Skin Read online

  SLUMPED INSIDE THE quarantine tent, every second seemed to last a week. While I waited, I stared unblinkingly at the red light, willing it to turn green.

  ‘Come on,’ I whispered under my breath. ‘Come the fuck on.’

  My biggest fear was that I would be too late. That I would arrive at the school and find the infection had spread and that Jazz was in a coma. Or worse.

  Then there was the question of the antibiotics themselves. Even if I did manage to find them and make it back to the school in time, there was no guarantee they would work. Like most people, the first thing we did when we returned to the city was stock up on as much medication as we could get our hands on. Though the official pharmacies had long since either been raided or closed, a thriving black market had quickly sprung up in their place. This was before the authorities had shut down the dark web, and for a brief window of time, there was no end to the bargains that could be delivered by a bio-suited mercenary. For a vastly inflated price, naturally. Back then the demand for Tamiflu was off the charts, and just like everyone else, we gobbled it down religiously twice a day, despite the warnings from the authorities that it provided no protection from the virus. We didn’t care, though. We were willing to try anything if it meant not getting sick. Along with the Tamiflu, we had dozens of packets of antihistamines delivered to our door. Blue Ventolin inhalers. Benadryl. Claritin. Colin even managed to get his hands on a couple of EpiPens, though again these were later proved to be utterly ineffective against the virus. We also had a range of antibiotics, just in case. It was those I was relying on to help Jazz, though whether I had the right ones, or whether they were even still in date, I had no idea.

  When the light finally turned green, I sprinted back to my room. I didn’t even bother taking my suit off before I began raiding the first aid box, stuffing anything that looked vaguely useful into a small bag. Once I’d finished, I looked frantically around for anything I might have missed. There was an unopened bottle of water on the side, so I put that in the bag, too, along with a couple of energy bars. At least he could have a break from onion soup.

  The clock on the wall read midday. I couldn’t believe it was so late already. Again I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to simply call a doctor. They could probably be with him within minutes if I explained the situation to them. Although that would mean I’d also have to explain how I knew he was there, which would be a tricky conversation. And then there was the fact I’d made him a promise. I thought about the fear in his eyes. The panic in his voice. While I was still angry about the camera, I couldn’t bring myself to simply turn him in. Not in the state he was in. No, I decided to stick to the plan and bring him the drugs. There’d be time later to try and convince him to talk to the authorities. For now I just needed to make sure he didn’t die.

  Forcing down a chocolate bar, I quickly logged on to my computer where I found several messages from clients already waiting for me. With no time to answer them properly, I tapped out a generic email to my manager, once again feigning illness. As I swallowed down the last of the chocolate, I suddenly remembered my mobile phone. Reaching into my pocket, I saw it was still recording, though the battery was almost dead. I hit ‘Stop’ and saved the file, before I spotted I’d received a new message. This one was from Colin.

  Shall we talk?

  I stared at the screen, trying to think of an appropriate response, until eventually the phone beeped and the battery died altogether. I put it down next to my computer. I’d reply later. There was no time now. I picked up my mask, swung the bag of drugs over my shoulder and headed for the door.

  I HARDLY REMEMBER the journey back to the school. Gone was the illicit pleasure of being outside. I felt detached from everything. Trapped in a bubble, with only the endless rasp of my respirator and the fog inside my mask for company. For all I could see, I might as well have been Amber on her treadmill, the cracked concrete churning endlessly beneath me, step after step after step…

  Somehow, I found myself back at the school gates. Without stopping, I launched myself at them, swinging one leg over the railings. As I attempted to pivot round, however, my other leg seemed to get caught in something, and the next thing I knew I was lying in a tangled heap on the floor of the playground. Though slightly winded, I forced myself to my feet and dusted myself down. There was no time to be hurt. I picked up the bag from the mossy concrete and limped on towards the school.

  As soon as I was back inside the hall, I began calling his name.

  This time there was no answer.

  I hurried across the wooden floor until I reached the boat. For a moment I thought he’d gone. But then I saw him, still huddled beneath the blankets where I’d left him.

  Stooping over him, I saw how pale he was, his lips almost blue. I wasn’t sure he was conscious, but then suddenly he twisted his head towards me. ‘Hey,’ his voice no more than a croak. ‘You came back.’

  I went to work cleaning his leg, spraying it with antiseptic and applying a light bandage. It was awkward working with the thin material, especially in my bulky gloves, and several times I knocked his leg, causing him to cry out in pain. Once I’d finished, I dug through the bag to find the most likely box of antibiotics.

  ‘The packet says you need to take two every six hours for a week.’

  He punched two of the small white capsules out into his open palm, swallowing them down with a sip of water before slumping backwards, his eyes closed. ‘Why are you being so nice to me?’ he asked, his voice a cracked slur.

  ‘Shush. Just try and get some sleep. You need to save your strength.’

  ‘I mean it. You could have just left but you didn’t. You came back. I bet you’re a great Mum too… I bet you…’ He trailed off as he fell out of consciousness.

  There was nothing else to do but wait and hope the drugs worked.

  ‘I’ve got to go now,’ I said quietly. ‘People will miss me. I’ll try to come back tomorrow and check how you are.’ I bent down and placed a couple of energy bars next to him. ‘Try and eat something if you can. You need to keep your strength up.’

  He didn’t answer.

  As I turned to leave, however, there was a rustle of movement. I looked down and saw he’d propped himself up again. ‘Hey, what did you do to your leg? Are you hurt?’

  I shook my head. He wasn’t making sense. He was probably delirious. ‘No, silly. It’s your leg that’s hurt, remember? Just try and get some rest and I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Jazz was adamant, though. ‘Look,’ he pointed. ‘Look.’

  I smiled sadly, glancing down all the same.

  That’s when I saw the streak of red on my own leg from where I’d fallen in the playground.

  It wasn’t the blood that bothered me, though.

  Rather, it was the gaping hole in my suit.

  And through the hole, my bare skin.

  Raw and open.

  Exposed.

  TWENTY-ONE

  IN THE END , we decided against burying the man. It just didn’t seem worth the effort. We simply declared the garden out of bounds and slipped back into our routine. We played board games. We did chores. Washed clothes. Swept the floor. And, on the odd occasion the kids did ask about the strange man who attacked Daddy, we shrugged our shoulders and furrowed our brows.

  ‘What man?’ we said.

  Food was still a problem, of course. After a few days of living on little but chocolate bars and fizzy drinks I’d developed a pulsing headache behind my eyes, my stomach cramping on the empty calories. Though I felt physically exhausted, I struggled to sleep at night, my thoughts wild and jittery. The kids too seemed strung out on sugar, their moods see-sawing between laughter and tears, Amber even more sensitive than usual, Charlie quick to bicker or whine.

  It was Colin, though, who seemed most affected, becoming more withdrawn and morose with each passing day. I suspected this wasn’t just down to the deterioration of our diet. Several times I caught him making painstaking examinations of the b
ite on his hand, holding it up to the light to look at it, dressing and re-dressing the wound, smearing it with antiseptic ointment. One night, as we lay on the sofa, he finally confided his fears to me.

  ‘I’ve been thinking. Maybe we should start sleeping separately.’

  I smiled, made a joke. ‘If this is your way of asking for a divorce, you really need to work on your timing. It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of dating options out there.’

  ‘I’m serious. And I’m not just talking about us either. The kids. There’s space for a room each if I take the garage. We could ration out the food so we don’t have to eat together. Keep contact to a minimum.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Is this about what that man said? About the virus being in the air? You do know he was crazy, right?’

  ‘I’m not talking forever. Just for now. As a precaution, until we get to the bottom of things. What harm could it do?’

  I sat up then, anger rising in me. ‘Harm? You’re talking about isolating our children on a whim. You’ve seen Amber. You really think she’d cope with being locked up on her own? And what about Charlie? He’d eat his rations on the first day and then starve. It’s utter madness. We’ve been cooped up together in this house for a fortnight. If we were allergic to one another, we’d be dead already.’

  Colin glanced down again at his hand.

  ‘Oh, come on. The bite? Now you’re just being paranoid.’

  Now it was Colin’s turn to get angry. ‘You know I think, just this once, I might be entitled to a bit of paranoia. A fortnight ago I buried a mother and child in the garden. Earlier this week I beat a man to death with a baseball bat. This is not business as usual, Angela. In case you hadn’t noticed, things are utterly fucked up. So when I make a suggestion that could potentially keep our family safe, the least you could do is take me seriously.’

  He rolled over, furious. The conversation was over. Though we were under the same sheet, our bodies didn’t touch. We might as well have been in different rooms.

  At some point in the night, I managed to drift off to sleep. When I woke again, it was still dark. Something was different, though. Something was wrong. That’s when I realised Colin was gone.

  I was up in a flash, fumbling for the light switch. He wasn’t in the living room. Nor the bathroom. I staggered through to the kitchen, then into the children’s bedroom, where Charlie and Amber were still fast asleep. There was no sign of Colin anywhere.

  I tore back through the house, working myself into a frenzy. What if he’d actually cracked and walked out on us? Or worse. What if he’d decided he couldn’t take it any more? He wouldn’t be the first. In the immediate aftermath of the virus, suicide rates had rocketed. I tried to imagine my life without him. How I’d explain it to the kids. How I’d carry on.

  By the time I’d searched every room in the house I was shaking. I went outside, calling his name as loudly as I dared, my voice small and shaky in the night. There was no response. It was the first time I’d been out of the house since we’d dragged the man to the bottom of the garden, and though it was thankfully too dark to see anything, the thought of his body lying out there made my skin crawl.

  I moved around to the front of the cottage to look in the garage. As I did, I passed the car. Sure enough, when I pressed my face to the glass I could make out the shape of my sleeping husband, squashed up on the back seat. For a moment I thought about waking him. Of hammering the glass and screaming at him for being so selfish. For scaring me like that.

  Instead, I simply returned to the living room and curled up on the cushions, cold and alone beneath the thin blanket.

  The next morning, I woke to find Colin in the kitchen, preparing a breakfast of Sprite and Kinder Egg. I waited for him to apologise for leaving me in the night, but when he didn’t mention it I didn’t push. We were all under pressure. It was hardly surprising if one of us lost it once in a while.

  Only it wasn’t once in a while. Over the next few days, I watched as Colin steadily withdrew from the rest of us. He’d eat alone, or find excuses to be in the garage, tinkering with the generator or solar panels. In the evening he would get ready for bed, then make his way to the car. When I finally questioned him about it, he muttered something about not wanting to take any ‘unnecessary risks’.

  Consciously or not, his behaviour seemed to trigger a reflective response in the children, who also retreated to distant corners of the house. Gone were the long afternoons playing Monopoly. The fun and the games and the laughter that up until that point made things just about bearable. Instead, we became four independent beings living under one roof.

  Still, as distressing as this new development was, I had more pressing matters to worry about. Our food supplies were running dangerously low. One of us would have to go out and hunt for food again. It was either that or starve. Yet, as desperate as our situation was, I couldn’t seem to motivate myself to do anything about it. In fact, I could hardly bring myself to do anything full stop. I found it was getting harder and harder to get up off the sofa each morning, my limbs heavy, my head fuzzy. I found myself slumped for hours in the living room in a sort of trance. Neither awake nor asleep. Not seeing. Not thinking. Just sitting.

  The next day, as I lay motionless on the sofa, I looked up to see Charlie standing nearby. He was holding something in his hand.

  ‘Someone keeps trying to ring you,’ he said, handing me my phone.

  I took it from him. I hadn’t seen my phone in days. Weeks even. We’d all long since given up trying to get a signal, and I was amazed to see it still had some charge.

  Swiping the screen, I saw that Charlie was mistaken. There were no missed call notifications. I was about to hand it back to him when I noticed the small red alert sign on the screen. It was a text message.

  Half convinced I was hallucinating, I opened it up and read it. Then I read it again.

  Charlie peered over my shoulder, trying to see what I was looking at. ‘Who’s it from Mummy? What does it say?’

  It took me a moment to answer. When I did, my voice sounded strange and distant, as if someone else were speaking. Someone who didn’t believe the words that were coming from their mouth. ‘It’s from the government. It says… Well. I think it’s saying that we can go home.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  IT’S A FUNNY thing to know you’re dying. I don’t mean that in an abstract sense. Technically, we’re all dying. Even you, my poor sweet Egg. Or at least you will be if and when you are ever conceived. Sorry to break it to you, but from the moment you meet Mr Sperm, the clock starts ticking. But no, I’m talking about dying imminently. In months rather than years. In days rather than weeks. When it’s close enough that you can count the hours.

  Back in the old world, I never really gave my own death much thought. Sure, it was there in the background. Something unpleasant but inevitable, like renegotiating my car insurance, or going for a smear test. There was no point in fighting these things, but equally there was no need to dwell on them until they were actually happening.

  Then, of course, everything went insane and death was everywhere. Colleagues. Friends. Family. These weren’t the nice, neat sanitised deaths I’d pictured on the rare occasion I’d actually considered my own demise. Everything tied up in a neat bow. An old woman tucked up in bed, thumbing through her photo album one last time before quietly slipping off into an eternal slumber, surrounded by three or four generations of smiling relatives. These were violent, messy, abrupt deaths. People ripped from the world in their prime. Or sooner. Before their lives had even really had a chance to begin.

  But even after the virus hit, my real concern was always the children. That was my biggest fear. Whether fleeing the city, or camping out in that damn cottage, I was always convinced the children would get sick. I never considered that it might be me who fell ill. It never occurred to me that I might be the one falling backwards from my chair, clawing at my throat as if choking on a sandwich. That it might be me weeping and rocking
and tugging my hair, praying to a God I actively didn’t believe in to give me one more shot at living. Or at the very least, one more chance to see my family and make things right.

  And yet, here we are, Egg. Here we are.

  THE FIRST FEW hours after I realised I’d been exposed are a bit of a blur. My initial instinct had been to run. Leaving Jazz sprawled on the wooden floor, I sprinted for the double doors and down the hall. I stopped before I got to the playground, though. Where was I going to go? Outside was even more dangerous than in the school. And it wasn’t as if I could risk going back home and infecting the house. No. I had little hope but to sit there and wait it out. Maybe I’d get lucky? After all, Jazz had managed to stay healthy all this time. If I wasn’t showing symptoms in three days then I could assume I’d dodged the bullet. Until then, there was nothing for it but to sit tight.

  By the time I shuffled back into the hallway, I was convinced I could already feel the virus working its way through my bloodstream. My breath was short. My heart was hammering. My skin prickling. This is how it begins, I thought. Within hours I’ll be feverish. By tonight my eyes and nose will be streaming. By the morning I’ll be struggling for air. After that, it will only be a matter of time.

  Jazz was still on the floor where I’d left him. By now he was totally unconscious. Part of me had an urge to kick him. To take out my fury and frustration on his ribcage. In truth, though, it was hard to see any of this as his fault. Not really. I had been the one who had followed him here. I knew how dangerous it was, and yet I kept coming back again and again. No, if anyone deserved to be kicked, it was me.

  All at once, I felt anger slide towards self-pity. I wanted to curl into a ball and weep. I even thought about lying down next to Jazz. If I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t it be better to feel the warmth of another human one last time? Of course, I kept my distance, unable to stomach the thought of being found like that. Entwined with a stranger. That was assuming we were found at all. I pictured archaeologists millennia from now, digging down through layers of sediment to find our last moments preserved in stone. Tagging our bones. Shipping us off to museums. What would they make of the scene? Two bodies beside a boat inside a school. I imagined scholars arguing over the circumstances of our death. Were we castaways? Had we drowned?