The End of Men(70)

Sufficiently caffeinated, Amanda returns: “Okay, where shall we begin?”

“Why was it you that had to do all of this, finding the source of the virus? On your own?” I respond. Amanda has never had a huge amount of time on the phone so I’m dying to know more.

“I became obsessed with knowing how the Plague had come to pass. I still don’t understand how people aren’t more gripped by the need to know why. This disease destroyed my life, it has destroyed billions of lives. How could anyone not be desperate to understand how and why?” She pauses and takes an angry swig from her can.

“Everything was upside down. Maybe in more normal times it wouldn’t have been like that. But we needed to understand the origin of the virus to be able to have a vaccine and avoid this happening again.”

I swallow convulsively. “Do you think it will happen again?”

“Just because your husband left you doesn’t mean your house can’t catch on fire. In other words, tragedy doesn’t immunize you against further tragedy.” I look at her, both baffled and terrified. “The vaccine we have should be effective, yes, and we can use it to adjust to new strains. But in theory the Plague could mutate, allowing the vaccine to be ineffective.”

This makes sense and yet I had assumed, unconsciously, that of course the Plague couldn’t return. That amount of bad luck is impossible. Apparently not.

“Can you tell me more about Patient Zero?” I ask.

“Euan,” she quickly corrects. “You have to think of him as Euan in your head; otherwise you might call him Patient Zero in front of Heather and that’s not nice. They were married for forty-five years and she hates that we refer to him as Patient Zero. I don’t like it either, to be honest. It’s so dehumanizing. It reduces his life entirely to his death from this bloody awful disease. I nearly called him Patient Zero the second time I met his wife and she burst into tears. Can’t say I blame her. If someone referred to my husband as Patient Three Hundred and Forty-Five I’d want to throttle them. Euan was a sailor all his life. Sometimes he worked on the ferry, for a few years he was a fisherman. He ended up outside of the law and well,” she takes a swig of Red Bull, “suffice to say the consequences were greater than he ever could have imagined.”

We arrive in Bute and make our way through the small town of Rothesay, walking from the ferry terminal to Heather’s small terraced house overlooking the sea. Amanda has spent a significant amount of time with Heather, as she investigated the beginning of the illness and tried to understand the origins of the Plague, and then became close to her for reasons I don’t fully understand.

We meet Heather in her house and she politely offers us water. She seems quite suspicious of me but I was expecting that. Amanda had warned me that Heather has been offered huge sums of money by newspapers for her story as the “Widow of Patient Zero.” Heather has always refused, convinced that journalists will somehow blame her for the tragedy that started with Euan’s contraction of the Plague.

“You’re looking well,” Heather tells Amanda as we sit down in her small living room and they engage in comfortable small talk.

“So,” Amanda says, and clears her throat. “Heather, Catherine here is writing a report on the Plague. A sort of dossier of people’s stories, and she wants to know more about Euan so he’s not just—”

“The beginning,” Heather interrupts, her eyes flashing with anger. Her expression softens and she continues. “He was a lovely man, so he was. We met at school when I was fifteen and he was sixteen. We saw each other for a few months and married two days after I turned sixteen. We saw no reason to wait when we knew we were right for each other.” Heather starts handing around biscuits and I’m struck by how normalized the telling of stories of grief have become in the last two years.

“He always worked on boats and he was meant to be easing down but—”

“Can I ask a question?” I ask, awkwardly interrupting. I’ve read everything I need to know about Euan Fraser in the many newspaper articles about him. I’m not interested in him; he’s not here anymore. I want to know what it feels like to be the widow of Patient Zero.

“Of course.”

“What does it feel like to be in this position? Lots of us have lost our husbands, but I don’t have journalists asking me if my husband could have done anything differently as though he’s responsible for starting the Plague.”

I can feel Amanda tensing beside me. This isn’t what we agreed I would ask.

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“People are already talking about it,” I say in my softest, most placating voice. It doesn’t matter. The shutters have come down on Heather’s eyes.

“Why don’t we discuss Donal,” Amanda says firmly, shifting the conversation away from Heather.

“Who’s Donal?” I ask, baffled. Have I missed something? Maybe Donal was one of Heather’s sons?

“Donal Patterson is the man who brought the monkeys to the Isle of Bute along with Euan.”

Oh my God. This is the man Amanda referred to in her interview with Maria Ferreira. There are internet conspiracies about who he is and what he did, although all of these conspiracies assume he is dead.

“Is he alive?”

“He is. He’s immune.”