The Days After Read online

  In disbelief I asked Jessica to repeat herself over and over again and each time she would remember something different, and each time I would continue to understand the words that were leaving her mouth, and each time I would continue to fail to comprehend their truth. She told me with such excitement, and took such pleasure in her captive audience that it seemed from fantasy, and it crossed my mind that perhaps I was still in the fingertips of my morning dream. I wasn't. I could have been.

  There had been a lot of emergency landings of airplanes and a few crashes; the airports were all closed by the end of the third day. People had been getting sick across the globe. Initially the finger was pointed at European birds because large contingents of farming communities had been the first to be taken ill, however, after a day or two more, the illness had swept through each and every demographic across the globe.

  I switched off, there had been too much information fired at me by a frantic, chain smoking Jessica. The ashtray was overrun with butts, and patches of spilt coffee covered the surface of the wooden topped island. Multicoloured alphabet magnets on the fridge spelt out “Jessi is a minx”, which made me laugh, and she laughed and jumbled them up when she realised I was looking at them over her shoulder, and we finally stopped talking about the 'disease'.

  We'd dated about four or five years ago, I was at university and she was young at the time; still at school. We broke up, her brother had threatened to beat me up unless I did, so I did, the irony of being a lover not a fighter. She was highly strung and hard work but she used to make me feel like I was the only one in the world, the one she wanted above all else, a dangerously addictive and alienating drug, and sitting there, it was as though I had an outstretched arm across the table, after all those years of being clean I was instantly back to square one, absorbing the attentions of the beautiful creature opposite me, caffeinated and excited, elegant and intelligent, laughing and smiling, making me feel like she needed protecting and that she wanted me, and only me to keep her safe, and I knew I was falling for it, and I didn’t care, it was easier not to.

  Jessica shook the empty box of cigarettes that were between us and then picked it up, sneaking a finger with pink nail polish into its opening and searching inside, a prodrome of panic.

  “We're out!” Jessica jumbled. A bridge of saliva formed from her bottom lip to the half bitten finger nail of her index finger, it didn't disgust me.

  I insisted on going to the shop to get us some more cigarettes and told her that I wanted to die of lung cancer rather than whatever the illness was, the words sounded arrogant as I said them.

  She snapped at me, “No. Don't go out there!” The burst satisfied me, for some reason I felt like I needed the confirmation from her that she wanted me around.

  “I'll be fine, honestly.” I shrugged. “The shop is just there, it'll only take me five minutes, I’ll be back before you know it.”

  She looked down at the table and started to tear a sheet of kitchen towel into tiny pieces, I assume she was trying to appear as helpless as possible.

  “Honestly Jessica, I’ll be fine!” I said in a stern voice and she was slightly taken aback so I softened my tone. “How about I wear this thing?” I lifted a bike mask off a hook on the wall.

  She gave up on protesting and told me to stay safe and hurry back and not to let anything happen to me, which seemed like a humorous request, but I let it go and kissed her on the head and promised her that I would be fine and that I wouldn't let anything happen to her either and then I left the room carrying the bike mask.

  I went upstairs and slowly opened the front door. The sun was shining above and there was no wind in the air, it was a perfect day, the few clouds above were mere brush strokes and everything in-between was deep blue. I heard a car in the background, but it must have been driving a few streets over as I couldn't see it. I stepped out and checked I’d put the mask on properly, I realised what muzzled dogs must feel like, I empathised. I closed the door and began to jog towards the shop which was only fifty yards away. There were more patches of smoke rising in the distance polluting the idyllic sky. The pavement looked hot and the crystals in the grey slabs glistened in front of me. The vacancy of the street reminded me of young summer holidays, ambling around the quiet weekday neighbourhoods of residential West London, and I felt a pang of remorse, longing for my youth.

  The shop was still and looked run-down, as it always did. The E was missing from the silver letters above the entrance and now read 'PRIC CHECKER'. There were no lights on in the shop. The two glass panels on the front had been smashed. The top, not fully and its glass was spidered ice. I hunched over and gingerly stole through the bottom panel.

  I peered around the shop at the cluttered shelves. Red packets of digestive biscuits lay lifelessly in the middle of one of the aisles. The shattered pieces of glass crunched under my feet as I carefully approached the till. I saw two blue shoes resting upright on the floor. I contemplated for a second and then proceeded to look around the counter. The shoes were attached to a pair of legs in mustered corduroys. A man was lying flat on his back beneath the double shelf of bottles and cigarettes. The whites of his eyes were staring blankly upwards. His mouth was open and a swollen tongue was resting on his lower lip. His chest was a void, surrounded by bloodied skin meshed together with his green shirt. The rim of the mutilated cavity was a mixture of dark brown and purple skin curling outwards interspersed with bodied tips of protruding ribs. The white of his spine was visible through a thin veil of pink mucus at the base of the deep red hollow.

  I hoisted myself onto the counter above the man, or more appropriately, the half-man half-husk lying beneath the wall of cigarettes and bottles. I reached over and using the tips of my fingers I swivelled two packets to the edge of the shelf until I could just about snatch at them. I shimmied slowly along the counter and closer to the man on the floor, I reached out to the glass bottles on the wall with their metal screw-on lids. I managed to tip a bottle of wine off the shelve and grabbed the neck before it slipped onto the mess below. I exhaled as I slid off the counter and onto the floor, the mask I was wearing was wet inside and claustrophobic, I was overcome with urge to rip it off and to escape through the sunlight back to Jessica, to get out of the shop, away from those white lifeless eyes, from that mouth with its licking tongue, away from his muted bones and as I crunched over the glass and hunched through the door, images flashed through my mind of shredded flesh and torn intestines, I felt sick and the images trickled down from behind my eyes into my mouth and choked in my throat.

  “Has you got n-e change?” A man slurred somewhere to my right.

  “No sorry.” I replied instinctively, and selfishly.

  “Ahh thanks you, have nise day.” He politely slurred again.

  I walked over to him. His face was hidden under a green baseball cap that had three green arrows on it and read, 'I love recycling'. He was sprawled out on a bench and surrounded by gold and red cans. I told him that the guy running the shop was dead and that he should go and take whatever he wanted, but he told me to, “Fuck off!” And then muttered something else inaudible under his breath.

  I placed the bottle of wine next to him and left.

  I let myself into Jessica’s house and loudly stomped down the stairs to the kitchen calling her name so that she would know it was me. I found her sitting on the floor by the aga with her head buried in her knees, crying. I wished she was reticent, she was the opposite, probably another reason why we broke up.

  I sat down next to her and slid a cigarette behind her ear.

  “Sorry.” She said wiping her eyes. “Thank you for getting the cigarettes.”

  “Not a problem.” I felt awkward as I put a hand on her blue jeans. “You okay?” I tried to sound sympathetic.

  “Yup, I’m okay.” She meekly replied and then proceeded to sob.

  I put both arms around her and pulled her into my chest. I played into her act, and she stayed in my arms crying for what felt like an eter
nity, and it began to feel like a burden. I looked over the mound of golden blonde hair locked under my chin, trying to work out when she would stop and we could go back to having fun. For a minute I was jealous of her tears, jealous that something could effect her so much that it overpowered her, jealous that she could experience a moment so intensely that it tore her apart. I tried my best to loose the thought and managed to in mindless inspection of the room. Dusk was settling, the sun hung low in the windows and was shining into the kitchen; the terracotta tiles set into the floor looked better when bathed in sunlight, there was an empty goldfish bowl in the corner; the plastic skull inside it was grinning at me, cookery books had been stuffed into any and all available crevices and it looked contrived; her mum was, I had always thought, a lesbian, a manly one, she probably didn't cook.

  Finally Jessica ran out of energy and she asked about supper and I concurred and released her from my arms. She threw something from the watery freezer into the aga. We decided to change and make an event of the evening. I relished the idea as I was still in my wretched clothes.

  Jessica’s brother was about the same size as me, and although I did have plenty of clothes of my own across the street I did not fancy the trip in case she saw and thought I was abandoning her. Paul’s room had a stale air to it, he had been at university in France for the past few years, but there was something more to it than that, the room felt lonely, as if he had died a few years back and it had been left untouched. The walls were dark blue and the curtains were drawn as to only let a narrow bar of light through. There was a framed pastel picture of some horses hanging off-centre in the middle of one wall, a cork board above an empty red desk on another with nothing pinned into it except for the pins themselves. I slid the curtains along their rail and light flooded the room, illuminating the dust in the air. The digital clock on his bedside table was flashing 13.21 in red numbers, it must have been broken as it was definitely past eight. I sat on the bed and stared out of the window. The view was unappealing, tower blocks littered the near horizon, standing assertively over hundreds of manufactured rooftops. The sun was starting to disappear behind a grey block in the distance, its light was softened by greasy black smoke which was smudging the sky from afar.

  The sound of shattering glass and a scream pulled my eyes to the white monolithic block of flats that stood a few houses back. A panicked woman appeared at her window, twenty floors up. Smoke was spilling out of the top of her window like fingers on piano keys. Her scream was wet and teary, a desperate, 'Help'. A window above her opened and a man leant out, waving the smoke from his face, and then dashed back inside. He reappeared with what looked like a duvet cover and hung it out of the window towards the woman below. Her teary scream turned into a sharp, ear piercing shriek, no words, just noise.

  The door behind me clicked, “What’s going on? I heard screams.”

  I pointed and Jessica came towards the window and hid behind me, peering over my shoulder, “What's happening?”

  “That man is trying to get the woman below to climb up that sheet, I think.”

  “Oh my god.” Jessica whispered under her breath repeatedly. “She’s actually going to do it, I can’t watch, I can’t.” Jessica dived onto the bed and pulled a pillow over her heard. “What’s happening, is she all right?”

  “Nothing yet.” I replied.

  “Is she going to do it?”

  “I'll tell you if she does.”

  The woman then turned around and looked back into her flat and started shrieking without breath. She grappled with the sheet and awkwardly climbed onto the lip of the window. I could barely watch, she looked unhealthy, overweight, clumsy, as though she might have had trouble crossing the road yet she was trying to climb up a sheet. I imagined what she must have seen, standing on that lip, the grey concrete countless feet below, what she would look like if she fell, a splash of pink matter discolouring the grey stone and I shuddered with vertigo. She made some progress, her feet were off the lip, like a caterpillar in blue jeans she was slowly wriggling up the duvet cover. She looked down every now and again and sank her head into the sheet, frozen with fear, before continuing.

  I told Jessica that it was going to be okay and she thanked god and then talked about herself, “I couldn't do that. I can't even do a single press up!”

  Then came a bellowing cry from the man above. I looked back out of the window and the sheet was billowing in the wind, the man above still firmly clutching his end.

  Jessica sat up, “What happened, where is she? I can’t see her?”

  “She didn't make it all the way.” I said and closed the curtain and we both sat there for a while.

  “Harry, it feels like time has stopped. That stupid clock is blinking a me and It hasn’t changed, it's just flashing 13.21 at me! It’s not even the right time!” She threw whatever was in her hand at the floor and lifted her knees up to her chest.

  I interrupted the silence in fear that Jessica might start to cry again and return me to my feelings of inadequacy. I picked her up with her feet dangling over my left arm and took her back upstairs to her room. I threw her onto her bed which was piled unreasonably high with cushions and she bounced up and down, grinning from ear to ear. I said some cheesy line about making myself look pretty and her not needing to, it embarrassed me as it came out of my mouth and I left the room trying to forget about it.

  There was a navy blue suit and a white shirt in Paul's wardrobe. The suit was slightly too big for me, I checked the label but it didn't mention the size, I think it was a 38. I cat-walked back an forth in front of a full length mirror on the inside of the wardrobe, the fit could have been better, but I looked pretty good, debonair even.

  The kitchen was glowing, Jessica had covered every available surface with candles, mostly tea lights in their little silver buckets.

  She really looked amazing; her thick golden blonde hair was tied up and she had left just a few strands to elegantly hang down her cheek, she was wearing a tight black dress that ended just above the knee with a rim of black lace and the misogynist in me swooned at the sight of her wearing two white oven gloves.

  I acted as if I had been overwhelmed and as though I was lost for words, muttering, stuttering, clambering for superlatives.

  “Absolutely stunning.” I clumsily communicated, and it worked and she turned pink and looked at the floor.

  “What do you think about the heels?” She awkwardly angled her leg and pointed her toes at the floor.

  “Amazing.”

  I perched on the stool and watched Jessica as she elegantly moved between the shadows among the hundreds of candles. She pulled the metallic dish out of the oven and placed it onto the coffee stained island, and I imagined walking over to her and kissing her neck and sliding the two strings off her shoulders, the black dress slipping down her body into a pile on the floor.

  “What are you smirking about?” She said catching me in the midst of my salacious thoughts.

  “Nothing.” I said laughing and then complimented her on the food.

  “There is plenty more if you like it. Mum stopped giving me money when she left for France as I never used to spend it on food, so now she just fills the freezer with ready meals.” I grinned, understanding her mother's concern.

  “Wine?” Jessica pulled a bottle of red out of a low cupboard. “I have no idea if this will go well with lamb tagine, but it's all we have.”

  We toasted to finding each other in the midst of so much chaos and ate like pigs for five minutes without saying a word, only letting out occasional 'mm' noises.

  When we finished we dumped the plates into the sink and drank heavily, catching up on the last four years. Jessica was set to start her final year of university, studying history of art. She talked of friends I should've remembered and what they'd been up to: Tamara, her brunette friend whose father was an ambassador, and who I didn't remember, had overdosed on heroin. Anya and Tom had had a baby and he'd dropped out of university, I didn't remember them e
ither. Her brother, the one who had threatened to, 'knock my lights out' had come out a couple of years ago and was living with his boyfriend in Montreal whenever he wasn't in Paris. She knew about my mother but I only let the conversation reach the 'I'm so sorry' stage. I told her about Charles being sent to rehab in South Africa. She already knew and went pink when I mentioned his name, and I shuddered with the thought that perhaps they had gotten together before he was shipped off. We talked about music, Jessica had been in a band over the last couple of years, she said nothing ever came of it, but that it was where she had wanted her future to lie. She had one of those wind up grammar phones and a record collection she'd inherited from her dad that went all the way back to the sixties. We pulled it out from an old brown trunk covered in peeling stickers from behind the sofa in the sitting room and spewed records all over the floor like imagined teenagers from another generation, dancing around the room, swigging from the wine bottle and singing whenever and wherever we could.