London, United Kingdom
Day 35
It’s the first year of my life I’m not looking forward to Christmas. How can I when the apocalypse seems to be dawning? The shops are continuing on as if nothing is happening, determined to avoid the financial ruin of closure in December, a month of gold. How can people go into the Liberty Christmas Department and spend £30 on a sequined robin decoration when our husbands, our sons, our fathers, our friends, might all be dying?
Theodore is blissfully unaware. I used to worry about having such an unobservant child—he would tell me he couldn’t find something when it was literally right in front of him—but now it seems like a blessing. If he senses my unease, he isn’t showing it but our house is full of fear. You can practically see it seeping through the letterbox. The first case was only five weeks ago in Glasgow but it’s already everywhere. There are reports of cases in every city: Manchester, Newcastle, Bristol. London is erupting with it. St. Thomas’s Hospital announced an emergency yesterday, so terrifyingly close it might as well be next door. Our small, lovely house in Crystal Palace used to feel like a haven from the stresses of daily life. Now it is a puny, insignificant life raft. It cannot do what I need it to. It cannot assure me that my husband and son will be safe.
Last week we put up the Christmas tree. I was insistent it would happen on the first day of the month, as it always has done. It’s the one tradition I gleaned from my short time with my mother. Christmas starts when the tree goes up on December 1. Anthony and I heaved boxes of plastic fir branches and dusty ornaments down from the attic. Phoebe was always horrified by our fake tree, but when you’re an orphan, you become sensitive to news stories of other orphans. Christmas trees going up in flames and turning family homes into charred skeletons of smoke and ash, killing almost everyone and leaving a few unfortunate children behind, are uncomfortably common.
Usually Anthony assembles the tree and then leaves me to the decoration. He’ll grab a beer or a glass of red wine and sit comfortably on the sofa as I potter around considering red tinsel or silver. Is a gold theme what I want? Not this year. This year, he stood by my side and methodically placed ornaments and tinsel and Christmas lights over branches, transforming this squat, dense piece of plastic into a glowing, sparkling thing of festive wonder. He smiled as I hung the ornament Libby had made for us with a photo from our wedding on a beautiful white bauble. In the photo I’m looking up at Anthony, bliss personified. He’s tucking one of my dark, bridal curls behind my ear, and I remembered the moment as clearly as if it were yesterday. My heart plummeted in my chest with fear and longing. Anthony carefully placed the angel Theodore made at nursery last year at the top of the tree, forehead creased in concentration to avoid it being wonky. He looked up at the tree and then down at me, a soft smile on his face. We were both thinking the same thing and he knew it and I knew it but we didn’t say it because what’s the point in breaking someone’s heart when it won’t change anything? The words hung in the air, illuminated with worry. Will this be our last Christmas together?
Theodore was entranced by the tree for a grand total of four minutes before returning to the much more exciting task of “building a boat,” which seemed to involve sitting in the empty ornament box and yelling, “Boat, boat, boat.” It’s as fine a way as any to build a boat.
Anthony hasn’t gone to work all week. I wouldn’t let him. I told him in all seriousness that I would rather we lived on my income and he never worked another day in his life than have him leave the house one more time. Most of the time I work remotely, and I’m not teaching classes this term, so it’s not a problem for me. I work. Anthony cares for Theodore. I go out to get food, briefly and carefully as late as possible in the quiet of nighttime, touching no one, standing near no one. I watch my two loves with beady eyes, interpreting the smallest cough as a sign that it is here. My tall, strong husband and small son, now equally vulnerable.
The news started off so casually. There had been an outbreak of a form of flu in Glasgow. Thirty dead, many more infected. It sounded so quotidian; the flu. Glasgow seemed so far away. I assumed the powers that be would find a solution. It would be yet another scary news story and nothing more. We’re used to scary diseases starting in faraway places and being brought here. Maybe that’s why we underestimated it. Scotland? we all thought. Surely a dangerous disease can’t start there.
But it’s only gotten worse. Every day the newscasters’ tones have become graver and graver. First it was thirty cases, then fifty, then one hundred, then it jumped suddenly to thousands and tens of thousands and what’s next? Millions? Billions? Everyone dead? Tonight, I realized the man who usually does the News at 10 wasn’t on. It was a woman. I burst into tears and Anthony asked me what was wrong, the news hadn’t even started yet, what could be wrong?
I didn’t say anything, just bawled. What if the newsreader is sick? They film it in London, don’t they? What if he has it? What if you have it but you’re just not showing symptoms yet, I wanted to cry. I haven’t talked about any of this with my friends, not properly. I don’t know how. Most of us have kids so it’s not like we’re popping around to each other’s houses on a moment’s notice anyway, but I don’t know what to say even to my best friends. Libby lives in Madrid and is desperately trying to figure out how to get to London and what to do for work once she gets here. I don’t want to burden her and I don’t know what I’d say. Phoebe has two daughters so it’s different for her. I can’t quite bring myself to talk to her and hear her comfort me about the risk of my son dying when the reality is, I’m nauseous with jealousy that she has two girls. Her husband is at stake but her children aren’t. It’s not the same. No, I’m staying quiet for now. I stopped taking Theodore to nursery weeks ago. The idea of it made me shiver; putting him in a big room with thirty other children and adults who could have been anywhere, touched anything, be carrying it but not know. Anyone could have it.
So, we stay here in the house, hibernating, hoping to outlast the Plague as if it will recognize our fortitude and strength of will, see our house and go, “No, let’s leave them alone. They don’t deserve this.” I don’t want to voice my fears any more than I have to and ruin precious time with Anthony but we have no one else to talk to. At night we whisper to each other the frantic fears of two people with death peeking in the window, waiting. Last week was the first week in a year that we didn’t have our fertility conversation. Of course, now there is nothing I want more than to be pregnant. I need the safety of numbers. My happiness, my soul, is wrapped up in Theodore and it’s too much. It’s so fragile I can’t bear it. All I want is to know that I’m pregnant with a new life, a safe new life. A girl. I need to be pregnant with a girl. I would inject myself every minute of the day with a thick, stinging serum if I could have a girl now.
I was so disappointed when Theodore was a boy. You’re not supposed to say that, but I was. I cried when the sonographer told us. Anthony didn’t know what to say as I wept on the table, the jelly cold and wet on my stomach. I was weeping for boring blue dungarees and diggers and running around parks that I didn’t have the energy for. I wanted to replace the relationship I had with my mother before she died. If only I could go back and tell myself what I know now. I would also weep for the safety lost.
No one from the scientific community has made a statement about why it affects only men. We all know that it does; it’s obvious. But no one has said why. Maybe they don’t know? Surely they know. We can separate conjoined twins and treat cancer and prevent AIDS with drugs. Surely they know why men, and only men, are dying. And nearly all of them die. The death rate is staggering. A 3.4 percent recovery rate, which seems to be completely random. There is no rhyme or reason. An elderly man was on the television last night telling his tale of coming close to the brink and somehow staving off death despite the Plague’s best efforts. In the next clip a mother cried about her twenty-four-year-old son, a promising footballer who looked almost embarrassingly strong and healthy. He contracted it on the bus, she thinks, or maybe from one of the other players on his team. Nine of the other players have died. The team is disbanding.
Anthony sits on the sofa next to me, grasping my left hand as I journal. We haven’t discussed it but we spend as much time as possible together. We sit next to each other at dinner, as close as we can physically be. We curl into each other on the sofa. We sleep entwined like otters.
He hasn’t commented on my incessant writing, but he’s used to it now. I’ve always journaled, on and off. More so when there are things to write about. Now there is everything to write about. The small part of my brain that is still engaged in my work can’t help but pick up on the changes we’re seeing through the television. I will record this. I know I will. I’m not sure how, but I will. I don’t understand how everyone isn’t already recording everything. I’m taking tens of photos and videos of Theodore and Anthony a day. I flick through them before I have a bath as I get all of the weeping I want to do all day out of my system in the quiet calm of the early morning.
I can’t bear the possibilities. The questions flap around me. Will Theodore catch it? Will Anthony catch it? Will my gorgeous baby boy die? Will my husband die? Will everyone catch it? Will there be a cure? When will there be a cure? What if there is never a cure? What if this never ends? Is this the end of the world as we know it?
They started calling it “The Great Male Plague” last week. The tabloids had a field day after the doctor who treated the first patients, Amanda Maclean, did an interview. She said it was the worst virus she had ever seen. She called it the new Plague and it stuck. She says she wasn’t listened to and if Health Protection Scotland had taken her seriously we could have gotten control of it. I don’t know what to think about that.
You always assume that the people in power will know what to do. Surely they’ve all got it figured out, but I don’t think anyone knows what to do. Nothing like this has ever happened. We’re all blindly stumbling around in the dark and none of us knows a thing.
They’re showing a clip on the TV of one of the trains leaving Glasgow. It looks like a scene from a film. There are people pushing ticket inspectors to one side and shoving themselves onto trains. They’ve all gone mad. The whole world is going mad.
Anthony switches off the TV with a decisive click.
“That’s enough news for tonight,” he says quietly before pulling me into his arms.