The Poison People

by Alex Makepeace

  “But then I saw the man in the safety suit in Hebdon. Like you, Josh, dressed like that, in your safety stuff. So I thought maybe I’m not mad, maybe it is something else. Please.” I looked at the three of them. “Tell me. Tell me what it is.”

  “Poor boy,” said Akka.

  “He knows nothing,” said Magda.

  “Guess he hasn’t been following the news,” said Kobro. “Which explains a lot. No, my friend. You are not mad. Okay? It’s a crazy world out there and you are right slap-bang in the middle of it, but you are not mad.” He pursed his lips, made a sucking sound. “But you’re dead right to say you’re infectious: what you are carrying is a virus, okay? Variola vera. More commonly known as smallpox.”

  He looked at me, waiting for some kind of reaction. They all were. Even the old man was surveying me through those hollow pits.

  “I’ve . . . ” I remembered the girl in the common room with tangled hair. “The smallpox attack in America. It’s just an excuse . . . ”

  The black railings. The marching soldiers. The American tourist with his wide-open smile.

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

  “Vereesh,” said Kobro. “Still with us, buddy?”

  17

  I woke on my front, my face buried in the pillow. Panicked for a moment as I tried to work out where I was, pieced it together: the bright, blurred TV, the creaking steel bed frame, the hollow rattle of the old man sleeping.

  I turned over. The blinds were drawn, the room dark except for the TV—a window into another room. Young people gathered together on a sofa, talking. Big Brother.

  Raising my hands to my face, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. Realised: I was no longer shackled. Rotating my sore wrists, I looked around the room, but there were no obvious changes, no guard at the door.

  I laid my feet on the cold floor. Taking care for some unexpected injury, I stood up. My clothes were folded on the chair. On top of them sat the mala, the Swami smiling up at me. So that was how Kobro knew.

  Taking care not to disturb the old man, I began to get dressed.

  It didn’t surprise me that the door wasn’t locked, but I nonetheless lowered the handle as softly as possible.

  It opened onto the first floor of a house. An ordinary Victorian house by the look of things. Nothing special, not too grand. Ikea prints on the cream walls, a hardy blue-grey carpet that looked like it had seen better days.

  As I crept down the stairs, I could hear talk coming from a room on the ground floor. Fortunately not the one by the front door, but towards the back—a kitchen maybe.

  I leant over the banister. The door was closed. Okay. I made for the front door. It, too, was unlocked. I eased it open.

  The streets were full of foreigners, the stores signed in Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Russian. I passed a Bulgarian bar, a Chinese noodle takeaway, a taxi office fronted by Hassidic Jews. Grocers laid their wares out upon tables along the pavement, tables piled high with tomatoes and chillies, plantains and coriander, mint and courgettes; stews topped with green and red roasted peppers bubbled in the window of Kurdish restaurants; nameless, nationless youths sat boxed, on display in internet cafes.

  I pulled up my hood, hunched my shoulders, took care to weave between the pedestrians without causing offence.

  The Sudanese pushing the buggy, the Jamaican pensioners dawdling outside a bookie’s; the gypsy women with their billowing ankle-length skirts, the Polish builders flecked with paint, Aussie backpackers. I realised: isn’t that what everyone in this Babel is up to? Minding their own business, their own world, their own complex histories, language, culture? They didn’t want any trouble either.

  I fitted in perfectly.

  I came to a park. Dark, locked up, but there was a gap in the fence. I ducked through it, weaved between the trees. I heard something and crouched down.

  Here, like an animal, as I had learned, I waited.

  A figure stepped out from behind a tree. I tensed, ready to run for it. But something told me to hold on, hold on . . .

  Another figure approached him. They embraced.

  I watched them, these silent silhouettes moulding, fumbling. One bowed low to the other, dropping to his knees. He tugged at the man’s flies, gently at first but with increasing urgency. Helped by the other, he unloosened the belt, pulling the jeans apart. He plunged his face into the gap. The standing man gasped.

  I moved on, out of the woods, into an open space by a boating lake. I saw them all now—moving sluggishly along the path, loitering under lamplight, sitting at the far end of a darkened bench. An almost courtly ritual.

  So I was not alone, but neither was I afraid.

  I moved through a kids’ area, towards some kind of adventure playground. I climbed over the fence and scrambled up a small artificial hill. I squatted down at the summit while below me the traffic rumbled, the gays embraced.

  In the distance, the towers of London twinkled.

  “But that’s not all,” I had said to Kobro. “Not all of it.”

  He grinned. “Do you believe in God, Vereesh?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know.

  “Do you believe in the theory of evolution?”

  I thought about this. Yes.

  “Do you believe science has all the answers?”

  All the answers? “No,” I said. “I mean, I think there’s an explanation for everything, but I don’t think we know all the answers yet.”

  He nodded. “That’s about right. It’s certainly true of medicine, though some of those guys, they’re . . . well, they’re pretty arrogant. And hey, who can blame them? Ever since Pasteur they’ve been hunting down those microscopic organisms like big game hunters. Not bad after two millennia of quackery, eh?”

  I shrugged.

  “Man, you have no idea. Koch. Jenner. Sabin. These guys are my heroes. Do you realise how many lives have been saved? How the world has been transformed over the past century? Jeesh . . . you really are an ungrateful sonofabitch.” He laughed. “Anyway. There’s been this great leap. This giant step forward. Disease is on the retreat across the globe.

  “But, don’t forget—those trembling strings of DNA are children of Darwin too. They have one imperative, and one only. Like you, Vereesh, like all of us—they want to survive.”

  The old man began to cough. He started softly, as if something was caught in his throat, but it soon became more insistent; a forlorn, pitiless hack. Magda went over and sat him up. She rubbed his back, coaxed him forward. After a desperate struggle, he managed to bring something up.

  He sat back against the pillow, exhausted, while Magda dabbed a tissue around his mouth, tidied his thin white hair.

  “You ever heard of Mary Mallon?”

  I shook my head.

  “Typhoid Mary?”

  Maybe.

  “New York, in the 1900s. She worked as a cook in wealthy households. Infected twenty-two people with the Typhus bacterium. Bless her.” He smiled. “She actually infected more people as she stayed on in the households to look after them.”

  In those days, he said, people didn’t realise you could be infectious and not show any symptoms. But that was Mary. It took a sanitary engineer to finally track her down. Mary did her utmost to evade arrest, terrified of the consequences. Quite right, too: she ended her days locked up, isolated and still infectious.

  “It added a new word to our language,” said Kobro. “Asymptomatic. We realised disease had developed a cunning survival strategy.”

  Nevertheless, over the last century medicine had perfected ways to identify asymptomatics, to isolate them if necessary. Protect the community.

  But then, towards the tail end of the 1980s, they began to notice a new phenomenon.

  “Epstein first posited the hypothesis after an outbreak of an enterovirus—polio—in northern Bengal. They’d considered the area polio-free for generations and there was very little cross-pollination—travel, to you—among the affected population. But up it spr
ung, seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Eventually, Epstein concluded the virus had been asymptomatic in someone who had passed it on to their child, grandchild, or even further down the line. The virus had, in effect, managed to join its genes with our own.”

  He sat back, shaking his head in wonder. “An epidemiologist’s worst fucking nightmare. How the fuck do you model that? We’d long been aware of abnormal genes passing down the generations—the haemophilia in your royals, for instance—but external organisms employing the exact same strategy? And there’s more. Turns out these carriers, they’re . . . You’ve never been ill, you said?”

  “I didn’t say that. I mean, I can’t remember.”

  “Mumps? Measles? A cold for Christ’s sake?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

  “Come on, Vereesh, you know.”

  “No,” I insisted.

  “Their behaviour too,” he continued. “These new folks . . . they talk of blackouts, of visions. They sense things . . . There’s something about them, a kind of . . . survival instinct that in the right, or wrong, circumstances appears to override everything else, every human, every moral constraint . . . They become, in effect, not unlike the bug they’re hosting. You know what I’m talking about, Vereesh?”

  I looked into his watery blue eyes.

  “Of course you do,” he continued. “You see, that’s what really has us worried. Not just the implications for fighting disease, though they are truly alarming, but what it means for us all. The indivisibility of the human genome, right? Because, let’s face it, you’re not exactly, not wholly human, are you, Vereesh? And that’s a problem.”

  18

  “Big city,” she said. “Big enough to get lost in.” I didn’t hear Magda coming, but I wasn’t surprised that she had.

  “You’re like me,” I said. “That’s why you don’t wear anything.”

  “More or less,” said Magda, sitting beside me, pulling her legs up to her chest. “I’d never thought about it before—that I never got sick. Kobro reckons it’s because the bug part of us is so strong, it kills off anything else that tries to get in. That’s why he was asking, you see, about any illnesses.”

  “And Akka, too. The old man.”

  “Vladimir,” said Magda. “Yes. Quite a little company we have become.”

  “But not Kobro.”

  “No.”

  “Have you all got . . . the same?”

  Magda gave me a sideways look. “What, the pox, you mean? Hell no, baby. You’re special. Have you any idea how many bugs are out there? Hundreds, thousands, millions maybe. Nature is very busy, quite a powerhouse. It’s not every day someone like you turns up, someone with a real honest-to-God superbug. You’re the golden boy, first division. Congratulations.”

  Against the blanket-grey sky, a plane, lit up like a winking electric cross, charted a course along the Thames and towards Heathrow. Another, more distant, began to follow its path.

  “What’s going to . . . happen?”

  She gave me that look again, a small smile. “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes it’s good not to know,” she said. “That way maybe you can look forward to a happy ending. But for who, Vereesh? For you? For me? We both want one for ourselves, but everyone else? Do they want us to survive, spreading our nasty germs? I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does—Kobro even. Kobro especially.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Dr Joshua Kobro. A big man in the OMS, World Health Organization. Or so he says. I don’t know.” She shrugs. “Maybe he’s just a lab technician. Anyway, he seems to be able to pull the strings. He got me out before they got to me, that’s what counts. He keeps me safe.”

  “Got you out of where?”

  She pushed her hair back from her face, silver in the night light. “How old are you, Vereesh?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “A baby. That’s sweet . . . I would have liked a baby.” She pinched my cheek. “How about I adopt you?” She laughed. “That’s funny, when you think about it—you’re the child. Then there’s me and Josh. We’re like the parents, right? And then Akka and Vladimir. The old people. Grandparents. What’s that family in the movies? The one with Frankenstein, Dracula?”

  “The . . . Addams Family?”

  “Addams. Yeah, that’s us. The Addams Family. All we need is that butler guy. The tall one. Lurch. Isn’t that him?”

  “Magda. So you don’t know what’s going to happen?”

  She put on a straight face. “Such a serious young man. But seriousness is not a bad thing in a boy. My boy would be like that. Studious, a scholar.” She nodded as she said, “It’s a serious place, this world.”

  We sat smoking a while. I’d almost given up getting any sense out of her when she said, “There’s no game plan, baby. No great strategy. People like us, creatures like you and me and Akka, we’re grateful for whatever we can get. It is our destiny, it’s in our genes, to survive. We do what we must, whatever we must. You get that, don’t you, baby? You’re not so bad at it yourself, so far.”

  I got it, but I felt a tremendous sorrow begin to gather, a terrible sense of injustice, of loss.

  “Never mind,” she said, sensing this. She tweaked my nose. “We have each other, don’t we? All we need is a Lurch, no?”

  19

  LEPERS

  Harringay was the perfect place for us—even its name was a sleight of hand, a word inside a word. The centre of the London Borough of Haringey, Harringay, sat between two underground stations but was out of sight of both, its rows of red brick Victorian terraces more like a northern town than London tan.

  All of London was there though, all of new London anyway—the Middle Easterners, the Eastern Europeans; the Asians, the Africans, the Chinese.

  The Kurds and Turks had staked their claim first, mind, hence the Selale restaurant with its mountain scenes and the old ladies who sat on a raised dais kneading dough, Yasar Halim’s shelves stacked with flatbread and sweetmeats, the electric pink facades of the flower shops bubbling with balloons; juice bars, barbers, photographers, the men’s clubs that lined the main drag.

  They liked a march too, those folks. Usually it was for Kurdistan, or Ocalan, or some other moustachioed Stalin lookalike, waving their old-style red flags and shaking their fists to urgent, incomprehensible slogans.

  Magda said they gathered at the civic centre for some speeches before going off to do their shopping, but this march was a bit different. For starters, there were plenty of headscarves—which you didn’t tend to see with the Kurds, whose women were more likely to sport tummy studs—and while there was a spattering of hammers and sickles, there were also plenty of Stop the War-type banners over the shoulders of students and crusties, politicals and religious types. The Middle East, Magda reckoned, and wasn’t that me down there, turning around on tippy-toes on the lookout for the sexy Socialist Worker?

  We were watching them from the bedroom at the front. I wasn’t allowed out again until my beard had grown, and it was a stubborn bugger, thicker in some patches than others, a spicy blend of black and red.

  “Where’d you get that from?” Kobro asked as I’d tucked into breakfast, meaning the red bits. I’d shrugged.

  “Vereesh, buddy.” He’d laid a gloved hand on my shoulder. “You are a fucking international man of mystery, aren’t you. Your mum. At least you must know something about her?”

  “I . . . ” I thought of Ma, seeing me off at the bus station, pressing the mala into my hand. Proud old hippy, job done. “I’d like to know how she is, how they all are.”

  Kobro looked pained. “You’ve got to get it into that fat head of yours, everything has changed. Believe me, the authorities would know the moment you called, mailed, messaged. If she is okay, and I’m sure she is, she’ll be under close watch. Nah. The only thing you can do is hold tight for now, my man, and remember—it’s not just you, there’s the rest of us.”

 
“There’s nothing online,” I said. “I mean, nothing true.” There was tons of bollocks, of course. Not just on your usual conspiracy sites and blogs, but the BBC, CNN. Lots on Britain’s Bio Terror Outrage. The Silent Killer In Our Midst. Empty schools, parks, zoos. Fears of a terror cell among university students, the targeting of a Camden nightclub. Arrests had been made as part of an ongoing investigation. The US was demanding a crackdown.

  There had been two outbreaks in the UK—London, and Stockport, near Manchester. Four people had been infected: Daniel Addo and three unnamed females. The picture in America was worse. Hundreds of people diagnosed or under observation. Arthur Penn, who was apparently in a serious but stable condition, was all over the American media, pictured fat and happy one Thanksgiving.

  The three British females (women? girls?) were as yet unnamed. They were all in intensive care and said to be “very poorly”.

  Daniel was the only one in England identified. He was pictured as he appeared on his student ID—upright, serious, hopeful.

  And now, according to the media anyway, dead.

  Daniel. Danny. My first new friend, dead. But how could that be when I could still picture you smiling? Your broad grin as you passed back the whisky?

  I wouldn’t, I couldn’t believe it.

  Yet it was the one detail among all that bullshit I suspected was true.

  But there was no talk of Ma. Of Hebdon. Of Summer, the beastie in the bio-suit I glimpsed between the trees. And no word of me, neither, which somehow seemed more sinister than the untruths being peddled by the media.

  “I went on one of those once,” I said, meaning the demo.

  “You, baby boy?” said Magda, lighting a fag. “Political? I don’t believe it. I thought it was all your Swampy.”

  “Swami.”

  “Yeah,” said Magda. “I never had you for a demonstrator.”

  “I could demonstrate,” I said.