The Poison People

by Alex Makepeace

  CONTENTS

  Quotations

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Cover: Paolo Ghezzi

  Formatting: Gina Wynn

  First edition published by Altrove Books, February 2018

  Copyright © 2018 Alex Makepeace

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Horizontal gene transfer when genes (DNA) are passed from one organism to another . . . is a phenomenon that has only recently been recognised as also occurring among higher plants and animals. No living thing is untouched by the potential for horizontal gene transfer, with bacteria and viruses facilitating multiplication and recombination (creating new combinations of genes).

  BROWN’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA

  Mary was on the lookout and peered out, a long kitchen fork in her hand like a rapier. As she lunged at me with the fork, I stepped back, recoiled on the policeman and so confused matters that, by the time we got through the door, Mary had disappeared. “Disappear” is too matter-of-fact a word; she had completely vanished.

  THE HUNT FOR TYPHOID MARY, JOURNAL OF GEORGE SOPER

  1

  Burning rubber, that’s how humans smell, like the odour that hangs in the air after a car has just skidded to a halt.

  I try to breathe through my mouth but a cough catches at the back of my throat.

  “That’s nasty,” says the man. “Hope it’s not catching.”

  I keep my hand clamped over my mouth until the fit subsides. I remove it and, careful to touch nothing else, bury it deep inside my pocket.

  “I said: hope it’s not catching.” The man looks at me askance. He’s not kidding. We live in troubled times. Danger these days can take many forms. He’ll have seen the headlines, heard the radio. He’ll be thinking: you never know quite who, or what, you might pick up these days.

  “Nah,” I say. “Just the arse-end of a cold, nothing to worry about. But do you mind if I open the window?”

  “What? I smell or something?”

  Nothing personal, mate, you all do. Despite your Polo aftershave, your Lynx effect, or maybe because of it, people always have that burning rubber smell to me. In truth, it’s not just rubber, but that’s a convenient catch-all for the jumble of perfumes and polymers, synthetic fibres and accumulated soot, which remind me your typical self-styled human is maybe not so human after all.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Just a bit stuffy.”

  “Go on then.”

  As I’m reaching for the handle, the man says, “What happened to your wrist?”

  I, too, notice the red rim beyond my sleeve. “Oh,” I say, thinking quickly. “Painting a mate’s house.”

  The man is about to say something else when the rain surges against the windscreen. We brake in a blur of rear lights, slow to a halt.

  I breathe in the cool air. The man pulls out his phone, sends a message.

  At least it looks like he’s lost interest in me, which is a relief. What was it Magda said? “For a moment, I thought I might have to kill you.”

  I can’t help but smile.

  The rain rushes against the side of the truck, leaks in through the window. The man gestures for me to wind it back up again.

  “Sorry, mate,” he says. “You’ll have to put up with my stink.”

  But it’s not just in my interest. If you knew what I was, you’d want the window wide open, come rain or shine. The pair of us would sit here drenched, if you knew the odds. Not that you’d have picked me up in the first place. Friend—you would have, you should have, speeded up. Called the cops, alerted the military. They’d have had their helicopter gunships out in no time, bearing down on me, all guns blazing, chewing up the pavement as I fled from the forces of righteousness.

  Because you never know who, or what, you might pick up these days.

  2

  Be aware then, be warned. This is how it begins: the signs, the symptoms.

  Lying there like a wounded thing. Wheezing, fevered, shivery. I was thick with phlegm, my legs lead-heavy. Laid out, bowled over, I was a sick, sick, sick boy.

  But of course, it could have been anything.

  “Put it there,” said Summer. “Not there, there.” She had on her best Funk Me boob tube, low-slung jeans. She’d raided her mum’s makeup drawer again, with the opposite effect than intended: she looked about ten years old, although she was pushing thirteen.

  “Drink this.” She lifted the warm mixture to my lips. It burned the roof of my mouth.

  “What,” I gasped, “is that?”

  “Honey, brandy, water,” said one of the wee ones.

  “Pepper,” said another.

  “Curry powder,” added a third.

  “Curry?”

  “It was in one of those Ayurvedic books,” said Summer. “You know, from India.” She shrugged. “Maybe I got the amounts wrong. Anyway, it said you’re to have plenty of liquid. And eat. Here, we made you boiled eggs.”

  “With soldiers,” added a weenie. They lifted the tray onto my lap and looked at me expectantly.

  “Just . . . leave it here, okay. I’m not too hungry right now.”

  “But the book said . . . ”

  “Liquid . . . is good. But some water, okay? Now I need to sleep.”

  “You need some peace and quiet,” said Summer. She began to usher the others out. Just before she disappeared, she turned back to me. “I’ll make sure they don’t bother you.” I nodded, closed my eyes.

  A glass was being laid beside my bed but I pretended to still be asleep. The rustle of the beanbag, the hiss as someone sat down.

  “Vereesh,” she said. Not Summer. Ma.

  She leant forward with grim-faced intent, the laughing eyes I’d become so accustomed to back to their hard slate-grey.

  “They said they found you in the dip,” she said. “How on earth did you end up there?”

  And I, too, despite that great stretch of time, was back to where we began. “Don’t know,” I said. This was no time for evasions, appeals for sympathy.

  “Unconscious, they said. Had to carry you back. You can’t remember how you ended up there?” I shook my head. She looked exasperated. “Well what’s the last you can remember?” Her American accent pierced the BBC English she had perfected over the years.

  “I’d been do
wn the town,” I said. “Getting my stuff together. Got the bus back. I remember . . . ” I was straining now. “Taking the bags back into the room.” We both looked—there they still were, resting against my half-packed rucksack. “And then . . . ” I shook my head.

  “And were you feeling poorly before that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did . . . ” I noticed her bottom lip had a wee tremble. “Did anyone give you anything, Vereesh? To eat? To drink?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not the night before? This week? Come on, honey, someone must have stood you a pint down the Ku on Thursday.”

  “Ma . . . ”

  “Do you have stomach cramps?”

  I shook my head.

  “There’s been no blood when you go to the toilet? Palpitations? What are your symptoms?”

  I explained.

  “Sounds like some kind of . . . flu to me.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Vereesh, you’ve never been sick.”

  “I’ve had colds.”

  “No, you have not,” she said. “Not even when you were a baby. All that time we were in India, not so much as diaper rash. It actually began to worry me; I took you to a doctor. He looked at me like I was mad.” Her expression began to soften. “Maybe it’s a sign—now you’re going away. My little toad is all grown up.”

  “Ma.”

  “If you need me you’ll call?”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “And you’ll remember our code?”

  “Ma.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just a crazy old bird . . . ” She smiled, leaned over, laid the back of her hand against my fevered brow.

  “Hot,” she said. “Hot!”

  3

  I caught the coach from Sunderland Central.

  Ma was there. Even Clive had made it.

  “You’re sure you’re better,” said Ma.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  The driver opened the trunk. I handed him my rucksack. “Take care,” said Ma. “Keep safe.”

  “It’s only London, Ma,” I said, “not the Middle East.”

  “Big city though, big man,” said Clive. “Watch yourself.”

  “Here,” said Ma. She pressed something into my hand. The Swami, with his white bushy beard, his brown face grinning like he’d eaten all the pies, stared sublimely up at me amidst a nest of beads. She had given me her mala.

  “Ma. I can’t take this.”

  “I know you’ve . . . moved on,” she said, “but I thought now you were going away it would be good for you to have something familiar, from home . . .”

  “Ma.”

  “Please, Vereesh . . .” She smiled. “Sorry, I mean Matt.”

  The bus started up. “I’d better get going.”

  “Go on then,” she said. She closed my hand around the mala. She gave me a big, long hug. “Write,” she said.

  “I’ll e-mail.”

  The coach whisked along the A1. The statue of Angel of the North, grand and lonely on its hill by the motorway, loomed above us as red as fire, as red as rust.

  I pulled out the mala, made the Swami spin between my fingers.

  “What’s that?” asked the girl across the aisle. She was from the estates—tracksuit bottoms and boob tube. Hair pulled back and—a flash of stainless steel between her lips—tongue stud.

  “A mala,” I said.

  “A what?”

  I knew better than to explain. “Just a lucky charm,” I said.

  “What do you want one of those for?”

  “My mum gave it to me,” I said. “I’m off to university.”

  “What you studying?”

  I hesitated. “Theology.”

  She snorted. “What you want to bother with that for? Are you a priest or something?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m just interested is all. About the way humans have tried to make sense of stuff. But it’s almost the opposite of philosophy, which reduces everything to a kind of . . . nothingness. Religion . . . reaches for the stars, if you like.”

  The girl seemed unimpressed. “If you’re not going to be a priest, then how are you going to get a job?”

  I shrugged. I’d never really thought about that.

  “I got into the Royal Free,” she said.

  “Royal Free?”

  “Aye.” She looked at me like I was thick. “The teaching hospital. Trainee nurse. They pay your fees and lodging and you get five grand a year.” She put on her headphones and picked up a copy of Glamour.

  I turned around for a last look at the Angel but it was long gone.

  4

  LOST in London.

  I’d reeled from the bus station, senses blaring, and by the time I’d got myself together again I had utterly no idea where I was or how I’d got there.

  Rucksack heaving, I strode along the mansion streets, trying to look like I knew where I was going, put off from asking by the fuck-off expressions of the passers-by. I kept fiddling with my phone, but the message was still the same: there would be no Google Maps unless I could find a hotspot. My meagre data allowance was already used up.

  “Big city, big man,” Clive had said. And now here I was, lost in its heart. Lost in its guts.

  A main road, a high brick wall. Then: black railings, soldiers in red. I finally twigged, a gleeful grin smeared across my face. I sneezed.

  “Bless you.”

  “Ta.” I wiped my sticky hand down the side of my jeans.

  “Where are you from, son?”

  “Sunderland.” That wasn’t the whole truth, but I guessed he would never have heard of Hebdon-Le-Hole.

  “Sun Der Land. Is that near Scot Land?”

  “Aye,” I said. After all, he wasn’t far off. “It’s about seventy miles south of the Scottish border.”

  The man looked relieved. “And you’ve just arrived?” He nodded towards my rucksack.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And you thought you’d check out the sights? We’ve been here since Saturday and can’t get enough of them. This is our second trip to your palace.”

  “Aye,” I said. “Well, actually . . . ” I felt my cheeks begin to burn. “No. To tell the truth, I’m lost.”

  An explanation. A consultation. A Texan tourist with a functioning smartphone.

  “Good luck, son.” His generous smile. His firm handshake. “God bless.”

  I was back on course.

  I threw my rucksack on my bed. My room wasn’t much—I stretched my arms out and they could almost touch both walls—but at least it was all mine. Enough with sharing: for the first time since I was a nipper, I had a proper place to myself.

  With a view, too. I looked down at the crowd gathered around the bus stop, in all their colours and cultures. Back home, me and the other residents of the commune, or “fucking hippies” to the locals, were about as colourful as it got. Not that anyone other than a local would ever have called me a hippy—I’d long since had my hair shorn to a close buzz, got into the skater thing—but I was a bit of a stoner, mind.

  I took out my baccy, rolled myself a joint. Thin and tight—I didn’t know where my next stash would come from.

  The cough caught on the first drag. It started light, a little stutter I couldn’t clear. I chanced another pull at the joint but now it came back tenfold, a real wheezing cough that bent me like a reed. I had to hang onto the desk as it shook through me, and when it had subsided that all too familiar hot-cold feverish feeling lingered.

  So I wasn’t entirely better then, but I’d known this when I’d insisted that I was. After all, I wasn’t going to miss the start of uni, was I?

  I sat down on the mattress and rested the joint on the windowsill. Dug down to the bottom of the bag and pulled out the mala, let the Swami swing pendulum-like between my fingers.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Shit. I looked around for somewhere to hide the joint. In a moment of madness, I thought about flicking it out of the window but
instead pinched its smouldering tip and shoved it into the desk drawer. I stuffed the mala back into my bag and waved the smoke away.

  “Aye?” No answer. I ushered the last blue-grey wisps outside and opened the door. A man stood there, smiling.

  “I am sorry to interrupt you, but I saw you arrive,” he said. “I am your neighbour, Daniel.”

  Daniel had just arrived from Ghana. If I thought I’d had it tough navigating the big city for the first time, Daniel’s phlegmatic account humbled me. The poor lad had never used escalators before, let alone rode on the Underground, yet he seemed remarkably unperturbed.

  “Yah.” He grinned. “I must admit I waited a little bit to see how it was done, and when I finally stepped onto the stairs I held on tight. But then this man pushed me. I was standing on the wrong side! This city will take some getting used to . . . ”

  “You’re not wrong there,” I said. “How about escaping this madhouse, going for a pint?”