On the news the top story is that the World Health Organization has raised the pandemic warning to level five. This is what Audrey has prepared for, what Audrey has warned others about, and what her business is singularly ready to meet. And yet Audrey’s not going into work today, neither did she go in yesterday.
‘Funny,’ Audrey says to him. It’s all come at the same time:
love and disaster, Roger and a pandemic. She doesn’t dare move.
They spent the afternoon, yesterday, in bed in a guest house. This is something they could never have expected and so they lay in hiding. Outside, at the window, the weather changed for the worse and the seagulls, like joyriders on the coming storm, wheeled and moaned and whooped and jeered. And the two of them lay together and watched the gulls mix the paint of sky and cloud with their claws.
Today they are holidaying in their hometown. The noise of it is new to them, it crawls up their ankles and makes them tread with a tingle: the crunching of the pebbles on the beach, the chiming of the fruit machines, the chit-chat at coffee tables, the murmur of tipsy pensioners singing at a pub table. Down to the beach for lunch they go and in their carrier bags they have tins of beer and cockles and mackerel and bread. He carries in one hand a large portion of chips. They sit on stones and watch the frothy palaver of the sea skittering on shingle. Roger begins by throwing chips one at a time up into the sky, and then he chucks the lot sky high and the seagulls scream in from all quarters of the earth and pluck the chips from thin air so that in seconds only an empty bag settles on the beach.
‘Don’t the gulls look like old men, all puffed up, ready to give someone a telling off ?’ Roger says. ‘Look like your friend, Ken.’
‘You’ve come on all talkative.’
He smiles ruefully. They kiss, and the gulls turn the world again with their claws, pedalling the globe, faster, faster and the wind comes up with the night bringing more bad news, more deaths.
Filling in for them at work, Andy is more than obliging, ready to take up the call, ready for Christ’s victory, ready to be the last man standing, shepherding them through the valley of the shadow of death to the green and pleasant land, while the two undertakers do their loving.
That night she startles and finds him. ‘Roger, tell me I’m not dead.’
‘You’re not dead.’
A man of few words, he has just enough to save her.