Over the following few days she had systematically rid the harbour of straggling corpses. Although many had already gone, maybe moving back inland, there had still been some left, dragging their feet across the concrete in the rain. She had always waited until they were separated before moving out quickly, kitted out in her waders and leather jacket in case of attack. Once they had been dispatched she had returned home, pulling the shop’s shutter down quickly to stop any that may have spotted her. When she had been sure the harbour was free of threat she had begun the grim task of clearing the bodies, dragging them over to the harbour edge and pushing them in, whilst also saying a few words for anyone she had recognised. When all the bodies had finally gone the rain had done its share of the work, mercifully washing the blood away. From then on Eliza had stayed inside, slowly going through her dwindling food supplies and trying not to think what the future held for a person alone in a world of the dead.
And then, a week later, she had heard the yelling.
“At first I thought you might be Isaac, but I had never even heard him raise his voice. And the arguments, both sides, they were just...manic. Violent too, from the sounds of it,” she said, limping back inside the house.
“Marcus,” I said, helping her into the study, where she sat down gratefully in the armchair. I pulled up a small stool to rest her leg on, adjusting the support bandages that I had finally managed to apply after all of the carnage in the hallway.
“Whoever it was, they were loud, angry... and I had to presume also dangerous. I suppose I was right,” she said ruefully rubbing her ankle. “Anyway, I watched you for a day as you went around the house, turning it upside down. I had no idea what you were looking for in the house of an old man...”
“We just wanted to know a little bit about him, before we could...” I started.
“You wanted to know, we just wanted to do the smart thing and finish the bastard off,” said Marcus, sitting nonchalantly on the windowsill and looking out across the sea. With the sun glinting on the crests of waves the little port looked almost peaceful, even though we now knew that under the waves the dead still walked, trudging through silt and stones for as long as their bodies held together. Maybe Marcus was trying to spot them, to find a new challenge to test his mettle against.
“Yes, I wanted to know more and I still say it was worth it,” I replied, opening a tin of beans and passing it to Eliza along with a fork washed in rainwater. Eliza frowned at me and glanced towards the window before digging the fork into the beans, eating slowly and quietly.
“Isaac was a polite man, as far as I could tell from the few times I saw him. He bought a pair or two of walking boots from me over the years. I asked him once who he went walking with, just some general shop banter, and he told me that he liked to go hiking with a few books in his rucksack as his only company. I don’t recall him mentioning his family, or the... girl... that girl he’s buried with now. He was clearly a very private man. What an unfair way to end a life. I suppose everyone who died... all of them... well, I don’t know whether to be glad I’m still alive or not.”
She continued to eat, staring down at the can as if trying to glean some answers from it. Although it seemed somewhat trivial after everything that had happened, I decided to ask her where we actually were, and where the harbour was situated. She gave me an answer but the name meant nothing to me. I had no frame of reference. The word drifted away like a piece of seaweed in my watery thoughts, never to be seen again.
As I watched her a question started to tickle the back of my mind but Cato was the one to raise it first, his voice drifting down from his perch on a pile of books.
“Why were you creeping into the house last night? Were you going to kill us?” His voice was thick with suspicion and I felt guilty by association for him asking the question, as Eliza had shared a lot with us since our first violent contact. She remained stony faced for a moment before finally replying.
“Maybe,” she finally said, still eating the beans as she watched me carefully. Marcus had turned back towards us from the window and I could tell from the way he was eyeing the food that he was becoming hungry too, so I opened another tin and passed it to him. He started to tip the contents into his gaping mouth, keeping an eye on the newcomer Eliza as he did it. When he had finished he passed the can back to me and folded his arms across his huge barrel-like chest. Eliza finished her own food and gently placed the tin on a side table. There was an icy tension in the room but Eliza soon started to speak again, to my relief.
“Well I must say that despite all your other problems, you do seem to know your first aid. My ankle definitely feels a lot better, I might even be able to walk on it,” she said. She still looked a bit ill at ease, sitting within our strange family unit. “I think,” she said after a few minutes, “I think you need to pick out a new name. It’ll certainly help me cope with this oddball situation a little better.”
“Who says we want you to stay in our situation?” said Marcus, his brow furrowing in disgust. “You just invited yourself in, ready to bludgeon us to death in our beds.”
“Only if it was necessary,” Eliza replied testily. “Thankfully it wasn’t in the end. I know you say you haven’t been here long but have you heard a word I’ve been saying? We might be the only people alive in this part of the world now. We didn’t meet in the best of circumstances and if you really want to be alone that’s fine, but for better or for worse and despite that horrendous attitude you sometimes display, I think it will be better for us in the long term if we stay together, at least for the time being. I know I was slowly going... crazy... by myself.”
I nodded; it definitely made sense. We had set out to find other people and in the grand scheme of things we could have found a lot worse. Eliza seemed honest, pragmatic and a survivor, definitely what I needed. I just hoped I had some skill or quality that she needed.
“All right, I’ll choose a name, if it’ll help,” I said, standing up. I walked over to a bookcase and ran my finger along the rows, trying to look for a name that would suit me. My eye was drawn to the faded flames on the spine of a battered paperback titled “Fahrenheit 451”. I flicked through the pages and found the name of the protagonist. It was as good a name as any.
“Guy, that’ll do,” I said, sitting back down. Marcus snorted and Cato started giggling but I ignored them. Eliza just shrugged, probably because there were more important things to think about in a situation like this than the suitability of someone's name. I looked over to Eliza and this time was able to ask a question before Cato was able to stick his oar in. “So you’d cleared the harbour... had you decided what you were going to do next? Were you just going to wait it out?”
She fidgeted in the seat, trying to get comfortable, although it was probably an emotional discomfort rather than a physical one, so eventually she levered herself gingerly to her feet and walked over to the window to look out over the harbour. Marcus fixed his eyes on her as she moved, baring his teeth like an animal.
“I didn’t have a plan, to be honest. After clearing the harbour I just drifted around my house aimlessly, eating a little, sleeping a little. When you showed up I wanted to talk to you, see what was going on, what the arguments were about... I never really knew but I think I’m more of a social creature than I thought. I mean, I haven’t got a husband, haven’t had a relationship for years but...” she said, sighing as she opened the window a little to let a fresh breeze into the room. Despite ridding ourselves of Isaac, there was still the lingering stench of his fall into decomposition. “I always had friends, a lot of friends. Some around here, some up in the town... I always saw at least one friend a day or at the very least spoke to them on the phone. I made sure of it, I suppose. I even chatted with the the people who were trying to escape the plague, as they waited for the boats. I’m sure I annoyed some of them but I always got a few good conversations. When you showed up, you became the only point of interest left. Maybe it would have been better if I’d approached open
ly in the day but after some of the things I’d heard I had no idea what was going on in here, I might have walked into a bloodbath. I just knew I couldn’t stay over there alone.”
It was a feeling I could well relate to, as no matter how much noise or banter the others were making, I still always felt isolated somehow.
“Well I’m happy, I mean, it’s good. We came to the mainland to find out what had happened and to try and meet someone new, so I’m glad you came over,” I replied. I smiled a little and for the first time Eliza fleetingly smiled back.
With Isaac finally dead and gone, there was nothing left for us in that house. We took what we thought would be useful and made our way over to Eliza’s shop, with Eliza managing to walk the whole distance without any help, the support bandages doing their job admirably. She unlocked the shutter and pulled it up slowly.
“It hardly makes any noise,” I remarked, thinking it would make a loud clattering as it rolled into its housing.
“I keep it well oiled,” she replied, “because the corpses seem to react to sound. I don’t want them surprising me before I’ve even had a chance to get outside.”
Inside the shop the displays were well ordered and clean, if sparse. There were a few empty shelves and it was clear that most of the stock had been given out over the last few weeks. There were still a few useful items though, and the three members of what passed for my family spread out to take in the details. Marcus started peering under a glass counter at an assortment of Swiss army knives, staring hungrily at the glinting blades. Perdita amused herself by gently turning a map spinner, before picking out a map at random and unfolding it like a concertina. Cato started tapping cylinders of butane, listening carefully to the difference in their tones.
“When you’ve finished,” said Eliza, lifting the door to the counter and heading into the back, “you can join me for some food, if you want. The beans were all right but I need something a bit more substantial.”
I followed, somewhat ashamed about the other’s odd behaviour. We went through into a hallway stacked on either side with half empty boxes of stock and turned back on ourselves, up a stairway and into her residence.
It was a modestly decorated flat, with bright colours on the walls and a huge array of furniture dotted around the place. It was quite cluttered, with no obvious order to anything. Maybe she knew where everything was so had no need to sort her items by category. Wherever I looked there were strange ornaments that seemed to almost be from another world: large eyed cats with odd paws seemingly waving in greeting, ceramic raccoons reclining on their haunches to reveal huge stomachs and testicles, charcoal blackened wooden masks showing extreme expressions... all of them were placed seemingly at random on any available surface, sometimes on top of piles of books. I stared in awe at the treasure trove, a testimony to the civilisations of a world that I had no knowledge of, and longed to know more about.
Eliza led me into the kitchen and lit a small portable camping range that she had set up on the counter, putting a pan of water on to boil. “No gas or electricity, not since last week,” she told me by way of an explanation. She searched through the cupboards and eventually pulled out a packet of dried tubes. “I adore pasta. I would eat it morning noon and night if I could,” she said, half to me and half to herself.
“Why can’t you?” I asked.
Eliza thought to herself for a moment. “I suppose I could... but then again, too much of a good thing....”
I sat down at the small wooden kitchen table and looked over at a cork notice board next to the window that overlooked the harbour. There were photographs pinned on top of photographs, a lifetime of memories all jostling for space. They were obviously from Eliza’s many trips around the world and showed her with a huge array of different friends in exotic locations. It made me wonder why she had chosen to settle here, at the back end of nowhere.
It felt good to be sitting at the table with nothing to do but wait. The water had started bubbling, Marcus and Cato and (I found myself a little ashamed to be relieved about this) Perdita were off amusing themselves and I was here, sitting in a kitchen waiting for a freshly cooked dinner, like an everyday person. Well, maybe not everyday in this new world....
It was simply the best meal I could remember bar none, even topping the fresh fish I used to eat on the island. Eliza covered the pasta with a simple sauce made from a tin of chopped tomato, some dried herbs and a little salt. I eagerly asked for seconds a few minutes after she had served me, something about the taste stirring a memory in me, too indistinct to grasp. I stopped eating for a moment and tried to bring it into focus, but it was gone. It was a regular and frustrating occurrence, spotting shapes of my past with no knowledge of what they represented. Eliza ate more slowly, savouring every bite. I suppose I should have done the same, as this food might one day be a thing of the past, yet I couldn’t help myself. Eliza suddenly sat up in her seat, struck by a thought.
“Wait here,” she said, as she got up and limped out of the room. She returned a couple of minutes later with a medical dictionary, before placing it open on the table and leafing through the contents. I glanced down at the pages.
“Don’t look,” she said, picking the book up and holding it against her chest. She peered downwards and looked back up at me, her eyes twinkling. “All right. What are the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning? Go.”
“Wait, what? Why are you...”
“Go!” she said insistently.
“Well, which heavy metal? They all present differently,” I said, knowing that they did but not knowing how I knew.
“Do they?” She glanced down at the book again, her mouth moving a bit as she read to herself. Eventually she looked up again. “We’ll start easy then. Lead.”
“Acute or chronic poisoning?”
“Oh for the love of... acute,” she said, exasperated.
I considered for a moment. The information was there, I knew this. It was an unfamiliar but welcome feeling.
“A metallic taste in the mouth, abdominal pain with vomiting, diarrhoea with a black stool, lethargy, weakness, cramps, it can make the patient present with abnormal LFTs or renal complications, if the patient is a child there may be encephalopathy with cerebral oedema...”
“I think that’ll do, take a breath,” she said, before leaning in a little. I could smell tomatoes on her breath, which was warm against my face. It was somehow a wonderful feeling, a microcosm of human contact. “What’s an LFT?”
“Liver function test,” I said, smiling at myself more than anything. “Keep going, this is good.”
“It is, isn’t it?” she said, flicking through the book some more. Eventually she found something obscure and narrowed her eyes. “Let’s do another one.”
She quizzed me on Dengue fever, common and uncommon blood disorders, auto-immune conditions, always picking something at random. I always had an answer. Eventually she put the book down, shaking her head with incredulity.
“For someone who knows nothing, your memory for medical facts seems to function perfectly well,” she said at last, as the afternoon started to draw on. I was lazily picking at pieces of the pasta. My stomach was long past full but I was simply enjoying the opportunity to indulge myself.
“It seems that way, which is extremely frustrating, maybe more so than if I had no knowledge whatsoever. I know a lot of different things but have no idea where I learned them from. I know how a society works but have no idea of my place in it. If I learned everything from a book, then I have no memory of reading it,” I said. Maybe it was time to discuss this with someone who knew a lot more about the world than I did; maybe she could give me some guidance towards the truth.
“The amount you know is more than simply studied knowledge. Your hands were too skilled with the bandages; that’s muscle memory. You’ve done it a thousand times, I’ll bet. You must have been a doctor of some sort. Maybe one day using one of your skills will help you recall when you learned it,” she said, wiping the plates cle
an with a little rainwater. Perhaps the tap water was safe – it was still running – but Eliza hadn’t wanted to risk it without knowing how the plague was spread.
“Perhaps... but nothing has helped so far. The closest I get is remembering a sound or a smell, or a taste. Even then it’s only the slightest hint, like a random frame thrown into a cinema reel,” I said. Cinema reel, another titbit of information bleeding into my mind...
“Perhaps one of the others could help?” she asked, her back to me as she wiped the surfaces clean with a cloth.
“I doubt it,” I said. “I’m generally the last thing on their mind. I’m just a means to an end, a helper, simply tolerated. I try to keep them on the straight and narrow and keep them out of trouble but it’s a thankless task. I don’t know why I put up with them,” I said, before sighing, the answer to my own question was staring me in the face. “Yes I do, I know why. It’s because they’re all I’ve got.”
“Where are they now?” she asked as she turned back towards me, her face serious.
“Downstairs,” I said slowly, a frown creasing my brow. “Why?”
“Well, I mean...” she said slowly, leaning back against the counter, “you’re a lot more tolerable when they’re not around.”
“Tolerable?”
“Perhaps tolerable wasn’t a good choice of words... but certainly, definitely you seem to get on with things better when you’re alone.”
“No, no, no,” I said, standing up. “I’d be dead without them. Even Cato, he saved me once on the island, working out the best way to get our shanty roof to stay on. We had so little rope but he pushed and nudged Marcus so that he put it just where it was needed, and it stayed put. All the time we were there, it stayed put.”
Heal the Sick, Raise the Dead Page 6