by Ryan Casey
“Fuck it,” she said. She reached for the edges of the cage and dragged it along the floor, out into the artificial light of the blinded office.
Right away, she noticed a couple of things had changed in her absence.
A couple of things that made her muscles tighten.
Firstly, the rat’s brown dish that was once filled with biscuits was completely empty, not a scrap or crumb left over.
The water was empty too. So much water for a little rat like this. So much water to consume in the space of an hour and a half.
But the main thing Sarah noticed—the main thing that had her gasping in awe—was the rat itself.
It was running on its wheel, squeaking with enjoyment.
Its eyes were clear. Its nose looked healthy. Even its fur looked shinier.
“Fuck,” Sarah muttered, reaching for a tissue and wiping her eyes, unable to contain the smile on her face. “Fuck.”
She’d have to verify it. She’d have to run test after test after test.
But right now, this little rat that hadn’t eaten a scrap of food for three days, that had shown no energy or motivation to run on its wheel, certainly didn’t look like a rat with AIDS.
Daddy’s Little Princess had come good.
She was going to make him so proud. She was going to make humanity so, so proud.
Two Years Later
The halls inside TCorps Labs always used to bustle with life. Jane knew this because she’d read about it in the news. She’d read about the major pharmaceutical deals that went down at this place—the visionary chemists and their breakthrough experiments.
She walked along the metal hallway. Glass cracked under her feet. Each and every step sent an echo right through the building.
She’d been lucky to make it this far, really. Not everybody made it to the second year. But she’d been smart. Inquisitive. She’d had her wits about her. Wits got a girl a long way. Wits kept a girl alive.
Wits were the difference between Her and Them.
She looked down the large, circular middle section of TCorps Labs and stared in disbelief at the scene below. The windows to the individual labs were all smashed. Decomposed bodies lined the corridors. The smell—the smell of death—was so strong in the air, especially in this confined, tight space.
But the smell of death followed her everywhere, now. The smell of death was the new normal. Smelling something other than the odour of a dead body was a stark shock to the nostrils.
She walked along the metal corridor. Up ahead, some of the metal grating had fallen. Dust kicked up with every step she took. It was dark, but her eyes had adjusted to the dark, too.
Death and dark. Adjustments were a necessary part of human evolution.
She sat back against a wall and looked up, right to the top of the fantastic structure, and she couldn’t believe for a moment that this place was where it all started, apparently. This place—this huge, self-contained world—was the root of everything that had happened, or so the rumours went. Jane wasn’t sure what was true and what was false anymore. There were a lot of rumours—a lot of supposed facts and falsehoods.
As far as she was concerned, all that mattered was that it had all fallen apart. All that mattered was that nothing mattered. The world had turned its back on itself. Shot itself in the face.
Greed. Discovery. It was inevitable, really. It was always going to end like this.
She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath of the pungent, sickly air. She knew what was happening to her. She knew what would happen next. At least she’d found somewhere safe—somewhere sheltered—for it to happen. At least she’d found somewhere where she could lie with the rest of them, anonymous and forgotten.
She arched her leg up. The bloodstains were visible on her green combat pants that she’d worn for God knows how long now. The trousers were torn. Small round marks had pierced through them, through her leg.
She smiled and shook her head, turning away from the wound. A part of her hoped that maybe she was different. In fact, that was why she’d come here in the first place, wasn’t it? To try and find a cure. To try and find some kind of order. A way to rid herself of the inevitable.
A way of ridding herself of the fate that had befallen her mother.
Her husband.
Her daughter.
Her baby.
But logic prevailed, in the end. Logic prevailed over pointless hopefulness.
Because there was no way out of this mess. There was only more mess, for years and years and years until, eventually, the mess became so large that it dragged the planet from the sky and sent it hurtling into the centre of the sun.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a rusty blade. It was covered with blood—the blood of others, the blood of so many. A tear rolled down her cheek as she turned it in her hand. She wished she had something better to do it with. Something more civilised to finish herself off with.
But beggars could not be choosers. Never could be, never would be.
She grabbed the chain around her neck. She opened the locket with her wart-covered, dirt-coated fingers and stared at the image. Her little girl, grinning away. Her little girl, who would always be with her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t join you sooner,” was all she could manage to say. “I’m sorry I waited so long.”
She pressed the blade to the side of her throat and kept her eyes wide open. She wanted to see the vision fade away. She wanted to finish her life with one last glimpse of the world—one final glimpse at her daughter’s face, on that locket.
She pressed the blade further into her skin—held it hard against her neck—and waited.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Then, with as much force as her withered arm could manage, she sliced her throat.
The first thought that entered her head was how little pain she was actually in.
The second thought was, “Wow, that’s a lot of blood,” as it sprayed out of her neck, sprayed over her locket and dripped down the metal corridors, pooling out of her and welling up in her mouth, thick and warm.
She fell head first onto the metal floor, blood dripping down through the gaps for miles and miles, the life seeping out of her. Her vision was blurring. She couldn’t come up with a coherent thought. Everything seemed dreamlike, distant…
Her eyes started to close. She knew what it meant, as she gargled and choked on her own blood and vomit, but she didn’t struggle. She didn’t try to cry or protest. She just watched as the blood waterfalled from her neck, out of her body, out of her forever.
Before her eyes closed completely, her body shivering, she could’ve sworn she saw a little rat scuttle past on the floor below.
I: GROWTH
— And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
— Anaïs Nin
1.
Jonny Ainsthwaite was just an ordinary twenty-three-year-old until the day he was diagnosed HIV-positive.
He lay back in his bed with his hands behind his head and stared up at his ceiling. The room he was in was dark, dingy. It smelled bad—or so he was told, anyway. In truth, he was beyond recognising smells, distinguishing good from bad. It all just existed. It was all just there. Irrelevant.
His phone buzzed. The recognisable alarm that he set for 9.30 a.m. every morning even though he had nothing to get up for. He reached over for it, cocooned between the sheets of his single bed, and cancelled the alarm. His eyes were still weary, residue of sleep in the corners. He could see a text from his best mate, Brad, which he didn’t open properly because he didn’t want Brad to know he’d read it, not yet. He needed time to formulate his excuse. He was pretty good at formulating excuses.
Anita’s having a massive do on Fri if you fancy it. Hear there’s a lot of fit girls going from UCLAN. Just saying…
Jonny smiled and hit the lock button of his phone. In his head, he liked the idea of going to a part
y, just like the ones he used to go to in his late teens. Yeah, those—drinking all night until a group of them crowded around the downstairs bathroom and spewed their guts up. Meeting and sleeping with a different girl every night. Fuck—the fun days, that’s what they were. The days when he was fun.
The Days Before.
He set the alarm to go off again in fifteen minutes and turned back over to face his wall. He was supposed to be finishing off a song he’d written today. Some electronic thing he’d started working on a few months back. Seemed to go down pretty well on the Internet. But unfortunately, “pretty well” wasn’t good enough to make a living wage. And yet, he earned enough to get him by, thus the government didn’t offer any sort of income support. He was too proud to claim any, anyway. What sounded better—a full-time starving artist, or a part-time artist with a nice fat lump sum from the government to keep him sweet?
He heard something downstairs. The clinking of a spoon against a bowl, or a glass against a sink. Still, something. His stomach sank. A sign of life. A sign of life other than him. Which meant he’d have to get out of bed—make it look like he was busy, working, making his music. He pressed his hands against his face and threw the sheets away.
He looked around his room. The blinds were right the way down, just the way he liked it in here these days. It created a separation from the outside world. A cave to hibernate in after a long, tiring day of, well, being human. His computer was the centrepiece of his room—his shrine, his life. He grabbed a creased white t-shirt from the back of his chair and pulled it over his body.
Usually, people couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment they slipped into a depressive rut. Usually, it just seemed to be a case of looking back and realising, fuck, life used to be alright, didn’t it? When did it get so shit?
But in Jonny’s case, he could pinpoint the exact moment. He could pinpoint it to the minute. Shit—if he thought hard enough, he could probably narrow it down to the nearest second.
August 29th, 2013. 1.14 p.m. Around the middle of the minute.
Doctor’s office. Alone—he was only there for the results of a routine HIV test that his university insisted on. He was a second year at the Manchester Metropolitan University studying Music Production. He liked it. Didn’t get much work done, but he enjoyed spending time with his new friends. Nothing on his old, home friends, sure, but still good fun. It gave his life a sense of routine. Of purpose.
Anyway, back to the doctor’s office. He’d had a blood test two months earlier, just before the summer holidays. And then they’d sent him right back for another blood test. Didn’t really say much about it, and didn’t really think much of it. Alice from his course told him she’d been sent back four times and it was because of the amount of alcohol running through her bloodstream affecting the results.
Which, to Jonny, made perfect sense.
But this time, something was different. He was at the hospital. The doctor didn’t have a needle, he wasn’t wearing gloves. Hell—his office didn’t even look like the other places. It was a stuffy day. One of the windows was open, rattling in the corner of the room that looked out at the empty car park. This doctor—chubby man, balding head, looked more like a banker than a doctor in his black suit—was holding a piece of paper, and then he was saying words, words that Jonny couldn’t understand or comprehend.
Until the words “HIV-positive.”
At first, Jonny thought for a moment that they must be talking about somebody else. This doctor—Doctor Parnable, his name was—must just be sharing some stories about people he’d diagnosed with HIV in the past. After all, he couldn’t be HIV-positive. Sure, he didn’t live in the eighties. He knew that HIV could affect anyone and everyone.
But not him, right?
Then more words. More words. The doctor staring at him. Brown, watery eyes. Neutral face.
“…You do not need to be concerned right now. You currently only have the primary HIV infection. You will visit us for regular blood tests to monitor your health. You will not need treatment until the virus has begun weakening your immune system…”
All these words, all the time his eyes flicking from a computer screen to the piece of paper and to Jonny, always in that order, again and again. Like he was reading from an autocue.
“…We measure the levels of CD4, which are infection-fighting cells, in your blood. When the CD4 count falls below 350, which could and most likely will be decades from now, we start treatment…”
Jonny remembered sitting there, totally stunned, for quite some time. And yet he had no concept of time. Time all of a sudden just burst, like a bubble.
And sure, this doctor told him he had decades.
And sure, he wouldn’t experience any symptoms, not yet.
But this HIV was inside him. It was living inside him, right now, like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode and blow the fuck out of his immune system.
After he left the doctor’s office, he called for his mum and told her right away. Funny thing happened.
Jonny cried.
Jonny opened his bedroom door. The light filled his room, like an unwanted force reaching in and invading his peaceful darkness. He rubbed his eyes and looked down the hallway. Light brown walls. Light brown carpet. Light brown doors. Light brown. His mum was obsessed with light brown. Cheered the place up, apparently. Read it in some magazine. Feng shui, or whatever.
He could hear that it was definitely her downstairs now. All the clinking and pottering around—that was her to a tee. Dad had a silence about him. He could be in and you wouldn’t know until you turned around and he was standing right behind you. A light foot for such a big man.
He went in the bathroom and took a piss. He didn’t bother looking in the mirror anymore. Apparently, he didn’t look as healthy as he used to look, but that was just how life was going to be from now, right? His hair was long, dark and curly, itching the back of his neck. He’d always been tall and thin, but now he was “gaunt,” apparently. He kept his head down as he finished his piss and flushed the chain.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he left the bathroom. He was pale, too. That’s one he’d noticed for himself.
He headed down the stairs. Every step was a slump. At first, he’d skulked around to be melodramatic. Probably a little bit of an attention thing. But now the skulk was his walk de jour. He skulked everywhere, not that everywhere was very far these days. To the end of the street on a good day.
There weren’t many good days.
He turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs and headed towards the kitchen. Lighter walls down here. Light cream walls. Light cream doors. More feng shui. Representative of the day of downstairs and the night of upstairs.
Again, “apparently.”
He pushed open the door to the kitchen, and the clinking and shuffling invaded every inch of his body. His mum was standing beside a blender, smacking it as it spun and spun. She was frowning and muttering under her breath. When she saw Jonny, she smiled, then returned right back to her blender.
“You’re going to have to take a look at this bloody thing,” she said, shaking it from side to side. “I just can’t get it to stop. I wanted a banana and strawberry smoothie. Now I’m going to get a banana and strawberry… well, whatever comes after a smoothie.”
Jonny, without even looking at the blender, went over to the plug socket and pulled it out. The blender rumbled and groaned, before coming to a halt.
“You aren’t supposed to do it like that,” his mum said. “It says in the instructions that you aren’t supposed to—”
“I turned it off, didn’t I?” He reached into the cupboard by the fridge and pulled out an extra-large box of Frosties, then started sprinkling them into a bowl. “Now sit down and enjoy your smoothie. Buzzing around in my ear like this.”
Jonny’s mum frowned and sighed. Perhaps he was a little harsh to her sometimes. She’d always been there for him since he’d been diagnosed HIV-positive. The first thing they agreed
was that Jonny would temporarily leave university. Even though he couldn’t quite make sense of the decision, not in a logical way. This was a progressive infection. If anything, he should be hurrying the hell up and finishing university.
That was the thing with HIV. It didn’t get better. Only worse.
All the things you ever wanted to do, you do, because one day you wake up with a sore throat and before you know it you’ve got full-blown AIDS.
“I’ve just been looking for some part-time stuff for you, anyway,” Jonny’s mum said. She sat opposite Jonny at the circular table—you guessed it, light brown wood—and took a gulp of her over-blended purple smoothie. She pushed a paper across the table and tapped on it. “See that?”
Jonny, picking at his Frosties, barely looked at the paper. “What is it?”
“It’s a job at the local shop,” Jonny’s mum said, pulling the paper back and smiling. “Been waiting for an opening to come there for ages, haven’t we? I figured it’d be good. It’ll… you know, get you out of the house—”
“Do you think I need to get out of the house? Do you not think I’m happy in the house doing my music?”
Jonny’s mum smiled and shook her head. “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not trying to accuse you. It’s—”
“Look, I earn enough from my music to get by. I pay you my cut of the bills. Besides, the money will only get better in time. It’s a business. You just have to give me time. Every business needs a bit more work in the first year.”
Jonny and his mum stared one another in the eye. Both of them knew this was a falsehood, deep down. Jonny knew he was making excuses. It was like a game between the pair of them of “who can say the right thing?” It was a game that Jonny usually won. There were very few “right things” you could say to a depressed twenty-something with HIV.
“I’m only trying to help,” Jonny’s mum said, pulling the paper back and taking a final look at the article.