On Sunday evening, I put out my bins in my neighbours driveway, but Monday, the rubbish van didn’t show. I checked the local Facebook community group and sure enough, there was a post from the council, apologising, and giving notice that a special collection had been organised in coordination with the army. I went back to the BBC and read the breaking news that the Home Office was utilising the armed forces to assist as emergency personnel, helping at hospitals and crematoriums, and driving the refuse lorries to collect the rubbish. I was impressed and waited to see if they would also be supplying food.
The news had a lot of discussion on the food shortages. The warehouses were making fewer and fewer deliveries; staff shortages at all levels meant that the food just wasn’t getting to where it needed to go. There were fewer staff at the warehouses, fewer drivers, even the people that could have coordinated the remaining drivers were at home looking after their kids, or ill themselves. And more people were getting sick all the time.
The bug I had caught had disappeared completely after a couple of days of home remedies and sleep. I wasn’t sure whether I had just had a cold, or if it had been a mild version of the virus. Online there was some speculation about its mechanism. It seemed that it was fairly harmless, until it had been in the body long enough to multiply. At sufficient concentrations, scientists thought that the virus could possibly cross the blood-brain barrier. Once there, they speculated that it destroyed the parts of the brain stem responsible for the important things like breathing, heart rate, and consciousness. The initial symptoms were much as I had experienced, but the virus usually progressed past the flu symptoms, to confusion, sleepiness, and then the sick would suddenly go unconscious and their hearts or breathing would just stop. If my illness had been caused by the virus, then my day off had probably saved my life; the virus had been destroyed before it had crossed into my brain.
After such gruesome reading, I had to phone home to check on my family. Vik answered on the second ring. ‘Hi Z,’ he said, sounding unusually alert for this time of the morning.
‘Hi Vik, what are you doing up so early?’ I asked.
‘My friends in America have stopped coming online.’ he replied, ‘The virus is there too, but things are much worse; lots of gun violence, and a lot of people have left the cities to be with family in the country. Also, we’re keeping the lights off, so it’s just easier to go to bed early.’
‘Have you checked when your power goes out?’ I asked, ‘mine went off at 2pm, but I think yours is later, starting at 2am.’
‘The power’s going out? Why? What’s the problem? He asked.
‘Some of the power stations still work… hydroelectric wind… solar, and the grid is still connected, but there just isn’t enough electricity to go around’ I replied.
‘But why? asked Vik.
‘I’ve been reading online a lot, and there was an in depth article on the BBC.’ I said, ‘It’s partly due to not enough fuel; the gas and oil supplies are unreliable, and partly because the power plants are short staffed.’
‘Really?’ said Vik, ‘That seems a bit crazy.’
‘Yeah,’ I replied, ‘but I’m just happy that there’s still power.’
Neither of us said anything for a moment, I almost mentioned the knockers, but then Vik said hesitantly, ‘Mum went out yesterday. She wanted to see how Maria was doing.’
‘What!’ I exclaimed.
‘I tried to talk her out of it, but you know what mum’s like,’ said Vik, ‘I was going to go with her, but she was already gone before I could get ready.’
I looked unseeingly at the computer in front of me. Why would mum do that? It was so stupidly risky. ‘Is she ok?’ I eventually asked.
‘Yeah, she didn’t stay long, I think Maria was ill,’ replied Vik.
‘Is she there?’ I asked.
‘Hold on, I’ll see if she’s awake.’ He responded. There were some muffled noises then mums voice, ‘Hi Z, what’s up?’
‘Mum,’ I said, ‘I thought we agreed we would stay in and hide, till things got back to normal’
‘Well, it’s been two weeks and Maria is just down the road,’ she said defensively, ‘I just wanted to check on her. It’s a good thing I did, because she’s almost out of food and was a bit under the weather. I invited her to come and stay with us, but she said no. She’s hoping her son will be coming and wants to wait for him.’
This was crazy, mum was wandering around as if we weren’t in the middle of a crisis, and now she was talking about taking people in. Her food was going to run out in no time. ‘I’m coming over’ I said. ‘We need to talk about a long term strategy’
I looked back through the notes I had made in my notebook. I could grow enough food to feed me, but probably not all of us. However, mum still had lots of food at her house. She usually bought extra-large bags of rice and lentils as it was cheaper, and tended to stock up on stuff when it was on offer in the shops, storing it haphazardly in the kitchen cupboards and larder. They also had Costco multipacks of instant mash and noodles that Vik bought, and there was an enormous cupboard in the garage, filled with tins of tuna and chickpeas bought in bulk, and bottles of coke and sprite.
It felt like a lot to me, but we really needed to take everything out and work out how many people they could feed, and for how long. If you continuously harvest runner beans from a beanstalk, they will keep flowering and producing more, for as long as the plant is still alive, but a larder wouldn’t magically fill up again once it had been emptied. Mum wasn’t thinking about finite food supplies, she just knew that she had plenty and wanted to share what she had. I needed her to see that this wasn’t necessarily the prudent thing to do.
I used the new back route out of the bungalow. I had dad’s sturdy old stepladder; heavy metal frame and wooden treads, which I placed against the back corner of the fence. I pressed the feet into the hard ground. The weather had changed again and it was windy and much cooler in the garden, with scudding clouds above. I had extracted an old tarp from the shed, along with a bag of spring clamps, and I chucked them over, before climbing up into the garden beyond.
I spread out the tarp, and using the clamps to pin it to the branches, lined the tunnel under the cypress tree: it would keep some of the bugs and dirt off me as I crawled through, and stop me getting so scratched by the needles. I peered out of the gap in the fence and when I was sure there was no one watching, I pushed the loose boards aside and stepped through.
I was carrying my smallest backpack with some crackers and a bottle of water, which I hid under the junk in the boot of the car. There was already a first aid kit, picnic blanket, boot liner, spare waterproof coat, woolly hat, and old walking boots in there, along with jump leads and an air pump. It’s surprising what a single person, whose main hobbies are gardening and walking, ends up with in the boot of their car. I got in, started the engine, and drove out of Carpenders Park.
It was mid-morning, but there were almost no cars on the road. I turned south at the main junction and headed towards Harrow. I wanted to avoid the town centre in case there was looting still going on, so headed left along the A410 Uxbridge road, and then round a roundabout to go into a smaller side road. I immediately hit a snag. Two cars had been parked at an angle across the entrance to the road, completely blocking it. I slowed, looking across. Behind the cars, I glimpsed a group of garden chairs, on which lounged several people; they were barricading the street! I saw the people look up and start to rise, as I continued round the roundabout and then sped back the way I had come.