“Accepted. Thank you. Oh, look, that’s our coffee. I got some brownies to share. I’ll give Beth some of mine because she really shouldn’t have one. She shouldn’t have sugar at all, I don’t think. Oh, well, we won’t tell Mum.”
Louis stood up. “I’ll grab it.”
They sat there, the three of them, drinking mediocre coffee and eating gloopy brownies, and Nina thought of Billy, healthy at home with his imaginary friend, and she decided she might never have been this happy in all her life.
FIVE
A week later Rachel realized she hadn’t seen any of her friends for two months. She messaged Sami and invited herself, Billy, and Beth over.
Amazing! Sami replied. Of course! Is he OK?
Yes, Rachel wrote. She stopped and looked at the word and was pleased with its straightforwardness. Yes. He is.
She sent the text.
The imaginary friend was still there. Billy explained his day-to-day life to her, and because Delfy seemed to like things orderly, his room was still tidy. He read books to her and giggled at things she said. He told her about every part of his life, and sometimes he frowned and listened to whatever she was saying in reply. Rachel was charmed by her. She had always wished she had been the kind of child who’d had an imaginary friend. She could have done with one; her childhood had been stressful and lonely, and she’d never have had the imagination to conjure up a companion. She was oddly proud of Billy for his invention of Delfy and a little bit jealous.
* * *
• • •
They sat in Sami’s kitchen. Billy had defied everything, all predictions, and he was well again. She could say it out loud: “Billy is well.” It was too much for her, and whenever there was an excuse to laugh, like now, she would take it. She knew she was laughing too much (she was on the brink of tears much of the time), and she knew her friends didn’t mind. She was supposedly laughing about an impression Sami had just done of the children’s school principal trying to stop a class revolt, but really she was letting the emotion out.
Billy was better, and soon he would be going back to school. He was a normal boy again. Beth hadn’t become ill, in spite of the midnight scare, and neither had Nina or Rachel or Al. She was certain of that now. The flu was in the past tense for them. It had been a near miss. Hundreds of thousands had died, maybe more. It was hard to tell because no one believed the official figures, and the guesses online were wildly different, ranging from (conspiracy!) no one actually died at all to (conspiracy!) the population of the world was now less than half of what it was. But it was better for them, for Rachel and her family, and that was a thing to hold on to. It was a solid fact. It had been scary, and now it was over, and she was laughing because she could. Also, Billy’s principal was truly crap, and it turned out she wasn’t the only one to think so.
She adjusted the baby on her lap and buried her face in Beth’s hair for a second, to hide the fact that she was somehow crying now, and managed to say: “Was it literally that bad?”
Sami sat down. “Yep. I was helping with reading, and Miss Lu nipped out to smoke or to cry in the toilets or whatever she does, and they just went fucking feral. Excuse my language, Beth. So along comes the head to calm them down, but it turns out she can’t do a thing. I sorted them out myself in the end. Anyway, do you guys fancy a drink? I’ve got some wine. We have to celebrate Billy.”
Emma nodded. “Oh, my God. I’d love that. Thanks.”
Rachel hesitated. She was happy. She was with friends. Billy was playing upstairs. She allowed herself the luxury of considering a glass of wine for a few seconds. She would be like everyone else, and it would be fine. Everyone else could drink and be all right.
“No, thanks,” she said, because she wasn’t really going to start drinking now. Beth wriggled on her lap, and Rachel put her on the floor, patting the top of her head as the baby scanned the room for interesting things at ground level. Beth was always staring at things, assessing them.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I forgot. You don’t mind if we do?”
“Of course I don’t!”
Sami’s house was small and chaotic, with every surface covered in pieces of paper and with all sorts of strange pictures pinned to the walls. Sami was a graphic designer, Sri Lankan by ancestry and a Londoner through and through. She was boyish and brisk, and she seemed just able to scrape together enough work to support herself and Lola. She stuck her projects up around the house so she could think about them no matter what she was doing. Right now the three of them were sitting around the kitchen table, a tower of paperwork in the middle of it like a campfire. It was like the table at home, and that comforted Rachel.
Sami put a glass of white wine in front of Emma and another in her own place, and she handed Rachel a wineglass with juice in it.
“Here you go,” she said. “Cheers.”
They clinked glasses.
“Lovely,” said Emma. “It’s so brilliant to see Billy up and running again.” Emma was blond and glamorous, an accountant who had taken a year off work because she was sick of never seeing her children. Rachel didn’t know her as well as she knew Sami. She couldn’t begin to imagine a life in which you could choose not to work. Her own maternity leave had brought them to the brink of destitution.
“I know.” Her words fell over one another. She hadn’t told her friends about that night yet. “He was so ill. I felt it. I knew he was going to go, to die, in my arms. I haven’t even got the words. That care for them at home thing is really just a way of saying either you’ll die or you won’t and there’s nothing we can do about it, so deal with it. All the medication is painkillers or placebos. Even Henry came over to say . . . to say good-bye to him. I invited Henry into my house. But Billy didn’t die.”
She knew she was barely coherent. Her words were all slurring into one another.
“I keep thinking, is this really happening?” Sami said. “I mean, to us? Here, now, in our lifetime, to us and our children? This plague that kills the children and the old people and some of the people in between?”
“Yes,” said Emma. “And meanwhile the superrich are getting ready to fuck off into space and start all over again. Twats.”
“I know!” said Rachel. “I hope they fire Ben Alford into the sun.” Al’s passion on this subject had infected her.
“If they did get to the new Earth,” said Emma, “they’d trash that, too. You know they would.”
“They won’t go anywhere,” said Sami. “It’s a load of bollocks.”
They sat in silence for a while. Eventually Sami lifted her glass again.
“Anyway. No point being morose,” she said. “You made it. Billy made it. Cheers to that. To our microcosm. The whole world is better for Billy, at least.”