‘And this also, said Marlow suddenly, has been one of the dark places of the earth.’
‘As she unfastened her brooch at the mirror, she smiled faintly to see her face all smeared with the yellow dust of lilies.’
‘Agnes. Please, Agnes. What is it? What are you mouthing on about?’ Dell’s voice came to me as if from another place, though she stood beside me, pulling at my arm.
‘All these books,’ I said. ‘No one knows. They think. The Mistress says. Everyone says.’
‘But what are they? Why do they matter?’
‘These people, these thoughts. All this time they’ve been here waiting. This sadness and hoping, this darkness and dust of lilies, this rushing into the wind. And they’ll go on waiting, and being found and being lost again. As if they don’t mind – to be read, not to be read.’ Truly, I didn’t know what I meant.
And still my mind is a whirl of questions. What are these books? What is this book I write in now? Did everyone among the endtimers have her own book to tell her own story in, as I have mine? Who allowed them this? The child in my belly pushes up against my heart. I breathe fast and shallow but find no air. The world is not as I thought it was.
‘Who says these words, though, Agnes?’
I couldn’t answer.
Jason
I slept – perhaps just for a moment – and dreamt that Walter, wandering through the house, peered in at our bedroom and found me and Abigail having sex. He blessed us in the name of Our Lord BJ Choudhry. Then there was a child, a little girl. And it was our child, Caro, yours and mine.
I remember the print-outs from your scan – those shadowy images that told us we were going to have a girl. By the following morning we’d stopped looking, and could watch only the repeated footage of paramedics carrying the bodies from the outhouse at Elmbridge Farm, and interviews with the neighbours who’d observed suspicious comings and goings, and the mother of one of the dead, weeping for her baby girl who’d shown such promise as a gymnast. They’d found incongruous pictures of Penny in her Random days – party girl Penny Farthing – and one with a dead-eyed look that hinted at drug abuse. There was nothing of Troy but a blurred picture of a student in a mortar board with a sneer for whoever held the camera.
Meanwhile the Nissan had led the police to me and I was telling them everything I knew. The journalists were all over our building, pumping the staff and the other residents for gossip, crowding the gate to press their lenses to my windscreen. The only way I could protect you was to let you stay a prisoner in the flat, while I attended to business. At first it looked as if they meant to cast me as an accomplice – the one who’d supplied the weapon. But it didn’t take them long to spot the ironies. A property developer with a gas-guzzling SUV in the middle of a stand-off with environmentalists – I looked less like an accessory than the prime target. So off they went to cosy up to the Urban Diggers and get the dirt on the crazies, the environmentals, the nutroast nutjobs. They were desperate for more on the family connection, but they never found the Jesus bus. The only thing Penny and I had in common was a mysterious past – we’d both popped up from nowhere.
For a couple of days Simon gave them a new angle – the Elmbridge boy found wandering with an uneaten sandwich in his satchel and a scrawled note pinned to his coat saying taek care of mi boy its not his falt. And I got the full measure of the state of education in Hebron, and a fresh stab of remorse for leaving my sister there. For me Simon’s survival was a miracle. I’d waited for the call to identify the body of a child and here he was alive and unharmed. And you were heroic, Caroline. You hated Penny for what she’d done to me, but you took Simon in without a murmur.
Then the Elmbridge Cult was lost in a blizzard of fresh news – a mystery virus causing panic across the south east. The reporters knew it was a mystery. They could sense the panic. They could more or less count the dead. Beyond that they knew nothing. The virus had been brought into the country by migrant farm workers. It had been spread by asylum seekers released from a detention centre near Dover. It had mutated in the intestines of an ibex goat smuggled into the east end for religious purposes. A leaked document from the Ministry of Defence allowed some smart investigative journalist to make the link between the Elmbridge suicide cult, government zoologist Dr Troy Phelps and a top secret research project. But factions remained loyal to earlier theories, or cohered around later ones, however mystical or bizarre.
Meanwhile the view from our flat over Blackfriars Bridge was transformed from one day to the next like a film fast-forwarding through seasons of change. Like waking up to snow, we saw one morning the bus stops abandoned and the roads clogged with cyclists in surgical masks. Another day it was nothing but ambulances. When the roads emptied and even the cyclists were gone, who knew whether they were at home avoiding contagion, or sick already? But not everyone had caught it, because suddenly they were sitting in cars in furious gridlock responding to rumours of food to be found in the west, or safety in the Scottish Highlands. That’s when the armoured vehicles appeared and the soldiers, to set up their checkpoint on the bridge. And we knew that the vans and trucks they waved through were loaded with the dead. Dogs prowled and congregated, indifferent to traffic lanes and military authority, but not to the marksmen sent to shoot them and to shoot the shoppers who looked too much like looters, until the shoppers who survived were all looters, any system of retail having broken down. And the streets were left to scavengers, and unsupervised children, and people wheeling corpses on supermarket trolleys, and to snarling clusters of survivalists dressed in ill-sorted uniforms and body armour, and to strange eruptions of emptiness and silence – and, distinct from all of these, the sudden gatherings of awestruck onlookers, little pockets of order, as one after another succumbed to the condition’s strangest symptom.
‘The blessing,’ I said, holding your hand at the window when the news first began to break. ‘They’re calling it the blessing.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why this singing, though, this drawing, this construction of strange objects?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe because it’s our deepest instinct – to make meaning.’
‘Even when there is no meaning?’
‘Especially then.’ And I felt the terror in your grip.
And who was I in all this? An onlooker from a high window, a nurse, a reader of Jane Eyre. A scavenger when it became necessary. A looter and barterer. A dodger of military bullets and a street fighter when I couldn’t avoid it. A shit-dumper and a grunting water carrier.
Can it really have been like this, or is it just the way I’ve reconfigured it, stretched out as I am, mushroomed and Django’d, with my brain’s wiring still scrambled from the sickness? Could I have lived through this and still be sane?
At some early point when we couldn’t begin to imagine how much worse it was going to get, you lay down with a fever, and I read to you, and Simon who seemed to have lost the power of speech was so quiet I sometimes forgot he was there. And we argued and you painted our wall and your second fever burned you into oblivion. And the last thing I could do for you was to carry your body to the designated collection point for a hastily improvised municipal burial, where you and others became landfill while the mourners covered their mouths – me among them – and looked away.
Agnes
I have shown Dell my book, this book that has been my most precious secret. It made me breathless to do it. She wasn’t shocked, but only puzzled at this new strangeness. When I read her something I’d written she smiled. ‘I see it now,’ she said. ‘You throw a pebble for someone to catch. Before, when you found meaning in the marks in all those books, I saw only the catching.’