Питер Мэй - Lockdown

It was all depressingly familiar — the place they had bought together with the money he had saved, and Martha’s inheritance. Even so, there was a crippling mortgage which he was still paying. It was a modest, two-bedroomed ground floor flat, the lower half of a modern terraced house in the leafy south London suburb of Forest Hill. At least there was a garden at the back for Sean, and MacNeil had been able to drive to Lambeth in twenty minutes outside of rush hour.

They had arrived here, mother, father, newborn baby, with such high hopes. But eight years on, this street was now just a painful reminder of how all their dreams had come to naught. A place haunted by failure.

It had never been a marriage made in heaven. He had only been twenty-seven when he first arrived in London, fresh-faced and naive from a job in rural Inverness-shire. The Met was a challenge, the Big Smoke an adventure. He met Martha in his first month. At a police party. She had been going out with a DC at the time, but it was a relationship nearing its end. She and MacNeil had been instantly attracted to each other. Sex was the driving force behind their relationship. They did it every chance they got, anywhere they could. They rented a little studio apartment in Lewisham, and spent most of his days off in bed eating ice cream, having sex and getting drunk. It was a crazy roller coaster existence, free from any responsibility, devoid of any thought of the future.

And then one day she told him she was pregnant, and their life changed.

Neither of them knew how it was possible. They had taken precautions. But there it was. Martha was torn. She desperately wanted children. But not just yet. She raised the subject of abortion, but MacNeil wouldn’t hear of it. He had no religious convictions himself, but his parents had been lifelong members of the Free Church of Scotland, and while he didn’t believe in their God, their morality had been seared into his soul. In the end, she was glad he had talked her out of it. Especially the day that Sean was born, and she held him in her arms and couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down her face. And through them had seen that her big, tough Scottish husband was crying, too.

MacNeil pulled up his car at the foot of the path and locked it. What had once been a single arched doorway was divided now into two — one maroon door, one white. MacNeil climbed the steps, his heart frozen by fear. Two words is all it had taken to blow the remnants of his life out of the water. Sean’s sick .

Martha opened the door before he got to it. He was shocked by her appearance. Her face was a bloodless white, deep shadows smudged beneath tired eyes. She seemed so much older than when he had last seen her, strained and tense. Was it really only a week ago? There had been no hint, then, that there was anything wrong with Sean. The schools were shut, and they’d had little or no contact with anyone. How in God’s name had he got infected? It was all he could think to ask her. And there was more than a hint of accusation in it.

‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head, and he heard the desperation in her voice. They went inside. ‘Maybe it was you. We haven’t been anywhere. Maybe you brought it in with you.’

MacNeil tipped his jaw and held his peace, containing the anger that rose in him like bile. ‘Where is he?’

‘The Dome. I called the doctor last night. By four this morning he was coughing up fluid. I can’t believe how fast it’s been. The ambulance came at first light.’ She glared at him accusingly. ‘Why didn’t you answer the phone?’

‘You don’t give me many reasons to want to talk to you these days.’ He looked around the living room. It was chaotic. Sean’s Arsenal football strip was hanging up to dry on the clothes horse. His games console was lying next to the TV. MacNeil relented. ‘I was working.’

‘Of course you were.’ Martha was unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘Aren’t you always?’

He looked at her and felt that familiar guilt. He knew she had cause. After the baby she hadn’t been interested in sex any more. And somehow they didn’t have much to say to each other. What little time off he had he spent with Sean, and she seemed to resent that. She grew more and more remote. He spent more and more time at work. The atmosphere in the house was awful. He just wanted to be out of it, to be anywhere else but here. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, they said. ‘I’m sorry.’ MacNeil shrugged. ‘It must have been terrible for you, on your own.’ He moved towards her, intending to take her in his arms, a belated offer of comfort.

She held out a hand. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘If Sean’s got it, I might too.’

He immediately delved into his jacket pocket and pulled out the small bottle of tablets he had been issued at the start of the emergency. The one they wanted back in the morning. He held it out. ‘Here, take these.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a course of FluKill. They get handed out to all the cops.’

‘What if you need them?’

‘I don’t care. Please, I want you to have them. Take them now.’

‘You’re only supposed to take them if you get it.’

‘Well, if you’ve got it, the sooner you take it the better. Here.’ He thrust them at her.

She took the bottle and looked at the label, and then at MacNeil. ‘A pity you weren’t around when Sean needed them.’

That stung. Not least because it was so unfair. ‘You’re the one who wanted me to leave.’

She put the bottle in her pocket. ‘Maybe I’ll take them later.’ She paused. ‘Will you take me to the Dome? I don’t have clearance to drive around the city. And there aren’t any taxis.’

He nodded. ‘What did they say?’

‘About what?’

‘His chances.’

She looked at him. ‘They didn’t say anything. They don’t have to. Everyone knows what the survival rate is.’ Her eyes filled and she pulled in her lower lip, biting down on it until it bled.

MacNeil couldn’t meet her gaze. He stared at the carpet, and remembered how he and the boy would rough and tumble on it. When Sean had been about three, they had watched an old Clint Eastwood movie together on the TV. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . You never imagine what lines will stick in a kid’s head. Eli Wallach had called Eastwood a ‘double-crossing bastard’. And as MacNeil and Sean had mock-fought the next day, the boy had suddenly shouted at him, ‘You cross double bustard!’ And MacNeil and Martha had spent the next half hour in hysterics.

‘We’d better go, then.’

It seemed almost bright in the street, although the light was still misty, and colder even than it had been first thing. But the house had been so gloomy and depressing, it felt almost cheerful outside.

MacNeil saw curtains twitching as he held the passenger door open for Martha. The neighbours would all have seen the ambulance come to take Sean away. The MacNeils would be pariahs now, latter-day lepers. No one would come near them.

They drove under the southern approach to the Blackwall Tunnel and turned off the roundabout on to Millennium Way. Ahead of them they could see the tent-like dome suspended from its superstructure of outward-leaning steel columns dominating the wasteland that was North Greenwich. The dual carriageway took them up through a derelict industrial landscape to a parking area next to the tube and bus station. There had been no tube trains or buses running for weeks, but the car park was full to overflowing. Masked soldiers at the entrance waved them on, and MacNeil drove past lines of ambulances to the blue hoardings erected around the Dome — this billion-pound millennium folly for which, beyond its short life as a concert venue, they had finally found a use. They were filling it with the sick and the dying. Its vast floor area had been honeycombed by partitions, and thousands of beds wheeled in to ease the pressure on city hospitals. A fleet of ambulances and medical supply vehicles lined up along the piers of the bus station.