Iris smiles beatifically at him. She’s a bit annoying. “We’d known each other for years. She’s friends with my little sister. I was focused on trying to recover from the loss, my dad and my two brothers died. Thankfully my brother-in-law is immune too. I worked in sports marketing and about eighty percent of my office died and the business collapsed. It was a lot to process. I was saying to my mum one day that I really wished I had met someone before the Plague. It would have been so much easier to cope with if I’d had a constant presence, you know?”
“And that’s where I came in,” Iris simpers.
James continues without acknowledging her. “I turned thirty in February 2027 and something flipped. I wanted to settle down and the Plague showed how short life is. That feeling of wanting to build a family and have babies. My mum said it reminded her of when she turned thirty and desperately wanted a baby.”
“Sometimes a cliché is a cliché for a reason,” Iris chirrups.
“The Plague put things into perspective for a lot of people,” I say as politely as I can muster, realizing I’ve been silent for long enough to seem odd.
“And now I’m pregnant!” Iris adds with glee, rubbing a nonexistent bump. “And so’s Phoebe!”
Phoebe turns around from the wine she’s pouring for someone and I know the exact expression that’s going to be on her face even before I look at it. It will be wide-eyed, her mouth pursed as if braced against whatever horror she’s awaiting. I hate that I know her so well and yet, somehow, my oldest friend has allowed me to find out this piece of shattering news in the most unimaginably awful way possible.
“How wonderful for both of you!” I say brightly. Smile, Catherine. Keep smiling. Do not let Iris see you cry. “Excuse me, I’m just going to nip to the loo.”
Phoebe follows me through the kitchen and upstairs to the bathroom.
“Catherine, I—”
“How fucking dare you? And just to be clear, in case you try and misrepresent this later, I’m not angry at you for being pregnant. I’m fucking furious at you for not telling me and then allowing some fucking twenty-eight-year-old moron to tell me for you. What the fuck?”
Tears are falling freely down Phoebe’s face. She always cried easily. I want to shake her, hard.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how, and then. I thought I would tonight, but. It’s. Oh God, I’ve fucked up, I’m so sorry.”
Bile is rising up in me. She couldn’t do this one thing right. This one decent, necessary thing. “You’re a fucking coward. Jesus Christ. We’ve been friends for more than half our lives and you couldn’t bother to tell me. Fuck you, Phoebe. Oh, and tell Rory his friend James and his wife are cunts.”
I don’t think I’ve ever been this angry and then, as I’m walking past the living room to get my coat, I hear Iris’s voice wittering, “There’s a reason that the baby boom happened after the Second World War, you know. When death is staring you in the face, you want something permanent to cling on to for dear life.”
I want to throw a glass at Iris’s head but I can’t and I won’t. There are so many things I can’t and won’t do so instead I just have to button up my coat and leave the house, alone. I walk to the station alone. I wait for a train alone. My nose runs in the cold and huge gulping sobs take over, which my body works its way through, alone. Always alone now, it seems.
LISA
Toronto, Canada
Day 1,700
I’m going to win the Nobel Prize. Of course I am. Everybody says so. It’s the first time the Swedes are awarding them since the whole world went to shit, only in three categories—Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry and Peace—and I’m a shoo-in. Margot keeps looking at me warily as I pace the apartment. Her enthusiasm is restrained. She’s the caution to my recklessness. It works in the long term, in life, in a partnership, but in a moment like this I desperately want her to be jumping up and down, as hyped as I am.