The Poison People

by Alex Makepeace

  I put on the dressing gown, opened the door, headed upstairs. They were both there, in my room, Akka and Magda sitting on Vlad’s bed. It was Magda who was making the noise, her shoulders hunched, quaking, her black hair straggled over her puffy, tear-streaked face, Akka’s sparrow arm around her shoulders. Akka, who looked at me and said, “He’s dead.”

  And it was Akka who took control. Despite her age and apparent frailty, she was sinewy-strong enough to help us carry Vladimir down into the kitchen, where she instructed us to lay him flat on the floor.

  “You go rest now,” she told Magda. “The boy can help me.” She told me to get some bin liners. “Now,” she said, “tear them so they open.”

  She laid the liners on the bare kitchen floor and started running some water into a bowl. She began to sing a quiet song. It sounded Indian or Eskimo or something. “Help me lift this,” she said, meaning the soapy water. “Good boy.”

  She crouched beside the corpse, began to remove his pyjama top. Looked at me to help her. “It was a good end,” she said as we lifted him up, rolled the sleeves down his limp arms. “To die in bed an old man, that is the best you can hope for.” She allowed herself a pixie smile. “Unless you are an old woman.”

  We rolled down his pyjama bottoms. “Ah,” she said, looking frankly at his genitalia. “Like he said: a Jew! Was a bad time for Jews! Here, help me roll him.” We rolled the corpse onto the sheeting and Akka began to sponge him down. “There are some candles over there—light, please,” she said. She began singing again as she washed the body. I turned out the lights as instructed and placed the candles around us. When she had finished drying Vladimir and had covered him with a sheet, she said,

  “Now you can go.”

  “What about you?”

  “No, no,” she said, still squatting there with the ease of an oriental. “I will stay. Otherwise the Kirkonväki.”

  “The what?”

  “He will become Kirkonväki, how you said it? Alive but dead.”

  I looked at her, but she was perfectly serious. “You’re sure?”

  “Go, go.” She waved me away.

  As I headed back up the stairs, she started up again, a kind of Cherokee chant, it sounded like.

  I lay there, looking at Vlad’s empty bed, thinking of him finally at rest, this strange old lady singing her Indian songs and keeping the Kirkonväki at bay. To die in bed an old man, she said, the best you can hope for.

  Unless you are an old woman.

  I heard Akka’s voice the next morning, along with the low tones of Kobro, obviously discussing what to do.

  “Ah,” he said as I entered the kitchen. He stepped back and slipped his mask and gloves on. “I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”

  “You knew him better,” I said, looking down at Vladimir’s corpse.

  “Yes, of course, of course,” said Kobro, looking around the room. His eyes were bleary and he stunk of booze.

  “Are you drunk?”

  “No,” he said. “Well, when I heard last night I had a drink or three. What are you, my keeper?”

  “Why don’t you wear safety stuff with Akka?” I asked.

  “What’s this? Twenty questions?”

  “Because I’m not so dangerous like you, boy,” said Akka. “I just make people shiver and shake. It clears up. You?” She made a cutting gesture across her throat.

  “Well, there you have it,” said Kobro. “And there was me being discreet,” he said. “Erysipelas. A member of the great streptococcus nexus. Though it could have been very different, couldn’t it, my lady?” I looked at Akka, but she seemed to have missed this, or else ignored it. “We were talking about what to do with Vladimir,” he said.

  I looked at Akka. “What you said last night, about Kirkonväki. You don’t really mean . . . ”

  Kobro let out a long sigh. “More folk tales, Akka? Don’t go scaring the children.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Up for a trip out tonight?”

  I found Magda in the front room, bleary-eyed. She was sitting on the couch in her sweatsuit and fluffy slippers, cradling a steaming mug of coffee. She looked like she had been crying all night.

  “Are you . . . alright?”

  She nodded, sipping her drink. “What have they decided?” she said, sounding blocked up.

  “Kobro thinks . . . the river.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s sensible.”

  “I was . . . worried that he might be found.”

  She shrugged. “Have you ever seen a body that’s been in a river?”

  I shook my head.

  “You can’t recognise it. The water . . . ” She shook her head. “Is sensible. When?”

  “Tonight.”

  She nodded and laid the mug down. “Now,” she said, patting the seat beside her. “Come here.” I sat down. “Closer. That’s better.” She wrapped her arms around me, kissed the side of my head, reclined. “That’s good, baby,” she said. “I need to feel some life.”

  And so did I, to hear the beat of her heart against my ear; feel her living, breathing warmth. The softness of her breast, the rumble of her tummy. We held on to each other, rocking gently as if we were at sea.

  22

  “An ignominious end, eh?” Vladimir was dressed again, in old man’s, dead man’s clothes bought especially from Oxfam. We rolled him onto the sleeping bag and zipped it to the top. His face disappeared as Kobro pulled the flap down.

  “Better than before, in China,” I said.

  Kobro nodded. “You’ve got to hand it to him, the boy did well.”

  Vladimir had reached the shore, lain low. He had taken a succession of menial jobs. Learned the language, the way of things. After a couple of years, “Armenian Joe”, as he was known, managed to find work with the US Postal Service.

  Who was he by now? Not the young Soviet conscript, his head a confusion of slogans and sexual longing. Nor Kirkonväki, only the conscienceless germ keeping him going. He was something else—a new man.

  For years he pounded the beat until his evident intelligence, along with his taciturn, not to say unfriendly, attitude made him a natural candidate for the Returned Mail desk, a cubby hole buried at the very back of the vast clearing rooms where only the most determinedly undeliverable mail washed up. Here Vladimir would open it and try to work out what to do.

  He shredded ninety percent of the post. More often than not it originated from kids or crazy people. Sometimes it was more interesting—love letters, threats, pornography—which he would take home and add to his scrapbook.

  It was a kind of hobby, rearranging the letters from time to time. Over the years, the swelling collection became in turns a love story, tragedy, farce. The lives he wouldn’t, he couldn’t lead.

  Kobro found the heaving book in Vladimir’s room after he had made good his escape.

  “I was asked to keep an eye on an outbreak of dysentery at the old folks’ home,” said Kobro. “When I arrived, he had already flown the coop—must have figured what the blood test presaged. I caught up with him at the bus station. How he managed to make it that far, heaven knows, but the old instinct was still driving those brittle bones.” He laughs. “He even took a swing at me with his walking stick, the old bastard!”

  “Did he have any family?”

  “Would you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s one of my interests. Your answer is no. Your kind tend to travel light—families, contact with the rest of the world, would only place them at greater risk of being caught. But what I can’t figure out is where’s the evolutionary edge in that? Surely you want to spread your genes too, right? I mean, isn’t that the whole point? I asked Vlad and he said,” he put on a cod-Russian accent, “‘I had women’ but I wasn’t able to dig any deeper than that. Sex, the intimacy of sex, seems to fall into the region of risky behaviour, right? But at the same time how can you procreate? I know there are periods of low and high infectiousness, so maybe that’s a key. Or maybe that’s still a ki
nk nature has to iron out. Any ideas?”

  I thought of Jane, of Carol. “No,” I said.

  We waited until night to get the job done. Loaded the corpse into the back of the van and we were off, swaying through the dirty orange night. We travelled in silence. Even Kobro’s incessant hypothesising seemed to have dried up. But at least he could look forward to a proper burial, a proper ceremony surrounded by friends and family. I knew the rest of us were thinking: this is what will become of me, if I’m lucky, if I can evade capture—being strapped to a gurney, opened up “like one of those lab rats . . .”

  Kobro said we shouldn’t think about countries, governments, when talking about science—truth, as scientists see it, has no borders. People talk about a Jewish this, a Masonic that, he said, but it was science that was the real international conspiracy, convinced, like any dangerous cult, of its ultimate benefit to mankind.

  “Sure, there are conspiracies,” he said. “Just not the ones you expect.”

  London unravelled. Once past Canary Wharf, office blocks became few and far between, council estates faced trendy new warehouse-style apartment blocks across flat tracts of grassed-over land. There were real warehouses here once, and factories, but now just the cranes were left behind, bowed black against the gunmetal sky.

  We kept going, hugging the river, which grew wider by the minute. We turned into a slip road and passed industrial units, a scrap metal yard. We pulled into an empty, gravelled car park.

  “It was earmarked for the Olympics,” said Kobro, stopping the van and leaning over, “but they didn’t need it.”

  We piled out of the van and followed him up a path. It opened onto a huge concrete basin. “There’ll be apartments here,” he said. “More meat for the financial grinder. Whatever. What matters for us is that.” He pointed at the flat, pier-like structure that stretched into the river. “That’ll do nicely.”

  We went back to the van. Akka, who was to stay behind and call if anyone came, crouched down and pulled back the sleeping bag’s flap. She leant over and kissed Vlad’s waxy forehead, saying something in Finnish.

  “Okay.” She sat up. “You can take him now.”

  Kobro opened the back and we slid the corpse out. Magda was quietly efficient in her black bomber jacket, gloves and baseball cap. Her face was set serious, intent on the job at hand. There was none of the emotional wreckage I’d seen earlier that day. Kobro too, a balaclava covering the mask I knew he wore at all times when I was about, had none of the joker about him. But there was something about his eyes through that woollen letterbox: a kind of detached look I’d never noticed before, distracted as I usually was by his continuous chatter; his almost dead-end eyes, shut off from any real empathy. It was as if the man now taking hold of Vlad’s legs and turning to lead us up the path was not actually a human at all, but some kind of avatar controlled from a remote location.

  As if this was just another one of their experiments. I almost lost my grip. “Steady,” said Magda, and I managed to keep hold, to contain the rising sense of dread, my thing I felt beginning to trace its cold fingers along the inside of my guts. But this time, instead of trying to keep it down so it forced its way up and overwhelmed me, I let it explore a while because now I knew what it was, that whatever happened, it was there to protect me, to protect us both.

  We skirted around the outside of the basin, keeping to the shadows. We paused for a final check to ensure we were alone, then headed for the pier. We were moving quickly now, the Thames rushing below as black as ink.

  We arrived at the end.

  “Okay. One, two, three!” And Vlad was gone, swallowed whole by the hungry river, slipping between its smacking lips with barely a splash, a spittle of foam. Gone, but this was no time to dawdle: we were already hurrying back, into the dark.

  We travelled home as we came, largely in silence. I noticed Magda had begun to weep again, but more like a sullen, angry child, her fists clenched, than a grieving woman. I touched her shoulder but she shrugged me off. Akka too didn’t look like the powerful part-witch who had taken control last night, but just a tired old Scandinavian woman. Only Kobro seemed more upbeat. He turned the radio on, found some dance tunes.

  “I guess we should have said something,” he said as we approached our turnoff. “The Lord’s Prayer or something. But, you know, we had to get him under pretty quick. Maybe we should hold some kind of memorial dinner, some kind of wake for him. How does that sound?”

  I looked at the others but they were lost in their thoughts.

  Kobro was still going on about the fine feast we’d have as we got in.

  “It’ll be just like Thanksgiving,” he was saying. “I know, I’ll get some apple pie. Have you ever tried apple pie? I mean real apple pie?” He was waiting for my answer. I shook my head. “Well, I’ll have to see if I can get some . . . ” But I was not listening, instead I was taking notice of his eyes, which remained almost as dead as before.

  “We have to go to bed now,” said Magda abruptly. She gestured towards the front door.

  “Ah . . . ” said Kobro, who lived in a WHO apartment in Kensington. “I get the message. But tomorrow? Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. Magda closed the door. She looked at me, her eyes still puffy, but clearer now.

  “Akka wants some time alone,” she said. “I’ve given her your room. You can stay in mine. Is that alright?”

  23

  This form shifting beside me . . . it was morning and I was waking up next to Jane, the sun behind the thin curtains, the sound of traffic outside, and that fucking crazy, psychedelic dream finally over. What the fuck was it we took last night? I blinked. I blinked again.

  Those varnished, absinthe-green nails . . . a wave of nausea washed over me . . . nothing to do with my thing. This was all human.

  Those were not Jane’s fingers but Magda’s. Magda who, as I lay in Akka’s bed, had climbed in after coming back from cleaning her teeth, who said, now no funny business, young man. Turn over, there. Goodnight, baby.

  Goodnight.

  The nightmare rolled on.

  I remembered Vladimir slipping into the river. Gobbled up in his dead man’s clothes. Akka’s ghost-white face in the back of the van, how old she looked, and she knew it too. Is that what we were all doing? Waiting until it was our turn to be taken by the Thames?

  I thought of Ma. How she was, what she would want me to do.

  Take care of yourself, she would say first of all. Don’t worry about me. Well, I’m sorry, Ma, I thought. I do. I do worry about you. I love you, you fucking dippy hippy.

  Even if there were times I thought you were crazy. Well, not anymore.

  “Who’s crazy?” asked Magda.

  “Sorry, speaking out loud.”

  “Who’s crazy?”

  “Oh. I was just thinking . . . about this. There was a time, shortly before you zapped me with that gun thing, that I thought I was crazy.”

  “Ya,” she said. “Is natural.”

  “How about you? Was your experience similar?” There was a long pause. “Magda?”

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I asked: was your experience similar.”

  “No,” she said. “It was not. I mean, my experience . . . there was no sanity in my experience to begin with, baby, so it would be difficult to . . . distinguish. With the insane, I mean.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “What’s this?” She grabbed hold of my morning glory. I yelped.

  “Baby!” I felt a knee in my back. “I said no funny business!” She propelled me out of the bed and onto the floor. I tried to cover myself up as Magda sat there, laughing.

  “What all this?” Akka had come in with some mugs on a tray.

  “It’s our boy,” said Magda, still laughing. “He crept into my bed overnight!”

  “You didn’t!” said Akka.

  “No I bloody didn’t!” I protested. “She did!”
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br />   “Akka, darling,” said Magda, “do I look that desperate?”

  Akka shook her head, smiling. “Where I come from,” she said, laying down the tray, “they have a saying: count yourself lucky if you wake up with the same person you went to bed with.”

  Between Sweden and Finland sits an archipelago of low-lying islands that from above looks like a great vase has been dropped upon the hard sea and shattered into a thousand tiny pieces across its surface. Some of the islands are so close together they’re connected by a series of bridges, others you can walk between when the sea freezes over in the depths of mid-winter. But a few are flung out too far for bridges, and the ice at that distance is notoriously unstable.

  It was on one such far-flung island, Oosterholma, that Akka was raised.

  Technically Oosterholma was still a leper colony, although by the time Akka was born in the 1940s, the illness was extremely rare, accounting only for an elderly couple, whose infection dated back to the turn of the century, and an unfortunate Moroccan sailor who had been diagnosed while his ship was docked in Helsinki. Otherwise the population was able-bodied.

  “In the spring,” Akka said, “it was good for hunting. That was my favourite time. We ate much. We ate till we got fat.” The islanders would take to their boats and harpoon as many migrating pilot whales as possible, securing them to the sides of their vessels and tapping them for their essential oils while still out at sea.

  They would rig up a great canvas bath between the boats, even during blustery weather, and fill it with the whale fat, blood and oil, stripping naked and rolling in the thick mix before scrambling back on board. They believed the oils helped forestall their condition—the leprosy of their parents, grandparents—which they considered in remission. It had always been thus, and hadn’t it always worked?

  The gods, too, had always been. The malevolent sea monster, Iku-Turso. Ahti, god of the depths or giver of fish. Nakki, the fearsome spirit of pools, wells and bridges. Kirkonväki, the unlamented walking dead. Mielikki, wife of Tapio, the goddess of the forest. Otso, the spirit of the bear. Louhi, the matriarch of Pohjola, hostess of the Underworld. Loviator, the blind daughter of Tuoni, the personification of death and mother of the nine diseases. Jesus, the newcomer, the sky god, the Sainted One, who was accorded his time and obsequies each Sunday.