Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 (5 page)

‘Ask your fishmonger to dispose of the heads if you’re squeamish,’ the dough-faced chef said. ‘But traditionally these form part of the decoration.’ He started to insert dead-eyed fish heads into the pastry. ‘This is why it’s called Stargazey Pie.’

Magnus switched channel. A petite, blonde woman dressed in pastels was walking through an abandoned room. Whoever had lived there had not been house-proud. They had left in a hurry and remnants of their belongings were scattered around the space in dusty piles.

‘Marcus paid £292,000 at auction for this derelict Victorian townhouse,’ the woman said, stepping over a sleeping bag lying rumpled on the floor like the skin of some giant serpent. ‘But with a bit of TLC the property has the potential to realise much more than that. Marcus, what are your plans?’

A sallow-faced man with large bags under his eyes stared nervously into the camera. He hesitated and then his words tumbled forth.

‘I fix it up nice, nice fixtures and fittings, nice wallpaper, nice carpets, then I rent it out to young working people who want a nice place to stay.’

‘That sounds nice,’ said the blonde woman.

Magnus switched channel again. A good-looking girl with a wide smile and
café au lait
skin was displaying a set of exchangeable screwdriver heads.

‘. . . you need never be scrabbling around to find the right size of screwdriver,’ the woman said. ‘Because the perfect tool for all varieties of screw is right here in this little box.’

She laughed in a way Magnus might have found appealing had he not been locked in a cell in Pentonville for the last two days.

He changed the channel again and saw an exterior shot of a hospital somewhere in India. The scene shifted to the hospital’s interior, then to a full ward and then to a small child gleaming with sweat. A doctor with a cotton mask stretched across her mouth and nose placed a hand on the child’s forehead. The doctor’s hands were encased in thin plastic gloves. To avoid infection, Magnus supposed, but it seemed terrible to deny the sick child the consoling touch of flesh.

The child was critically ill, the voiceover said, and although it came from a poor family, poverty was not to blame. This was a virus that affected rich and poor.

Pete turned over in his sleep and started coughing. Magnus felt the force of his coughs reverberate through the bunk. One of the warders had promised that Pete would be heading to the dispensary, but that felt like a long time ago. Pete had been ill but lucid then. He had not said why he was in Pentonville, but then neither had Magnus. They were in the wing reserved for vulnerable prisoners and sex offenders and the fashion was for discretion.

The television screen shifted to Beijing and the portrait of baby-faced Mao smiling out across Tiananmen Square. It flashed to the White House then to Big Ben and back to the newsroom. The World Health Organisation was co-ordinating responses to the virus, the newsreader said, his face stern. In the meantime it had recommended that theatres, sports stadiums and other places of public entertainment be closed. People should go to work as usual – the newsreader gave a reassuring smile – but the advice was to avoid unnecessary crowds. Someone coughed off camera. The newsreader’s eyes shifted from the autocue to the studio beyond. He hesitated, as if unsure whether to comment on the interruption or not and then got on with the final item, a story about a family of chicks who had hatched next to a toy fire truck and decided it was their mother. Magnus watched a film clip of the chicks waddling in a line behind the red plastic truck and thought there was something obscene about it.

The television was getting on his nerves, but there was nothing else to look at except whitewashed walls and a barred window through which he could see a scrap of blue.

Sometimes in Orkney the land seemed like a thin strip between sea and sky. Few trees interrupted the view or the wind. He remembered how he and his cousin Hugh had played at superheroes when they were boys, leaping from rocks and ridges, arms outstretched, their parkas around their shoulders like capes, in the hope that a gust would take hold and carry them across the fields.

Pete coughed again. The grating sound reminded Magnus of the man he had beaten in the alleyway. The police had told him that his ‘victim’ was a Member of Parliament, a man with connections in high and perhaps low places.

Magnus heard a click as the flap covering the Judas-hole on the other side of the door flicked up and someone looked through. He slid from his bunk. He was still bruised from the beating the refuse men had given him and the movement made his body sing with pain. He banged against the door and shouted, ‘There’s a sick man in here.’

A voice from the landing commanded, ‘Step away from the door.’

Magnus did as he was told and was rewarded by the sound of a key turning in the lock.

The screw’s mouth and nose were hidden by a cotton mask like the one the doctor on the news had worn as she tended the sick child. He was an older man, a heavy smoker from the look of his lined eyes and sallow skin. The screw coughed and Magnus hoped it was a reaction to a thirty-a-day habit.

‘No association today.’ He shoved two packets of sandwiches and two bottles of water into Magnus’s hand and began to close the door.

‘My cellmate needs a doctor.’

Magnus nodded towards Pete-the-Pervert curled beneath a blanket on the bottom bunk and saw what he had been avoiding. The man was slick with perspiration. He had thought Pete was deep in sleep, but his eyes were open and Magnus realised that his cellmate was caught in a fever. The screw took a step back. Magnus asked, ‘Is this what they’re talking about on the news?’

‘Do I look like a doctor?’

Across the landing someone battered against their door. The rhythm was taken up by the surrounding cells, a fast tattoo that reminded Magnus of the football terraces. The screw’s hand moved to his keys. Panic tightened Magnus’s chest, but instinct told him it was important to keep his voice reasonable.

‘They say that whatever this is, it’s infectious. He should be in isolation.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’ The screw’s mask moved with his words. It was damp with saliva and Magnus saw the shape of his mouth, wet behind it. A clamour of shouting joined the banging. The racket boomed across the atrium, dissolving words into echoes, the music of fear.

Magnus said, ‘I’m only on remand. All I did was to try and stop a girl from being raped. I’m innocent.’

‘I know.’ The screw glanced towards the noise and then back at Magnus. ‘I can see it in your eyes. You’ve got a rapist’s charm, but you won’t get my knickers off without a fight.’

The cotton mask trembled and Magnus realised that the screw was laughing. He shouted, ‘At least move me to another cell . . .’ but the door was closing. Magnus heard the key turning in the lock and though he added his fists to the banging that echoed through the wing, the warder did not return.

Five

Magnus thought Pete might be dead. The wing had shaken to the sound of screaming, chanting and banging throughout the night, but the brightening dawn had stilled the noise, as if the prisoners were vampires forced to take cover from the sun. Pete had kept up a muttered conversation with himself for most of the night, but daylight had quietened him too and it was a long time since the bunk had rattled with his coughs, or swayed in response to his twists and turns. Magnus knew that he should rouse himself, get off his mattress and take a look at his cellmate, but the thought of the man curled beneath the blanket on the bed below, like a corpse shrunk in its coffin, gave him the horrors.

Magnus had kept the television on all night, trying to focus on something other than the noise around him, but Pete’s ramblings and laboured breaths had insisted their way into his head. Pete had been talking softly to some girl, asking her to be nice to him, telling her she was
beautiful
,
a sweet thing
,
a real doll
, until Magnus had wanted to slide the pillow from beneath his cellmate’s head and suffocate him with it. Men at sea shared smaller cabins, but this was a voyage he had been press-ganged into.

It had been Friday night when they locked Magnus in Pentonville. ‘Emergency measures,’ the warden who processed him said. ‘You’ll be in court Monday morning.’ There had been no explanation of what had prompted the crisis or why he was being held in prison, rather than a police cell. Magnus had remembered the recall of Parliament Kruze had been dismissive of and selfishly hoped that theatres were under emergency measures too – at least until he got out.

The screws had allowed Magnus a phone call and he had rung his agent, Richie Banks. The phone had switched to Richie’s voicemail and although Magnus had only left a short message, he was not permitted a second call.

Magnus’s voice had grown higher, and more like a liar’s, with every insistence that he had not touched the girl, except to free her from her attacker. Eventually tiredness won and he had surrendered to the indignities of prison admission. He answered questions about his medical history and mental health from a screw who looked like he had spent so long staring into the sun, it had all but burned the retinas from his head. Then Magnus had stripped naked, bent over to show there was nothing taped beneath his balls or secreted between his arse cheeks, and dressed in a prison tracksuit rough from rewashing. He had tried to comfort himself with the thought that the girl would clear him when she recovered, but the memory persisted of her huddled against the alley wall with her hands over her eyes, as the bin men set about him.

His thoughts were in danger of spiralling. Magnus looked at the patch of blue beyond the barred window. It was Monday morning. Someone would come to take him to court soon and, whatever the outcome, they couldn’t leave him locked up with Pete. Magnus turned the television down and held his breath, hoping to hear approaching footsteps or the jangle of keys that would signal his release. His ears seemed to sing with the silence. There was nothing, not even one of Pete’s rattling gasps. He turned the television volume up again.

Someone would come. First there would be the click of the hatch, the individual pack of cereal and portion of milk. Then a trip to court in a prison van and the chance to explain everything. If things went his way, he could be home in his flat by the end of the day. The thought brought warm tears to Magnus’s eyes.

There was a name for the virus now: V596. Naming the disease seemed to make its existence more real, but the television had also shown images of people around the country acting normally. London was not bowed, a jaunty TV presenter had said, standing in Oxford Street among the usual chaos of tourists, shoppers and slow-moving traffic. As far as the city centre was concerned it was ‘business as usual’. A couple of young Asian girls had bumped into the presenter in their haste to get to Topshop. The BBC had replayed the clip at intervals throughout the night and into the morning: the busy street, the reporter’s laugh as the girls knocked him off balance, the girls’ hands fluttering up to cover their mouths. Magnus had watched and re-watched it and thought he could see the reporter tensing in anticipation of the surprise collision.

‘Pete? Pete?’ Magnus’s voice sounded puny in the still brickness of the cell. ‘Are you all right, mate?’

He did not expect an answer and none came. Magnus tried to remember how the wing had sounded on previous days. He recalled slamming doors, the echo of footsteps, the shouts and laughter of men, but he had been caught up in his own misery and perhaps the prison always fell still in the early hours, at the intersection of early risers and the late to bed.

Magnus did an inventory of his body’s hurts. The bin men’s punches had buried the pain of Johnny Dongo’s fist-in-the-face beneath their own ache. His head was groggy from lack of sleep, and his belly felt empty and sick, but he had none of the symptoms Pete had been tormented by, no cough or sweating, no vomiting or diarrhoea. He leaned over the edge of the bunk. Pete was a foul-smelling huddle on the bed below. Magnus remembered an ailing sheepdog his mother had nursed in her kitchen, the strangeness of seeing the dog in the house, his mother saying, ‘It’ll not be long now. He’s turned his face to the wall.’ Thinking about his mother made Magnus feel ashamed. She would never leave Pete to suffer alone, whatever his crime.

The Judas-flap scraped back. A second later Magnus heard a key turning in the lock and swung himself off his bunk. It was a different warder this time, a younger man with a broad, red face, cheeks like boiled ham and the beginnings of a beer belly.

‘Fuck.’ The screw’s hand went to his nose. ‘It stinks in here. Kildoran and McFall. Who’s who?’

The warder looked like he had been up all night, but his skin was healthy beneath the tiredness, his voice free of the rawness that had made Pete’s words sound as if they were being bled from him. The sight of the man, ugly and healthy in the doorway, made Magnus want to sob with relief.

‘I’m McFall.’ He held up a hand in a gesture that was part salute, part supplication.

The screw gave Magnus a sour look. ‘Kildoran?’ He squatted down and stared at Pete, keeping his distance from the bunk. There was no reply and the warder turned to look at Magnus. ‘Turn him over.’

‘What?’

‘Roll him on to his back.’

Magnus took a step backward; his spine touched the wall.

‘He might be infectious.’