Skin Read online

  Charlie held up his hands in a half-hearted defence, but he was laughing too much to pay me much attention. ‘Amber and Jamal, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G…’

  ‘I mean it, it’s not nice. How would you feel if—’

  Before I could finish, Charlie’s screen went blank. He’d killed the feed.

  We all fell silent for a moment, and then Colin cleared his throat. ‘So who’s Jamal?’

  This time Amber’s scream was so loud I could hear her through the wall.

  Her screen went black, too, followed a few minutes later by the familiar thud of her treadmill.

  Colin frowned. He looked confused. ‘What the heck just happened? Do you know anything about this Jamal character?’

  I let out a long sigh. ‘You know, I’ve actually got some work I need to catch up on…’

  I switched off my camera and finished my food in silence.

  That was hours ago. Now I’m sitting at my desk, the plastic container that contained my dinner still lying beside me, a greasy scab congealing over the leftovers. A couple of minutes ago Colin texted:

  Hey. Sorry about earlier. Kids, eh?

  I didn’t answer.

  A minute passed before my phone vibrated again:

  Wish you were here with me now x

  I stared at the message, my finger hovering over the screen as I tried to think of what to write.

  Seconds later another message arrived:

  I miss you.

  Then another:

  What are you wearing?

  Then another:

  I’m so hard.

  I hurled my phone across the room.

  Killed the light.

  Went to bed.

  FOUR

  FOR WEEKS, IT was all anybody spoke about. The virus had spread from the Philippines to Indonesia. Then from Malaysia to Thailand. Then to China. India. Russia. New cases were appearing by the day, with no sign of stopping. The death toll doubling by the hour. Then the minute. Pretty soon we lost count. It was simply millions.

  At first it was unclear exactly what was happening. For some reason, the government seemed hesitant to use the word ‘pandemic’. While the symptoms were similar from region to region – the nettle-sting rash, the shortness of breath, the sudden swelling of the eyes then tongue then throat, followed by an agonising, choking death – it was difficult to establish the exact cause of the outbreak. Overnight, we all became amateur virologists. Armchair epidemiologists. Perhaps it wasn’t a disease at all? It might be something in the atmosphere. Or in the food chain. Air pollution from vehicle emissions. A build-up of toxins from illegal pesticides. A secret leak from a nuclear reactor. A biological attack by a terrorist state. Plastic microbeads. Nobody knew. And in the vacuum of uncertainty, rumours blossomed.

  The news channels had a field day, of course. Frowning reporters offered grave dispatches from capital cities. Istanbul. Athens. Kiev. Minsk. Every now and then they’d flash up a map of the world, the infected countries – more than half the planet at that point – bathed in an ominous red glow, with animated arrows suggesting the direction it was travelling.

  Right towards us.

  In between interviews, footage showed locals wearing dust masks as they rode the subway. Sardine-packed hospital waiting rooms, overworked receptionists weeping at their desks. Supermarket shelves swept clean of supplies. Bottled water. Tinned food. Powdered milk. Batteries. In America, there were pictures of empty gun shops. Men in khaki-coloured clothing and wrap-around sunglasses with mountains of heavy-duty artillery piled up in the back of their utility trucks, as if they were planning to shoot the disease to death.

  Then there were the pictures the regular broadcasters couldn’t show. The stuff that would sometimes pop up on your social media timelines and that you couldn’t help looking at, no matter how quickly you tried to scroll over it. The close-ups of the victims. Their faces ballooned beyond recognition. The scratch marks around their throats from where they’d fought for a final breath. And the mass cremations. The bodies stacked up under white sheets, taken out to burn in fields and deserts around the world, thick towers of noxious brown smoke coiling up towards the sky, visible for miles around.

  Still, there was no real sense of panic. Not yet. Rather, there was a strange sense of unreality about the whole thing. After all, we’d spent decades at the cinema watching this stuff. We’d flicked through it at the local bookshops a thousand times before. We knew the narrative arc by heart. The apocalypse was hackneyed. Old hat. Besides, as bad as things were, they still weren’t happening to us. It might have been creeping closer by the day: Croatia, Austria, Slovenia – even the odd case in Italy and France! – but it still wasn’t here. No, this was something that was happening to foreign people in exotic countries. It was a mudslide in Bangladesh. A famine in South Sudan. A terror attack in Lebanon. Just another pan-global atrocity playing out in montage on our mobile devices. Something to scroll and share while we rode the train to work.

  So blasé were we that, even when the first sporadic cases did eventually reach our shores, we still didn’t connect the dots. The janitor they found in our office building when we came into work one Monday morning? It was probably just a heart attack. The woman who dropped dead in the canteen of the shopping centre weeks earlier? She’d simply choked to death on her chicken sandwich.

  Even when social media exploded with footage of local deaths and the red tops’ headlines grew increasingly hysterical, it was still easy to pretend that it was all going to blow over. That everything was going to be just fine. After all, hadn’t there been scares like this before? Bird flu. Swine flu. SARS. And look at how those had turned out. An anxiety attack over nothing. No, pretty soon the government would announce a vaccination programme and whatever this was would be relegated to a false-alarm, just like all the others. All hype and no teeth. Until then, it was simply a case of keeping calm and carrying on, just like the tea towel said.

  And so that’s exactly what we did.

  We went to work. Sent the kids to school. Visited the shops.

  We switched off our news feeds and stayed away from social media. Changed the channel to cartoons and talent shows and episodic dramas, binge watching our way to serenity.

  We talked about the weather. Holiday plans. Career goals.

  It wasn’t until people we knew started disappearing – colleagues, a child in Charlie’s class, Colin’s aunt – that we started to appreciate just how serious the situation was shaping up to be. That things might not be all right after all. That maybe we should start doing what our paranoid neighbours had been doing for weeks. Securing the apartment. Hoarding food. Petrol. Water. Weapons. Or else just loading up the car with supplies and driving away. Getting out of the city altogether. Heading out to the countryside or the coast or somewhere remote. Lying low until the whole thing blew over.

  By the time we got our act together, though, there were no supplies left to buy. No food or petrol or water or weapons to gather. The shops were empty. The roads were closed. The electricity was off and the taps had run dry. By then, around half the city had been infected and there were soldiers on the streets.

  In other words, it was already much, much too late.

  FIVE

  WHICH CAME FIRST, the woman or the egg?

  I’m serious. Well, semi-serious. You see, I’ve been thinking about you again this morning, Egg. You and your two million or so other unfertilised sisters. Did you know that women are born with all the ova they are ever going to have? If that’s true, I guess that means that I didn’t make you at all. Rather, you were stitched together at the same time as me, in my poor old mum’s womb. Just as the egg that became me was made by her mother, my grandma, who was made by her mother, and her mother before that. And on and on it goes, a biological production line stretching back millennia. A microscopic torch passed from ovary to ovary over millions of years. Back before my ancestors were even ‘people’ at all. Back when they weren’t much more than proto-organi
sms, a few cells swimming around in the primordial swamp.

  And before that?

  It’s hard to say. My grasp on evolutionary theory is shaky at best, but I like to imagine I’m looking backwards through the telescope until I reach the very start of the chain. The very first egg, floating there in that silent darkness at the beginning of the world. Encoded within her tiny shell all the secrets needed to build a planet full of people. My earliest relative. And yours, too. Though I fear that you, sitting there in your top-secret government medical facility, may actually represent her diametric opposite. The very end of the chain. A genetic cul-de-sac.

  The place where it all finally stops.

  Anyway, all this talk of ancestry brings me round to my own darling daughter, who this morning has already been the source of a hundred headaches.

  It’s Saturday the something. February, maybe. Or perhaps April? I stopped paying such close attention to the calendar a few years ago now. With the windows and balcony sealed up, I hardly know what season it is, let alone the day. Dates, I decided long ago, are for people with plans. Holidays. Events. Celebrations. I hardly even bother keeping track of my own birthday any more. Cake and candles for one is just too depressing for words.

  Still, while I may have given up counting the days, my computer hasn’t. My online assistant ‘helpfully’ taking note of every email I send or receive, prompting me whenever a rare obligation does come up. Which is the reason I woke this morning to the high-pitched trill of a new notification:

  NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH DUTY: 09.00–11.00

  I first stumbled across our local neighbourhood watch scheme on an online forum last year and instantly I was hooked. In return for a few hours of basic health and safety training, you were given a licence from the government to break curfew and roam the city streets by yourself for an hour or so every fortnight with a camera strapped to your chest, the idea being that you could let the authorities know should anything untoward be taking place locally. Sure, you had to stick to a designated patrol route and then type up a detailed report for your group leader (in my case a lady called Fatima, who lives in the apartment block opposite ours.) But what a trade-off! For four years, I hadn’t been further than the ration drop-off point in the basement of the building. Suddenly I was free to walk out of the front door of the apartment as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  I remember the night before I was due to go out on my first patrol. I lay restless on my bed, unable to sleep. Of course, by then I had a fairly good idea of what to expect out there. In the immediate months after we’d sealed ourselves away, the Internet was awash with rumours. Gossip. Hearsay. The world was a dystopian wasteland inhabited by the dead and the dying. Fires raged day and night. Buildings lay flattened. Corpses lay stacked in the street by the dozen. People posted clips from Mad Max and Dawn of the Dead and passed them off as documentary footage. No one knew what was real and what was Photoshop. After a few months or so, however, official drone footage began to leak in from what was left of the media. Then we all saw what was out there. To my surprise, it wasn’t as extreme as I’d expected. For the most part, the world looked the same. Only without the people. Sure, there were some iconic shots. The Arc de Triomphe empty. Times Square deserted. Tokyo Station abandoned. In truth, though, it all seemed a little anticlimactic. There was nothing we hadn’t seen before in the cinema. None of it looked… real .

  As the years went by, more and more footage was beamed back to our bedrooms. And admittedly, some of it was pretty dramatic. Who can forget the shots of the Eiffel Tower, its lower legs now entirely engulfed by thick foliage? Or the London Eye lying on its side, its carriages rusting, its spokes bent in on themselves? Perhaps it’s images like these that have convinced Colin that the neighbourhood watch scheme is a terrible idea. Honestly, the way he talks about it, you’d think I was going off to war rather than for a mid-morning stroll around the neighbourhood.

  ‘What if you get into trouble?’ he’d fretted when he first found out I’d signed up. ‘What if someone attacks you?’

  ‘Who’s going to attack me? There’s no one out there.’

  ‘What about soldiers? You’ve seen what they do to people.’

  I patiently explained about my training again. About the protocols we had in place. About the special set of digital credentials I’d been given, authorising me to pass freely on the off-chance I should run into any military personnel. Though of course there’s not much danger of that ever happening. In fact, in the six months I’ve been on patrol, I haven’t once needed to show my ID to anyone. While I’ve seen online footage of heavily armed soldiers in various trouble spots around the country, our neighbourhood is almost embarrassingly safe. There’s never anyone out there but me, and the only traffic on the roads are the huge, automated lorries that criss-cross the country, delivering groceries and medical provisions to residents, or dropping fertility doctors to their appointments.

  While it’s comforting to live in such a quiet neighbourhood, the downside is that I never have anything to write up. Having read a dozen or so of the bone-dry reports from some of the other members on my team, they seem to have the same problem as me. It’s almost tempting to start inventing things, just to make it worth reading.

  Not that any of this seems to make much of a difference to Colin, who all these months later still frets about my participation in the scheme. One of his biggest gripes is that we undertake our patrols alone, rather than in a group. Apparently it hasn’t occurred to him that walking alongside a stranger with only the thin fabric of my hazmat suit for protection would potentially pose a far graver risk.

  Incidentally, this is exactly the same point I made to Amber when she texted this morning with the unprecedented request to accompany me on patrol. It’s a shame, really. While I appreciate her unusual willingness to spend some time with me – or to do anything outside of her obsessive exercise regime – I nevertheless declined her offer, reminding her of the multitude of dangers it would entail. All it would take , I typed, is a small rip in your suit. If you caught it on a rusty nail or a shard of shattered window, there’d be nothing anyone could do for you. Besides, does that old suit even still fit you? I inserted a winking emoji then finished the message with three crosses:

  Kiss kiss kiss.

  She didn’t reply.

  After breakfast, which as usual consisted of a small, vacuum-packed pot of porridge, I picked up the cup containing the government-issued pills we are required to swallow each day in order to stay healthy. I rattled the six small tablets against the plastic. There’s Vitamin D, obviously. That’s for the lack of sunlight. Then there’s B12, which we take due to the scarcity of meat. There’s also a supplement for iron, and another containing niacin and calcium, though I forget which is which. The final two are medications. A beige one for anxiety and a small green capsule containing a low dose of anti-depressants.

  Again, for obvious reasons.

  I tipped my head back, washing them down with a gulp of orange juice. Then I put on my suit, pausing to strap the small digital camera into the harness around my neck, before finally slipping on my mask. Then I headed for the front door.

  Even now, six months after I signed up, I still get a tingle of anxiety at the thought of leaving the apartment, and as I stooped to enter the cramped tent of the quarantine zone, I felt my heart beginning to race. We upgraded our front door a couple of years ago to a thicker steel model secured by an electronic access code. Although I know the number by heart, my hand was shaking so much that I got a digit wrong, resulting in a sharp buzz and a red light. I took a deep breath and tried again. This time the lock flashed green. As I depressed the handle, the door gave a slight hiss as the airtight seal broke. And then I was stepping out into the hallway.

  Alone.

  WHEN WE FIRST moved into the apartment building, almost a decade ago now, the communal areas were maintained to an incredibly high standard. Freshly watered plants lined the halls. The corridors were vacuumed
daily. The stairs swept and mopped. Today, however, the state of disrepair is overwhelming. The building is only a third full these days, and with the majority of families permanently sealed away, no one has yet volunteered to take responsibility for the clean-up. Even if they did, it’s difficult to know where they’d start. Most of the lights overhead are broken. Those few that still work tend to blink on and off at random, casting the halls in a stuttering fluorescent gloom. The potted plants are long gone, the only trace of them a few shards of broken terracotta, adding to a crackling topsoil of dirt and glass, as well as the odd belonging lost in the initial evacuation. A mobile phone. A set of car keys. An inhaler. A child’s toy.

  As I made my way towards the exit, I did my best to tread lightly, tiptoeing through the filth so as not to disturb the deadly dust that coats everything. I kept moving, past the lift, which is broken, permanently jammed between floors, and instead headed for the stairs. In order to get there I had to pass Mr and Mrs Chen’s old apartment. As with every time I go out there, I told myself not to look. Yet, as always, I found I couldn’t help myself, craning my neck to peek in at the charred remains of their home.

  The Chens were a young family who moved into the building around a year after us. Jin, Lucy and their son, Wei. While I didn’t know Jin well, I always made an effort to stop and talk to Lucy whenever we bumped into each other in the hall. We weren’t friends exactly, but Charlie was only a few months older than Wei, and so we had some common ground. She was nice. Smart, with a dry sense of humour. I remember one of the last times we spoke she told me they were trying for another baby and that she was nervous because Wei was already such a handful.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ I told her. ‘Second time round is a piece of cake. Trust me.’

  I didn’t see her again after that. Like us, the Chens had decided to stay and try and wait things out. They weren’t worried either. What was the worst that could happen?