His face was wet. Tears were slipping from his eyes and spreading out across his cheeks leaving coldness behind. He hadn’t even realised he was crying. The grief was something separate from him that his body could get on with while he was talking.
‘I’m sorry,’ Marianne said.
‘And that’s why I became a doctor.’
‘So you could save people like your father?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘So I could stop the same thing happening to me.’
Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Then: ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Tell me about Tapanuli fever.’
‘About what?’
‘Tapanuli fever. This thing I’ve got.’
For a moment the flagstones seemed to tilt under Owen’s backside. He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Then he remembered. Tapanuli fever. He’d told her she’d been infected with a tropical disease and she was in an isolation ward.
‘Oh, yeah, Tapanuli fever. Used to be known as the Black Formosa Corruption, back in Victorian days. Endemic to a few small regions of… er… South America. Argentina. I’m guessing that someone in Cardiff’s just got back from doin’ missionary work out there or something.’
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
Not surprising, considering he’d made it up. ‘It’s very rare. Like Ebola. Nobody’d heard of that until there was a sudden spate of deaths.’
‘And is that what’s going to happen to me?’ She was trying to be offhand, but he could hear the catch in her voice. ‘What’s the mortality rate? Isn’t that what you call it — “mortality rate”?’
Almost involuntarily, his right hand reached out as if to take hers and squeeze it reassuringly, but all it encountered was smooth, cold glass. After a moment there was a small thud as something hit the glass on the other side. Her hand, seeking his.
‘I won’t let you die,’ he said.
‘You didn’t answer the question.’
‘We just don’t know. In the jungle-’
Did they have jungle in South America? Or was it pampas? What the hell was pampas, anyway?
‘-In the jungle, half the people who catch it die. But we’ve got you under observation, and we can treat it with antibiotics and stuff. I won’t let you die.’
‘You’ve got me isolated. It must be very contagious.’
‘We have to take precautions.’
‘You haven’t even given me any antibiotics. You’ve just left me here, waiting.’
‘The tests. We’re looking at the results of the tests. Then we can treat the disease.’
Perhaps, he wondered, he could give her an injection. Just distilled water, but he could tell her it was an antibiotic. It might help her cope.
‘I wish I could see my family,’ Marianne said wistfully. ‘They could just stand the other side of the glass, couldn’t they?’
Owen knew that he shouldn’t be talking to her this way, but he couldn’t help himself. Jack would have told him to just leave her alone — do whatever tests were necessary and not engage in conversation — but he couldn’t do that. Unlike most of the people and the things that had ended up in the cells, she didn’t know what was happening to her. She needed reassurance.
She needed a friend.
‘They’ve been notified,’ Owen told her, ‘but they’ve got to stay away. We’re paid to take risks, here. They’re not.’
‘Could I write them a letter?’
He squeezed his eyes shut. Beneath the thin layer of chirpiness she put on, there was a deep chasm of vulnerability and fear. And he wasn’t sure whether he was making things worse or better. ‘Too risky. We’d have to spray the letter with antibiotics and stuff, to kill any bacteria, and the words’d just smudge and run off. It wouldn’t look pretty.’
‘Neither will I, if this goes on for much longer. I can’t wash, I can’t take a bath, and I haven’t got a change of clothes.’
‘Clothes we can find,’ Owen said quickly. ‘And I can probably get a bowl of hot water and some soap as well. If it’s any consolation, you still look great.’
‘Thanks. I bet you say that to all the dying girls in your care.’
‘Only the beautiful ones.’
‘Actually, some hot water would be nice. I must smell awful.’ She paused. ‘Talking of which, there’s a really crappy smell in this place, and it’s not me. It smells like the elephant house at the zoo. You know — that smell you get from things that eat hay all the time and then let it fester.’
It was probably the Weevil at the other end of the block, Owen thought, but he couldn’t tell her that. ‘It’s the drains. This area of the… hospital… hasn’t been used for a while. There’s probably all kinds of stuff down there. I’ll get someone to take a look at them.’
‘At the very least you could get an air freshener.’
‘Consider it done.’
‘Thanks, Owen.’
He felt a shiver run through him at the sound of his name, said in her soft Welsh lilt. There was something almost erotic in talking to her and yet not seeing her. If they’d been face to face in a bar then he would have been touching her arm by now, gazing into her eyes, smiling, looking away and then looking back. But now, like this, it was like talking on the phone, but with the added frisson that she was only a few inches away from him. Close enough that he could hear her breathe; feel the glass vibrate if she shifted position.
‘Owen,’ she said, ‘can I ask you a question?’
‘Nothing’s stopped you yet.’
‘Is there someone else down here with me? Someone else in isolation?’
‘What makes you think that?’ he asked cautiously.
‘Never answer a question with another question,’ she said, a laugh in her voice; ‘it sounds evasive. I thought I heard someone moving around. I tried talking to them, but they didn’t answer.’
Marianne was at one end of the block of cells; the Weevil was at the other. ‘You probably heard a nurse moving around,’ he said, putting as much sincerity into his voice as he could. And Owen was the past master at faking sincerity.
‘You’re lying to me. I think there is someone there. I think they’ve got the same thing as I have, this Tapanuli fever. And I reckon they’re even further gone than I am. Is that what I can look forward to: losing the ability to talk, just shuffling around in this awful place until I die? Is that what it’s come to?’
‘I won’t let that happen, Marianne.’
‘How can you stop it?’ Her voice sounded muffled.
‘I don’t know yet, but I will. I promise, I will.’
He turned to face her, twisting around on the flagstones, but Marianne still had her back to him. Her face was buried in her hands, and her shoulders were shaking with the effort of holding back the tears.
Grangetown was the opposite of an up-and-coming area. It was down-and-going, if that meant anything. Gwen had spent a lot of time there when she was in the police — raiding houses, breaking up family feuds, making door-to-door inquiries — and the place still made her feel like someone was watching her, all the time. All the vegetation — the trees, the bushes, the flowers in the gardens — looked dry and faded. Desperation and curdled anger seemed to seep from the drains and the gutters. The place had a kind of leaden gravitational pull that made it easy to get in and much harder to get out again.