Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 (20 page)

Through the window Belle was walking across the garden to where Will was still digging. They looked strange together, the large ugly man and the slight blonde girl; like different species. Will kept his eyes trained on the ground until Belle touched his arm. Something about the way he moved his head told Magnus the man had heard her coming and was impatient at the interruption. Will listened to what she had to say and resumed his task. Belle lingered for a moment, as if expecting him to give a response, then walked away. When she was gone Will stopped digging and leaned on his spade, staring down at the earth. Something about the way he stood reminded Magnus of the way his mother had been after his father’s death; her silences, the half-finished tasks.

Jeb said, ‘I remember the crash, that fucker coming towards us with the machete and Jacob blowing his head off, then nothing much until I woke up with Old Father Time snoring on the chair beside me.’ He touched his bandaged leg. ‘Jacob reckons we should slap some plaster of Paris on it. He’s on the hunt for some now, but in the meantime . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I’m fucked.’

There was a cross on the wall above the bed, a skinny Jesus pinned like a fly on a dissecting board. Magnus gave it a glance and said, ‘I haven’t told anyone where we met.’

Jeb touched his bandages again, as if to check that his leg was still painful. He grimaced and looked at Magnus, his expression wary.

‘Why would you?’

‘There are girls here. Young girls.’

Magnus shifted the chair back from the bed, though he knew Jeb was in no condition to reach him from where he lay.

‘Christ.’ Jeb closed his eyes. ‘You seriously think I’m a danger to them?’

‘All I know is where we met.’

‘Where
we
met. You were there too, remember?’

There was a sound on the stair outside. Jeb’s eyes met Magnus’s and he stopped mid-sentence. The door opened and Belle put her head into the room. She had tied her hair into sleek gold plaits and looked like a pretty supermarket assistant dressed up to promote Edam cheese. She said, ‘Jacob has asked us all to assemble in the ballroom.’

Jeb pulled up the bed sheet, covering his leg, the borrowed boxer shorts. ‘Did he say if he’d found any plaster of Paris?’

Belle stepped into the room. ‘No, just that he wanted us all to assemble.’

Jeb looked away. ‘You’ll have to count me out.’

Magnus felt his face glowing. He wondered if Belle had overheard any of their conversation. Her foot kicked the back of his chair, though whether it was deliberate or because the room was small, Magnus could not tell.

She said, ‘How about you? You’ve got both of your legs.’

It was in his mind to say that he was leaving, but the man had saved his life and it might also be a chance to say goodbye to Raisha.

‘Sure, I’ll be there.’

The girl looked at Jeb. ‘How long will you be stuck like that?’

‘I don’t know. If Jacob gets some plaster on it I might be hobbling around soon.’

‘You’re going to be bloody bored stuck in here.’

Magnus said, ‘Don’t worry about Long John Silver. He’s used to being on his own.’

Belle ignored him. She pulled on one of her plaits and asked Jeb, ‘Do you want me to bring you some books? There are some lying around.’

‘Sure.’ Jeb glanced at the sheet again. ‘Thanks.’

‘Fuck, I miss the Internet,’ Belle said. ‘Do you think there’s any chance someone might get it going?’

‘Maybe.’ Magnus shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

He had seen photographs of giant warehouses in California where servers were housed. Other survivors might be battling to reconnect them with the rest of the world, or the computers may have exploded; a flash of light in a sun-bright desert.

‘I still have my mobile.’ Belle slipped an iPhone from the pocket of her jeans. ‘It lost its charge ages ago, but I don’t want to get rid of it. I’ve got photographs stored on it.’ She touched the phone to her lips and put it back in her pocket. ‘I dreamed that they were all alive and living inside my mobile, my family, friends from uni, people I’d known at school, my mum and dad’s neighbours. They all waved to me from the screen, as if they were in a YouTube video. I know it was just a dream, but it felt real.’ Her voice sounded wistful. ‘I heard my mum calling my name. I couldn’t throw it away after that.’

‘I have dreams about people I haven’t thought of in years,’ Jeb said. ‘I had one about the guy who used to run the newspaper shop round the corner when I was a kid. I never thought much about him one way or another. He was just an old geezer who was permanently knackered from getting up at 4 a.m. He probably died long before the sweats, but I dreamed about him folding copies of the
Daily Mail
into a sack, ready for morning delivery.’

Belle nodded as if she understood. ‘Father Wingate says we’ll get used to it, but no TV, no video games, no Facebook, no Twitter . . .’

Magnus said, ‘No cat videos.’

‘Sure, some of it was stupid.’ The girl kicked the leg of his chair again. ‘But it was civilisation and none of us knows how it worked.’

Jeb said, ‘Someone will.’

‘Who?’ Her voice was full of scorn. ‘You? Him? All the useful people are dead. My dad was an architect. He knew how to make multi-storey buildings that would keep standing in an earthquake. What did you do?’

Magnus felt his face growing warm again. ‘I was a comedian.’

‘A comedian.’ She shook her head. ‘And you?’ She looked at Jeb.

‘I worked with disadvantaged kids.’

The answer was unexpected and it stalled her.

‘I was studying art history.’ Belle gave a small laugh. ‘We don’t know how to keep the lights on, or fix someone’s broken leg properly. We survived the sweats, but there’s no guarantee we’ll see this year out.’

Jeb’s skin was grey with tiredness and pain, but he seemed to be growing in confidence. He met the girl’s eyes. ‘My leg will mend and we’ll see this year out.’

‘And the year after?’

‘And the year after.’

The certainty in his voice seemed to comfort her. Belle gave a sad smile. ‘But there’s nothing to look forward to any more.’

She was the kind of girl who had been used to new clothes and foreign holidays, to nightclubs and long lunches gossiping about the night before with other girls who looked and talked like her. She had friended, followed, liked, tweeted and smiled for selfies and a part of her had been lost in vanished cyberspace.

Jeb said, ‘What do they call you?’

‘Belle.’

Magnus had expected Jeb to compliment her on the prettiness of her name, but he merely nodded, as if acknowledging the rightness of it and said, ‘I’m Jeb. It looks like I’m going to be hanging around for a while.’ His smile was small and wry but it was a smile. ‘Will you bring me those books when you have time?’

‘Sure.’ Belle’s answering smile lit up her face, as if she had found some small event to look forward to after all.

Magnus said, ‘I’ll be stopping by for a chat with Jacob and Father Wingate before I go.’

Jeb turned his prison stare on Magnus. ‘Do what you have to.’

There was bite in his voice and the girl glanced from one to the other, unsure of what was going on. She kicked Magnus’s chair again. ‘See you in the ballroom.’ She closed the door gently, taking any good feeling with her.

There was a Bible on the table next to the bed. Jeb picked it up and flung it across the room, but Magnus had seen the move coming and ducked. The Bible splatted against the wall and landed splayed open on the floor. Magnus picked up the book and glanced inside. A sentence was underlined:
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD
. He closed it.

‘You wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t stuck here.’ Jeb pulled the bed sheet back as if he were about to get to his feet. His body was lean and girded by prison muscle.

The sight of it made Magnus wonder if Jeb was right and whether he would have had the courage to press him had he not been imprisoned by a broken leg. He said, ‘What do you expect me to do? You weren’t locked in there for nothing.’

‘Neither were you.’

‘I tried to stop a rape. Things got nasty and when the police turned up they thought I was part of it. The whole thing would have been cleared up if it wasn’t for the sweats.’

Jeb touched his leg as if the pain of it reassured him. ‘You expect me to believe that?’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘Where’s your proof?’

‘I don’t need any proof.’

Jeb leaned forward, as if he would like to reach out and put his hands around Magnus’s neck. ‘Neither do I.’

Sticking his nose into other people’s nasty business was what had landed Magnus in jail in the first place. If he had walked away from the man tussling with the woman in the alley he might have caught a flight to Orkney when the sweats had started to take hold. He would be home now and would know, for good or for bad, how things were. Magnus sighed and said, ‘So tell me why you were locked in solitary in the wing reserved for sex offenders?’

Jeb looked away and for a moment Magnus thought he was going to refuse to tell him, but then Jeb leaned back and propped himself against the headboard. His eyes met Magnus’s.

‘It isn’t just sex offenders who are classified as vulnerable prisoners. I was kept in solitary for my own safety. I used to be a policeman.’

Twenty-Five

Magnus had never been to a mass before. He sat beside Belle on one of the chairs that had been arranged in a line before the altar in the ballroom, stealing glances at Raisha who had chosen a place at the opposite end of the row, and mulling over Jeb’s revelation. Raisha stared resolutely ahead, her features hidden by the black curtain of her hair. When she and Belle rose to receive the host from Father Wingate, splendid and smiling in his robes, Magnus remained seated, feeling awkward and resenting the trick that had been played on him. There were many miles to travel and a sea to cross before he reached home, but the priest had managed to imprison him indoors in fair weather. It was a hoax to rival transubstantiation.

The ballroom was large, with picture windows and a parquet floor. It had been a prettified marketplace, where daughters and sons of the rich were paraded and paired off in time to a band. Now the chandeliers that had graced the ceiling were gone. The room’s only decorations were a suffering Christ and the Stations of the Cross. From where he was sitting Magnus could see Jesus being nailed up.

Will acted as altar boy, still dressed in his gardening clothes, but ringing bells and swinging a censer of sweet-smelling smoke and incense with casual confidence that suggested he was not new to the task. His face was blank and it was impossible to know if the duty brought him comfort, or if he was merely going through the motions to please the old man. Perhaps they were all dolls in Wingate’s playhouse, puppeting through a semblance of a life because their real lives were over.

Jacob stepped up to deliver the lesson dressed in the same combination of army fatigues and dog collar he had been wearing when they met. He set his Bible on the lectern and rested his fingers lightly on its black cover.

‘I had the privilege of serving in Bosnia during their civil war. It was a painful conflict, as all wars are. During one particularly savage battle, my troop and I took shelter in a bombed-out factory. It had manufactured tin boxes. One of the many strange aspects of war is the way inconsequential objects often survive, while other, stronger, more important things are ruined. Metal boxes were scattered everywhere around the factory floor, but the people who worked there were either dead or had fled.

‘The glass windows of the factory had been blown out and as we sat there, steeling ourselves for the next round of fighting, a tiny bird swooped in through a window. It flew across the large cathedral-like space of the factory floor and disappeared through a rupture in the opposite wall. I realised then that we are like that bird. We appear on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.’

Prayers were said for Henry, wherever he might be, but Melody went unmentioned. Magnus wondered if her suicide had put her beyond the reach of the Church, or if she was now ranked among the amorphous dead, too numerous to warrant individual pleading.

When the service was over, Jacob and Father Wingate stood at the door to the ballroom, shaking hands with each of the small congregation as they left. Raisha was the first to go. Magnus slipped in front of Will, keen to catch her, but Father Wingate took hold of his arm and stayed him in the doorway.

‘I know you are eager to leave us, but we have a favour to ask.’

Magnus caught Jacob’s eye and knew that the soldier was calling in his debt.

‘Don’t worry.’ Jacob put a hand on Magnus’s shoulder. ‘We’re not about to ask for anything you’re not equipped to give.’

The priest’s words reminded Magnus of a phrase his mother had repeated in times of trouble: ‘God never burdens you with more than you can bear.’ He wondered if even she could believe that now.

Father Wingate led the way out of the ballroom, across the entrance hall and down a flight of stairs into a basement corridor. Upstairs the house retained glimpses of the stately home it had once been, but there had never been an attempt at grandeur down here. Everything was dark and meanly proportioned. Magnus recalled his granny telling him that big houses contained hidden networks of servants’ corridors and stairways, so the gentry would not have to see them going about their work. The servants had been the blood of the house, running along webs of hidden veins.