Lilly nods vigorously. “Yes. There is no movement of people internally within Sweden. We have divided the country into 162 zones. There is no movement outside of those zones. This will ensure that areas with no outbreaks, or which have been minimally affected, will remain safe.”
Imogen, brave woman that she is, responds to this by dragging Britain back into the line of fire. Rather her than me.
“Do you know how many British people have entered Sweden since the outbreak of the Plague?”
“We estimate around ninety thousand Brits and ten thousand other Europeans entered the country. Stockholm’s outbreak began on December 6, 2025. A few days later Gothenburg declared an emergency.”
“I have one final question,” Imogen says to Lilly. “You have talked so calmly and knowledgeably about these policies and the work of the Swedish Immigration Service and Home Affairs Office. How has the Plague affected you on a personal level? How are you?”
Lilly looks a bit stunned by the question. Her eyes are filling with tears. Oh no, Lilly, keep it together. I need you to be a beacon of angry determined hope in the middle of this shitshow.
“My dad and my brother are alive. It feels like a miracle to say that. I am from a small town called Kiruna, many miles away, so I cannot see them, but they are alive. When all of this is over, I’m going to move back home.”
“But until there is a cure for the Plague you can’t go home?”
Lilly nods. “And neither can you.”
At that, Imogen signs off from what must be the most bizarre workday of her life. I switch to another channel. It helps to hear voices, and think about other things, and learn facts and just not think about any of it here in the UK. Best to think about other, faraway places and take comfort in the fact that I’m not the only one who has lost the people closest to me. Show me I’m not alone. Show me I’m not the only one who’s destroyed.
I used to hate the news; why would I want to read about and watch misery? How things can change. Besides, the news is now more surreal than any film. It used to be politicians making speeches and footage of wars far, far away. Now it’s women wearing hazmat suits carrying bodies out of houses, lines of people waiting for food trucks to deliver food taken from less populated areas to their towns, factories working around the clock to produce medicines and soup and paper and all the other things we so desperately need and used to import.
“There has been an extraordinary direction of travel,” a nasally-sounding woman is saying, dressed in a remarkably smart suit but with no makeup on and scraggly hair. Can’t say I’d keep going to work to mangle someone’s hair into a helmet and paint lipstick on if my family was dying either. “The timing of outbreaks shows that the very earliest significant international outbreaks were borne of reversed immigrations that had existed for decades. Many of those who had immigrated to the UK from the Caribbean, the West Indies, Nigeria, Somalia, Ghana, Pakistan and India left in late November and early December, returning to their countries of origin, bringing the Plague with them.”
This woman is trying desperately to hold it together but she has the hollow-eyed shocked look of the recently bereaved. Watching her is painful and too familiar. Next channel. This one is showing the San Francisco Airport Riot, again. The image of the blond police officer shooting at a man who is shooting up again and again, shooting at nothing, has gone around the world. Something about it feels hopeless, like I’m watching the end of days. Before I switch the TV off, I turn on a podcast on my phone about beauty products, downloaded months ago in a different life. I avoid even the briefest silence. Before, I craved the slivers of time in which the house would be blessedly quiet. Now, the emptiness of the house feels almost violent. No teenage feet thumping up the stairs. No clattering of bowls in the sink and yells of “Mum” and a request to find something, be somewhere, do something.
It’s a lot not to think about and so, to keep myself sane, as the hours of sleep I dream of drift off without me, never quite able to grasp them, I work. I research the one thing the entire world should be preoccupied with and yet, somehow, isn’t. Where did the Plague come from? How did this god-awful disease come to be?