We didn’t have the faintest clue how bad it actually all was. In retrospect, the government did a better job than I gave them credit for at the time in terms of managing panic, managing expectations of what was happening, or going to happen. I assumed that they wouldn’t even know where to start, when I left – not because I would hold that place together, but because I often displayed glimpses of morality that were painfully absent from many of my peers. So, damage limitation; they weren’t giving out numbers of dead (or dying), they were giving constant reassurances that they were working on the problem, they were even suggesting that things were getting better. The hospitals that had closed were forgotten about in updates suddenly, and the presenters were caked in make-up so that, to the casual observer, you wouldn’t notice that they were red-eyed and just as sickly as you were.
And, somehow, I still wasn’t ill. I wasn’t even sniffling. I walked to the centre of London – which was all I really remember happening those few days, if I’m honest, that walk to and fro, following the river, noticing how there were no boats moving on it, and when they weren’t there it had an almost unsettlingly calm flow to it – and everything felt like it was coming towards an end. There was something in the air that felt like winding down; a taste, I can’t explain it any more than that. If there had been another Broadcast that day I wouldn’t have been surprised. I ended up walking up to Leicester Square from the river, up the Charing Cross road, along Oxford Street, down Regent’s Street. It was the sort of walk I never did; I never went into that part of the city, not before The Broadcast, certainly; that was reserved for tourists, weekends with visiting relatives. It felt like six in the morning on a Sunday, it was so empty, and the shops were all shut. You could actually see the streets themselves, the architecture, the frontages of the buildings. The pavements, even; you never usually noticed pavements, and yet, there they were. I got to actually look up at the buildings, at their lines where they met the sky, see the cornices, the parapets. I stood outside Liberty’s for an hour, maybe, just marvelling at it, at how anybody got away with building a doll’s house in the middle of one of the busiest commercial districts in the world. How did it slip through the cracks? A real man wouldn’t have cried at that, I suppose.
After that I was at a loss, so I headed down to the far end of Oxford Street, to see if this bar that I used to visit was open, or even still there, but it wasn’t, and I wasn’t surprised. I hadn’t been there since my twenties, and I have no idea why I thought it might have survived. I saw the boundaries of Hyde Park, went in, and Speaker’s Corner was there, just completely empty, so I took a spot, a nice open spot, and I stood there. There wasn’t anybody else around – I must admit, I expected the crazies to keep their spaces, because this was finally a chance for their theories on aliens and gods and conspiracies by the KGB to be heard – but I was all alone. I started talking anyway, rambling along, because it helped for me to vent, to get everything out. I started talking about why I had quit and that spiralled into other subjects, rambling on and on. It felt good to be talking, at least.
We’d been inside the room for far too long, fifteen men sweating it out, worrying that they might have something because nobody came back, hungry and thirsty and stinking, because the showers were behind a closed, locked door. We had a buzzer, like a servant’s bell, and it made people come to the window, see what we wanted. Then it just stopped working, stopped calling anybody to us. Some of the boys worried that it meant we were sick, but I told them that was bollocks. We were all fine, none of us were ill. (Course, we didn’t know it then, but it was probably because of the decontamination and the shots and the quarantine that we were actually okay, that we didn’t all kick it.) But they were antsy, and after too much time spent sitting on crappy beds with nothing to do, they were starting to talk about how to escape. Turns out it didn’t take much: the door gave way after just a few kicks from Stevens’ size 13s, and we were out into the labs. The guy who came when we pressed the buzzer was lying on the floor, not quite dead, but shivering, shaking, his sweat like an outline on the black marble floor underneath him. We called for an ambulance for him from the phone on his desk but nobody answered, so one of the boys – trained medic, good lad – said that he’d stay behind until he managed to get the poor guy more help. Don’t know if he ever did or not.
London was deserted, or as close to deserted as a city that big can be. People were there, just not acting like they usually did, and doing everything slower. Seemed like every other house had police tape up, or a poster warning people to stay away. Cars, as well; there were far fewer cars. I went off from the rest of the boys, on my own, because I wanted some time to myself, to see what sort of a mess the place was in. I picked up a copy of The Sun (one of the few newspapers that made it to print, by the looks of it, all ten pages or whatever it was, like a bloody pamphlet), headed into the park, sat and read it cover to cover. There was no sport section, no TV listings, no letters or ‘Dear Deirdre’, no horoscope, no tits on Page 3; it was just telling us all what we already knew. The editor was having a giraffe, asking the UK to start ignoring all quarantines, returning to our daily lives: He will come back for us, was the quote, and when He does we will be ready for Him, with a country that has picked itself up and dusted itself off. I heard this guy shouting then, over at Speaker’s Corner. He was the only one there, so I went over, sat opposite him, listened as he spoke about how we were losing our sense of ourselves just because we thought that God might be real. Aren’t we? he asked me, and I said, I don’t know, mate. You work in a hospital? I’d forgotten about the whites, so I told him no, told him that I was a soldier. You were in Iran? Yeah, I said, and he came down from the rock he’d been standing on, sat next to me. Aren’t you angry, if there is a God, that He let you go out there? He didn’t let us do anything, I told him, the PM ordered us to go, we went. Did you lose any friends? Yeah, I said, another unit was closer to the blasts. And you aren’t angry, that He let that happen? If He is real? I didn’t know what to say, so I did what I learnt from years of being a soldier: I kept schtum.
I’m sorry, he said, it’s been a confusing few days, I’m trying to work it all out. He held out his hand. Simon Dabnall, he said, Member of Parliament. No, sorry, ex-Member of Parliament. Piers Anderson, I said, ex-soldier. Ex? he asked, and I said, Yeah; I think I’ve just quit.
I went to the loo, and when I got back I had a missed call on my mobile from my aunt. She answered when I called her back but she was in floods of tears, gasping back the air as she said Hello. She didn’t even reel off her phone number like she usually did, so I just hung up, because … Well, you know. I think I knew what it meant. Funny thing was, she didn’t even try to call back after that.
Our numbers were down. Not viewers, staff. We were running the station on six of us, and one of the runners was starting to look vile, going yellow. I was alright, running off adrenaline. I had the constitution for it, one of those immune systems that kicks in when it’s important and doesn’t let up until I tell it to. We were reporting on what we could, and one of the few production staff said that they were jumping ship, heading to St Thomas’. Everybody seems to have gone there, she said, it’s on the internet. We should go. I told her that I didn’t want to, but she was persuasive, and … Other people have said this since: that the air changed, and it felt like we were heading toward an end. I could have just abandoned it all, gone out of the door and not looked back.
Actually, that’s a lie. I would always have looked back.
I went back home, cleaned my face off, made myself some breakfast – I didn’t even know what time it was, but it was light by that point – and I sat at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to Leonard. It was a habit that I had, something I did when people died. I don’t know how many times you had to do something for it to become a habit, but this one covered my mother and my father, some old friends, so Leonard got the same treatment. I don’t remember the letter now, but it was mostly just how much I missed him. I wrote something about how I assumed that he wouldn’t need me to tell him about the last few days, because he’ll have been watching them, but I didn’t know if I believed that, or if it was just something that I wrote to myself, instead, to make me feel better. I signed it and sealed it and put it in the cardboard box I kept in the closet, along with the other letters, and then made myself a coffee.
It’s when you’re about to give up that everything comes together for you. I had a call from … I forget his name, the guy who took over as Chief of Staff from Brubaker. That place was, for a day, like a revolving door, one name out, another one in. He called the studio and the intern answered, and he whistled at me as I was talking about how empty Times Square was. I went to dead air but the call was worth it. They – we – were about to launch something at somebody. That’s what they told me, that’s what I knew.
Sam called me for the last time, told me that they had started the launch sequence. It’s not with the press yet, he said, but it will be. Jesus, I said, are you alright? No, he told me, no, I’m not alright. I keep looking at everything and I feel so responsible, Ed. Is there anything I can do? I asked, and he said no, that he’d be in touch when this was all over. That was the last time I spoke to him.