Poppy wrinkles her nose at the memory. “The smell is how we realized. It was like nothing you can even imagine. We couldn’t even breathe in our own flats. I called the police and they called the coroners and they called the body people and eventually they broke his door down and took him away.”
“How long had he been dead?”
“I don’t know, but Cheryl who lives upstairs thought she heard one of them say it had been at least two weeks. It was gross.”
I take the squash and drink the tiniest sip possible. “No one helped him, then?”
Poppy’s eyes narrow. “What, like it was our fault that he died of the Plague? Have you seen the state of the world?”
“No, no,” I say, desperately backtracking. “I mean he didn’t have any family, friends, that kind of thing. His mum died around the same time as him.”
“Aw that’s a shame. Nah, I never saw anyone come to his flat once everything kicked off. Must have been loads of people like that though who died on their own. Makes you sad to think about it.”
Poppy says this in a voice that suggests she doesn’t intend to think about it anymore. I thank her for her time and make my way out. Just as I’m about to exit the front door of the building she pops her head around the stairs and calls out to me.
“Hey, lady. What’s your name?”
“Catherine.”
“Who did you lose?”
“What?” She comes down the stairs.
“I said, who did you lose? Who in your family died?” I’ve never been asked this before like this.
“My husband, Anthony, and my son, Theodore,” I say quietly. The shock of the question has brought tears to my eyes.
“I like to ask, so you know they’re not forgotten,” Poppy says. “You remember them and now so do I.” She pats me on the shoulder and goes back upstairs. I leave the building and walk quickly down the road weeping hot, hiccuppy tears. It is the kindest thing someone has done for me in months.
I’ve spent so long traveling, interviewing women and men, writing their experiences, researching, endlessly gathering information for a vague purpose. “An academic report,” I say, when they ask. It’s not a lie, but it’s not true either. I haven’t known. There hasn’t been a secret, overarching goal. I just knew I needed to record stories, I needed to talk to people about what has happened. I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened and move on. I haven’t been ready to move on; I’m still not.
I keep going back to Poppy’s words. You remember them and now so do I. For my entire childhood I knew, keenly, desperately, that I was all that was left of my parents. They had died and, apart from me, it was as if they never existed. All I ever wanted was my own family. Something solid and tangible. A family tree that went on for generations. A human need, thousands of years old, to be known. I was here.
And now my family is gone. My parents are dead. Anthony is dead. Theodore is dead. Once I die, that’ll be it. It will be as if none of us existed. The thought is unbearable. I need people to know I was here, that I had a beautiful son called Theodore. That Anthony and I lived and married and loved and created a family.
No one knows about Daniel. What an end to a life; his mother dying alone as he then died alone, remembered only in passing by a neighbor and a blog. That can’t be my fate, or Theodore’s fate, or Anthony’s fate. When people ask me what I’m researching for I should be honest. Remembrance: mine and theirs.
AMANDA
Dundee, the Independent Republic of Scotland
Day 1,660
I haven’t been to Dundee for over a decade, not since a friend’s hen do. The memory of J?gerbombs, flammable white nylon and penis straws makes me want to cry with nostalgia; a time when everything was simple and easy.