick up his Star Wars Lego. If Maggie heard what we said, and I’m sure her eyes were darting about beneath the fringe, it didn’t stop her frenzied digging up of sand. Charlie asked about his father—a question I sidestepped for the time being—and then released such a deluge of questions covering arcane practical measures that Joni gave him a pencil and told him to write it all down. I let my fingers toy with Charlie’s floppy hair. His bent head and square scribble reminded me of Julian at university.
Loss closed in on me. Really, I’d lost Julian weeks ago, when he first told me he wanted to move out. I was, if nothing else good could be said of me, a fighter: I’d fought to keep my family together. But this was different. Death, even I couldn’t fight.
Sadness gripped me in the fierce hug of an angry parent. What a waste! For years, I’d lamented how Julian wasted himself. His potential, his privilege, his intellect. And I’d clung to the hope that the man I first met at university would return. We used to sit up all night back then, brainstorming. The possibilities crackled around us like static electricity off the nylon carpet. When Julian received his family trust fund, he bought what we then called a “home computer,” which David trained us how to use just before he took his payout to some place called Silicon Valley and promptly lost it—though he did find an American wife to bring home. Julian and I stayed in most nights with that first iMac, programming, writing business plans, playing Lemmings; we must have led millions of the creatures away from certain death. We were geeks long before that was cool. And after three years of techy bliss, we shot out of university, right into the jet stream of the dot-com era. I picked my best plan—online retail; no one else thought it would catch on—and rode the bubble higher and higher while Julian . . . didn’t even try. He didn’t need to; he had the trust fund. And by the time that was spent, he had a successful wife. So.
It wasn’t that I ever stopped loving him, but it also wasn’t the first time I’d wondered: Did I marry the man—or his potential?
Billy sneaked up and huddled into my side.
“You’re crying, Mum-may.”
“I’ll stop soon,” I said.
“Good girl.”
I kissed the fluff behind his ear.
Joni called out that the new car had fold-down seats in the boot, so all the kids could fit inside, buckled up. They would stop quickly at Joni’s to pick up her stuff and then start a slow drive back toward the camp, while I got a carload of supplies and caught up with them. I could stop by Peter’s house on the way; better to do that alone, so the boy couldn’t rush inside and find, well, who knows what he’d find. His mother was a nurse, at the hospital, which must have been ground zero. Horatio von Drool stepped up beside me as their car turned at the end of the park, the yellow indicator bright against the black railings. He thumped his tail on the pavement and then spun round, startled, to see who had made the noise.
I waited outside my front door, key in hand. I had to go back in, get clean clothes for the kids, enough for a few days at least. It would be easy to avoid the buzz. The front door swung back, and this time I left it wide open. I stepped inside and went straight up the stairs. The handrail was smooth and cool, softened by a hundred years of fingers. It was calming, the sense of running my palm against theirs, as I caressed the full length of the wood, the perfectly hewn joint that turned onto the landing. Up the smaller staircase to the master bedroom in the attic. Two suitcases lay open on the bed, seemingly exhausted from their efforts to expel their contents all over the room. Every drawer of the tallboy was open, with clothes retched up over the sides.
So, Julian had been planning to leave after all. He’d started packing.
I moved across to open the windows. The curtains blew into the room like flags on a pole. At half-mast they slapped around my head.
In the en suite bathroom, I found disinfectant spray and disposable latex gloves inside an old first-aid kit. I scrubbed under my nails with a toothbrush, scoured a flannel up my arms and over my face, and finished by splashing antiseptic over my cheeks and mouth like it was Old Spice. Then I watered down some in the bottle top and gargled with it. My God, I thought while my throat burnt, maybe all the helicopter mums were right about hand sanitizer. What might Julian have touched before he died?
I pulled on the latex gloves and went over to my office, built into the eaves off the bedroom. My planning board caught my eye. A mood board of photos and color swatches and pencil sketches from a year’s worth of business trips to Denmark and China with—in pride of place in the center of this thought cloud—a snapshot of me next to the design world’s Next Big Thing, my smile so wide with relief I looked like I was about to eat him. Beside that, a single photocopied page with a red circle around his signature on a contract naming me the exclusive supplier of his overhyped, overpriced furniture to the overexcited consumers of Britain. A year of courting and kowtowing signed into cold, hard cash just last week. The press release from my PR agency still lay in the printer tray, livid with the red-penned changes that made up my final approval.
Still, with no electricity and no computers, I had no online store to worry about. None of it mattered. None of it even existed. Like the proverbial unseen tree in the forest, my life’s work had fallen without making a sound. I pulled from the pinboard a tweed swatch in the bright green fabric of the season, which we’d described as emerald but I now realized was the exact color of the thick moss on the roots of the trees around our camp. Beech trees, Joni had said. The fabric should be called beech moss. I placed the tweed alongside my collection of trinkets and talismans in the desk’s top drawer. I cast an eye over the bookshelf for anything that might be useful to take along, but there was nothing that could help us now.
The bedroom was an even worse mess from this angle. I shoved the suitcases off the bed and let them slump to the floor. I pulled out a leather weekend bag and stood it open. But the contents of my wardrobe just hung there, the work suits redundant, the party dresses with nowhere to go, the versatile coat stubbornly impractical in the current climate.
From the tallboy I grabbed a clean bra, threw it into the bag. Gathering up a handful of knickers, I found a hard stone, a big pebble from the garden that was painted with two black dots and a smiley mouth. Billy’s work left somewhere he knew I would find it: the drawer where I was always packing and unpacking, coming and going, apologizing and comforting while one of the babysitters tried to lure him away with chocolate and Octonauts. And then Maggie would start emoting in the only way she knew how, by making trouble, and I would end up bawling her out right before I stepped into a cab and disappeared for a week. Five whole sleeps. And where was Charlie in this mundane scenario? Was he even in the house or was he off with Peter and his mum, who always seemed to be just getting back from her hospital shift? Or maybe with Joni, if she’d staged one of her to-the-rescue dashes to pick him up from after-school club on the occasions that Julian forgot—actually forgot—to collect his own son (and the school always called me, every single time, to ask where I was and sounded miffed when I said, “Denmark”). And now all that was gone, too, and it was just me and a big pair of boots and a hippie and four kids—no, five, including bloody Peter—against the world.
I lay down on the floor and surrendered myself into child’s pose. My heart thumped like it used to during childhood night terrors, echoing through the caverns of the mattress. I concentrated on long breaths and talked myself down as I’d been taught: You can’t change the past, in this present moment you are okay. The plane will not crash if you sleep, you are not in control of the plane. At least there would be no more flights now.
The floor was uncomfortable. As I pushed myself up, I caught a glimpse of a faint green LED at the bottom of a hillock of Julian’s clothing. Covered by one of his ironically uncool-band T-shirts was a flashing light—an electronic light. Belonging to his laptop. I grasped the machine. With my fingertip covering the LED, I saw it flickering under my skin like a heartbeat. Sitting with my back to the bed, laptop propped on bent legs, I opened it up. A box popped up to warn me, 5 percent battery remaining. I okayed it away.
I clicked to open an Internet page: “You cannot access the requested website. Please ensure you are connected to the Internet.” I hissed. No Wi-Fi, of course.
All right, then—browser history.
Last opened on Friday, the day we had left to go camping: a long list of dead links to Facebook pages, Google maps aimed at Shropshire, and finally the BBC. I clicked on the most recent headline—or, at least, the last one that Julian had been able to access—posted on Friday evening, some twelve hours after we got to the forest: “Deadly Virus—Curfew Imposed.”
I clicked on the previous story, posted a few hours before: “Fatal Virus Triggers Epidemic.”
Farther down, the first headline in the list, posted just an hour after we had driven out of the city: “Terrorist Bombs Leave Many Dead.”
I snapped the laptop shut on the graphic images that had flashed before my eyes: a domed building flaming like a torch. Bodies in the road. A woman in one shoe running past the camera, a boy in a football kit running behind. Was the child with that woman? I opened the laptop again, punched in the password, and the image appeared. He was looking at her. She wasn’t looking back. I steepled my hands over my mouth and nose. Did she get to safety? Did he? No, of course not. Terrorist bombs. Fatal virus. Epidemic. She died. He died. I closed the tab, and her eyes vanished. It’s surely the mother of all mummy guilt, when your dying thought is: I ran away. I ran away from my child to save myself.
All this had happened while we were building tents and gathering firewood. We’d missed it by hours. My hands prickled with adrenaline sweat inside the latex gloves. I could have been that woman. That could be me. Would I have run away too? I was a very fast runner.
I scrolled the page down to the very first report Julian had seen on that Friday morning, “Breaking News: Terrorist Incident,” and read each subsequent update, reliving a timeline that started with multiple bombs across the country and speculation that the suicide bombers were homegrown, then took a twist to synthetic viruses, overwhelmed hospitals, and martial law—the curfew and soldiers—that was why there were so few people on the streets.
The news reports ended with an abrupt statement from the prime minister, photographed on the steps of a helicopter, confirming that “a despicable group of unidentified terrorists has attacked the people of Britain with a manufactured virus that is both fatal and virulent.” A man-made plague spread to all corners of the nation by dirty little bombs. Apparently, “the perpetrators would be held accountable for their actions.” By whom? Were they planning some kind of response from inside a bunker? If so, there was no sign of it.
I searched the browser history for more, but that was all Julian had accessed. How long the BBC hacks had limped on, informing a dying audience of the latest, I could not tell. Maybe they were still there, holed up in a studio, like during the war. I jumped up and pulled out a storage box from under the bed. There, under the spare blankets, was my collection of treasures. The material wealth of my childhood contained in a Quality Street tin. Among faded snaps and bits of coral was my ancient Roberts radio, the one that had kept me connected to the outside world during the long school holidays visiting my parents, wherever in the world they happened to be posted at the time. The set was my source of music, gossip, and sanity during long nights in the bush. When all the teenagers back home were watching TV and going to discos, I passed the time with other trailing offspring who were orphaned from their real lives.
I clicked the radio on and the hiss filled me with a familiar yearning for voices, ordinary voices. My fingers knew their way around the dial. Shortwave was an art and a science, and the middle of the day wasn’t the best time to get good reception, but I tuned through the busiest frequencies. There was only static.
I scrabbled in the tin for the antenna, but it was missing. I kept trying anyway. I roamed the waves, through banshee cries and mourning howls, and eventually slammed the radio into the tin with the other worn-out old tat, which I threw back into the box under the bed.
There were no familiar voices out there. Only static.