The End of Men(28)
“Amanda, go home,” she instructs in a soft voice that is, nonetheless, one I know can’t be ignored. Glaswegian nurses have powers of persuasion up there with messianic leaders. “Even if you can’t sleep, you need to rest.”
I manage a wan smile and head home. As soon as I go through the front door, I turn on all the lights and switch on the news. Silence is unbearable.
A BBC news crew is stranded in Sweden. Three women, all of them dressed in the same clothes as they were yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, broadcast news from a Scandinavian country thousands of miles away as their families die back home. They’re interviewing someone from the Swedish Immigration Service. She’s called Lilly and looks almost comically Swedish: blond and blue-eyed and wearing something black that on me would look like a maternity muumuu but on her looks like a piece of very cool draping.
“There was a rumor that Swedes were immune and so Sweden was a safe place. Whoever came up with that rumor can rot in hell. Of course, we’re not immune. Just because we’re blond and we like ABBA doesn’t make us immune from the Plague. Jesus Christ.” Her anger is invigorating. So often now people on the news burst into tears or fade away into silence as they realize that there is, in fact, absolutely nothing to say other than we’re all fucked. This girl has some spunk. I enjoy watching her speak.
“You Brits were swarming north for weeks and finally the flights were canceled and we closed our borders but it was too late! You were like a cloud of locusts descending on us, bringing death and destruction.”
The presenter, Imogen Deaven, is looking at the camera with a look of such exquisite Britishness that a honk of laughter bursts out of me involuntarily, one of the first times I’ve laughed since everything went so spectacularly to shit. Imogen’s expression somehow manages to convey to the audience, without uttering a word, “I am absolutely mortified, I want to die. I think I should maybe apologize for this if only to make things less awkward? There are too many openly expressed emotions here, I can’t cope.” Lilly is still looking at Imogen with a look of disgruntled expectation. Clearly Imogen is expected to apologize on behalf of an entire nation. To be fair, Imogen reported on the British ambassador dying a few weeks ago and I’ve heard nothing about a replacement, so maybe she’s the closest thing we have to an ambassador at the moment.
Imogen, God bless her, coughs and plows onward with questions she’s clearly prepared in advance. “Can I ask you about the policies the Swedish Home Affairs Office is implementing to prevent the internal spread of the disease?”
Lilly nods vigorously. “Yes. There is no movement of people internally within Sweden. We have divided the country into 162 zones. There is no movement outside of those zones. This will ensure that areas with no outbreaks, or which have been minimally affected, will remain safe.”
Imogen, brave woman that she is, responds to this by dragging Britain back into the line of fire. Rather her than me.
“Do you know how many British people have entered Sweden since the outbreak of the Plague?”
“We estimate around ninety thousand Brits and ten thousand other Europeans entered the country. Stockholm’s outbreak began on December 6, 2025. A few days later Gothenburg declared an emergency.”
“I have one final question,” Imogen says to Lilly. “You have talked so calmly and knowledgeably about these policies and the work of the Swedish Immigration Service and Home Affairs Office. How has the Plague affected you on a personal level? How are you?”
Lilly looks a bit stunned by the question. Her eyes are filling with tears. Oh no, Lilly, keep it together. I need you to be a beacon of angry determined hope in the middle of this shitshow.
“My dad and my brother are alive. It feels like a miracle to say that. I am from a small town called Kiruna, many miles away, so I cannot see them, but they are alive. When all of this is over, I’m going to move back home.”
“But until there is a cure for the Plague you can’t go home?”
Lilly nods. “And neither can you.”
At that, Imogen signs off from what must be the most bizarre workday of her life. I switch to another channel. It helps to hear voices, and think about other things, and learn facts and just not think about any of it here in the UK. Best to think about other, faraway places and take comfort in the fact that I’m not the only one who has lost the people closest to me. Show me I’m not alone. Show me I’m not the only one who’s destroyed.
I used to hate the news; why would I want to read about and watch misery? How things can change. Besides, the news is now more surreal than any film. It used to be politicians making speeches and footage of wars far, far away. Now it’s women wearing hazmat suits carrying bodies out of houses, lines of people waiting for food trucks to deliver food taken from less populated areas to their towns, factories working around the clock to produce medicines and soup and paper and all the other things we so desperately need and used to import.
“There has been an extraordinary direction of travel,” a nasally-sounding woman is saying, dressed in a remarkably smart suit but with no makeup on and scraggly hair. Can’t say I’d keep going to work to mangle someone’s hair into a helmet and paint lipstick on if my family was dying either. “The timing of outbreaks shows that the very earliest significant international outbreaks were borne of reversed immigrations that had existed for decades. Many of those who had immigrated to the UK from the Caribbean, the West Indies, Nigeria, Somalia, Ghana, Pakistan and India left in late November and early December, returning to their countries of origin, bringing the Plague with them.”