Seven Days of Us(30)

Except now, safely home and with time on my hands, the worst things I saw keep resurfacing. They haunt my dreams, and ambush me over family lunches. In Liberia, I slept soundly, lulled by the hum of a generator and the racket of Monrovian streets: shouting, dogs barking, cockerels crowing. But here, in the quiet of the English countryside, peace is evasive. When I shut my eyes, all I hear is children crying.

I will never forget a man who had recovered from Haag, only to lose his three-year-old son Abu to the virus soon after. I had become too attached to Abu myself—it was impossible not to. Right up until the day when he was fighting for his life, he would grin and offer his little starfish hand for a high five when I did my rounds. I remember, when Abu died, his dad just sat, weeping and rocking, saying that it should have been him, that he didn’t want to live anymore, that he would drive himself off a cliff. I covered Abu’s tiny body in a white cloth and said a prayer while I held his father’s hand. The prayer was for the man’s benefit. It would be difficult to believe in any god that afternoon.

But it is desperate memories like these that make me determined to return to Liberia. Every day that I am doing nothing in England, I am conscious of people dying, whose deaths I could have prevented. At the very least, I might have made their final hours more comfortable. As British aid workers, we are only allowed to treat Haag for twelve weeks. Since most of us volunteers arrived in October, we leave the treatment center dangerously short staffed. What happens in PPE may stay in PPE—at least at first—but our work is by no means finished.

Olivia posted the blog and flopped back on her pillow. It had been cathartic to write, but she longed to credit Sean—to say it was he who had coined the PPE catchphrase, and been her Red Zone buddy. She remembered how the donning and doffing was laced with sexual tension, weeks before anything had happened between them. But she couldn’t risk naming Sean online, now that he was a news story. Their secret crawled under her skin, like goose bumps. Since his diagnosis, checking her temperature had taken on a sharp, adrenaline-spiked significance. Even the normal reading, which she’d taken at 5 a.m., had been small relief—she’d seen plenty of patients develop Haag symptoms without a fever. Now, it was only 6:30 a.m. She had never felt less Christmassy.





Andrew


THE CHINESE ROOM, WEYFIELD HALL, 6:30 A.M.

? ? ?

Andrew had woken just before five—as so often these days. He wanted to blame the birds, but it was silent outside, and no light penetrated the pond-green drapes around the bed. He had never liked the four-poster they slept in at Weyfield—previously Emma’s parents’—just as he didn’t like Weyfield’s cavernous master bedroom. He had a fear that one day he would be taken ill, and a doctor would arrive and see the eccentric bed and write him off as a kind of squalid, senile lord. It had taken years of complaining about his back just for Emma to replace the horsehair mattress—so soft one longed for a snorkel. There was no way she would ditch the bed itself. Beside him, Emma snored. Years ago, he used to find the sound rather touching. As a young man, he’d felt honored to hear the inner workings of Emma Hartley, who looked like a china doll but snored like a drunk. Now, it was just a cruel reminder that he couldn’t sleep himself. Of course Emma could sleep. Her conscience was as virginal as the day they’d met. Emma never lied, never concealed anything. Perhaps this was why they’d grown apart. He lay looking up at the canopy over the bed, the ebb and flow of Emma’s breath raking at his ears. He tried to picture her snores as three-dimensional objects, thinking it might make a writing exercise. They had jaunty peaks—like meringues, or dog turds. Occasionally, a snore rose to a curly flourish, as if someone were piping it out of an icing bag. He flopped onto his side, his back to her, and savored the cool patch of pillow. The bed was oppressively stuffy. Perhaps she was having a hot flash, for old time’s sake, he thought, as the snores reached an abrupt hiatus. Then they began again, louder than ever.

But it wasn’t the dawn, or the bed, or Emma’s snoring that had woken him. Deleting Jesse’s e-mails hadn’t felt as final as Andrew had hoped. It didn’t change the fact that the man was here, less than a mile away. And Jesse’s voice, calling from Andrew’s past, had unlocked a Pandora’s box in his mind—memories of Beirut he had long buried. Ever since Jesse’s second e-mail, his dreams had echoed with the jabber of gunfire and the crooning call to prayer. He saw things he hadn’t seen for years—smoke mushrooming from rubble, apartment blocks ripped to cross sections, people running from flames, blood-stained pavements. He found himself startled by the rifle-click of Weyfield’s front door latch and sitting with his back to the wall—as if a sniper might be lurking in the larder. Madness. But he could no more help it than expect anyone to understand. He kept seeing the broken body of the child he’d watched flung into the air by an explosion. It was probably for the best that Jesse hadn’t grown up in Lebanon. At least he could destroy Leila’s letter soon. As predicted, Emma had requested a bonfire after a “Boxing Day Sort-Out.” He’d feel better once it was out of the house.

A ringing blasted the darkness, and he jumped. Beside him, he felt Emma fumbling for her alarm clock and getting out of bed. What on earth was she doing? Then he remembered—stockings. Even now, she and Phoebe remained oddly attached to this childhood ritual. “D’you mind if I put the light on?” she said, blinding him with her bedside lamp before he could answer. He watched her crouching over two crammed woolen socks, wearing one of the tent-like nightdresses she now slept in. It was a pity, because she had kept her in-and-out figure, unlike so many of his friends’ wives. But what did it really matter, since he only saw her undressed by accident, and they hadn’t had sex for months. He remembered past Christmases when they had managed a hurried morning encounter while the girls were busy with their stockings. But at some point, years ago now, he had become aware they were having sex because it was an occasion, as if she felt obliged to tick it off the list along with making a perfect Christmas dinner and festooning the house with bits of twig. It was around the same time Emma had had the menopause, and they had taken to sleeping under duvets of different weights. It was a small shift, but it felt symbolic, cocooning them in their discrete shells. He thought back to last Christmas morning, lying in bed, ruefully aware that Phoebe wouldn’t surface for hours and that he and Emma could have had a leisurely shag—if she’d wanted. But Emma had been downstairs, stuffing a whole turkey, just for three.