The Book of Air

by Joe Treasure

  I’m raving, Caro. Jesus Christ, I’ve resisted worshipping this sickness long enough. Resisted the other as well – the frenetic scramble for safety. Who never dreamt of his own mountain, ice cold air at three thousand feet, an endless uncontaminated food supply and a flame thrower to keep the sweating scroungers at bay?

  And there were enough in such a panic to survive they didn’t care what it took. Breathe in my direction, dickwit, and you’re dead.

  But more went the other way, elevated the condition, deferred to the priesthood of suffering.

  We learnt the stages to watch for. We knew their names almost before we knew that we knew them. The sweats, the staggers, the blessing, the burn, the pit. Only the virus itself resisted naming, until it didn’t need a name, because it had become the only topic of news or conversation.

  It was the third stage that held our attention, the stage we were all induced to call the blessing, whether we used the word with awe or with irony, whether we whispered it or spat it out quotation marks and all. However we viewed it, the sight of it took us by the throat – always the same unmistakable thing and always unique. A moment of grace descending at last, too late, on every sufferer. Some talent previously unexpressed leaping towards consummation. People who had never drawn drew on pavements in whatever they could lay their hands on – mud, ketchup, plaster dust. The impulse held them sometimes for minutes only, sometimes for an aching half-hour of absorbed effort before the body rebelled. Often the impulse was to sing or pull music out of some instrument, intended or improvised. They might be thwarted by lack of materials, or by the collapse of the nervous system as the staggers merged into the burn. But the urge was always there.

  It terrified us, as the thought of the Last Judgment or the Rapture terrifies true believers, with a terror that stops the breath and makes the hairs rise and the mind go blank. It was the only counterweight to the mundane labour of death. Because it wasn’t long before mass graves became necessary. Bodies were loaded on to trucks, carted in skips, lugged or wheeled to collection points. Soldiers and armed police patrolled with megaphones and automatic weapons, commandeering vehicles and food. Self-appointed militias cohered and fragmented. There was no shortage of guns. The dead became landfill, were stacked on abandoned construction sites, loaded into stadiums for burning, were left where they lay in empty houses or dumped like bin bags on the pavement.

  People became obsessed with the science of it. They’d stumble hollow-eyed from their computers sounding off about processes of synaptic transmission. Or they got religion. Theological disputes sprang up among people who’d been godless all their lives. The blessing had a divine origin, they said, that was obvious. But were we witnessing a rent in the veil between our illusory world and the eternal? Or were the sufferers clinging ever more ferociously to the wheel, their egos clamouring on the shore of oblivion?

  Others sneered at these squabbles. It was never about us. No carbon-based life form could hope to grasp the complexity of the event. To the invading race, the victims of the blessing were nothing more than an instrument, a keyboard. Minds greater than ours comprehended these individual acts of creation as notes – not even notes – harmonics within notes within melodies within symphonies of meaning, and in this way communicated with each other through our dying gestures.

  And some said fuck you to all this talk, ready with chisels and bread saws to slash any throat that stood between them and their next meal.

  So I steered clear of other people and locked Simon indoors. For a while there was TV. The statements from successive health ministers and secretaries of defence were incoherent, but some kind of explanation emerged. Government-sponsored research had gone spectacularly wrong, or exceeded even the most crackbrained expectations. Either way, the resulting microbe was never meant to leave the lab. The details were murky – something about a caprine pituitary gland, something about synapses harvested from a cloned ape. The spokesman who revealed its codename, the Othello Project, was forced to resign hours before the virus got him.

  The web was seizing up. News sites crashed or froze on cataclysmic headlines. Links took you nowhere, or wandered randomly, the whole thing kept going by emergency generators and a scattering of servers whispering to each other in the dark.

  One day the power went off in our flat and didn’t come on again. One day there was no more water. If I saw the last plane ever to curve over London towards Heathrow, the last bus to cross Blackfriars Bridge, I didn’t know it was the last until the absence made it so.

  We skulked as long as we could, me and Simon, nine flights up with no lift. A hundred and eight steps. It discouraged visitors. There was the fear of contagion. And I was afraid more particularly for Simon, that people would remember who he was. I think maybe I went a bit mad, Caro, when you were gone. After a while it was only us still living on the top three floors, so I barricaded the staircase. We scuttled like mice through the empty apartments, living on handfuls of rice and pasta, the odd shrivelled potato sprouting new growth, tins gathered from the kitchens of our dead neighbours, melted water sucked from their freezers. Out on the balcony scraps of furniture smouldered in the barbecue. But all the mechanisms of input and output had broken down. How much of my life I’d devoted to this. Pumping water indoors to be softened, heated, distributed. Expelling it, filtered of hair and food scraps, shitladen and frothing with detergent. Creating temperate, odourless environments. Marking off territories, the indoor world of people from the outdoor world of weather, vegetation, sewage, maggots, dung beetles.

  We experimented as our diet changed. We dropped little news-wrapped turds to explode softly out of sight. We squatted in the furthest bath tub and left the watery discharge to drain. We craved vegetables and fresh meat. But water was our biggest problem. It was thirst that drove me down to ground level, to weave through backstreets, dodging the soldiers and the psychos. Nine flights down with the shit bucket. Nine flights up with as much water as I could carry.

  During those weeks, I walked past Waterloo Station at dusk and heard the soft footfall of foxes on the IMAX roundabout. I saw a man shot on Hungerford Bridge for a bag of oranges. I watched a group of women roasting pigeons on a spit by Stamford Wharf, bartered a bar of chocolate for a couple of birds and took one back to Simon, hot and greasy in my pocket.

  We were all back on the streets by then, whoever was left, scrabbling for food and fuel, dragging our water from the river, making contact. We watched rolling news wherever it still rolled, read crudely printed missives from self-appointed officials and agitators. Gatherings were forbidden but people gathered anyway – to protest, to heal, to riot, to rage at God or at science for abandoning us.

  You were well out of it, Caroline, you and our baby that we’d both been so anxious to meet. Well out of it. But I’d have you back if I could.

  When your time came – when I’d read through your first fever and we’d fought each other to a state of spitting rage – your limbs began wandering and your eyes turned inward and you lost interest in the argument. Somehow you got yourself to the hall cupboard and pulled everything out, ironing board, vacuum cleaner, mop, all in a clatter with a snowdrift of plastic bags, to uncover the leftover tins of emulsion.

  The blessing was so focused always – we were beginning to learn that – so knowing.

  You used the blank wall above the couch and a four-inch brush. The colours were russet and sage green – maybe it was this that put the orchard in your mind. The figure running among the trees had something of you about her. As you worked, the corner of a building appeared behind her, far off among the branches, a gable and an open window, and I got the story – the loose dress, the naked feet, the hair tangled with leaves. There was fear in the girl’s eyes, but a kind of joy as well. It was an escape.

  And I saw that what you’d painted might have been Jane running from Rochester, or Rochester’s mad wife escaping from Rochester’s attic, or your own child liberated from death in the womb to run in our orchard. Or perha
ps you’d painted yourself in all of them, untouched, in a world before or after or beyond the virus.

  I might have asked you, and you might have told me, but the burn was tightening your throat, pressuring your mind into strange channels.

  It was a quick way to go, you can say that for it. You were gone, and soon enough it was all gone, centuries of technology, thousands of years of social order. The scope of our lives has narrowed intolerably. Six months ago I was hooked up to an intricate global network. Now I’m like this bath, stranded and useless. I’ll drag it down the stairs myself and dump it in the yard. Then I’ll walk barefoot on the lawn and see with the naked eye by moonlight the outer limits of life’s possibilities. I’ll take the Merc down to the road and drive as far as it’ll go. And what will I find? Nothing but desolation and danger.

  Unless I drive westward to the sea and accelerate from the top of a cliff.

  But I find myself still troubled by the urge to live.

  Agnes

  I heard the key scraping in the lock and thought it was him. The Reeds come always two together, but I heard only one person on the stairs and the key turning, and I thought he had come to let me out, to take me to his room. Or better, to take me with him on Gideon’s back to the towers to see Trevor and Dell.

  I thought it was Brendan come to say he loves me, that he has sat in the turret in a sweat of pain for my pain, panting for my want of air, dry for my thirst, but it was Roland, awkward and sheepish, frightened to open the door more than a crack. I ran to him and asked if he had come to let me out, but he hushed me and slipped inside, pushing the door behind him. ‘If they knew I’d come,’ he said. ‘If the Mistress knew.’

  ‘What, then, if they knew?’

  ‘I don’t know what.’

  ‘Then let me out.’

  He stood against the door and held something out to me. ‘I came to bring you these.’

  I stood close and saw they were cherries.

  ‘You must eat them though, and they mustn’t find the stones.’

  ‘How lovely to walk in the orchard.’

  ‘I must take the stones with me.’

  ‘Why won’t you let me out?’

  ‘Where would you go?’

  ‘Maybe to the moor. I’d rather starve than stay here to scratch and shrivel.’ I thought then of the text from the Book of Air that the Reeds had spoken when they left me on the moor: Better that crows and ravens should pick your flesh from your bones than they should be imprisoned in a workhouse coffin and moulder in a pauper’s grave. I know now what it is to be imprisoned in a coffin, what it is to moulder. I took the cherries, but held off eating them, though I longed for them, they looked so round and sweet.

  Roland was looking at the floor, all sullen. ‘And me? Where would I go once they’d found I’d let you out?’

  ‘Maybe there are other places than the Hall or the village.’

  He gave me an odd look. ‘I would have waited for you if you’d only stayed more like yourself.’

  ‘How am I not like myself?’

  ‘I’d have waited, but you were always traipsing to the turret, and then nowhere to be found, and now here. And Megan comes every day to the study.’

  ‘Every day to the study, where I’d be if they’d let me. I went to the turret only when I was sent for.’

  ‘And Annie is put to field work until she has her baby. So it’s just the two of us, Megan and me.’

  ‘And you’d rather sit in the murk than study and Megan cares less for book learning than for her own reflection.’

  ‘I would have waited.’

  I cried then, though I wanted not to, to think of our friendship and our game of kissing. I hadn’t thought myself called by Roland but it hurt me to think of him and Megan, plump smiling Megan. The two of them writing in the study and Sarah humming with pleasure at their work.

  ‘You must be quiet, Agnes, or they’ll hear us.’

  ‘Do you think they come every time I cry out or knock against the walls or kick the door? Every time I talk to people who only whisper back because they aren’t really here?’

  I saw he was frightened, not just of them but of me. Frightened of my stained face, my stinking clothes, my ungathered hair, of what I might do or say which could be anything because even I don’t know any more.

  I took a step towards him, but he turned his back on me. He must have had the key in his pocket because I heard it grinding in its hole. A murmur reached me from the Grace Pool so I went and sat between the tiled walls and started on the cherries, chewing to shut the noise out. I had my eyes shut tight, but I heard him come towards me, felt him sit beside me in the narrow space.

  ‘My calling must be soon,’ he said. ‘A few days maybe if the rain holds off. While the moon still shines. You know I must be taken to the woods.’

  I opened my eyes and saw his dark shape slumped against the wall, his head in his hands.

  ‘So you and Megan have talked.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it’s what you want.’

  ‘It’s what must happen.’

  We said nothing else for a while. From where I sat the voice from the Grace Pool was no more than the hum of the river heard from the top field. The barn owl was busy in the yard. I ate until all the cherries were gone.

  ‘You’ll breathe untainted air though,’ I said at last, ‘and eat what food you choose and open your own casement, and drink from the spring and wash in it, and though you need never labour like a cottager you’ll dig and plant, and feel the sun on your back, and the rain when the rain comes.’

  He made a noise in his throat and I felt him move and straighten. Then he said, ‘Do you know why I go so often to the murk?’

  ‘Because your father sat there the day before he died reaching for hazelnuts.’

  ‘No. Perhaps at first. But not anymore.’

  ‘Why then?’

  I waited for his answer and thought he had sunk again into his dark mood. But when he spoke his voice was full of life. It reminded me of our games on the stairs and along the passageways of the Hall.

  ‘You know that thing you have in the kitchen to grind meat for a pie.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The way the wheels turn against each other. Somebody thought of that.’

  ‘The endtimers.’

  ‘No. Somebody. And if meat, why not apples for cider? Why not anything?’

  ‘Not everything needs grinding.’

  ‘But grinding’s just one kind of work. Everything takes work. Do you see, Agnes? And you turning that handle is just a way of getting the work done.’

  ‘It’s me that turns the handle, not you.’

  The Grace Pool was silent. The birds had begun their fierce urgent calling. It was light enough that I could see Roland’s eyes. For that moment he wasn’t looking at me but at the stone wall beside me. Or at something that no one else would see.

  He said, ‘I spend time in the murk so I can understand how it worked.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘Partly. There are notched wheels that turn against each other, like in your meat grinder. But more of them and they’re knotted together and covered up, but I poke holes in the rust and I can see more of the hidden parts. It’s like this, Agnes. There are two kinds of movement. There’s turning like the movement of the grinder or the machine they used for opening tins – like the movement of a cartwheel along a track. And there’s a forward and back movement like when you cut a piece of wood with a saw, or bread with a knife. Whoever made the murk knew how to turn sawing into wheeling, and now I do too.’

  ‘And why would that be such a trick?’ I had no patience with his dreaming. The new day would soon be here and all I wanted was to make the kitchen fire and bring in more logs and put the porridge on to cook, to be a person again and not a dried out thought rattling in the red room.

  ‘Because that’s part of the secret, Agnes.’

  ‘What secret?’

  ‘Of what made the murk move
without a horse to pull it, without men to turn its wheels.’

  ‘So what’s the other part?’

  ‘The harder part. I don’t know what made the back and forward movement. Not a man’s arm, but something like the punch of a fist over and over, but not a fist either. I think something like a green log bursting in the fire. A blow to send the air rushing.’

  ‘And all this so you can ride without a horse?’ All I wanted was for Brendan to take me by the hand to the Mistress and to say he had called me and I had answered.

  ‘Riding doesn’t matter. What matters is finding something to push and push where there’s no man to push.’

  ‘Like when I boil the porridge in the clay pot,’ I said. ‘The lid is heavy but the steam doesn’t mind.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘So maybe you should build a fire and blow the murk across the lawn with boiling porridge.’

  ‘Maybe I should.’

  I heard the eagerness in his voice and it made me angry. ‘Except someone would have to carry the logs to feed the fire so the same person might as well push the murk.’

  ‘It’s not about the murk. I keep telling you. It’s about what the endtimers knew. It’s about how they lived and how we live. It’s about work.’

  ‘You talk about work but you don’t even know what work is.’ I was in a rage that the sun was rising, that he would soon be gone and I would be here still. ‘Every day while she lived my mother carried water from the brook. And every day before they locked me in here I carried water from the well into the kitchen at the Hall. And a pot of water is as heavy as a stone and slops about like a squalling baby that won’t lie still to be carried. You can sit in the murk and dream because you don’t know what it is to live like a cottager.’