“Well, that applies to all our water, doesn’t it? Sewage gets recycled back into tap water.” She didn’t like this idea, so she stopped talking. Billy needed lots of fluids, and she shouldn’t be putting him off. “Anyway, I’ll get your drink. Any food? You could have a banana, you know.” She could smell their jacket potatoes cooking in the oven. Billy hadn’t eaten anything solid yet.
“No food. Thank you. Not today.”
* * *
• • •
The next day Billy said: “You know you said there was a banana?”
It wasn’t easy to get them anymore, but Al had found some brownish ones in the supermarket months ago and had brought them home in triumph. Rachel remembered her own mother feeding her mashed bananas when she was recuperating from anything, and to her they were the taste of convalescence. She had kept them in the freezer for ages, waiting for Billy to be able to eat again.
“Yes!” said Rachel. “Yes. Would you like one?”
“Bananas have good things in them, and Delfy says I need to eat food so she can see how my digestions works and so I can get strong again.”
Rachel laughed. “Who says that?”
“Delfy.”
“Who’s Delfy?”
“Delfy is my friend.” He paused. “Delfy says hello to you, Mummy.”
“Does he live in your head?”
“Not he! She! Yes, at the moment, she does.”
Rachel sat on the edge of the bed. “Oh, good! Tell Delfy hello back from me. I’ll get you a banana, and you can give some to Delfy, too. Shall I mash it up?”
“Yes. I will have it all myself because Delfy is watching in me. She doesn’t eat food. She wants to see me eat food.”
“Well,” said Rachel, “that’s perfect. You can eat enough to make both of you strong.”
* * *
• • •
As the days went by, Billy spoke about Delfy more and more, delighted with his invention. Rachel saw the imaginary friend as a way of coping with the boredom of being stuck in bed, and she thought it was a godsend. Delfy, according to Billy, lived inside his head and wanted to find out about the world exactly as Billy rediscovered it. Delfy and Billy read books, drew pictures, and watched TV indiscriminately. As time went by, they tried standing up on Billy’s wobbly legs and fell back onto the bed, giggling. They laughed at things that weren’t objectively funny. They watched the news and wrote down more and more numbers on the pieces of paper beside the bed. They dozed as Rachel read them stories. Delfy was the personification of recovery, and with her voice in his head, Billy got better.
THREE
When she woke in the night, though, she knew something was wrong. She had the same old feeling in the pit of her stomach.
She knew it had been a nightmare but couldn’t remember any details. Just the feeling lingered on. She seemed to be sitting bolt upright, and even when she was wide-awake, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was catastrophically wrong.
She crept out of bed and made her way to the door, hoping not to wake Al, who was breathing heavy, sleepy breaths beside the rumpled space where she had been, or Beth, whose cot was right beside her. She tiptoed across the landing in the dim light of the streetlamps that shone through the frosted glass pane in the door downstairs. That glass had a crack in it. Everything was falling apart.
She passed through the strips of plastic sheeting into what had once been the sterile zone and stood on the threshold of Billy’s bedroom. It was still gratingly tidy, as he had barely got out of bed except to go to the loo. Still, there was no longer a flu handbook on the bedside table; now there was a pile of picture books and a piece of paper with the number 633,910,111 written on it.
She gazed at him. His breathing was even, and his face was untroubled. She put a hand on his forehead and knew that his temperature was normal. There was no fever anymore.
“All right, Mummy,” he said, three-quarters asleep, and she kissed his hair. His curtains were not quite closed, and as she pulled them together, she saw the unusually starry night outside and wondered whether it could be true that people, including, perhaps, her daughter, were going to go and live up there. Could the human race really abandon the perfect home it had trashed? Privately, she thought the talk of space colonization was a distraction from the awful things going on down here, but she wouldn’t say that in front of Nina, who had started going to some space classes that were, at least, free.
It was when she came back into her own room, relieved and sleepy, that she saw that her instinct had been right, but that its focus had been wrong. It was Beth. Baby Beth, the unexpected joy of Rachel’s early forties, was panting. She was burning with a fever, and Rachel grabbed her from her cot and held her close. That woke her properly, and her chubby face crumpled as she started to wail. Al sat up.
Their eyes met. She saw her own dread reflected.
“She’s . . . sick,” said Rachel. It hurt her to say the word, and for a moment, all her strength was gone, and she sat on the edge of the bed.
She could not go through this again. She couldn’t. Everything was supposed to be better, and if Beth had the flu, then it would begin all over again. It couldn’t. She couldn’t. She couldn’t lose Beth. No.
Al put a solid arm around her, and she collapsed onto his shoulder. He took the baby from her arms. Everything about him calmed her, and when he said: “Go to sleep. I’ll do the night shift. We’ll need you in the morning. Sleep. I’ve got her,” she rolled over and closed her eyes.
* * *
• • •
Daylight was coming around and through the flimsy curtains. The room smelled normal. It didn’t have the sick scent that was lingering, just a tiny bit, in Billy’s room.
She shuffled down the landing to look in on Billy, who was asleep, and then walked slowly down the stairs, following the smell of toast and coffee to the kitchen. She dreaded what she would find, picturing the baby limp on Al’s shoulder, gearing herself up to sterilize Nina’s room and put Beth in there, behind plastic sheets, for weeks and weeks. She would have to get back into the quarantine suit, and Nina would stay away for even longer: it would be weeks and weeks, all over again, and at the end of that, they would need another miracle.
Beth, however, was sitting in the high chair, throwing toast crusts onto the floor and giggling.
Rachel tried to compute what she was seeing. “Did that happen?” she said. She checked the wall clock: seven a.m. Al passed her a coffee and half his piece of toast and peanut butter. “Was it real? Last night? Thank you.”