Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 (2 page)

It was not the first outbreak of the sweats, but it was one of the earliest and it made headlines around the world. Magnus McFall imagined the
Oleander
often in the months ahead. The giant liner becalmed on sunny waters, looking from a distance like a picture postcard of luxury; the rescue launch hurtling towards it throwing plumes of white foam in its wake; the stench of decay awaiting the medics in the lower decks; the impossibility of salvation.

PART ONE

One

London was hotter than Mumbai that summer, hotter than Beirut, hotter than hell, or so people said. Magnus McFall believed them. The train’s windows were open, but the air blasting through the carriage had a nasty, second-hand quality that reminded Magnus of sliding into a recently vacated bath, warm water scummed with soap. It did not help that the passengers were rammed together as if it were the last train out of Saigon. He breathed in through his mouth and tasted burning rubber. Some summers the tracks melted, stranding passengers between stations. It would screw him, but the possibility brought a smile to Magnus’s face. He thought he might talk a wavering suicide bomber into sticking to his plan –
paradise is worth dying for, son, pull that string and shame the infidel
 – if it meant the show would not go on, even though the show was the only thing that really mattered.

Magnus caught a girl glancing at him from across the aisle and grinned again. The girl frowned and looked away and Magnus wondered if he should practise smiling without showing his teeth. His agent, Richie Banks, had advised him not to get them fixed: ‘They’re as crooked as a pyramid sales scheme, but they’re your best feature, chum. Make you look a bit less like your mother left you out in the rain.’ Judging by the photographs lining his office walls, Richie had represented some odd-looking comics in his time. Magnus was not sure his agent knew the difference between a funny man and a funny-looking man.

Magnus glanced at his watch. Ninety minutes to go. He took a tissue from the pocket of his jeans and dabbed the sweat from his forehead, surprised by how calm he felt. It was the dead calm of the soldier about to go over the top, or an armed robber readying to storm a bank, but it was better than the gut-twisting that could cripple him before a show.

He looked down the carriage. Most of the passengers were also bound for O2. The crush of teenage girls in baseball caps stamped
Johnny Dongo Done Done Me Wrongo
was obvious. So was the group of middle-aged women, co-workers in some office, he guessed, large bosoms quivering with the motion of the train, bags clink-full of bottles that would be confiscated at the stadium entrance. There were couples too, the women better dressed than a night in the dark warranted in deference to the high ticket price; the men smart-casual in best jeans and trainers. They were out for a good time and that meant they would give him a chance. The Johnny Dongo look-alikes, Dongolites, were a different story. There were four of them smart-arsing by the door, dressed like 1930s history dons on their way to enlist for the wrong side, their floppy hair plastered with sweat and styling gel. They would be impatient for Magnus’s set to end and for Johnny to take the stage. Magnus wondered how they could stand the combination of tight collar and tie, the tweed suits heavy with perspiration. One of the Dongolites took out a Meerschaum pipe and stuck it between his teeth.

Magnus’s own stage gear was zipped inside a garment bag slung over his shoulder, a white shirt and gangster-sharp, midnight-blue suit that looked like a safe choice until you caught a glimpse of scarlet lining. His guts were beginning to clench. He looked out of the window, trying to keep his eyes on the horizon, the way you were meant to on a rocky ferry crossing the Pentland Firth. London blurred by, a strip of blue sky above rows of apartments, precipitous graffiti and concreted back yards cast in shade. It was a world away from Orkney, but the tall buildings reminded him of Stromness, the shadows thrown by the houses along the seafront on to the jetties lined before them. The memory made Magnus think of school and all of a sudden he wished Mr Brown, his maths teacher, was going to be in the audience. ‘You see, Mr Brown,’ he would say, ‘folk do find me funny. It turns out that I am a funny guy after all.’ But Mr Brown was as dead as Magnus’s father, both of them buried in the Kirkwall churchyard. The maths teacher felled by a heart attack he had cultivated as carefully as an investment banker might nurture his own pension, Magnus’s father killed in a careless accident. Bad luck, everyone agreed, especially as Big Magnus never even took a Hogmanay dram.

He tried to picture his father swaying beside him, against the rhythm of the train, but imagined instead the old boy saying, ‘You’re the support act, son, not the headliner.’ Though phrases like ‘support act’ and ‘headliner’ had never been a part of Big Magnus’s vocabulary.

Was it a bad sign that the only people he wanted to invite to his gig were dead? Probably just a sign that he was kidding himself. Magnus would not have invited them had they been alive. His wee mammy would have jumped on a plane to London at the hint of a gig; the same went for his sister Rhona, her man Davie and a whole swathe of aunties, uncles and cousins eager for a spattering of stardust.

‘No little lady you want to show off to?’ Richie Banks had asked, looking up for a moment from the contracts splayed across his desk. ‘Seeing a man on stage can do things to a girl, if you know what I mean.’

‘No one at the moment,’ Magnus had said, looking at the view of brick wall through the dim glass of Richie’s office window and wondering how his agent could have stood to spend the best part of thirty years there. ‘Come along if you want.’

‘It don’t have the same effect on me, son.’ Rich had laughed. ‘Anyway, sad to say, I’m already booked,’ and he had mentioned another of his stable who was a regular on television panel shows. ‘Gets the jitters before he goes on TV. Needs me to hold his hand.’ Rich had pushed the contract for six nights’ warm-up at the O2 across the desk to Magnus and pointed to where he should sign. ‘This is a big gig for you, a good opportunity, don’t fuck it up.’

‘Why would I fuck it up?’

Rich slid the signed contract into an envelope. His grin was still in place, but he had raised his eyebrows, punting the question, which was no question at all, back to Magnus.

O2 was the next stop. The man in the seat beside Magnus was reading an
Evening Standard
he had folded into a pocket-sized square. Magnus glanced over the man’s shoulder at the headline: ‘Mystery Virus Wipes Out Cruise Ship’. A photograph of an impressive-looking liner illustrated the article about the latest outbreak of the sweats. He scanned the text. There had been cases of the virus in London, but nothing on that scale. The article listed instructions on how to act. People should observe hygiene precautions, phone NHS Direct if they felt unwell, avoid close contact with strangers. Magnus looked at the crammed carriage and grinned. London had not closed for the Blitz, the IRA, or al-Qaeda. It would take more than a few germs to shut down the city.

The train slowed. The man beside him coughed and then sneezed. He wiped his nose on a tissue and stuffed his newspaper into his jacket pocket. One of the Dongolites pulled out a spotty handkerchief and mopped his forehead. The boy was red-faced and shiny with perspiration;
gleaming like a . . . like a . . .
 Magnus cast around for an image he could use on Dongolite hecklers, but nothing useful . . . 
pig
,
conker
,
bell-end
 . . . came to mind.

Magnus followed the flow of people on to the platform. There was work being done in the station. Some of the barriers that flanked the platform’s edge had been taken down and temporarily replaced by traffic cones strung with fluorescent tape. They narrowed the walkway, pushing people even closer together.

Magnus saw the crowd before and behind him and realised that the rest of the train had been as full as his compartment. There were other trains, one every fifteen minutes, all crammed with people. Most of them were heading to the stadium. Magnus swallowed. It would be all right once he was on stage. For now he was just a part of the crowd, everyone moving at the same slow pace towards the exit, like one body composed of many cells.

The four Dongolites from his carriage paused up ahead. Magnus glanced in their direction as he drew level. The sweat-soaked youth was swaying gently on his heels, with the unfocused stare of someone about to be transported on a wash of acid. He was wearing black-rimmed spectacles, round and ridiculous, that made him look as if he had put his eyes to binoculars some
Beano
-reading wag had grimed with soot. The glass magnified the youth’s eyeballs and Magnus saw them roll back in his head, pupils spooling upward until all that was left was white, greased and boiled-egg shiny. The Dongolite tottered backward. The heels of his spit-polished brogues knocked a traffic cone from the platform’s edge. He swayed gently, took a step towards his friends, and then teetered backward again.

Magnus gave a shout of warning and moved towards the group. He heard the shrill blast of the guard’s whistle, saw the Dongolite’s knees crumple, his specs falling, smash against the concrete as he tipped off the platform, backward on to the tracks.

Christ!
One of the Dongolites tore off his jacket, exposing maroon braces and matching sleeve suspenders. He froze.
Christ!
Jesus Christ! Christ! Jesus!

The other two Dongolites threw themselves on to the ground, ready to pull their friend up from the tracks below, but too slow, too slow. Magnus was with them now, face flat on the platform as if a bomb had gone off. He caught a quick glimpse of the boy’s body, floppy hair corn-gold against the gravel, unseasonable tweeds rag-doll-rumpled and then the train was flashing past, the shouts of the crowd and the frantic scream of the guard’s whistle not quite drowned out by its sound.

Richie Banks had once told him that ‘Good comics have ice in their soul. I’ve known more than one cold cunt go up on stage and do their full routine, same day that their mother died. Unfeeling bastards, but a joy to represent. They don’t let a crisis get in the way of a gig.’

It was like speaking to God, standing at the edge of the stage, facing the flare of lights that razed all view of the audience. Magnus did not mention the Dongolite’s fall, the corn-gold hair shining bright in the dark, the rush of the train, or the shout of the youth frozen on the platform,
Christ! Christ! Oh Jesus Christ!
But the sound of the accident was in his head, the scent of blood and burning rubber still in his nostrils. When he took his bow and announced, ‘Here’s the man you’ve all been waiting for, Jooooooooooohnny Dongo!’ the applause of the audience brought back the shouts of the people on the platform and Magnus could have sworn he heard the guard’s whistle screaming on, so high his eardrums felt ready to explode.

Two

Johnny Dongo looked a mess. His hair had lost its comic bounce and hung in a lank cowlick over a forehead sheened with sweat. He spat into his handkerchief, raised a glass of milk cut with rum to his lips and said, ‘What a fuckup.’

Magnus could not think of anything to say and so he kept quiet. He was on his fifth beer, one half of him still high on applause, the other still reeling from the shock of the accident.

‘A fuckup,’ Johnny repeated. ‘A fucking fuckup.’

It had been a great gig, a show to be proud of, but nobody contradicted Johnny. Magnus took a swig from his bottle of Peroni and looked at his feet. There were six of them in Johnny Dongo’s hotel room: Johnny’s manager Kruze, a couple of Dongolites Magnus had not been introduced to and Johnny’s girlfriend Kim, her face stern beneath her blonde beehive, but with a hint of a smirk that put Magnus in mind of Myra Hindley’s mugshot. They were sitting on a trio of couches around a black coffee table that looked like it had been designed for snorting coke. The Dongolites were side by side, legs crossed in opposite directions as if to indicate that, despite appearances, they did not trust each other. Johnny was squeezed between his manager and his girlfriend in a too-tight arrangement that hinted at a power struggle. Magnus had the third couch to himself.

‘A fucking fuckup,’ Johnny muttered.

Kruze’s eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy. He put an arm around Johnny’s shoulder and gave him the kind of anaconda squeeze a wrestler might give a rival. His bald head gleamed. It looked solid, Magnus thought. Strong enough to batter down doors, but heads were fragile things, no match for speed and metal.

Kruze said, ‘Kim’s the only one who’s going to suck your dick tonight, Johnny. It was a good audience and you did a fucking amazing show, same way as you’re going to give another fucking amazing show tomorrow.’ The TV was on, its volume muted. An aerial view of the abandoned cruise ship shone from the screen, followed by a shot of the Houses of Parliament. Kruze picked up the remote and killed the picture. ‘If these bleeding emergency measures don’t shut down the theatres, that is. A big fuss over very little, if you ask me.’ It was not clear whether he meant the recall of Parliament that the sweats had prompted, or Johnny’s tantrum. Kruze stirred the milky contents of Johnny’s glass with a straw. Ice cubes rattled dully within. ‘Drink your medicine. Time for beddy-byes soon.’

Johnny lifted the glass to his lips and drained it. A dribble rolled down his Roger Ramjet chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, then stretched for the carton of full fat on the table and poured some into his glass. He topped it up with a generous tot of Admiral Benbow, turning the white liquid a treacle-toffee shade of brown that tugged at Magnus’s bowels.