She had seen her brother tonight for the first time since the beginning of December, last year. But it had not been Billy. He had been a husk, barely there at all. In a sense, to Nina, he was already dead. It had been the worst Christmas ever.
* * *
• • •
Mum had called her yesterday. “Come over,” she’d said, her voice husky. “And . . . I think you need to bring Dad. Billy won’t last the night. You need to see Billy to say . . .” She hadn’t been able to say the word. Nina had tried to be strong, but as soon as the call ended, she had cried and cried and cried. She went to Dad for comfort because he was all she had, and he hugged her and pretended that Billy would be fine. Then he agreed that they should both go to Mum’s house to see him, and now here they were, in the rented house with its drafts and its peeling paint, letting their tea go cold.
But Mum stayed upstairs until after midnight, and then when she did come down, the news was different.
* * *
• • •
On that same night, in a different part of London, a man was sitting at his wife’s bedside. Her face was waxy, her skin white, with blotches that sometimes looked pink, sometimes almost blue. She was sixty-seven years old and she, too, was dying of the flu. He pushed the hair back from her face and talked without stopping.
“Imogen,” he said. “Immy, I’ve been an idiot. You are the most wonderful person in the world. I love you. Please, don’t go. Please. Please. Please, don’t, darling. Please, stay and let me look after you. I’ll make it up to you, I swear. Please, stay with me.”
He said it all, and he meant every word of it.
TWO
Two days later, Al came home furious. He walked straight into the living room, switched the television on, and flicked around with the remote until he found the news.
“Sorry,” he said to Rachel. He was still standing up, and he paused and kissed her. “So rude. I’m really sorry. How’s Billy? Where’s Beth?”
Al and Billy had lived in the same house for all these weeks, but they had barely seen each other since the terrible night when they’d realized Billy was sick. Billy had lived in his tiny sterile zone, and until they had taken turns to go in and say good-bye two nights ago, it was always just Rachel who put on the suit to go in.
“Billy’s sitting up in bed,” she said, smiling. “He’s watching cartoons. Beth’s in the kitchen playing with bricks. What’s the matter?”
“I saw a news flash on a screen,” Al said, sitting down to watch. “He got off! The bastard got away with it! That’s what it said.”
“No.”
She went to fetch Beth, who shouted in delight at the sight of her father. Al set her on his lap, and they watched the news report together.
They had been following this trial through Billy’s illness; it had been a landmark case. This man, Ben Alford, was probably not much older than Rachel was, but he had the red face and the air of entitlement of a powerful man from any era. He could have been a Victorian mill owner, a medieval baron, a disaster capitalist from the more recent past. The gist of the case had been that he employed many thousands of people in this city and had invented a new scheme whereby he was gleefully paying them nothing at all.
For the past few years, Starcom had been buying up housing all over London. They would aggressively step in and make impossible-to-refuse offers for whole terraces, blocks of flats, anything at all. Then they would rebuild the property as “workers’ accommodation.” They gave their workers a place to live and paid them in vouchers and free things. “Cash-free living,” he called it, as if that were a positive. A group of citizens had crowdfunded to challenge the legality of the “worklifeplus” scheme, and now, it seemed, they had lost.
Al, who worked with the homeless and saw exactly what happened when you bought up all the affordable housing from a city that was already struggling, had been desperate for Alford to lose.
“Mr. Alford is delighted to be vindicated,” said a spokeswoman with shiny hair and a steely smile. “He looks forward to expanding the worklifeplus program across the city and beyond.”
“Our landlord is going to sell to Alford,” said Al. “I know he is. That’s why he’s letting the place fall apart around our ears.”
* * *
• • •
Mumma!” Billy was shouting down the stairs. She ran up, leaving Al swearing at the television, and Beth, who was eight months old, attempting to join in, yelling at the screen. Beth seemed to be as angry as her father about this.
“How are you doing, darling?” Rachel said, then kissed Billy’s head and straightened his duvet. He was not, in fact, watching cartoons on the old iPad his father had brought over for him, but was watching the same news report about Ben Alford. He looked pale, with blue bags under his eyes, but he was bright eyed and interested in everything.
“Doing OK. Thank you,” he said. “This man is boring. I want to see the proper news.” Billy considered “proper news” to be anything about the J5X virus or the space program. He wanted to know everything there was to know about the thing that had happened to him. He studied the reporters who stood outside government departments talking about the epidemic. He nodded along to what they were saying, writing down numbers and random words, with no context, on a piece of paper by his bed.
She would have preferred him to be watching cartoons, sleeping, or drawing meaningless pictures, but she wasn’t going to complain. She still couldn’t believe the miracle.
“How are you doing?” she said, taking the iPad out of his hand and putting it on the table. “Warm enough? Hungry? You know it’s nearly sleep time.”
“I think we would like a drink, please,” said Billy. “Can we have some hot lemon?”
Rachel smiled. “Of course you can!” She didn’t pick up on his use of the royal “we.”
“Do you know what astronauts drink on the space station? They drink their own wee,” Billy said. “It did say so on the telly. And their sweat. Next year’s mission will be to the Rock. It’s an asteroid and a launchpad.”
Rachel wrinkled up her face. “You’re very well-informed. Seriously? They drink wee and sweat? That doesn’t sound very nice. They must filter it.”
“Nina will have to drink her wee when she is an astronaut,” he said, and he giggled. “Wee! For a drink! For Nina! Yuck!” He laughed and laughed.
Rachel sat on his bed and laughed along with him. “They must filter it. And treat it before they drink it.”
“Yes, but it is still wee.”