She comes toward me with a purposeful walk. I was right—she is tall. Her eyes are a startling blue.
“Catherine?” Her Scottish accent is strong. Although the woman we’re going to talk to today will no doubt have a far thicker accent than this so I’d better get used to it.
I keep telling Amanda how grateful I am for her time; she’s a busy lady. Head of Health Protection Scotland and arguably the most influential woman in medicine now in the Independent Republic of Scotland.
“I want Euan’s and Heather’s stories to be in your report. It’s important,” is all she says in response to my awkward gratitude. On the ferry across to Rothesay on the Isle of Bute I ask her to tell me everything she knows so far before we meet Euan’s wife. She says, “Let me get a Red Bull first,” and I’m reminded that when I asked what she missed more than anything from before the Plague she said, “Coffee,” in a tone of such longing it bordered on lust. She nearly became a dentist to avoid medicine’s early starts. However, she’s good in a crisis and so even at the age of eighteen knew that a career in which a root canal counts as a drama would not suffice.
Sufficiently caffeinated, Amanda returns: “Okay, where shall we begin?”
“Why was it you that had to do all of this, finding the source of the virus? On your own?” I respond. Amanda has never had a huge amount of time on the phone so I’m dying to know more.
“I became obsessed with knowing how the Plague had come to pass. I still don’t understand how people aren’t more gripped by the need to know why. This disease destroyed my life, it has destroyed billions of lives. How could anyone not be desperate to understand how and why?” She pauses and takes an angry swig from her can.
“Everything was upside down. Maybe in more normal times it wouldn’t have been like that. But we needed to understand the origin of the virus to be able to have a vaccine and avoid this happening again.”
I swallow convulsively. “Do you think it will happen again?”
“Just because your husband left you doesn’t mean your house can’t catch on fire. In other words, tragedy doesn’t immunize you against further tragedy.” I look at her, both baffled and terrified. “The vaccine we have should be effective, yes, and we can use it to adjust to new strains. But in theory the Plague could mutate, allowing the vaccine to be ineffective.”
This makes sense and yet I had assumed, unconsciously, that of course the Plague couldn’t return. That amount of bad luck is impossible. Apparently not.
“Can you tell me more about Patient Zero?” I ask.
“Euan,” she quickly corrects. “You have to think of him as Euan in your head; otherwise you might call him Patient Zero in front of Heather and that’s not nice. They were married for forty-five years and she hates that we refer to him as Patient Zero. I don’t like it either, to be honest. It’s so dehumanizing. It reduces his life entirely to his death from this bloody awful disease. I nearly called him Patient Zero the second time I met his wife and she burst into tears. Can’t say I blame her. If someone referred to my husband as Patient Three Hundred and Forty-Five I’d want to throttle them. Euan was a sailor all his life. Sometimes he worked on the ferry, for a few years he was a fisherman. He ended up outside of the law and well,” she takes a swig of Red Bull, “suffice to say the consequences were greater than he ever could have imagined.”
We arrive in Bute and make our way through the small town of Rothesay, walking from the ferry terminal to Heather’s small terraced house overlooking the sea. Amanda has spent a significant amount of time with Heather, as she investigated the beginning of the illness and tried to understand the origins of the Plague, and then became close to her for reasons I don’t fully understand.
We meet Heather in her house and she politely offers us water. She seems quite suspicious of me but I was expecting that. Amanda had warned me that Heather has been offered huge sums of money by newspapers for her story as the “Widow of Patient Zero.” Heather has always refused, convinced that journalists will somehow blame her for the tragedy that started with Euan’s contraction of the Plague.