Geldof ran toward his mum, forgetting the egg slicking his forehead, the anguished months when he thought she was dead, the years when their relationship had been defined by strife. He became a young child again, with no complications to get in the way of the simple yearning to toddle toward his mum and be enfolded in arms that felt like an impenetrable shield against the world.
Fanny almost fell under the force of his charge. After a moment’s hesitation, she curled one arm under his armpit and stroked his hair with the other. Even as Geldof wet her T-shirt, his heart swelled with a joy so fierce that it forced a torrent of words up through his throat like a burst water main. “I thought you were dead and I never got to say good-bye and I’m sorry I was so rotten to you and I never listened to you and I never appreciated you and I wanted to eat meat and I pretended to pray and never told you I loved you and masturbated all the time…”
He stopped, realizing he’d gone too far with the confessions. Ignoring the titters from the others gathered around, he took a shuddering breath and pulled back to look his mum in the eyes. He’d never seen tears on her face before, but they were there now, glistening in the gullies of the awful scars. The pictures hadn’t prepared him for how brutally she’d been savaged. Her face looked like the surface of the moon, ragged white craters rammed in by the force of passing asteroids. He wanted to kiss them away.
“I love you, too,” Fanny said, mercifully glossing over his masturbation revelation—not that a sixteen-year-old boy admitting he was rather fond of tugging one off could be considered much of a revelation. “I should’ve told you every day.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard those words pass her lips. He hugged her tighter, as though the years of distance could be erased by this one moment of intense closeness. Fanny’s thin body trembled as she took great sucking breaths through the ruin of her nose. A sudden heat flushed her body. In combination with the other physical ticks, it made her seem like an old boiler about to blow.
“You need to let go now, Geldof,” she said.
As though he were holding a knitting needle jammed into the main socket, Geldof couldn’t release his arms. Fanny’s trembling became violent. With sudden force, she put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. She staggered backward, rapidly and repeatedly chanting a phrase that he couldn’t quite catch.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“Just give me a minute,” she said, squatting and holding up a hand. “Please.”
When Geldof tried to go to her, somebody grasped his arm. He looked up to see a girl with astonishing green eyes.
“Seriously, you have to give her some space,” she said.
He became fully aware of the other people, around half-a-dozen, who crowded around his mum. A bear-sized man Geldof recognized as another of Fanny’s old cronies knelt down and began whispering in her ear. Eva, who’d followed on behind Geldof, stroked her cropped hair. Something wasn’t right here. He still didn’t know what happened after the pigs left her for dead. Perhaps she’d had a mental breakdown. All he could tell was that she was fighting some raging internal battle. A year ago, Geldof would have been hurt and resentful at being pushed away, but he’d changed. And so had she. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in the softer tones of her voice, understand it in the way she’d held him and told him she loved him. He stood at a respectful distance until Fanny’s breathing began to return to normal and she got to her feet. Scott and Eva flanked her, holding her elbows in what looked suspiciously like a move to restrain her.
“I’m fine now,” she said. “It was just the shock.” With a look at each other, Scott and Eva dropped their hands. Fanny took one last whooshing breath and turned her eyes on Geldof. “I know you are here, and it makes me happy. But are you insane? You don’t have the virus. You were out. Why did you come back? And how did you find me?”
Something about what she’d said niggled Geldof, but he focused instead on delivering the good news. “We’ve come to get you out.”
“We?”
Geldof whistled. In response, engines started up, and down the track rode the mercenaries. They’d all agreed it would be wise for Geldof and Eva to go in together in order not to spook anybody—a plan he’d ruined by breaking into a run the moment he saw his mum. Fanny stared at them, her face darkening. “This is your grandfather’s work, isn’t it? He found you.”
“Yes,” Geldof said. “When he found out you were alive, he put up the money to get you out.”
“And he sent you here with these men?”
“Not exactly. He didn’t know I was going to come. But don’t you see? None of that matters. A helicopter’s coming back for us in a few days. It can sneak us out. We can be together again.”
Sadness dulled Fanny’s eyes. “I can’t leave.”
“I thought you might be stubborn enough to stay here for whatever crusade you’re on now. I came to convince you to leave.”
“You don’t understand. I want to come with you, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Fanny looked at the mercenaries again. “Because I’m infected.”
“No,” Geldof said, backing away. “You can’t be.”
Even as he denied it, he knew she was telling the truth. Now her reaction to him made perfect sense. She’d been fighting her urges—hopefully just a desire to kill him rather than have sex with him first, which would have been a far more disturbing fate. He heard a chorus of clicks and looked at the mercenaries. Automatic weapons had materialized in their hands.
“This is turning into a right royal fuck-up,” Scholzy said.
“We’re all infected, apart from her,” Fanny said, indicating the girl with the green eyes. Her voice was calm and authoritative, so unlike the shrill badgering Geldof remembered. “But we’re not a threat to you.”
“I prefer not to take any chances,” Scholzy said as he locked the barrel of the gun to his shoulder. “Nothing personal.”
Infected or not, she was still his mum. Geldof stepped in front of her. “You’ll have to shoot me first.”
“Considering I still have your puke on the back of my jacket, I’d rather like that.”
“Go ahead. Then you won’t get the rest of your money.”
The gun remained pointed at his head for a few seconds before Scholzy laughed. “Now that, I wouldn’t like.” He lowered his weapon. “You’ve got one hour to say your good-byes. Then we’re getting out of here. The mission’s blown. And I warn you all: anybody who comes within spitting range of us gets a bullet in the skull.”
Not taking his eyes off Fanny and her gang, he turned his head. “James, get Sergei on the satphone. Make sure the drunken moron remembers where and when he’s supposed to pick us up. We’ll hole up somewhere else until the rendezvous.”
Geldof, still faint at the risk he’d taken, felt a light touch on his shoulder.
“We need to talk,” Fanny said. She held out her hand, and Geldof looked at it nervously. “I won’t bite, and you can’t get it from just touching me.”
“It’s not that,” Geldof said. “I just can’t remember the last time we held hands.”
“Does it matter now?”
In response, he curled his fingers through hers and they walked off toward the lake.
* * *
Once they were settled on a large rock, breath visible in the cold air, Geldof gave Fanny the news she needed to hear.
“Dad’s dead,” he said. “He got shot.”
“I know.”
In a flash, he realized what had niggled him earlier. She’d said that he’d got out with a certainty that meant it wasn’t a guess. Now she knew that her husband was dead. “How do you know this stuff?”
“I read Lesley’s stories.”
“How?”
Fanny pointed toward a large satellite dish atop a hangar. “That’s how.”
“You have Internet access.” For the first time since seeing her again, Geldof felt that familiar combination of frustration and anger she’d always engendered in him. “You have Internet access! Why didn’t you send me an e-mail?”
“I sat in front of the computer so many times, but I could never bring myself to type anything. I thought you’d be better off without me. I wasn’t a good mother. And I may as well have been dead. I was in a place I thought you could never visit and I can never leave.”
“Don’t you think that was my decision to make?” Geldof said, straining to keep his voice calm. She said nothing in response. Looking at the pain in her eyes, at the scars that ran not just over her face but down her neck and up her arms, Geldof forced himself to swallow his hurt. This was a new beginning. He didn’t want to ruin it by falling into the same old pattern of arguments. “What happened? Terry said you were dead. He just ran away when they attacked, the villain.”
“Don’t blame him. He did try to save me. He did save me. If he hadn’t come back, they’d have finished me off. They ran after him instead. While they were gone, I dragged myself into a freezer and closed the door. They came back and followed the trail of blood, but couldn’t get in. After a while, they wandered off.” She paused, her eyes distant with recollection. “Once they were gone, I got bandages and painkillers from the shelves and dressed my wounds as best I could. I was too weak to come after you, so I locked the doors of the supermarket and stayed there for two days. When I finally found the strength to make it back to the house, you were gone, and David and the twins were dead on the floor.”
“What did you do then?”
“I buried them in the back garden and stayed. What else could I do? I had no idea where you’d gone and no way to contact you.”
“Did you have the virus then?”
“No. It hadn’t mutated yet.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed another wound, a smaller bite mark than those from the pigs. “Courtesy of Mr. Brownlee in number 15 about a week later.”
“The obsessive car washer.”
“The very one.”
“I don’t understand why you’re not like the others, though. Didn’t you get it as badly?”
“I got it badly, alright. After he bit me, I smacked his head off the bonnet of his car until he passed out. Then I went roaming. When I saw my first uninfected person, I felt this unbelievable tide of anger rising up in me. All I wanted to do was kill.”
“And did you?”
She shook her head. “When I was lying in that supermarket, sweating and feverish, I had an epiphany. I’d spent my whole life campaigning for animals, not eating meat, but it made no difference to those pigs. I’d always thought that all living beings were the same, but I realized then that we’re different. Animals always act on their instincts. We don’t.”
“You mean we’ve evolved?”
“No. People always confuse evolution with civilization. The structure of our brains hasn’t changed in thousands of years, but the way society developed forced us to cooperate, to learn to control these primal desires that still lurk inside us. This virus brings these desires to the fore again. But it doesn’t have to be that way. When I felt those bestial urges, I chose to be human. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Now, I mean to help people make that choice, too. That’s what we’re doing here. Even if I didn’t have the virus, I would stay. It’s the right thing to do.”
She hasn’t changed so much, Geldof thought. Still fighting for a cause.
“This is why I was so shitty to you,” he said. “I never hated you. I just hated that you were so strong and I was so weak. I was never as committed or as driven as you and I took all kinds of crap from bullies at school because I wasn’t strong enough. I should’ve tried to be more like you.”
Fanny took his shoulders. “I wasn’t strong. I was arrogant. I was a self-righteous, hectoring stereotype. Deep down, I even knew the hemp was causing your rash. And I still made you wear it, because I thought it was the ethical choice, that suffering would build character. I thought I was opening up your horizons, when I was really narrowing your beliefs to match my own. I should’ve let you find your own way.”
Looking at the aching regret in his mum’s eyes, Geldof knew what he must do. It was funny that after all those years of her forcing her beliefs down his throat, it took the opposite approach to convince him. He was acutely aware of how immature he’d been. Everything he’d done was a reaction to outside pressures rather than a result of looking within.
“I’m staying,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You can’t.”
“I want to help. I want us to be a family again.”
“And I want that, too. But I can’t let you stay. It’s too dangerous.”
“Just thirty seconds ago you said you should have let me find my own way. Well, I’ve found my way. All I did in Croatia was watch television. And your dad was pressuring me to get into the business. He wants me to take over.”
Fanny looked horrified, and for a moment he thought she was about to launch into a diatribe about fair trade, ethical treatment of workers, and the evils of international corporations. Instead, that old stubborn look, distorted by the scars but still recognizable, crossed her face. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t stay here. I forbid it.”
His grandfather’s words about idealizing the dead came back to him, as did the tight knot of anger in his stomach he’d nursed, like a stillborn evil child poisoning his blood, for most of his teenage years. “You forbid me? You’re just the same as you ever were.”
He got up to storm off, with no clear idea to where he would storm off.
“I’m sorry,” Fanny said softly. “You’re right, I shouldn’t be forbidding you from doing anything. But try to understand: you’re my son, all that’s left of my family, and I love you. If you don’t leave, you could die. I couldn’t face that.”
Geldof stopped as the pain in her voice disarmed his anger. He was behaving like a petulant teenager again. Well, this time he wouldn’t let it happen. They would talk about this like adults. He would make her understand. “And you’re my mum. I can’t face losing you again. If I go, that’s what would happen.”
“We could Skype.”
“I don’t want to be your Skype buddy. Listen, you always wanted me to fight for something. Here I am, ready to fight. By your side. And don’t forget that I’m the one paying those men. If I tell them to go without me, they’ll go. So you don’t really have any choice.”
Fanny looked at him for a long time. Finally, a small smile turned up the corner of her scarred mouth. “You’ve grown up so much. I still want you to go, even though it would break my heart. But if you really want to stay, I won’t stand in your way.”
That was easy, he thought.
He hugged her again. This time she showed no signs of wanting to rip his head off. They had a whole new relationship to build from the ashes of their old one, and, although he knew there would be problems ahead, he felt the swell of optimism that only the hope of a new future could bring—which, he supposed, was a bit ironic considering he’d committed to living in a country in which he occupied the same position as plankton in the food chain.
They sat close together for a while, looking across the water to the hills shrouded in mist. “I wish Dad was here,” Geldof said.
“He would’ve loved it, the dope at least. He probably wouldn’t have been too happy about us eating all the squirrels.”
“Hold on. You’re eating meat?”
Fanny shrugged. “Somehow being a vegan just didn’t have the same appeal any longer. Plus there’s no tofu in the shops.”
In Geldof’s opinion, judging from the fleeting look of loathing that had crossed her face when she talked about the pigs, there was an element of revenge in his mum’s new diet. He kept his opinion to himself, just happy that she wouldn’t try to stop him from eating whatever dead animals were on the go. Nor did he confess to having given up the vegan lifestyle at the first opportunity. It would have seemed disloyal. He would just eat whatever they laid in front of him that evening.
Now that the important matters were out of the way, he turned his mind to something that he’d been itching to ask. “Who’s that girl? The one that told me to give you some space.”
“Now we get to the real reason you want to stay. She’s only been here a week. She’s immune.”
“What’s she like?”
“Tough as nails. Do you want me to put in a good word for you?”
Geldof blushed. “No. She’s way out of my league.”
Not to mention that her first impression was my admitting I’m a wanker, he thought.
“Don’t be so sure,” Fanny said. “From where I’m sitting, you look pretty handsome.”
* * *
They talked for another hour, Fanny explaining about the camp, how they resisted the violent tug of the virus through meditation, visualization, dope smoking, and sexual release. She also promised to induct Geldof with daily lessons in combat yoga and hunting. Once they were done talking, they walked back to Scholzy to tell him about Geldof’s decision to remain. Geldof intended to send his grandfather an e-mail informing him that he would have to find somebody suitably evil to run the company in his stead and instructing him to pay the rest of the mercenaries’ fee. When he approached, the mercenaries were in deep discussion. They broke off as Geldof approached. Scholzy’s cheeks were pinched and his lips set into a grim slash.
“I’m staying,” Geldof said.
“You’re not the only one,” Scholzy said. “Fucking Sergei’s got himself fired. He helped himself to the rest of his vodka flask on the way back and thought it would be funny to land his helicopter on a truck.”
“You must have a backup plan, right?”
“Wrong. It was hard enough coming up with this one.”
“So how are you going to get out?”
“That’s a very good question,” Scholzy said. He nodded at Fanny, who was standing nearby. “Can these people be trusted?”
“Yes,” Geldof said without hesitation.
“What about the animals?” Scholzy asked, addressing Fanny. “Are we going to be attacked every five minutes?”
“Unlikely,” Fanny said. “We’ve eaten everything in a radius of about a mile. We have to go farther out to hunt every day.”
“Then we’ll stay here for a few days while we figure out what the hell we’re going to do.”
* * *
After the sun set, the commune gathered to eat in the living room of one of the houses. Fanny served up a delicious-smelling casserole of potatoes, carrots, and wildcat. Geldof was banned from touching it. Salivating, he tried to protest that cooking the animal would surely have killed the virus, but nobody would listen. He reluctantly accepted they had a point. He felt a woozy sense of unreality as he sat, chewing on a meat-free version of the dish, and watched Fanny wolf down the flesh she’d once so vehemently rejected.
The mercenaries didn’t join them. They’d set up their own separate camp on a rocky outcrop, chewing on their rations beneath a canvas sheet and warming their hands over a fire set in the middle of their ring of tents. The bikes were parked in a protective semicircle around them, and the lake guarded their backs, but looking at them through the window he could sense their watchfulness. He didn’t blame them. Just about everything that could go wrong had, and then some, and they didn’t know his mum as he did. If she said everything was fine, then it was.
Fanny, clearly with his inquiry about Ruan in mind, had sat him down next to the girl. It took him five minutes to speak to her. It wasn’t that he was trying to formulate an opening gambit to impress her, for he’d meant it when he said she was out of his league and figured that there was no point trying. She didn’t give the impression of wanting to talk, keeping her body angled away from him. Still, he found it a struggle not to keep looking at her and decided that not attempting to strike up a conversation would seem creepy. He waited until she shifted slightly in his direction and stuck out his hand. “I’m Geldof.”
She gave what seemed like a tired sigh, before taking his hand. “Ruan.”
The physical contact left him flustered, which had a lot to do with the idiotic pronouncement he made next. “So we both have daft names then.”
“What’s daft about my name?” she said, her eyes narrowing.
Wincing, Geldof tried to retrieve the situation. “Sorry, I didn’t mean … I just meant to say we have unusual names.”
“Ruan is the name of the village in Ireland my father came from. It’s a perfectly reasonable name. I do agree that your name is bloody stupid, though.”
Still a hit with the ladies, Geldof thought, but kept plugging away. “You can blame my mum for that one.”
“Why’d she call you Geldof?”
“Big thing for Bob Geldof.”
“Mine had a thing for Noel Edmonds.”
“At least she didn’t call you Noel.”
“Well, names apart, your mum is an amazing woman.”
“Yes, she is. I’m surprised, to be honest. She never used to be like this.”
Ruan half-smiled. “I figured that. I saw her on television once, at that rally against Trident.”
“God, the naked incident. That wasn’t at all out of character.”
“What do you mean?”
“She used to walk around the house in the buff and try to get me to do the same. Among other things, she believed getting air to your bits helped ward off infections.”
“That must have been awful,” Ruan said, turning her body toward him.
In the past, he’d refused to talk about Fanny, sometimes even telling people he was an orphan—something he bitterly regretted in the months he believed this had come to pass. However, Ruan was clearly interested in her and he saw it as a way to strike up some kind of rapport. “Oh, that’s just the tip of a very large and ugly iceberg.”
They talked all through dinner and remained at the table after the others had adjourned to the pier to pass joints around a roaring fire. Ruan’s closed demeanor faded as she chortled at Fanny’s many and varied embarrassing former peccadillos. At one point, he tried to steer the conversation around to Ruan by asking about her parents. She looked down at the table, not responding and blinking her eyes rapidly. He took the hint and went back to the subject of his mum.
Finally, Ruan began to yawn and Geldof’s mouth ran away with him again. “Do you want to go to bed?”
Ruan’s eyebrow shot up.
“I didn’t mean with me,” he said, hoping the dim light would hide the traitorous blood that rushed to his cheeks—an uncontrollable process he hoped would disappear as he got older. “I just meant I don’t mind stopping if you’re tired.”
It was hard to read her expression, but he had a feeling that surprise flickered across her face as she responded, “That’s okay. I’m enjoying myself.”
“Then let me tell you about the time a lion almost ate us when she chained us to its cage at Glasgow Zoo,” Geldof said, suppressing a smile.
“You’ve got to be joking,” Ruan said.
As they talked on, Geldof glanced out toward the pier and felt a rush of love at the sight of Fanny holding court, the heads of her followers bobbing along to her words. Only one person wasn’t paying attention: a young boy who sat outside the circle. It was too dark to make out his expression, but he appeared to be staring at Ruan and Geldof. From the way he was gripping his legs, it seemed something was bothering him.
He’s jealous, Geldof thought happily.
He’d never had another boy envy his prowess with the ladies before. It was something he could get used to.