Not Alone, page 5
I nod.
‘Kate, you know I’d never choose not to have you in my life, don’t you?’
‘Dad loved me, but—’
‘But he was ill and so many things seemed to be troubling him. I know it doesn’t help, me saying it, but . . . him taking his life had nothing to do with how much he loved you.’
‘I hate how fragile things feel now, like I’m waiting for more things to break? Like everything’s uncertain?’ A person alive one moment and gone the next.
‘I know,’ Jack says softly, and I see that shiver of melancholy. ‘Life is.’
I grimace but I’m glad he doesn’t contradict or gloss over that unsettling feeling. It would leave me alone with it.
Things have been harder this last year, grief making things rocky sometimes – each of us snapping at the other, irritable and sad. Far from those first carefree perfect years, or at least that’s how they seem now. But our own wedding is only a few months away . . . when all I want is to feel all the good stuff. ‘I just want everything else to fall away. And for us to feel happy and loved-up, just like we did when we first met.’
‘How can we, though?’ Jack says with mock seriousness, a glint in his eyes. ‘After I finally let one rip in front of you!’ He laughs, making me laugh too.
‘Or you’ve cleaned up my vomit after I got that stomach bug that first winter?’
‘Yeah – I know I’m a pro at clean-ups but . . . thanks for that.’ He smirks. ‘That bit at the start is the fantasy bit, isn’t it?’
I nod a small smile. ‘I know, I know.’ Both of us on best behaviour, hormones making us see each other in a fog of gold. ‘And we’ve each got to make ourselves happy too, right? Chase our own dreams down.’
‘I admire you for chasing down what you really want to do—’
‘I wish they weren’t all short contracts though, so I didn’t need to do all these part-time retail and bitty jobs.’
‘Yeah, but you’ve had the stamina to do that, keep the money coming in. Many people would give up—’
‘I can’t not do something meaningful with my life.’
‘I know, it’s one of the things I love about you.’
We go back to our chopping, before Jack suddenly slings down his knife and the greens he was shredding. ‘Fuck it.’ He sweeps me up, arms tightening around me like mine around him, like there’s still space to be extinguished between us, like we can’t quite get close enough, his mouth moving in sync with mine, eyes closed. Carrying me down the hallway, stumbling past the unpacked suitcases and feeling for the bedroom doorway, our eyes only opening when he accidentally clocks his head and mine against the door frame, which only makes us laugh harder, still trying to kiss. ‘Been thinking about this all day.’
The black is liquid and heavy, suffocating. Outside, the furious thrashing wind, everything rattling, scouring, shaking and clonking as if I’m at the centre of a too-full washing machine manically spinning its drum.
My fingers – numb and sore from taping sills and vents, hammering rugs and blankets across windows, moving furniture to barricade – find the lid of my laptop. The bright white screen hurts my eyes as the familiar bathroom reappears around me – gleaming tiles, enamelled tub and glittering taps, shower curtain printed with rainbow fish. And I gulp in air, able to breathe again.
I grab a book from Jack’s ‘toilet library’. The first is just full of stoic quotes. I flick at random to: ‘I am calm while the storm is raging around me.’ I snort, imagining how Jack would laugh. But there’s a shudder as the building creaks, followed by a great crash, and I skim a few other volumes before pushing away the books. I need something that can distract me.
I light the candle Anna bought me. As maid of honour she keeps buying wedding-planning gifts and sending me ideas and quotes and colour samples, joining me at all my dress fittings for moral support. This candle is sickly-sweet and citrusy – not my taste – but it fills the room and makes me think of her.
There’s just enough light to cut little songbird-sized holes in the bamboo segments I’ve piled in the corner, and to staple down the miniature bark roofs, then cut and tie fifteen inches of wire into bored holes for hanging it. Popular table favours, these crafted bird boxes – I like them. Anna’s going to burn ‘Lovebirds’ on them. Just sat there in the hallway, I piled them in at the last moment, for something to do.
I imagine incorporating this night into my speech on the special day, now I’ve decided I’m going to stand up beside Jack and Adders and give one, not sit silent. And I smile – it might get a good laugh. Maybe I’ll also be laughing at having to alter my dress around a bump too . . . I hope not. Ever since we spoke about maybe trying after the wedding, we’ve not been careful and I feel silly wondering if I feel different – achy and cramping – after our anniversary two nights ago, as if you can tell you’re pregnant that quickly.
Pausing, I realize my eyes sting. And my breathing is exaggerated, the air thick and dry. The laptop blinks at me.
I saw the warnings on the news: particles breathed in can clog and damage the lungs. Some are so small they could pass through tissues and into bloodstreams.
Is it inside the flat?
Four in the morning. I suddenly feel heavy.
I type another message for Jack into my phone, though the ones I sent yesterday and the day before still show as unread.
Jack, you OK? Where are you? Please let me know you’re alright. Am barricaded in the bathroom! I did as much as I could to the windows, like they said on the TV. Wish you were here with me. Love you XX
There’s probably several of his waiting to ping to my phone too. His amused tone – often how he responds to things going wrong – at how no one could have predicted something of this scale. About the hug he couldn’t wait to give me. That he loved me too.
Jack must have slept at the clinic the previous night instead of coming home. I imagine him weighing it up again yesterday, whether to attempt the journey despite the government lockdown and get back to me before the storm hit properly, or whether it was safer to stay put, shuttered up like I am, but at the hospital, trolleys and boxes of medical supplies used for barricades, ward curtains pinned across windows. All that glass to cover.
Maybe there are patients he had to stay to care for, or people had walked in, ill, and he’s trying to help. The hospital is a small private one, no A & E, but still, they might turn up as they did during the flu scare.
I shut the laptop, just the flickering flame and sharp scent for company in the grey gloom.
Images of damaged lungs, bloodied faces, bodies in the streets, covered in dust, a shape falling from the balcony opposite, and buildings levelled in the London borough Jack’s hospital is in – all keep dancing in the dark. It’s all felt unreal, but now I’m trembling again, sick as it washes through me.
The previous night – when I spent my evening waiting fruitlessly for Jack to come home – they were calling it a ‘plastic dust storm’: extremely high levels of particles and toxicity. They kept showing that great swirling mass of Storm Stewart on the surface of the globe – huge hurricanes – and kept talking in trillions about all the minuscule plastic specks and flakes to be lifted up out of the ocean, vast red algal blooms caused by chemical pollution lifting with it. How they’ve recorded bigger hurricanes each year too – climate change – making all this feel inevitable.
This will be the warning, I think, big and awful enough to make everyone really act, this time. Surely. I tick off in my head all the things I will do differently – convince Jack to give up his Subaru, do more research on what I’m buying, join a regular clean-up group, use that microfibre wash bag every time and not just when I remember, persuade family to go vegan, sign petitions to change the laws, join more protests . . .
The candle flickers, the flame and smoke stretched out long and thin, sizzling with a chemical bitterness as if there’s something burning in the air that’s too small to see. My throat is dry and sore, like the beginnings of a cough. The key symptoms replay in my head: irritation to skin, throat and lungs, trouble breathing, stiff painful chest, coughing blood. Leading to asphyxiation or heart attack. Emergency medical places were set up, but the advice soon changed to hole up at home and not to venture outside. I itch at the scarf around my face, knowing the thin cotton weave is useless to protect me.
And suddenly I remember, probably only six foot from me in the loft above, is Jack’s old army gear, including a proper particulate-filtering mask!
I hesitate, heart pounding, my throat dry and itchy – wondering if that mask is the thing that’s going to save me – before peeling away my tape and towels and pulling the bathroom door open, the thrashing wind getting louder as I do.
It’s definitely inside. In the candlelight, I can see the vents above the window in the room opposite have been thrust open, and little trails of grey have worked through the seals around the window too, my tape peeling, barricades half fallen over.
I drag a chair into the hallway, and the loft hatch swings down after one sharp shove – along with a great snowdrift of thick grey dust! Coating me. I flail, wobbling on the chair, screwing my eyes to slits and holding my breath under the hopeless scarf, my nose blocked, a bitter taste in my mouth. In the seconds it takes me to grab the rucksack and push the hatch back up, I see a grey miasma of smog howling through the great holes in the roof.
I’m crying as I stumble back inside the bathroom, wedging and sealing the door behind me with tape and towels, grey swirling inside, head aching, washing my eyes, nose and mouth out with bottled water . . . before ramming that precious mask on my face as tight as it will go.
I huddle in the corner, the candle snapping and shrinking before winking out. Turning the ring on my finger, Jack’s face as I saw him just the day before yesterday – smiling wearily – is clear in my mind.
I just have to hold out here. Jack will make it back. He will.
I peel the curtain aside. It’s still thick out there, daylight dulled to twilight. But as I stare at the moving swathes of red-grey dust, the flats opposite appear in a ghostly outline. And beyond them, where town should be, sporadic glowing dots – street lights. I shut my eyes to take careful breaths in and out – I keep getting breathless, my throat and lungs burning as if sore and inflamed, my nose blocked and crusted. Imagine something else. Don’t think.
It’s like a film set. A well-established colony on Mars. That’s all. Pretend it’s nothing more.
I open my eyes again. Martian dust storms can last a while. Every day that passes, though, it is dissipating.
Squinting upwards, the sky seems brighter too. A pale warmth to it. Hard to tell, but it feels like the twilight-daylight is lengthening too.
I shamble towards the sofa – standing up feels too exhausting – and sink into it, absently flicking the lamp switch, but of course, nothing happens. Peering down at the coffee table, I trace my finger over the neat rows of crosses on the paper chart I made, each cross marking the food I’d rationed myself for that day used up. After those first thoughtless weeks, I’ve tried to make it last as long as possible. I’ve been able to stretch it to ninety-two days. Three months.
Fuck. Three months since I saw Jack.
A horrible heavy dread thuds in my sore chest, tears prickling behind blocked ducts creating a pressure around my eyes. I feel dizzy. I suck in another wheezy breath. And cough out pink phlegm.
But three fucking months. I try to make my tired brain calculate whether that means it’s close to May, or if our wedding day has already come and gone. I cling to my phone suddenly, though all my devices ran out of power a long time ago. I sob, my eyes prickling and twitching. All of our family and friends who should have come together on that day are probably all gone. Dead, dead, dead. The noise of those last news broadcasts that I watched and rewatched once nothing new came in reverberates round my head. Snippets of it gouging through my mind. A military voice. Death tolls in the first twenty-four hours. Do not leave your home. Repeat. Do not. Repeat. Do not.
Slowly I notice a soft pitter-patter. Familiar and soothing. Not the irregular whooshing and battering of the dust-laden wind. I look around the dim room, before turning to the window. Tiny droplets of grey-red mud pepper the scratched grimy glass. Outside is thick with falling threads of mud.
I sit and stare out at it for days. Until the clouds dry up and the air bobs and dances with grey and red particles again as if nothing has changed. But I can see the splattered rooftops of town some distance beyond the flats opposite now! The row of poplars behind the flats opposite visible too, bare limbs sodden and splattered grey-red. I hadn’t even considered that: trees and plants dying too. I blink, counting up those ninety-two days again. It should be spring.
The car park four floors below has disappeared under mud. Nothing moves out there but the haze. My hands find their way to rest on my chest, to feel that strained beat of my heart beneath the whistling and rattling of my lungs, to feel at least one thing still living. And absently stray across my too-small stomach too.
Yet past the poplars, there’s the supermarket, and as I watch I slowly rise to my feet. There’s movement in the car park.
With more energy than I’ve felt in weeks, I hobble to the spare bedroom and grab the binoculars off the bookcase. Wearing a dust suit and face mask, hood up over their head, someone is pausing at each car, checking for fuel, ignoring the electric-only skinny ones. Then they head towards the supermarket.
I scan the shopfront as they disappear inside, adjusting the lenses until the image clears again. Empty shelves and turned-over baskets, all the glass frontage smashed through. A big white army-style four-by-four – the splattered grey almost obscuring the blue UN lettering on its side – is parked across the entrance. I flinch the binoculars away from my face. There was something slumped in the front seat.
I rush to put on my shoes and coat. But at the front door to the flat, my fingers tremble on the cold metal of the lock and I can’t catch my breath, lungs tight and coughing up that pink phlegm. My head feels dull – bleary and tired. I imagine myself outside. Air still heavy with particles. Bodies visible through glass and under debris. Empty black windows and grey splattered walls bearing down on me. The 150 metres up the road, across the Hiz Bridge, and the same distance back down to the supermarket car park – achingly far. The words of that last broadcast blare in my head: do not go outside. And the energy that propelled me to the door leaks out of me.
A sickly smell, like rotting fruit, is coming from the cracks around the door.
I heave, sagging backwards against the hallway wall.
Not yet not yet not yet. Words pinging round my fuzzy brain to the rhythm of my short tight breaths. Not today.
Once the red-grey haze clears more, Jack might still come home. I know what he’d say. You’re hurt, stay put; I’ll get back to you. He trained for stuff like this in the army. He’ll get back. He will he will he will. Words echoing round my skull. Yet it’s followed by that other fearful voice in my head: he didn’t train for this. Not this not this not this.
And what if he doesn’t come back? What if he doesn’t?
I think of Mum and my brother, my eyes drawn down the hallway to that useless phone on the kitchen counter.
Please. Let us all live.
Making it back to my spot on the sofa, I paw at the maps laid out beneath my chart. The route to the house in Birmingham. To Mum and Paul. I imagine Mum, desperate to know I’m alright. And part of me wants to run out there right now and sprint off in her direction. I start coughing once more, burning through my lungs. I feel like a child again, wanting my mum to hold my hand for the needle or dentist, except now I’m scared of what happens if my lungs keep burning and my stomach keeps growling.
How long will I wait here on my own? I can hear a sort of keening in the back of my head.
The day I leave for Birmingham will be the day I accept Jack didn’t come home. That he is covered by rubble or dust somewhere in his clinic or what’s left of it. That Jack is dead. Dead dead dead.
6
Rain thrums on the windows, smearing the glass and obscuring the sunset, making dusk feel closer than it should. Harry and I sit on the sofa, staring, hoping it doesn’t turn. So far it’s good, clear rain. I try to imagine the water butt filling up, inch by inch.
‘Is it time?’ Harry whispers.
I adjust the plinking bucket in the corner, pulling him clear.
‘No, it’s not really evening yet, not dark enough—’
A muddle of sharp echoes sounds over the rooftops.
Harry’s eyes widen. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m not sure.’ I can’t make it out, but there’s yowling and barking too. I creep down the hallway to the front door of our flat, and hesitate, listening, before I step out onto the landing and shove on my boots. I pull our front door closed – Harry hanging back in the shadows of our hallway – and push on it, just twice, to make sure it’s locked. I pace, the noise growing louder. I tug on the lacing of my boots and finger my knife, still in my back pocket, before finally heading out into the stairwell and deciding I’m going to look out the front of the building.
At the half-landing between first and second floors, where I stood with Harry only an hour or so ago, I can taste vomit in my throat. I can see on the road outside: long arms and legs pumping, broad shoulders. There’s the sound of boots sploshing through puddles and slapping against hard ground. It’s as if my brain can’t quite put it together after years of not seeing one, but it is a person. A man. At the top of the road. And running in this direction.
I can’t see the dogs yet.
Something roped over the man’s shoulder flaps as he runs – dead rabbits, badly butchered and hacked apart, bits of hide and entrails flying off them. Idiot. And I would never trigger a chase by running.
My feet take me down to the half-landing between the ground and first floors without me realizing it, until suddenly I’m there, drawn hurriedly down to the next window.
