by Rhys Thomas
‘Hold on, Edward,’ he begged. ‘Just hold on.’
A car horn sounded outside the house. Miriam’s whole body lifted weightlessly with anticipation and she looked out of the window. She could see Henry’s father waving to her from the car. She waved back, smiled and ran to the front door.
‘It’s them,’ she shouted.
Miriam swung the heavy door open as if it was made of balsawood and stepped into the cold night air. Henry’s father was already out of the car, standing directly beneath the street lamp.
‘Quickly,’ he called.
The fresh draught that had blown so easily through her faded. Something was wrong. She ran along the garden path and nearly fell down the steps near the gate.
‘It’s Edward,’ said Henry’s father.
The upper layer of her skin bristled. She could see him lying supine on the back seat of the car. The monster had come for him. She pushed past Henry’s father and looked at her son. His eyes were closed and sweat glistened orange on his face. In the gap between the two front seats, Mary watched her brother with a confused expression. Miriam’s eyes met Mary’s and time slowed.
‘What’s happened?’ she said.
Her voice sounded as if it was coming from somewhere outside her body.
‘He’s been shot,’ said Henry’s father.
Miriam stopped. Tiny white stars flickered to life across her field of vision and her head felt light.
‘Come on. We need to go to the hospital. Get in the car,’ said Henry’s father.
‘Wait.’ Miriam looked at Edward lying beneath his warm winter coat, his hair slick with sweat. ‘I don’t understand.’
Her mother came out to join them. ‘What’s going on?’ she said.
‘Take Mary inside,’ he said. ‘And let’s go.’
Miriam started to tremble.
‘What’s going on?’ her mother asked again.
Miriam ran round to the other side of the car and opened the door. Edward was lying in deep shadow.
‘Eddie?’
Mary crawled up from her seat and put her arms round Miriam’s neck. Miriam hugged her tight and kissed her cheek. The little girl started crying instantly, as if Miriam was squeezing the tears out of her. She took Mary to her mother. She didn’t want to let go and Miriam had to prise her clear. Her little arms stretched out to her.
‘I want to come,’ she cried.
Miriam pulled the door closed, confused, her mind swirling, and they rushed towards the hospital. She looked into the back seat and reached out her hand. Edward’s skin was cold. His eyes were half open but he didn’t respond to his mother.
‘What happened?’
Henry’s father gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles popping out of his hands like mountains as he threw constant glances at the mirror.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. His voice was watery, indistinct. ‘We were getting petrol at the garage round the corner.’ He shook his head to clear his thoughts. ‘A man just walked in and . . .’ He looked at Miriam. His face betrayed his fear. ‘He killed the boy working there, just shot him. And then . . . it just happened so fast, Miri.’
He swallowed.
She wished she could have said, ‘It’s OK, James, take your time,’ but she couldn’t. She couldn’t speak.
‘There was no warning. It was just so barbaric. He turned his gun on Mary and it went off, and then Edward was lying on the floor.’
They overtook a car and the engine roared.
‘He jumped in the way of the bullet, Miri.’ The old man’s voice faltered.
Miriam placed the fingers of her right hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. She turned back to her son. His head shifted a little and his eyes flickered gently open.
‘He did what?’ she said.
‘He saved Mary.’
‘He—’ She cut herself off, unable to speak. She looked at Edward again. ‘Edward?’
The boy couldn’t fully open his eyes. ‘Mum?’ he said, groggily.
‘We’re almost there,’ she said. ‘You’re going to be fine.’
They arrived at the hospital. Henry’s father pulled across the road and into the main sweep. Two army trucks blocked the entrance. A powerful white floodlight threw the trucks into vivid colour. Several other cars were queuing, trying to get into the hospital grounds. A few troops were gathered in front of the road block, waving the cars back. Miriam jumped out and ran up to the guards.
‘What’s going on?’
One of the guards removed his gas mask.
‘Hospital’s full. We’re not admitting any more.’
‘But my son’s been shot.’
It didn’t even register.
‘I’m sorry, but there’s nobody allow—’
‘He’s eleven years old, for God’s sake.’
The guard’s face changed. He looked at his colleague, an enormous man, much taller than both Miriam and the first soldier. He pulled off his mask.
‘We’re not supposed to let anybody in.’
‘He’s not ill,’ she said, quickly. ‘He’s been shot. Please.’ She felt warm tears trickle over the edge of her cheeks. ‘We can save him. Please.’
The two soldiers looked at one another again and, after a few seconds of silence, nodded their assent to each other.
‘OK, where is he?’ said the big soldier.
‘Over here,’ she said, running back to the car.
She turned to the soldiers. They were both younger than her. Their faces did not look confident; they looked as lost and as scared as she was.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
The little soldier pulled open the back door as the other one leaned into the darkness and lifted Edward out easily. Quickly, he stumbled past the road block. The people in the other cars wound down their windows and shouted their disgust at the two guards. Miriam and her father-in-law followed them to a roofless army truck on the other side of the barriers.
Around the side of the main building they were met by a doctor and nurse, who bundled Edward on to a gurney and rolled him inside, into the bright white lights. In here there didn’t seem to be any infected people. There were hundreds of people injured and bleeding. All of the chairs were occupied and many people were lying on the floor, others prostrate on beds that had been wheeled out into the corridors. Medical staff ran around frantically between patients. There was a kinetic energy in the room.
The doctor stopped the gurney in the centre of the waiting room.
‘We’ll have to work here,’ he said.
He was tall and thin, with sure, confident movements. He cut Edward out of his clothes. There was blood everywhere. The nurse brought wipes and cleaned it away in professional silence.
‘Will he be all right?’ asked Henry’s father.
The lights brought his face into sharp focus. The lines of age scored his cheeks.
‘We’ll see,’ was all the doctor replied.
He leaned over Edward and concentrated fully on the task at hand. The bullet had entered Edward’s body above the left hip. Whenever the doctor lifted the wadding from it a deep, purple ooze dribbled out of the wound. A chunk of flesh flapped free as the nurse tried to clean it.
Miriam stood back from the gurney. Everything was happening at terrifying speed. The doctor peered at the hole in Edward’s side, his face inches from his belly. He placed his hands under the boy’s back and his brow furrowed. He said something very quietly to the nurse that Miriam didn’t catch. He looked at Edward’s face and prised open his eyes between his thumb and forefinger, first the left eye, then the right. Returning to the wound he rolled Edward gently over and peered beneath his body. And then, dramatically, the doctor stood up straight.
‘This is going to be OK,’ he announced. ‘It went straight through.’
Miriam’s knees lost their rigidity and she grasped the metal bar on the gurney. The doctor’s shoulders slumped, giving away his true exhaustion.
‘You’re a very lucky boy,’ he said. He t
urned to the nurse. ‘Stitch him up and he’ll be fine. Give him some morphine. One mil’ll be fine.’
He looked down and spotted the white volunteer badge on Miriam’s chest. The tense bonds of his muscles relaxed.
‘Oh,’ he smiled, nodding to the badge, ‘well done.’
And he walked away.
The noise of the hospital came back to them: the sound of quick talking, of machines whirring, of feet squeaking on the tiles.
‘Is that it?’ said Miriam.
They looked about them but they were just two islands in the stream of people that flowed by.
They took Edward back into the night and wheeled him to the car. The number of people trying to get into the hospital had grown to such an extent that the roads leading into the main drag from either side were blocked with traffic. Miriam looked out of the window for the guards who had let them in but all she saw were anonymous androids in gas masks.
As she did this Henry’s father leaned into his grandson and took hold of his hand.
‘Robin Red Breast Number One, where are you?’
The boy opened his eyes a fraction. He regarded his grandfather through tiny cracks.
‘I’m in the clouds,’ he whispered back.
His lips were dry but he managed to stretch them into the faintest of smiles. The buzz of the world washed all around them but for that moment it was just the two of them, boy and grandfather, held in a tiny space away from everything else.
‘Everything is sun.’
It started to rain heavily the next day. The rubbish had not been collected and there was a faint odour of decay in the air. The illness had first appeared nearly a week ago. Nearly one week had passed since Henry had woken that morning and told his wife he wanted to leave London. The relative stability of the city was starting to unravel as it became clear that the onslaught being delivered by the illness was showing no signs of abating.
The government told its people that the number infected was still low but it did not seem that way. The bulletins did not come from the Prime Minister now: members of government organizations were delivering the messages. That morning the latest news was that members of the families of those infected should not go to work. If a large number of those infected had worked in the same building then you should remain at home. Quarantine was voluntary, they said. The government did not have the power to quarantine members of the public involuntarily, nor did they have the desire to enforce such measures, they said. Schools were closed. They still had no idea what was causing the illness. Miriam turned off the small television set in the kitchen.
It was six o’clock in the morning and it was still dark outside. Everybody else was in bed. Her own night’s sleep had been fractured. Pangs of absolute terror were sated by pockets of gratitude that came to her – gratitude that Edward was still alive, that he was lucky, that they were all back together again.
The small kitchen window had been left open and the smell from outside had seeped into the house. She closed it and cold droplets of rain fell on to her hand.
She went to check on Dora, the girl they had brought home,who had refused to move from her armchair downstairs. Miriam flicked the light switch and her eyes were drawn to the centre of the carpet. The television was on the floor, though really it was no longer a television set at all. Its screen and its large plastic backing shell were standing side by side. The innards had been dismantled and laid out in front of the screen.
Miriam looked at Dora. She was staring at the carpet. Two dots of light were in her dark eyes.
‘What have you been doing?’
Miriam knelt in front of Dora’s handiwork. A screwdriver the girl had found was lying at a perfect right angle to the television screen. The components had been arranged into neat piles: screws, washers, bolts, clips, wires flattened straight in all the differing colours. The old cathode ray tube was on the far right-hand side of the little piles. Miriam turned back to Dora.
‘How did you do this?’
Dora did not look at Miriam when she answered: ‘I wanted to take it apart.’
Her hair looked even more lank than it had last night.
‘Are you ready to tell us where you live?’
‘I had a vision last night, as I slept.’ Her eyes did not flicker as she spoke.
‘You had a dream?’
The girl blinked. ‘I won’t dream again. Not between now and the time I die; it won’t let me dream. I had a vision. I was in some woods. It was night time and I was in my nightdress. The woods were lit by a strong moon. The trees were bare and I could see deep into the forest. There were others there, people like me. They were all dressed in their nightclothes as well. They moved between the trees aimlessly. They looked down at their feet and they were so sad.’
As she spoke tears formed in her eyes and cut wet lines down her face towards the edges of her lips. Miriam made no attempt to approach her. She did not want to break Dora’s thread. The girl put her palms to her face and flattened the skin of her cheeks.
‘I walked into the woods. The wind made my nightdress flutter against my thighs and my arms. I didn’t try to approach any of the other people, and they did not try to approach me. We were separate but the same. Then I saw an old woman. She wore a black shawl thrown over her shoulders. In my vision she walked towards a man. The man brought his eyes up from the forest floor and looked into the old woman’s face. As soon as he did it he disappeared from the woods. The woman had collected him. She changed direction and walked away from me but I followed. She found a little boy. He looked into her face and when he did he disappeared. The woman passed between the trees. As people looked at her face they vanished into nothing. And then the old woman turned my way. Her head was bowed and she stopped in front of me. My bare feet were standing on a bed of pine needles and their scent was strong in the air. The moonlight dimmed as she came close. She lifted up her head and I felt her gaze on me. She was pale and wrinkled and as I looked into her eyes I saw colours. Her eyes were black, but in the blackness were wriggling colours. And then I was gone. I had disappeared. The woods had been rushed away. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I was standing on a rocky plain. There were three moons and the sky was vermilion. The wind blew dust over rocks. I could see the curve of the planet. And the people were there, the ones in the woods the woman had looked at. We had been transported to that rocky, forlorn place. Everyone like me had been taken.’
Dora stopped and brought her bottom lip into her mouth. It came back moist. She looked at Miriam.
‘Take me with you, Miriam. Don’t leave me.’
The girl looked at her and then Miriam could see him, Henry, in her eyes. Her eyes were exactly the same as his had been. They were the same. Dora was Henry, just as he was her.
The first light of dawn took the shadows back from the room.
‘I won’t leave you,’ she said.
A blazing, spinning ball of memory and emotion combined and turned in her body. She hadn’t known. Her skin became hot and she felt like her body was turning to dust. For the three days that Henry was ill she hadn’t known what would happen to him. She had not been able to grieve in the same way as everybody else. She looked up at Dora again, but the girl had turned her face away and was gazing out of the window at the new day.
‘I need . . .’ said Miriam, and then couldn’t say any more. She stood and left Dora in her chair.
The room in which the children slept was dark. They were both asleep. Edward had stopped sweating and was breathing softly. Miriam sat on the edge of the bed, put her hands together and thanked God for saving her son.
As she did it she remembered a party she had been to, just weeks before. It was the first time in a long time that she had been asked about it, but the discomfort she felt when answering was still the same as it had always been. She told them the same thing as she always did, that she didn’t know why she believed, but that was never enough for people. They always wanted more.
She went to th
e window and drew back the curtains. The back garden was as neatly kept as ever. The street light in the alley behind the garden shone on to the lawn but its circle of light was drawing in as the dawn rose. There was a pile of leaves in the corner that her mother had raked. Beyond the back garden fence was the parking area she had played on as a child. It didn’t look much different, even now.
Behind her, a little voice yawned from the bed. Mary stretched her arms into the air and could barely open her eyes. Miriam went over to them. This was her family now: just the three of them. She picked a piece of fluff from the blankets and dropped it to the carpet. Edward and Mary looked at her through sleepy eyes.
‘I’m sorry I came to London without you. I shouldn’t have left you.’
Edward pushed his sheets forward and clambered over his sister towards his mother. He winced as his side stretched. He held out his arms and she took him to her. He rested his head on her shoulder and closed his eyes. Miriam took a bunch of hair from the back of his head between her fingers.
‘I won’t do it again. From now on, we stick together.’
‘I want to go back to Granddad’s,’ Edward whispered.
‘I know,’ said Miriam, stroking his hair. ‘So do I.’
Stay inside, lock your doors, boil your water. Surely they must have better advice than that by now. She turned the car radio off. The streets were busier than she had seen them. The number of people stricken with the illness was visibly increasing. They had come out on to the streets to sit or lie down and wait for death.
‘Why is everybody sitting down?’ said Mary.
‘They’re very ill,’ said Miriam.
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘I don’t know.’
She tried to keep a steady mind. Just go to the house, get what you need and get out of there, she told herself. It was a simple plan.
They looped past Trafalgar Square and headed south. They had to queue at Battersea Bridge. To her right sprang six tall towers, stark and bare against the wintering sky. The clouds swirled overhead, spitting rain sideways across the windscreen. This was London as she now knew it – dangerous and massive. The river was swollen, its dark grey mass flooding past. It gushed underneath the bridge. There were no boats.