In the en suite bathroom, I found disinfectant spray and disposable latex gloves inside an old first-aid kit. I scrubbed under my nails with a toothbrush, scoured a flannel up my arms and over my face, and finished by splashing antiseptic over my cheeks and mouth like it was Old Spice. Then I watered down some in the bottle top and gargled with it. My God, I thought while my throat burnt, maybe all the helicopter mums were right about hand sanitizer. What might Julian have touched before he died?
I pulled on the latex gloves and went over to my office, built into the eaves off the bedroom. My planning board caught my eye. A mood board of photos and color swatches and pencil sketches from a year’s worth of business trips to Denmark and China with—in pride of place in the center of this thought cloud—a snapshot of me next to the design world’s Next Big Thing, my smile so wide with relief I looked like I was about to eat him. Beside that, a single photocopied page with a red circle around his signature on a contract naming me the exclusive supplier of his overhyped, overpriced furniture to the overexcited consumers of Britain. A year of courting and kowtowing signed into cold, hard cash just last week. The press release from my PR agency still lay in the printer tray, livid with the red-penned changes that made up my final approval.
Still, with no electricity and no computers, I had no online store to worry about. None of it mattered. None of it even existed. Like the proverbial unseen tree in the forest, my life’s work had fallen without making a sound. I pulled from the pinboard a tweed swatch in the bright green fabric of the season, which we’d described as emerald but I now realized was the exact color of the thick moss on the roots of the trees around our camp. Beech trees, Joni had said. The fabric should be called beech moss. I placed the tweed alongside my collection of trinkets and talismans in the desk’s top drawer. I cast an eye over the bookshelf for anything that might be useful to take along, but there was nothing that could help us now.
The bedroom was an even worse mess from this angle. I shoved the suitcases off the bed and let them slump to the floor. I pulled out a leather weekend bag and stood it open. But the contents of my wardrobe just hung there, the work suits redundant, the party dresses with nowhere to go, the versatile coat stubbornly impractical in the current climate.
From the tallboy I grabbed a clean bra, threw it into the bag. Gathering up a handful of knickers, I found a hard stone, a big pebble from the garden that was painted with two black dots and a smiley mouth. Billy’s work left somewhere he knew I would find it: the drawer where I was always packing and unpacking, coming and going, apologizing and comforting while one of the babysitters tried to lure him away with chocolate and Octonauts. And then Maggie would start emoting in the only way she knew how, by making trouble, and I would end up bawling her out right before I stepped into a cab and disappeared for a week. Five whole sleeps. And where was Charlie in this mundane scenario? Was he even in the house or was he off with Peter and his mum, who always seemed to be just getting back from her hospital shift? Or maybe with Joni, if she’d staged one of her to-the-rescue dashes to pick him up from after-school club on the occasions that Julian forgot—actually forgot—to collect his own son (and the school always called me, every single time, to ask where I was and sounded miffed when I said, “Denmark”). And now all that was gone, too, and it was just me and a big pair of boots and a hippie and four kids—no, five, including bloody Peter—against the world.
I lay down on the floor and surrendered myself into child’s pose. My heart thumped like it used to during childhood night terrors, echoing through the caverns of the mattress. I concentrated on long breaths and talked myself down as I’d been taught: You can’t change the past, in this present moment you are okay. The plane will not crash if you sleep, you are not in control of the plane. At least there would be no more flights now.
The floor was uncomfortable. As I pushed myself up, I caught a glimpse of a faint green LED at the bottom of a hillock of Julian’s clothing. Covered by one of his ironically uncool-band T-shirts was a flashing light—an electronic light. Belonging to his laptop. I grasped the machine. With my fingertip covering the LED, I saw it flickering under my skin like a heartbeat. Sitting with my back to the bed, laptop propped on bent legs, I opened it up. A box popped up to warn me, 5 percent battery remaining. I okayed it away.
I clicked to open an Internet page: “You cannot access the requested website. Please ensure you are connected to the Internet.” I hissed. No Wi-Fi, of course.
All right, then—browser history.
Last opened on Friday, the day we had left to go camping: a long list of dead links to Facebook pages, Google maps aimed at Shropshire, and finally the BBC. I clicked on the most recent headline—or, at least, the last one that Julian had been able to access—posted on Friday evening, some twelve hours after we got to the forest: “Deadly Virus—Curfew Imposed.”
I clicked on the previous story, posted a few hours before: “Fatal Virus Triggers Epidemic.”
Farther down, the first headline in the list, posted just an hour after we had driven out of the city: “Terrorist Bombs Leave Many Dead.”
I snapped the laptop shut on the graphic images that had flashed before my eyes: a domed building flaming like a torch. Bodies in the road. A woman in one shoe running past the camera, a boy in a football kit running behind. Was the child with that woman? I opened the laptop again, punched in the password, and the image appeared. He was looking at her. She wasn’t looking back. I steepled my hands over my mouth and nose. Did she get to safety? Did he? No, of course not. Terrorist bombs. Fatal virus. Epidemic. She died. He died. I closed the tab, and her eyes vanished. It’s surely the mother of all mummy guilt, when your dying thought is: I ran away. I ran away from my child to save myself.
All this had happened while we were building tents and gathering firewood. We’d missed it by hours. My hands prickled with adrenaline sweat inside the latex gloves. I could have been that woman. That could be me. Would I have run away too? I was a very fast runner.
I scrolled the page down to the very first report Julian had seen on that Friday morning, “Breaking News: Terrorist Incident,” and read each subsequent update, reliving a timeline that started with multiple bombs across the country and speculation that the suicide bombers were homegrown, then took a twist to synthetic viruses, overwhelmed hospitals, and martial law—the curfew and soldiers—that was why there were so few people on the streets.