Janette Hospital - Due Preparations for the Plague

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

Fourth Estate

A Division of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Janette Turner Hospital 2003

The right of Janette Turner Hospital to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007149285

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007485338

Version: 2016-06-15

I have often asked myself what I mean by preparations for the plague … and I think that preparations for the plague are preparations for death. But what is it to make preparations for death? or what preparations are proper to be made for death?

Daniel Defoe, Due Preparations for the Plague (1722)

To state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

Albert Camus, The Plague

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Book I: OLD MOLE

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Book II: FOG

1. Salamander

2. Chien Bleu

3. Phoenix One, Phoenix Two

4. Phoenix Three

5. Lowell

Book III: CODE NAME: BLACK DEATH

1. Code Name: Tocade

2. Code Name: Geneva

3. Code Name: S

4. Code Name: Black Death

5. Triage

Book IV: VANISHING POINTS

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Book V: JOURNAL OF S: ENCRYPTED

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Book VI: IN THE MARSH

1.

2.

3.

Book VII: THE DECAMERON TAPE

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Book VIII: AFTERMATH

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Keep Reading

Acknowledgment

P.S.: Ideas, interviews & features …

About the Author

About the book

Read on

About the Author

Also by Janette Turner Hospital

About the Publisher

OLD MOLE

Hamlet (to the ghost of his father):

Well said, old mole! cans’t work in the earth so fast?

Hamlet , Act I, Scene v

Nobody chooses his parents,

but everyone invents them.

Adam Phillips

Brightness falls from the air , and so do the words, which rush him. They swoop like starlings from the radio hooked to his belt, though before brightness , before Queens have died young and fair , the broadcast was blurred murmur, bits of music, bits of talk, voices heard but not listened to. Now the phrases flock about Lowell and he bats at them, distressed. Dust hath closed Helen’s eye, I am sick, I must die —but no, Lowell thinks, I must not— Lord, have mercy on us , and yes, Lowell prays, Lord have mercy, because in spite of the fact that the reader has a mellow voice, a soothing and expensive poetry-reading voice, an unmistakably National Public Radio voice, what Lowell can hear is his own father in shadow duet, word for word and line for line, and then suddenly, with a sharp change of tone, Forty thousand fee t, he hears, severed fuselage … the fatal plunge …

Shocked, he almost loses his balance on the ladder. Death , he hears, and it is plummeting at him, no question, final cure of all diseases . The news commentator says these words. (Does he really say them? Is it possible?) The paint can, mad rudder, swings wild and a length of eavestrough comes away in Lowell’s hand. He throws himself forward across the steeply pitched roof and lies sprawled there. The tiles beat against his heart like frightened birds.

Oblivion has taken to offering herself this way, quick and shameless. She tries it once or twice a week. She sickens him because he is not immune to her whorish charms. He can feel the ladder with his feet and if he puts his weight on the top rung, he thinks the whole contraption of self-erected scaffolding will stay firm. Probably. Perhaps. The brush is still in his right hand, the can of Milky Way White (high gloss, oil-based, exterior finish) in his left. There is a comet’s tail of spilled cream across the cedar shakes and he will have to climb down for the turpentine.

Later, he thinks, looking below. He feels queasy. Anniversaries of the airline disaster are a very bad time. Every year, every September, this sort of thing happens, even though every year, as September approaches, he believes he has put it all behind him, he believes he has laid the ghosts, he believes he will feel nothing more than a dull, almost pleasurable sort of pain, like a toothache. And then: Shazam , he is a wreck again.

Have the words really come from his radio? Or from the messy attic of his mind? He supposes he could check, call the station, order a cassette, replay the show, and if they really had been spoken, what would that prove? A convergence of inner and outer worlds? Thoughts and fears escape, Lowell thinks. When the pressure inside the head builds too high, thoughts fly the coop and speak themselves back at us through other people’s mouths. He dips his brush in the can and paints a long wide stripe on the fascia board. From two storeys down, through the window, he can hear the phone ring. The house is not his, but even so he fears it will be that girl again, that young woman, the one who will not let sleeping dogs lie. He knows this is irrational. He knows there is no possible way she could reach him here. Even so, whenever he hears a telephone, he trembles. He fears it will be that young woman. Samantha. That is her name. He never returns her calls.

“There are too many unanswered questions concerning the deaths,” she says on his answering machine, but he will not listen. “We are gathering data,” she says, because of course Lowell is not the only one to turn manic at anniversary time. “If you are interested, I have extensive information on the hijacking and on the death of your mother.”

Lowell erases her messages.

“We have new information,” the voice of Samantha says, said, yesterday, last week, the week before, “we have just received startling new information from a woman in Paris,” whom Lowell erases from the machine immediately and entirely, though less successfully, less entirely, from his memory and from his sleep, a certain Françoise of the seventh arrondissement in Paris who had intended to be on that flight, the fateful flight , that hovers blackly whenever Lowell thinks of it—and even when he does not—like a vulture above his head.

“She has unexpected ties to your father,” Samantha says, the voice of Samantha says, speaking of Lowell Hawthorne’s father, “which I think will be of interest to you. Of considerable interest, I think you will find—”