Gillian has been furiously scribbling down everything Jackie’s said for the past hour. She’ll be implementing a working draft within a few weeks.
“Can I ask a quick question?” I ask. “Are you and Mary still friends?”
“’Course we are! We had lunch every Wednesday at Bynum’s Steakhouse for a decade. Now we do a video call every week at the same time.”
The meeting ends with the usual good-byes, thank-yous and promises to follow up by e-mail. Gillian looks at me with a resolute expression. I hate it when politicians look at me like that. It always means I’m going to work a seventy-hour week for the next few months.
“Let’s get started,” she says.
FRANCES
London, United Kingdom （England and Wales）
Day 337
The Icelandic Coast Guard is going to take out a restraining order against me if I’m not careful. Can public agencies take out a restraining order against a citizen in another country? Probably not, but they could stop taking my calls.
I don’t understand what’s so hard about this. My husband—my lovely Toby—and lots of other people are stuck on a boat somewhere around Iceland. They don’t have the Plague and they don’t have enough food. They need food. It’s simple.
The new head of the Icelandic Coast Guard, Heida, is a very no-nonsense woman who talks a lot about resources. I don’t think she’s married. I keep trying to find out more about her personal life, try to build a rapport, but she’s quite resistant to it. No matter. My husband is on a boat in the middle of nowhere. Heida needs to help me and Heida is going to help me even if she doesn’t know it yet.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading so I know about virus survival times on surfaces and sterilization. One of the major perks of working in a library is the easy access to books and time to spend researching things online. The virus, according to the Public Health England Task Force, survives for thirty-eight hours on a static surface. Women are hosts, which means every time a woman coughs or sneezes or breathes on her hand, she’ll spread the virus onto the thing she touches. These two things are problems but they are solvable.
Heida needs to understand that they are solvable.
If I could, I would fly out to Iceland myself and give her a piece of my mind, but there’s not going to be any plane travel for the foreseeable, maybe ever, so for now I’m stuck with phone calls.
My plan is simple. Heida needs to get lots of canned food—soup, vegetables, potatoes, sausages, that kind of thing—and either freeze them or cover them in boiling water so every bit of them is drenched. Then she needs to get a massive piece of plastic and sterilize that too, and use that to cover the cans. Then she needs to attach a note to the big plastic pack of food telling whoever reads it to eat the food, not panic and wait to be rescued because everything is going to be okay.
I’ve thought this through. It’s not that hard.
I’ll call Heida again. I’ve told her my plan every day for the past few weeks and I think she’s slowly coming around. You know, she does like me. She wouldn’t pick the phone up otherwise, would she? I don’t think the Icelandic Coast Guard is a barrel of laughs at the moment. I like to think I provide some light relief.
“Hello, Frances,” she says.
“Hi, Heida, how’s it going?”
“Not too bad, as you would say. What can I do for you?”
“I’m nothing if not consistent, Heida. I need you to carry out my plan to deliver food to my husband and the other passengers on the Silver Lady and save hundreds of lives. Please and thank you, Heida.”
“I have gotten approval for this now.”
“I know you always say no, Heida, and— Wait, what?”