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 perhaps 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?’