The End of Men. Christina Sweeney-Baird
London, United Kingdom Day 5
I’ve never been good at the school pick-up. I don’t like talking to groups of people I vaguely know. Strangers are fine, as are, obviously, friends. I just cannot form a clique to save my life. The nursery gates are rife with stressful opportunities for me to put my foot in my mouth or misinterpret a friendly hello as a ‘Come and talk to us!’ wave when actually it was a ‘I’m busy talking to someone, nice to see you from a distance!’ wave. I have a PhD in Social Anthropology and yet the difference between these two waves can easily be lost on me. The irony, by contrast, is most certainly not.
For the last few days pick-up has been stressful in a different way. Everyone wants to talk, not because they think I’m a brilliant conversationalist (although I live in hope). No, they seem to want a verbal sounding board for their mounting anxieties. The Plague is all anybody can talk about even though we’re all assuring each other that it’s very far away, what is it up to Glasgow? 400, 500 miles? Perfectly safe. The authorities will have it all in hand soon. One of the other mums, a lawyer, has told me three days in a row, in the resolute, inarguable tone I’m sure she uses in court, that there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Absolutely. Nothing. If she’s trying to convince herself I hope she’s more successful than she’s been in convincing me because all she’s done is stoke the panic I’ve kept simmering away.
It feels like yesterday we were celebrating Guy Fawkes Night at the St Joseph’s fireworks night. It was an evening of hot dogs, mittens, adorable pictures of Anthony holding a pink-cheeked, excited Theodore. It was the last time I remember feeling truly relaxed and happy in a crowd of people and it was only five days ago. The news is still using the subdued tones of journalists who deal in facts not opinions. But the facts are becoming increasingly nauseating on their own. A virus affecting only men. ‘This has not been confirmed by officials but has been widely observed in the outbreaks in Glasgow, Edinburgh and along the West Coast of Scotland,’ they intone on the news.
I’ve been racking my brains and I can’t think of a single infectious disease that only affects men. I mean, it’s not like I have a particularly good knowledge of infectious diseases but still. Isn’t it weird? Why is no one from a hospital or the Government confirming how weird that is? It would make me feel better in a strange way if someone from an official body came out and said, ‘This is unheard of, we have no idea what is going on.’
Beatrice, normally my social saviour – my ‘nursery’ friend – grabs me by the hand, frightening me.
‘Beatrice!’ She sent her nanny to do pick-up the last few days. It’s a relief to see a friendly face but the relief quickly dissolves. She is drawn and haggard.
‘I’m moving to Norfolk. Tomorrow.’
‘What? You’re what?’ I splutter. Beatrice has a country house in Norfolk where she spends, at best, four weekends a year, letting it out on Airbnb the rest of the time.
‘The virus. I don’t like the sound of this, Catherine. There’s been an outbreak in Streatham. I’m getting out of the city before it’s too late.’
‘Before it’s too late for what?’
‘There’s no point in leaving if the worst has already happened.’
Beatrice is terrifying me. She is the calmest person I know and she looks and sounds unhinged.
‘I have three sons, Catherine. Two brothers. My mum died last year. My dad is my only parent left. We’re not staying in London to find out how bad this is going to get.’
I don’t know what to say. I have no arguments against what she’s saying, only platitudes to recite from the other mothers and the feeling of vomit rising in my throat as I think of my own statistics. One son. One husband. No mother. No daughter. This would not end well for me.
‘How are you affording it?’ I finally find the words to ask a sensible question.
Beatrice looks at me with an expression fast approaching pity. ‘Why do you think Jeremy and I have always worked so hard, darling? Why do you think we live here? Between the two of us we don’t need to work for a few years.’
She dashes off, Dior bag still slung over one shoulder, off to scoop up Dylan from the playroom of this quiet, kind Montessori school in a part of South London I’ve just realised Beatrice considers to be deeply beneath her. Unlike her, I don’t have anywhere to go. I have to stay here and wait.
Glasgow, United Kingdom Day 9
Is the beginning of a Plague a good time to get a divorce? Or maybe I should just kill him and avoid the paperwork? Will, the fucking idiot, went to work. He knew not to. I have been so careful.
When I left the hospital on 3 November at the end of my shift I changed out of my scrubs and walked, in my underwear, to the fire exit in the changing room and put on fresh scrubs from the plastic just before I left through the door emblazoned with FIRE EXIT ONLY. I did not give one single solitary fuck about fire exits.
After getting out of the car once I got home, I ignored the front door, stripped in the garage and burned the clothes. I walked naked through the house and showered with the water as hot as I could bear and a new bottle of sterilising scrub wash I took from the hospital store room. I didn’t go near the boys and screamed at them when they started jokingly coming towards me in pigeon steps. Will was incredulous for the first night as I slept in a camp bed in the garage. He went to work the next day despite my telling him on pain of death not to – he left before I woke up – and when he came home, he was white with shock.
‘I believe you,’ he said. Fat lot of good that will do us now, I wanted to scream. He had been exposed unnecessarily. He had gone back to the hospital. The one place in the country with a higher number of infected bodies than anywhere else.
He hadn’t gone to work again. Until yesterday. It had been eight days since the day in A&E when this miserable thing started and he was still fine. The incubation period can’t be more than a few days based on the speed with which men were returning to A&E. We were safe, out of the danger zone just enough for me to sit in the same room as Will and the boys and laugh along to something on Netflix without having a heart attack every time one of them sneezed. My moron of a husband went in to work on 4 November and somehow escaped death and then, a week later, must have decided that life here in this quiet suburb on the north side of Glasgow just isn’t thrilling enough for him.
‘It’s a baby,’ he shouts at me when I finally run out of steam after his return. He was only gone a few hours. ‘She’s going to die if I don’t help. I’m the only paediatric oncologist in the hospital at the moment.’ He doesn’t say why he’s the only paediatric oncologist because he knows it answers my questions for me and makes his arguments absurd. He’s the only paediatric oncologist in the hospital at the moment because the other two fucking died.
‘You have two children here in this house,’ I scream with fury. ‘You might be a better doctor than me but I’m a better parent. I care more about Charlie and Josh than some toddler.’
Will is weeping now. I’ve never made him cry before. It makes the words I want to shout die in my throat. ‘Her mother called me on my mobile. She begged me, she was going to die. No one had given her the chemo in over forty-eight hours. She’s, she’s, I … I just …’ He breaks down into sobs. I so desperately, even through my anger, want to reassure him, hold him and rock him and say it’s OK, no mistake is irreversible, I forgive you.
But this mistake is not reversible. I cannot touch my husband because if he is carrying the virus I might catch it and then our boys will be more likely to get sick. I cannot forgive him if the boys die because of this. A nameless, faceless child in a hospital ward four miles away is not my concern. My boys – Charlie and Josh, with the beginnings of stubble growing across their jaws and hazel eyes and