“He’s dead, Joni.”
We looked at each other for a while. I wanted to put my finger under her chin and close her mouth. She expected me to talk, but there was nothing, nothing in me needing to come out. She launched into a litany of “oh my Gods” and “poor Julians” and “poor everyone elses,” and you’d never know that only twenty-four hours ago she had felt quite strongly that her brother-in-law was an arse. It was like she’d opened a drawer marked “Grief,” and the contents were spilling down her face. Her words of comfort, however much they were intended to help, struck me as so inadequate—belittling almost, in light of what I’d just seen—that I had to turn away. I had that sharp feeling in my fingers again, the one the marriage counselor had told me was a physical manifestation of the way I channeled hurt into anger. “Have you ever noticed that every time you need to cry, you get angry?” She had told me it was a coping mechanism. Well, now more than ever, I needed to cope.
“Stop, Joni, just stop it!”
Surprised, she did.
“We can’t do this now. The kids will start asking questions, and I can’t deal with that on top of everything else. We need to get them away from here,” I started saying. “We can’t risk them seeing—”
“You can’t gloss over finding your husband dead in your home. What happened in there?”
“He was on the sofa. The denim one by the garden doors.” What more did she want me to say? My drawer was firmly shut and was unlikely to open without jimmying. “I didn’t touch him—there were flies. Loads of flies.”
Joni nodded.
“I mean really shitloads of flies. And a buzzing. That’s what the kids can’t see—the fucking buzzing.” I ground my fingertips into my forehead.
“We’ll go back to my place,” she said, “and work out what to do next.”
I thought of all those front doors, cheek by jowl down that sordid little street, a buzz behind each one. “No, we need to get out of the city. There must be bodies everywhere. Every single one of these places”—I jabbed at the gracious, smug, contaminated homes circling the park—“is full of buzz.”
“Where we going to go?”
A desert island, I thought, or a lush valley with a salmon-filled river in perpetual spring, or a Mediterranean village with oranges falling from the trees and a fishing boat sitting atop its own reflection in smooth waters. We could get in the car and drive somewhere like that, through the Channel Tunnel and across to the Continent, just keep going until we got someplace where the living is easy.
“Marlene?”
That was a fantasy. “Back to the camp,” I said. “It’s the only place we know is safe.”
“Mum-may, I’m hungry,” Billy whined. As usual, we didn’t get anywhere fast. I was still revolving on the roundabout in the park, trying to think straight. The other kids climbed on board and surrounded me, their pleading-chick mouths gaping. Joni produced some tiny boxes of raisins, but soon enough they were at it again. I swatted the midges away, hissing that I couldn’t just pluck food out of the air and why can’t they let me concentrate for five minutes? Then Joni remembered that we still had baked beans in the car and stumped off to fetch her tiny gas stove, which she set up in the sandpit. The kids sat cross-legged in the dirt, while Joni settled into a primitive squat to poke at the food cooking over a naked flame.
I walked along the pavement, away from the houses overlooking the park and the dark windows that seemed to be eyeballing us. People could be watching through those windows. Survivors. If we were alive, there could be others. Maybe I’d watched too many TV shows, but I wanted to be away from strangers, at least until we knew more about what had caused this to happen. So I eyed the parked cars. Before we could leave the city, Joni needed a Beast of her own. Something reliable. Her knackered hatchback was kept on the road by the constant attention of a local mechanic, whose magic touch we lacked. The last thing we needed was to break down and get stranded where there might be buzz—or strangers.
I ignored the endless SUVs and coupes and minivans. I knew exactly what I was looking for: the souped-up Land Rover driven by that surgeon who lived on the next street. It would suit us just fine. It would keep us mobile. Just in case.
The vehicle was hulking in its space right outside the surgeon’s house, and I gave it a proprietorial pat on the bonnet as I passed. I rang the doorbell. It chimed. I waited. Rang again. Then I took a step back and shoved the front door with my shoulder. It didn’t budge. I stepped back and kicked at it with the full heft of my new boots, but though it bent in, the lock held. I turned and looked up and down the street for inspiration. The sight of the new Beast drove me on.
Above the door was a portico, decorated with fancy ironwork. I pulled my sleeves down over my hands and jumped up to hang on it. I swung both legs back and, using the momentum, pounded them into the door, which burst open and wedged against a body that was lying at the bottom of the stairs. A frenzy of flies heaved itself from the corpse and swarmed out the door. My fingers failed, and I dropped down into the cloud, my left knee and shoulder taking the brunt of the awkward landing. I scrambled away, squashing bluebottles under my hands as I struggled for purchase on the concrete steps. I fell onto my backside among the purple slate that covered the garden. There wasn’t even any grass to wipe my hands on. I scraped away the guts as best I could on the concrete and got up. I gave the Land Rover one last look, but I wasn’t going anywhere near that body to find the keys. Farther down the street was a cluster of half-decent urban tractors, no doubt tanked with fuel and primed with snacks, ready to tackle the rugged terrain of the school run.