“And she’s still on compassionate leave?”
Matron gave me a look of pity. I didn’t understand. “No, she, she. She couldn’t cope, Amanda.”
Ah. I see. The Second Plague, as they call it on the news, has taken one of our own.
A few of my favorite male staff members have thankfully survived. Billy, a porter here for thirty years with more tattoos than skin, burst through the doors on my second day back.
“Amanda! You’re back, that’s my girl. Wasn’t the same without you. Don’t have a clue what we were doing without you.”
“I’m right here, Billy,” one of the other consultants, Mary, said dryly from the other side of the ward.
“Right you are, Mary, I wasn’t meanin’， no, no, was meanin’， ah you know what, I’ll be off. Lovely to see you all.” A tiny bit of glorious normalcy in the face of the Plague. The moments are brief, fleeting and so welcome.
My twelve-hour shift flies by in a blur of sepsis, broken limbs, suicide attempts and a few car crashes. Standard stuff by all accounts. Another two hours of paperwork and the clock has hit 10 p.m. I’m meant to be going home. I take another chart from the rack on the wall and see the patient. A simple kidney infection; painful but easy to treat. I’m disappointed to be done in twenty minutes. After leaving the patient’s cubicle, the night matron sees me going to take another chart off the rack.
“Amanda, go home,” she instructs in a soft voice that is, nonetheless, one I know can’t be ignored. Glaswegian nurses have powers of persuasion up there with messianic leaders. “Even if you can’t sleep, you need to rest.”
I manage a wan smile and head home. As soon as I go through the front door, I turn on all the lights and switch on the news. Silence is unbearable.
A BBC news crew is stranded in Sweden. Three women, all of them dressed in the same clothes as they were yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, broadcast news from a Scandinavian country thousands of miles away as their families die back home. They’re interviewing someone from the Swedish Immigration Service. She’s called Lilly and looks almost comically Swedish: blond and blue-eyed and wearing something black that on me would look like a maternity muumuu but on her looks like a piece of very cool draping.
“There was a rumor that Swedes were immune and so Sweden was a safe place. Whoever came up with that rumor can rot in hell. Of course, we’re not immune. Just because we’re blond and we like ABBA doesn’t make us immune from the Plague. Jesus Christ.” Her anger is invigorating. So often now people on the news burst into tears or fade away into silence as they realize that there is, in fact, absolutely nothing to say other than we’re all fucked. This girl has some spunk. I enjoy watching her speak.
“You Brits were swarming north for weeks and finally the flights were canceled and we closed our borders but it was too late! You were like a cloud of locusts descending on us, bringing death and destruction.”
The presenter, Imogen Deaven, is looking at the camera with a look of such exquisite Britishness that a honk of laughter bursts out of me involuntarily, one of the first times I’ve laughed since everything went so spectacularly to shit. Imogen’s expression somehow manages to convey to the audience, without uttering a word, “I am absolutely mortified, I want to die. I think I should maybe apologize for this if only to make things less awkward? There are too many openly expressed emotions here, I can’t cope.” Lilly is still looking at Imogen with a look of disgruntled expectation. Clearly Imogen is expected to apologize on behalf of an entire nation. To be fair, Imogen reported on the British ambassador dying a few weeks ago and I’ve heard nothing about a replacement, so maybe she’s the closest thing we have to an ambassador at the moment.
Imogen, God bless her, coughs and plows onward with questions she’s clearly prepared in advance. “Can I ask you about the policies the Swedish Home Affairs Office is implementing to prevent the internal spread of the disease?”