Chapter 9

In the morning, the three of them went down to East Park; Jill was on the ‘critical’ list. Mike was distraught; June and Tony tried to comfort him.

‘I’m sorry, no, it is not possible to visit a patient at the moment. No, not at any time of the day for the time being. We can take messages for patients, yes, but not from them. It’s a matter of what is practicable with the number of patients we have. We’re doing everything we can for the patients.’

Mike had the feeling that his message of love and encouragement would be considered too trivial for them to bother to deliver.

They went on down to the hospital. The boys were still on the ‘recovering’ list.

‘Those two lists are awfully big wadges of paper. I’d love to know how many cases there really are.’

‘That’s just the ‘critical’ and the ‘recovering’. They don’t seem to have any lists of all the admissions, or the deaths. And I don’t know how many schools there are in Burnfield.’

‘It’s not long since you were saying that they weren’t pulling their punches, letting us know there were half a million dead. Perhaps really they aren’t letting us know how bad it is.’

‘Let’s go and see how Angie and Steve are.’

Recovering.

The general consensus was that they should go round to Auntie Alice’s again.

‘But she’ll feed us again. We’ll be eating her out of house and home.’

‘She likes feeding us. But perhaps we should get her something.’

‘So she can feed it straight back to us? And if we get her more, to put into stock, she’ll just think we’re extra hungry.’

‘We’ll get her something else, for herself.’

‘Like what? Everywhere’s shut except the food shops.’

They decided to get her two quarter kilos of butter, and a pot of her favourite ginger and orange jam.

‘We’ll end up eating half the butter, but it’s still a treat for her; and she’ll know the marmalade’s for her, ’cause she only eats it at breakfast.’

The till at Longridge’s was operated by an unfamiliar man.

‘Before you ask, Barry’s critically ill. I’m his brother and my firm’s shut for the present. Four-forty-five, please.’

They met Jenny coming in as they left the shop.

‘Hello, Jenny. Have you heard about Cathie?’ Subdued.

‘No. What about Cathie?’ Apprehensive.

‘She died yesterday.’

‘I don’t believe it! No!’ Jenny sat down on a crate, dazed. ‘I’ve known her since we were little girls. We were at school together. I’ve been working with her for nearly a year now.’

Silence.

‘My little sister Vicky, and my dad are sick too. And Lynne – she’s the other waitress at the Britannia. Vicky’s critical. Why’s it got to be all my friends and relatives? Me and my mum’s worried silly. I don’t even know how to tell her about Cathie. We didn’t even know she was sick.’

‘The night before last, she wasn’t. It started during the night, her dad took her in first thing, and a policewoman came round yesterday afternoon and told them she was dead.’

Silence.

They had to move aside to let some more customers in. Jenny got up and started to go into the shop. She reeled, grabbed Mr Longridge’s brother’s coat sleeve, and sat down heavily on the check-out table.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Longridge... Oh! Who are you?’

‘That’s alright, ducks. Are you okay?’

She was pale as a ghost and glistening with sweat. Mike put his hand on her forehead; she was clammy, cold.

‘Put your head between your knees, Jenny.’

She didn’t seem to hear him; he gently curled her over and did it for her. She didn’t resist.

‘What’s up with her?’

‘Shock, I think, and then standing up suddenly.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘No, I think she’ll be alright in a moment.’

‘I’m okay now.’ Starting to rise.

‘You stay down there for a bit... Would you mind getting her a cup of sweet tea?’

‘Of course not.’ He locked the till and disappeared into the back room. He re-appeared a moment later.

‘It’ll only be a minute. She had the kettle on already for a cuppa for us.’

‘Thanks very much.’

Silence.

Teas, not just for Jenny, but all round.

‘Goodness! Thank you. We didn’t expect that!’

‘Don’t mention it. You okay now, love?’

‘Yes thanks. I felt awful for a minute. I thought I was going to pass out.’

‘You nearly did. Are you sure you’ll be all right? Do you want us to walk you home? Where do you live? You sit here and tell us what you wanted to buy and we’ll collect it for you.’

They prepared Jenny’s mother properly: they sat her down, and June made the tea, Jenny telling her where everything was the while. Then Jenny broke the news.

‘It kind of brings it all home to you when it’s someone you’re so close to... God, I hope Vicky’s going to be all right!’

And Jill.

There was a copy of Thursday’s Evening Echo on a chair in the corner. Tony picked it up and read it. After a period of silence, Jenny’s mother got up. ‘Have you lot made any plans about lunch? I’ve a stew on the stove, that I was making for the four of us before Viv and Mark got sick; and Jenny and I didn’t feel like eating last night. I’ll just hot it up.’

They were very grateful, and the stew was very good. ‘Mum’s stews are always the better for being recooked!’

For a moment, laughter; but it reminded them of why the stew had been left in the first place.

‘We’d better go round and see the Jordans as soon as we’ve washed up, Jenny. They’ll need all the emotional support they can get.’

‘Before we go to Auntie Alice’s, let’s get a paper. Yesterday’s Echo was very thin, but all to the point. They said the Government’s ban on traffic was depriving them of supplies of paper, but that by keeping the paper thin and reducing the number of copies printed, they could keep going to a week. They actually suggested that customers share their papers!’

But there was not a newsvendor to be found, and all the newsagents were closed. They went round to the Echo offices, but there was a notice on the window, CLOSED DUE TO STAFF SICKNESS.

‘That doesn’t look like an Echo notice to me! Neat block type isn’t their style: they’d dash it off with a thick felt tip pen. And they’d put it up on the inside of the window, I’d have thought.’

They peered into the gloom in the office: things seemed to have been left where they were in the middle of working.

‘Is there anyone about?’ whispered Tony.

‘Can’t see anyone.’ On a Friday afternoon, in the middle of Burnfield!

Tony tried to tear the notice off the window, but it was well stuck on.

‘Now I’m sure this isn’t an Echo notice! I bet it’s covering up the Echo’s own notice; I’d love to know what that says.’

Tony decided that while the others went to Auntie Alice’s, he’d go to see Terry Dobson, an Echo reporter he knew. ‘I’ll see you round at Auntie Alice’s later on; failing that, back at your place, June. Are we all staying there again tonight?’

‘I should think so. Mike?’

‘Yes.’ Preoccupied.

Auntie Alice was mourning her cat. She’d kept it indoors since the threat to destroy all straying animals, but it had died sometime in the night. No previous symptoms, nothing.

‘I sealed it in a plastic bag and put it in the dustbin. They said not to bury dead animals, but I couldn’t bear to hand it over to be incinerated. The bin men are supposed to have been this afternoon, but there’s been no sign of them.’

Surely rubbish collection is one of the last services they should cut during a major epidemic. I bet they’re not really incinerating dead animals; I bet they’re going into lime-pits. But Mike didn’t share his thoughts.

They told her about Cathie, without mentioning anything about lime-pits; and that Jill was critically ill. ‘And here am I, grieving about a cat that was getting on in years anyway! Cathie seemed such a nice girl, the once I met her. I do hope Jill’ll get better soon.’

It’s almost as if she hasn’t really taken it in.

She was very grateful for the butter and marmalade. ‘I know whose idea these were, but thank you both anyway.’

‘Thank Tony too. He chipped in as well. He was going to come round later on. He still might if he’s not too long at Terry Dobson’s.’

They all settled down to watch the telly. Alan Wilberforce was chairing a discussion between various unheard-of celebrities. Coming in on the middle of it, they didn’t know exactly who anyone was. A Ministry of Defence spokesperson was explaining away the apparent conflict between their own labs research and American statements. His explanation was being dismantled, piece by piece, apparently very effectively but quite incomprehensibly, by a Professor Lindale – professor of what, or from where, they never discovered.

‘So what you’re saying, Professor, is that Mr Waterford is a deliberate liar?’

‘Or at least that the originator of his statements certainly is. If you’ll allow me to ask him a few questions, I can quickly discover whether he understands the rubbish he’s been talking, or whether he’s merely following a brief.’

‘Perhaps first you’ll tell me what you think is the Ministry’s motivation for hoodwinking the public over an issue like this?’

‘I’d rather pass that question over to your political experts.’

‘Dr Clarke?’

‘May I first check my understanding of their positions? The MoD labs claim to have isolated a virus responsible for the disease. The US Department of Defense claims that a bug – of unspecified type – with a complex life cycle, is responsible, and further, that the bug is a biological engineering product from China, released not as an act of war but accidentally. The UK MoD reconciles these two positions by saying that the bug with the complex life cycle could be a normally harmless, perfectly ordinary inhabitant of the human digestive tract, but that now it is carrying the virus. Professor Lindale says that this is absolute balderdash, and that neither of the original claims have the ring of unadulterated truth about them. The question of whether Mr Waterford is personally responsible for the MoD’s lies is surely irrelevant, except in so far as it may imply that we are unable to probe the Ministry position more deeply than his brief goes. Do I have the picture?’

‘That is pretty much the picture I have; I think you have clarified this very difficult discussion admirably. On behalf of our viewers, thank you. Do continue; you were going to tell us what you supposed might be the Ministry’s motivation for lying to us.’

‘I can imagine quite a few possible motives. To help me choose between them, I’d like to ask a few questions.’

Then they were mouthing silently; and then the picture disappeared. A moment later the test card appeared, and a voice apologized for the temporary fault, saying that Alan Wilberforce would be back as soon as possible, and that in the meantime, here was some music.

June got up and changed channels. Astonishingly, there was a Western on BBC1. The other channels all appeared to be in the middle of continuous News. It was all on the same subject. June and Auntie Alice stared in horrified fascination as casualty figures, county by county, appeared.

But Mike wasn’t so interested in the details, and he wasn’t sure he believed them anyway. He’d been doing a bit of mental arithmetic, and he didn’t like the answers. Unless the few pages of ‘critical’ and ‘recovering’ lists he’d seen at the hospital and two schools were wildly untypical, or his estimate of the numbers of such pages in each wad was wild, or those three places had ludicrously more patients than the other schools, then Burnfield had far more than its fair share of cases, without counting the dead and those neither critical nor recovering. Casualties within his own circle certainly ran much higher than they were saying in general. But he’d not heard Burnfield mentioned in the news as a particularly bad area.

The news finished with a report about the war in South America, and how disease casualties were now worse than the casualties from the recent fighting. Both sides were ‘drawing back and trying to care for their sick.’

Or simply too many of them are too ill to fight.

Adverts.

Whoever is going to go out and buy a keep-fit machine just now?

Channel change. BBC 2, still test card and music. BBC 1, still a Western. Peak, off altogether. By winding the little channel adjusting screw June was able to get a distant independent, but the picture was spotty and the sound was crackling. June tried to tune in better, and then tried to decipher it for a while. Eventually she gave up; it seemed to be something about a remote tribe somewhere who’d been found all dead except a small child. She tried BBC 2 again, and then back to the adverts.

Auntie Alice went to make a pot of tea.

When BBC 2 finally reappeared, it apologized for the loss of Alan Wilberforce’s Hour, and went straight into the news. Which told them nothing of significance. They learnt nothing worthwhile all afternoon. Auntie Alice made them supper, and they left about nine o’clock.

By eleven o’clock they were getting worried about Tony. At a quarter to midnight, he arrived on a bicycle.

‘Where have you been? We’ve been worrying you might have got sick and gone in. You are okay, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I’m fine. Get the kettle on Mike, and help me find somewhere to put Brian’s bike, June.’

‘Cup of tea at this time of night? I’m ready to turn in!’

‘We’ll be up ages yet. I’ve got an awful lot to tell you.’

‘How come you’ve got Brian’s bike?’

‘Easy, easy, I’ll get to that. Give me time. I could do with a sit down, and a cup of tea.’

‘Have you eaten?’

‘Not since lunch. Haven’t had time to think about it. Now you mention it, I’m starving. What have you got?’

Mike fried Tony a couple of eggs, and made beans on toast. He and June had a small helping each too.

‘Last time we saw you, you were going to see a chap to ask about the closing of the Echo.’

‘Mmm. Terry Dobson. Well, he’s dead. Tim, his flat mate, found his address book for me and marked the other Echo reporters. Most of them are sick and some are dead. Melanie Downs is the only one I could talk to: she’s at home in bed recovering from being beaten up by a gang of BNP thugs a few days ago. She’s the lucky one. But she didn’t even know they’d closed the Echo down, much less why. But she gave me the names and home addresses of some of the other staff.

‘To cut a long story short, I was right. That notice was covering up one that Andy put up, which said CLOSED BY GOVERNMENT ORDER. Apparently Geoff Haworth, the editor, got himself arrested when the pigs came to tell him that the Government’s order to close all non-essential businesses applied to newspapers as well. The rest agreed to go quietly, but please could Andy stay long enough to clean up so everything wasn’t ruined? About the only thing he actually did was put up that notice, and take photocopies of some of the stuff they’d been going to print: he was afraid that the pigs would come in and remove it.

‘Well, I was beginning to want to know a bit more about some of the briefings the pigs might have been getting recently, so I thought I’d try and track down Brian. I went round to his parents in Raikeley. Brian is dead, too; he died yesterday afternoon.

‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained, thought I. I don’t know any policemen, but the chap Brian used to share with is at least as likely as any other to turn out to be decent. So I got his address from Brian’s dad. Mark, his name is. I thought, telling him Brian’d talked to us can’t do Brian any harm now. And even if Mark won’t tell me anything, with a bit of luck he won’t tell anyone I was asking.

‘I was lucky. Mark was at home, and ready to talk. He said I’d got the luck of the devil, he doubted that there were above half a dozen blokes on the force who wouldn’t have run me straight in.’

‘What would they charge you with?’

‘I asked him that. He said he didn’t know, but they’d find something down at the station. If necessary they’d make something up. They don’t like nosey parkers. And Exercise Alpha is especially secret.’

‘Did he tell you anything new about that?’

‘Only that the lucky devils don’t seem to be getting sick. They still don’t know if there’s really a war or an exercise. Some of them have lost wives or kids, and they don’t know.’

‘Seems a very fortunate coincidence from their point of view. All the same arguments about needing a higher police to population ratio afterwards could well apply even though it isn’t a war. And nice for them personally, although I bet they wish their families were in there too.’

‘It gets a bit much of a coincidence when you discover that Exercise Alpha happened at the same time everywhere. Mark isn’t sure, but he thinks it did. It certainly did in several places. Officially, they’re not supposed to tell even pigs from other areas when exactly the exercises are, but he’s got a friend in the Sheffield force who didn’t quite get in in time, like Brian; and his father in Slough was taken away supposedly on a no-notice training course. And he’s got various bits of indirect evidence about other places. There’s a little group of them who’ve discussed it, but he says they don’t know what to make of it. None of the others would talk to us, he doesn’t think, and none of them have any idea why it is.

‘And then, on top of that, he says that the casualty rate in the force seems to be awfully high, much higher than the national, or even the local average...’

‘Does he have any figures?’

‘No. He just knows about an awful lot of individual cases. I told him, so do we. But he seems to know more, particularly in the police force.’

‘Perhaps he just knows more people than we do. He must know an awful lot of policemen.’

‘I’m not so sure. He was thinking in percentage terms, and saying more like fifty than eight percent incidence, and more like ten than one point eight percent deaths.’

‘Eight and one point eight? It was six point five and one point six at eight thirty.’

‘Was it? Which channel? They’ve been varying a lot, according to Melanie Downs. My figures were Independent, at ten thirty.’

‘Independent was off this afternoon. And BBC2 went test-card-and-music for three quarters of an hour.’

‘I reckon the figures are all eye-wash – or more like whitewash – anyway. If the critical and recovering lists at East Park, Carr Syke and the hospital are anything to go by, even if every case is one or the other, it was nearer twenty or thirty percent incidence this morning. There’s no way to find out about the deaths.’

‘Short of digging up the pits and counting.’

‘Don’t, Tony. It’s not funny. So, the authorities aren’t telling us the truth. That’s surely not news. Would it do us any good to know the truth? Would we be able to bring back Cathie, or do anything to help Jill, or even to improve our own chances, if we did know the truth?’

‘I don’t know about helping Jill, but I think we can do something about improving our own chances. And we could have improved them more if we’d known sooner. If it’s not just coincidence, then someone else must have noticed. I wish I knew what it meant.’

‘What, for Pete’s sake?’

‘Being outside isn’t good for you. And especially not rainwater. Cathie, Brian, Jill: out in the rain on Wednesday night. Jill not out for as long as the other two, and she’s survived. Mike wrings out the wet things, and gets red itchy hands.’

‘They’ve just about cleared up now.’

‘Good. Anyway, having noticed this among my friends, I mentioned it to Mark, and he did a mental tally, and it’s the same in the police force. The office chaps are doing much better than the others. The same goes for the Echo staff. And right at the beginning, it was all the kids under canvas, and all the sewage project workers. That’s why Mark gave me the bike, to avoid me being outside any more than I had to.’

‘But why should being outside or getting wet give you the disease?’

‘Don’t ask me. But if it seems to be so, I’m not going to experiment with my own life to find out for certain.’

‘But surely it must just be coincidence, or they would have noticed, and checked with much bigger samples, and told everybody?’

‘Like they give us the true casualty figures?’

‘And like they feed us a lot of baloney about viruses and complex-life-style bugs, if Prof what’s-his-name’s right.’

‘But I can see why they might lie to us about the true casualty figures: to stop people panicking.’

‘I’ve heard that before. But they admit that two percent of the population have died, and another two or three percent are at death’s door, and that there’s no sign of a cure. If that doesn’t panic people, nothing will.’

‘It’s a matter of psychology. One madman on the loose with a gun will panic people; he might kill a couple of dozen people or so at most. June’s right: they might lie to us about the casualty figures, or having found a virus, to keep panic at bay. The Americans could easily just be trying to score propaganda points against the Chinese. But why shouldn’t they tell everyone to keep out of the rain?’

‘And why silence newspapers? I don’t really follow the argument for cutting non-essential traffic and business activities at all, since the disease seems to be everywhere already. They’re not stopping anything spreading.’

‘Nationally, no, but within a locality, possibly. Keeping people at home reduces the chances of it spreading on an individual level. Perhaps that argument applies with particular force to newspapers, with their distribution arrangements. But that still doesn’t explain why they shouldn’t tell people to keep out of the rain. And a disease which you catch by being out in the rain doesn’t sound like one which spreads by personal contact.’

‘I find it rather hard to imagine how a disease can be caught from rain. Perhaps it is spread by personal contact, but getting wet through gives it a chance to take hold. Perhaps it breeds in wet skin.’

‘That might explain why washing doesn’t seem to be harmful. But it doesn’t explain why being out a lot is bad, or Mike’s red hands.’

‘I’m not sure about the being outside bit. The kids in the camp, and the sewage workers were very much in personal contact, and might well have been wet a lot. Mike’s hands might have got a lot of it that had been breeding on Cathie and Jill, off the clothes.’

‘We’re doing a lot of speculation with very little to go on. Generalizing from the particular and all that. Did Mark get anything useful out of any of his briefings?’

‘Not really. He’s only had general briefings, sort of ‘This is the Situation, This is what you should do in such-and-such Circumstances.’ He’s not been on any special operations, to have had special briefings.’

‘Maybe they suspect he might tell someone. Did he know what special operations there’d been?’

‘No. He didn’t even know about the closing of the Echo until I told him.’

‘I suppose another interpretation is that he’s not telling us, just wants to seem to be on our side.’

‘That’s another thing that bothers me. They shut pretty well every paper in the country down by starving them of paper. One contrives to keep going for a while, so they squash it less subtly. I bet they haven’t done that to many ordinary businesses that’ve defied the close-down...

‘I doubt if many have anyway.’

... and on top of that, Independent blacks out for a whole afternoon and BBC2 has a ‘temporary fault’ which cuts off the only programme trying to explore any real issues involved in the epidemic. If it’s censorship, then it’s subtle enough to be unsure about, but unsubtle enough to be suspicious. There must be a lot of people wondering by now. What do you suppose they’re trying to hide?’

‘I don’t know. But if Exercise Alpha really did happen everywhere at once, it sounds as if someone at the Ministry of Offence knew – or at any rate suspected – that something was about to happen.’

‘I bet he’s in a shelter somewhere. With his wife and kids. If you’re right. But there’s a lot of ifs about. I grant you there’s a lot of coincidences about, too, though. I wish there was something we could do.’

‘There might be, if only we knew what. I wish we knew what the situation really is. I don’t feel we’re getting anything useful out of the telly.’

‘You never know when it might say something useful, so one of us ought to keep tabs on it. Or we should keep in touch with Melanie Downs; she’s watching pretty well all the time, stuck in bed. We ought to put our heads together with more people anyway. I’d like to see what it was Andy thought the pigs might try to suppress. I didn’t have time to look properly when I saw him. I wish the library was open: I’d love to read up something about public health, and epidemics in general. I don’t say I’d become a doctor overnight and solve the whole thing when the experts can’t, but it might help to understand the situation better.’

‘I think it’s time we all got some sleep. We can think what to do in the morning.’

Back to the top

On to Chapter 10