Meg Rosoff - How I Live Now

Then just when we got used to our new life and our daily walk to town and waiting hours for a couple of loaves of bread and half a pound of butter and four pints of milk (because we’re children) the whole countryside was quarantined due to an outbreak of smallpox or should I say an Alleged Outbreak of Smallpox because these days we didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t, and Osbert and the Food Queue were virtually our only sources of information since even the voices on the radio sounded strange and when you could manage to tune in to them you didn’t know who they were or whether they were telling you the truth, and there were no newspapers and the phone lines were dead more often than not.

Anyhow, the upshot of the so-called Smallpox Epidemic was that you weren’t supposed to be out on the streets at all and now big black trucks went around and left bags of food twice a week at the end of the drive, and if you had any special requests you could write them on a piece of paper.

We thought this was pretty funny for a while, and wrote things like chocolate and sausages and cake and Coca-Cola on our list and then Piper got mad at us because she was the one who did most of the cooking and there were things she really needed, and all our stupid requests were getting in the way of them noticing that what we really needed was flour. Not that they paid any attention to our list anyway. We got what we got.

So OK, there was smallpox. But because everything was getting worse by little daily increments and you didn’t know what was true or not true it seemed easier just to treat this news as another fact of life and nothing particularly to worry about.

Think about it. It’s May in the middle of the English Countryside. And everyone’s saying It’s the most beautiful May we’ve had in years and Isn’t it ironic? From my point of view this made any doomsday scenario even harder to get my head around, especially having grown up in the Concrete Jungle, which possibly overstates the case given that the Upper West Side is fairly leafy, as concrete jungles go. But we’re still talking about a few nice trees here and there whereas in England I was drowning in fertility. And although there were tons of rumors coming from every direction, nothing THAT BAD seemed to be happening to any of US.

Meanwhile about 100,000 white roses all over the front of the house are blooming like mad, the vegetables grow about six inches a day, and the flower gardens all around the house are so full of color that you couldn’t help feeling ecstatic and dizzy just looking at them. According to one of Isaac’s rare speeches, the birds were happier with the invasion than they’d been in years since no one was driving cars or farming or doing anything much to disturb them, so all they did was lay eggs and sing and try to avoid getting eaten by foxes.

It was getting to be like Walt Disney on Ecstasy outside the house what with squirrels and hedgehogs and deer wandering around with the ducks and dogs and chickens and goats and sheep and if anyone looked totally disoriented by this whole war thing it was them.

Piper and Edmond and Isaac and I used to watch this lunatic fringe milling around every day around sunset and then Edmond and I would slip away up to the tiny bedroom at the top of the house or the big storage closet under the eaves or the lambing barn or one of about a thousand places we’d found where we could try and try and try to get enough of each other but it was like some witch’s curse where the more we tried to stop being hungry the more starving we got.

It was the first time in as long as I could remember that hunger wasn’t a punishment or a crime or a weapon or a mode of self-destruction.

It was simply a way of being in love.

Sometimes I thought hours had passed when really it was minutes. Sometimes we fell asleep and then woke up to finish where we’d left off. Sometimes I felt like I was being consumed from within like a person with one of those freak diseases where you digest your own stomach. And sometimes we had to stop, just because we were raw and exhausted and still humming humming humming with something we didn’t even have the strength left to do anything about.

Then we would sleep for a little while and eventually reappear and try to act normal which meant things like helping Piper search for honeycomb or dandelion leaves or spending a few hours weeding the vegetable garden. All the sunshine meant there were vegetables earlier than there should have been, and given the dire straits we were supposedly in, there seemed to be lots of food. And of course being me, now that there was a war on and rationing and all, I was in deprivation heaven and hardly needed my father screwing Davina in the next room to help me lose my appetite for a few years.

The rest of them ate eggs and goat’s milk and greens from the garden, and there were baked beans that we’d stockpiled and Piper was getting incredibly good at making things with the dried beans and rice and bacon they put in our package most weeks. There were starting to be tomatoes from the garden, and there were lots of green beans and everyone except me missed bread which was getting harder to come by and especially Anchor butter which Edmond said he dreamed about though we made something I thought worked pretty well by beating the goat’s milk for ages with a whisk.

One of the stranger things that we just came to accept was that no one seemed to know exactly where the food was coming from. At first they thought it must be the local council, but some people whispered that it was the Red Cross, or the Americans, and others suspected The Enemy, and lots of people wouldn’t touch it at all Just In Case.

I was pretty happy to starve rather than eat food Davina made in peacetime but I never thought anyone was trying to poison us during the war. I tried eating a little more so Edmond would stop looking at me that way and after a week or so he even said I looked better by which I’m sure he meant fatter so I cut back some after that.

But I was talking about the quarantine.

According to what Osbert picked up in one of his clandestine spy-boy meetings down at the pub, the Smallpox Epidemic was just a rumor spread around to keep us all quiet and scared and out of the way.

Then we heard that people were dying.

Edmond said that it was measles not smallpox and that most people weren’t dying, but because it was almost impossible to get medicine, people were dying of pretty ordinary stuff like pneumonia and bad cases of chicken pox, and broken bones and some women died having babies.

We got flyers in with our food saying to boil all our water and Be Extra Careful When Handling Knives, Tools or Firearms Because Minor Injuries Could Lead to Infection and Death . Which struck me as extremely amusing given that we’re supposedly in the middle of a war, which usually has the same effect.

I didn’t know if the food was poisoned. I didn’t know whether we’d get an infection and die. I didn’t know if a bomb would fall on us. I didn’t know whether Osbert would expose us to spores from some deadly disease picked up during his secret meetings. I didn’t know if we would be taken prisoner, tortured, murdered, raped, forced to confess or inform on our friends.

The only thing I knew for certain was that all around me was more life than I’d ever experienced in all the years I’d been on earth and as long as no one shut me in the barn away from Edmond at night I was safe.

So there we are carrying on our happy little life of underage sex, child labor and espionage when someone came to visit us, which, after weeks of Just Us Five kind of took us by surprise, to put it mildly.

He was a not-too-bad-looking man around thirty-five who seemed too tired even to pretend to be all polite and friendly and he said I’m sorry to bother you but have you got any drugs?