Patrick has never seen so many people outside Mia’s primary school, not even on the last day of term. Cars and vans are haphazardly double parked, bumper to bumper, in the street and on pavements. In the playground, parents and children form dense, irregular groups that seamlessly cluster together and drift apart as if their movements are choreographed. A BBC Cambridge television van with a satellite dish on its roof has even been allowed to park inside the playground. He counts three television cameras, four microphones and as many people with notebooks. How on earth has this happened?
Bewildered, he grips Mia’s hand and hesitates for a moment outside the entrance, wondering what is going on. He finds a crumpled copy of the Cambridge News under his left foot. When he bends down to pick it up he is stunned to see Lilly smiling radiantly up at him from the front page under the headline ‘Health Emergency as School Children Struck by Mystery Contagion’. He recognizes the photo from her Facebook page. He traces a circle around her face with his index finger and skim-reads the first couple of paragraphs, ‘first victim … dangerous seizure … battery of tests … a second child … official investigation …’
He doesn’t have to ask how the media has identified Lilly: in the far corner of the playground, Catriona Vickers holds court in front of an arc of journalists.
He quickly stuffs the newspaper into his bag and anxiously checks on Mia, hoping she might suggest they turn tail and head home. After all, she had spent much of year five reaching this point and refusing to go in. But, in typically contrary fashion, she emphatically hikes up her school skirt, pulls back her shoulders and takes a couple of deep breaths, urging him towards the fray with a determined push to the base of his spine.
‘Come on, Dad,’ Mia shouts up at him. ‘All things are difficult before they are easy.’ It’s the same phrase he used with her last year when she was refusing to go into school. The irony doesn’t make him smile. The diary with the creepy photomontage of Lilly is still fresh in his memory and he shivers in spite of the sultry heat rising from the tarmac. Her composure unsettles him. It’s not natural. He buries the thought before it has taken shape. He can only worry about one child at a time. Instead he wipes his forehead and imagines himself on his bike, legs pumping as he speeds along Black Fen Drove, the only noise the sound of his breath. Inhale three strokes, hold for two strokes, exhale six strokes. Ten breaths per minute. He hasn’t been on a ride all week and he’s missed it.
The febrile atmosphere washes over them as they walk towards the back of the crowd. He keeps a tight grip on Mia’s hand, worrying about what she makes of it all. It’s so noisy he can hardly hear himself think. He glances down but, to his surprise, she smiles serenely. ‘It’s started,’ she says, staring up at him with her strange watery green eyes. Or, at least, that’s what he thinks she says, because her voice is lost in the general din. Unlike Patrick, she doesn’t seem in the least unnerved by what is unfolding in her playground.
People he doesn’t recognize are wielding professional-looking placards with angry messages: ‘We demand answers! Now!’; ‘Wind turbine syndrome – get the facts!’; ‘Who will be next?’ Every so often a chant ripples through the crowd, although he notices not everyone joins in. He’s faintly reassured to see that many of them look as disturbed as he feels. He can’t believe that all this has been triggered by what has happened to his daughter. Thank God Grace didn’t come! Thank God Lilly is in hospital without her phone! Thank God for Mia’s resilience!
He ruffles Mia’s hair affectionately as they push forwards. Everyone is talking too fast and too loudly. Sentences hang in the air, only half formed. Patrick is reminded of the word game he sometimes plays with Mia where she has to fill in the gaps. ‘I heard that she’s been put in an …’ There are three options: ‘isolation ward’, ‘induced coma’, ‘intensive care’.
He can’t stand the way people seem to relish the drama of his family’s situation. ‘I hear she’s been given the all-clear and sent home,’ Patrick wants to shout back at them. Except no one will listen. Besides, it’s not true: he’s just read Grace’s last message (she’s sent eight since he left home), saying the hospital has phoned and they want to do some tests that involve Lilly being locked away in a room for three days while a machine monitors her brainwaves and a video camera records her every movement. It sounds as creepy as an episode of Black Mirror.
Mia surges into the crowd, Patrick trailing behind her. The gossip changes course. ‘I heard the gypsy boy stole …’: ‘a ring’, ‘an iPhone’, ‘a swan’.
Mia stops to correct them. ‘Not true, not true, not true,’ she yells, but no one takes any notice. Patrick tells her to ignore them and urges her forward. Everyone seems to have forgotten that children are witnessing this craziness. Why on earth don’t the parents get them into school where calm and order will surely prevail?
He looks up at the first-floor window and sees the headmistress, Miss Swain and other teachers staring down at them all, no doubt trying to work out what they can do to quell the growing hysteria. Patrick pauses to plot the best route to the revolving door. He sees Mia look up at her form teacher and wave. To his surprise, Miss Swain waves back and even gives a stiff smile. She must have been watching them all the time.
Mia weaves through the crowd. Patrick follows, head down, cycling style, breathing in the heady fug of sweat, fear and adrenalin, hoping no one recognizes them because they are now infamous as the tragic family. He had wanted to get to school early, specifically to avoid the gaze of other parents, but going by bus had scuppered that plan because it took so long. He knew their well-meant but anxious enquiries about Lilly and Mia would have unsettled his younger daughter and upset him. And he has enough self-insight to know he would have been unable to distinguish between genuine concern and someone fishing for information to be shared with one of the multiple WhatsApp groups that have sprouted like weeds over the past week to analyse every aspect of what is going on.
There are already three different groups for the parents in Mia’s class. One for those Grace describes as ‘the voices of reason’, a second, established by Catriona, for the conspiracy theorists, and a third by Miss Swain to keep in touch with parents. The teacher’s messages are limited to practicalities, reminding them school is open as usual, that she will be doing an extended weekly session of Show and Tell, to take pupils’ minds off their missing classmate, and providing updates about Tas. ‘He’s as well as can be expected,’ read her last message, a phrase that sounded faintly ominous and fuelled renewed speculation on Catriona’s group chat that information was being withheld from them.
There are two separate groups for Lilly’s class but Grace had been excluded from one, a gesture she reads as hostile but Patrick argues is humanitarian because it was set up by Nuala, who is a proper friend, to deliver updates to concerned parents of students in Mr Galveston’s class so that they don’t bother Grace with too many questions. ‘Watch out, she’s working against our daughter,’ Grace had warned him. She’d said the same thing about Miss Swain. Her paranoia frightens him. She doesn’t trust anyone.
When he couldn’t sleep last night, he had taken a look at Catriona’s WhatsApp group on Grace’s phone and seen that it contained links to spurious articles about wind-turbine syndrome, including an interview with a woman who claimed that she had seizures due to the noise from turbines. ‘How Infrasound Has Blighted My Life,’ read the headline. He now regrets that, in a fit of pique, he had added a link from Grace’s phone to a piece in the Guardian: ‘How to Catch Wind-turbine Syndrome From Hearing Someone Talk About It’. He wrote a long message about how infrasound is emitted by surf, storms, wind, heartbeat and respiration, and suggested that perhaps Catriona should also start a campaign to ban the air they breathe. Catriona’s husband then posted a series of links to various climate-change-denial websites.
Finally Nuala had waded in to advise parents to expend positive energy supporting each other rather than engaging in ‘petty political point scoring’. Grace was furious with them all, but especially Patrick, because he had made it seem she was more focused on fake news than on Lilly. He’s beginning to realize that, apart from worrying about Lilly, Grace’s biggest fear is people thinking she is a bad mother. He feels Mia pulling at his arm. ‘I want to go and see the television cameras,’ she shouts up at him. Before he can answer, her slippery hand has slithered through his fingers.
‘Mia,’ he shouts, ‘come back! There isn’t time.’ Patrick is desperate to get her away from the playground and into school so he can go to the hospital. He tries to push after her but he treads on someone’s foot and stops to apologize. When he looks round she has been swallowed by the crowd.
‘Steady on, mate.’ A man he doesn’t recognize puts his hand firmly on his shoulder to hold him back.
‘Sorry, I’ve lost my daughter,’ Patrick explains breathlessly, as he turns to face him.
‘You need to slow down,’ the man says, tightening his grip.
‘You don’t understand,’ says Patrick, who is less worried about Mia getting lost than what she might say to other people.
The man leans forward so his mouth almost touches Patrick’s ear. He feels spots of saliva spray his cheek as he speaks. ‘We’re all worried. Just imagine if you were the father of the poor girl lying in a coma and no one was telling you the truth because of a cover-up.’
‘She’s not in a coma,’ says Patrick, angrily. But the man isn’t listening because the headmistress has opened a window on the first floor and is leaning out to address everyone through a megaphone.
‘Testing, testing, testing,’ she says, clearing her throat. ‘Please can you move back to let our pupils get into the school building. We are open as normal.’
‘Why aren’t you telling us the truth?’ someone shouts up at the window.
‘We have told you everything we know and are posting regular updates on the school messaging system.’ Her voice reverberates round the playground.
‘Is it true another pupil has fallen ill?’ another voice yells.
‘As soon as we have more news, we will inform you,’ she reiterates. Her responses sound rehearsed, as if she’s reading from a script given to her by the Department of Health.
While everyone’s attention is on the headmistress, Patrick takes advantage of the space that has opened up to sidestep in the direction of the television van. To his relief he comes across a familiar face fighting her way towards him. ‘Hey,’ he shouts. ‘Hey, Nuala!’ He’s never been so pleased to see her.
‘Hey, Patrick!’ she shouts back.
‘Have you seen Mia anywhere?’ he asks, as she gets closer.
‘Yes.’ She nods and points in the general direction of the BBC van.
He’s relieved to see she’s not with her husband. Patrick now realizes that one of the reasons so many people are here is that entire families are milling around the playground, trying to decide whether to send their children into school. He would have no patience with George’s urge to play the maverick on a day like this.
Nuala tacks towards him, making steady progress, her long tent dress swaying from side to side, like a sail, as she glides effortlessly between people, while he is relentlessly buffeted by sharp shoulders and elbows. When she finally reaches him, he’s taken aback as she throws her suntanned arms around his neck to give him an emotional hug. ‘I can’t imagine what you’re going through,’ she says in his ear. ‘Such terrible times.’ Her curly dark hair tickles his face and lips. ‘How’s Lil?’
‘We measure the days in good nights and she’s had another good one. It’s strange, but when we’re with her you wouldn’t know there’s anything wrong. But as soon as we leave, all I can think about is whether she’s going to have another seizure. Thanks for asking.’
‘That’s great news. Hayley is still very affected by it all. And Mia? I heard about what happened yesterday.’
‘She is strangely fine. Emphasis on strangely. We’re very proud of her.’ He forces a laugh and she smiles. Nuala doesn’t pull away from him. He notices how her hair smells of coconut and, beneath the fabric of her dress, she feels as small and scrawny as a sparrow. His hand rests on the bony cartilage at the top of her spine. He gives her a reassuring hug. One that says, ‘I’m fine and I hope you’re fine, and these people are the mad and we are the sane.’ But instead of feeling like the arbiter of calm, he is momentarily possessed by the image of Nuala up against the wall in the derelict waste-ground at the end of the road, palms resting against the crumbling brickwork, as he falls to his knees, slowly lifts her dress, and parts her legs to press his face into the warmth between her thighs. The pressure and the heat are getting to him. Thinking is not doing, he reminds himself. ‘But if you think, you might as well do,’ he imagines his brother saying, while laughing at him.
He tries to unravel himself from Nuala’s embrace before she can feel him growing hard through his shorts. They disentangle and she leans towards him again until her mouth is so close to his left ear that he can feel her breath cooling his cheek. ‘Is Grace okay? She seems a little on edge.’
‘What happened yesterday evening was my fault,’ he says, assuming she’s referring to the WhatsApp spat. ‘I sent the Guardian piece from Grace’s phone. I wanted to inject a bit of sanity into the debate. Wind-turbine syndrome is complete bunkum. I can’t believe that theory has gained any traction. And Catriona’s husband works for a company that peddles misinformation about climate change.’
‘I understand,’ says Nuala.
‘Grace is furious with me.’ He feels disloyal saying it but the urge to connect with someone amid this madness overwhelms his usual reticence.
‘She’s furious with me too,’ says Nuala. ‘She’s under a lot of pressure.’
‘It’s all got so out of hand so quickly,’ he says, sweeping his hand around the playground, then resting it on her shoulder.
‘It’s terrifying how it’s taken on a life of its own. Not that I told you that. Otherwise Catriona will accuse me of being a collaborator.’
‘Where have all these people come from?’ Patrick asks. ‘They can’t all be parents.’
‘Social media rent-a-mob.’ Nuala shrugs. ‘Twitter is aflame. It’s the usual fact-phobics.’
‘Is it true another child has been taken to hospital?’ Patrick asks.
She nods. ‘She’s from the secondary school. That’s all I know. Year ten. There’s no obvious connection between her, Lilly and Tas.’ She flounders. ‘Perhaps it is something contagious. Not necessarily the wind turbines, but perhaps something else has got into the groundwater. Maybe we’ll all be infected.’
‘It’s always tempting to read too much into coincidence,’ he says, placing a reassuring arm around her shoulders.
Mia has found her way to the far corner of the playground where a group of adults and children cluster around journalists interviewing Catriona Vickers. Even Mia can tell Catriona dressed for attention when she got up this morning. While everyone else is in shorts and T-shirts, she is wearing a bright yellow sundress, belted tightly in the middle, red lipstick and high-heeled shoes. She looks like a giant inflatable balloon, except instead of gas she is pumped up with her own importance.
The journalists fire questions at her. ‘Have there been any other cases of wind-turbine syndrome in the UK?’; ‘What is the science behind the theory?’; ‘Is there a range of symptoms?’ Catriona holds forth. She goes on and on about how wind turbines cause pollution, sleeplessness and put chickens off laying eggs until even the journalists start to look bored. ‘We need a new angle,’ Mia hears one of them mutter.
She can’t believe that no one is asking the right questions, still less that Catriona has wangled her way centre stage to hijack what should have been her show. They should be interviewing me! I’m the one who knows what’s going on. I’m the one who was with Tas. Less than twenty-four hours ago, everyone wanted Mia’s opinion. Pupils and teachers alike were tripping over to congratulate her, but today she has become invisible again. She scuffs the toes of her leather boots on the asphalt in frustration. Nobody has even noticed that she’s here.
This is not what was meant to happen. At the end of yesterday’s meeting with Miss Swain, when the headmistress and the school counsellor had come into the classroom to speak to Mia and her parents, she had been quite clear about the reasons for the illness sweeping the school. It was so obvious that Mia couldn’t believe they hadn’t already worked it out for themselves: by digging up the Anglo-Saxon burial site, the archaeologists had angered the spirits of the dead and released a medieval illness that had been buried for centuries. Lilly had swum near the site all summer and Tas lived next door. This was obviously the common denominator they kept searching for.
‘Strictly speaking, the dead have come to claim the living,’ she calmly told them.
Although she couldn’t say this, she knew Lilly had been targeted because she was a deviant woman, like the girl with her baby in the grave: Lilly had got pregnant without being married. Her mum was on the right track when she argued with her dad that Lilly might have done something that brought on the seizure.
Mia had watched as everyone carefully made notes. She noticed her parents exchanging worried looks with the headmistress and was pleased that at last they were paying proper attention to her warning. There was a long silence as they absorbed the seriousness of the situation. Then Miss Swain asked her a typically annoying question. ‘So why do you think you haven’t fallen ill, Mia?’
‘Perhaps I am protected,’ she said dreamily, pressing her calves together so she could feel the ring digging into her ankle. ‘Or perhaps I will be next. Or maybe you will.’ She gave Miss Swain her best death stare and she stopped asking questions.
Yet, observing the hoo-ha in the playground this morning, it seems her theory has been forgotten or completely ignored. Instead of people demanding that the archaeologists suspend their dig right away and the Travellers be allowed to stay on their site, the focus has moved to some wind farm she hadn’t even heard of until today.
Catriona’s interference has changed everything. The possibility that the council will force the Travellers to leave to make way for the archaeologists to excavate the entire site remains a real possibility. No one will object because no one cares about the Travellers. She can tell that from the way Rawnie has to go to the toilet and shower in an unheated outside washroom even in the winter, and because she relies on Tas for reading and writing. And she overheard her parents talking about the reason their new home was so cheap was because it was near the Travellers’ site.
Her stomach somersaults as she imagines Rawnie packing up her caravan. Tas had told her the day before he got ill that his mum mentioned they might have to move north to Lincolnshire because they had family there and a pitch had come up on a site near Boston. They had searched for Boston on a map and quickly grasped that it would be impossible for Tas to stay at the same school. They would probably never see each other again.
Mia needs to win back momentum fast. She bends down and takes out the ring from the inside of her sock and carefully puts it on her finger. She has made a promise to Tas that he won’t ever have to leave his home. She will do anything in her power to keep her word. She wishes he were here with her now because they could work out a new plan together. Mia is good at coming up with ideas. But there are always so many crowding her head that she finds it difficult to decide which one to choose. Tas knows which is the best. But it’s impossible to get in touch with him because he’s in hospital.
As she watches Catriona answer more questions – she’s even talking about Lilly now, describing how her symptoms match those of a woman who caught wind-turbine syndrome in Australia – Mia imagines all the things she will never do again if Tas leaves: she will never eat biscuits from the plate with the fancy pink drawings of ladies with parasols; she will never trot so fast round the field on Guit’s back that she feels her actual internal organs bounce inside her stomach; she will never hear Tas’s older sisters tease him that his wife has arrived when Mia appears at the gate. Even worse, Tas seems to have grown more accepting of the situation. He kept saying he didn’t want to do anything that might make things even more difficult for his family and that he’s already had to move schools five times, twice because he was bullied for being a gypsy. When Mia suggested that maybe he and his mum could move into a house closer to Cambridge he had burst out laughing. ‘Mum settled in a house? You’re having a laugh, Mia. It’s not our way.’
‘Would you ever live in a house?’ she had asked him, with curiosity. He shook his head vigorously.
‘Even if it meant we could be together?’ she asked.
‘It’s not my world, Mia,’ he said. But then he had kissed her cheek for the first time. ‘I don’t want to be settled.’
Think, Mia, think. Her mind darts back to the beginning of term when the school had introduced a weekly after-school class called ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’. It was a project Miss Swain had come up with to impress the headmistress. Mia tries to remember the lessons in case there is something that might prove useful. She has begun to appreciate that Miss Swain is someone who generally manages to turn life to her advantage and that this is a skill she would do well to learn herself.
She casts her mind back to the first session. It focused on the importance of life-affirming messages. Miss Swain had asked everyone in the class to write positive messages about themselves on Post-it notes. ‘I am clever’; ‘I am unique’; ‘I like myself the way I am.’ They then had to repeat these out loud. When Miss Swain went round the class asking them how they felt afterwards, Mia said she felt just the same. She pointed out that the phrases had no meaning if everyone said the same thing. ‘We can’t all be unique, we can’t all be clever and we can’t all like ourselves the way we are. There are always winners and losers in life.’ This was a concept she had experienced at first hand.
The second session was on ‘How to Be a Good Friend’. Mia and her classmates all had to fill in a chart on a piece of A4. On the left side they were asked to list good choices about friendship and on the right bad choices. A prize was awarded for the child who came up with the best ideas. Bea Vickers had won. Her good choices included ‘asking someone if they need help when they are crying’; ‘sharing the giant bricks’; ‘helping with spellings’. Her bad choices involved ‘cyber bullying someone for the way they look’; ‘leaving someone out of a game’ and ‘not sharing sweets’.
Not only had Bea inflicted all these ‘bad choices’ on Mia, she had also set up an Instagram poll asking people to vote on whether or not they thought Mia was an ugly freak. Eighty-nine people said yes and three said no, which meant that Mia had one more friend than she had previously thought. It was after this that Mia had confiscated Bea’s phone. After awarding the prize, Miss Swain had asked if anyone wanted to discuss what they had learnt during the session. Mia had stood up. She could remember exactly what she said because Miss Swain had kept her back at the end of class and warned her about being intimidating. These words come back to her now. She steps out towards Catriona and the journalists and claps her hands, like Miss Swain does when she wants everyone’s attention. She stands upright, hands clasped behind her back, heels together and boots sticking out at right angles.
‘Just because she says something doesn’t make it true,’ she announces, pointing at Catriona Vickers.
It has the desired effect. Suddenly everyone’s attention is on her. Even the man holding the camera swings it round so that its big eye is watching her. But instead of asking her name and her opinion on everything that has happened, the television reporter bursts out laughing, which makes the other journalists laugh too. ‘That’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard all morning.’ He guffaws. ‘What do you know, young lady?’
‘I know a lot of stuff,’ says Mia, defiantly, remembering how her dad always says to stick to the facts. ‘I know that thousands of years ago you could walk all the way to Russia from here, and that pole-vaulting was invented in the Fens to get over the dykes and rivers. And I have a pet eel that took four years to swim here from the Sargasso Sea. And one day he will go back. For an orgy.’
Laughter ripples through the crowd. Mia feels her face burn with shame and darts back into the throng. When she touches her cheeks they are wet with tears of frustration. She doesn’t stop running until she reaches Patrick again.