Chapter 28
Broken glass
The last pandemic happened at just the right time to do maximum damage.
International travel was decelerating fast, but the world was still mobile and porous enough for the viruses to move speedily across borders and contaminate widespread populations who were of course weakening as they aged anyway, while research resources for medical science were increasingly devoted to finding a way to reverse the Gelding.
And it was viruses, plural, unlike the previous pandemics that had at least had the one common virtue only being the global sharing of a single infectious disease.
In this case it was yet another agile variant RNA virus that rode its pale horse out of the endlessly inventive kingdom of orthornavirae that had already scourged the world with waves of increasingly virulent coronaviruses, only now it had teamed up with a second killer, a novel borealpox variant that emerged from the thawing tundra in Siberia.
The combination of respiratory disease and what were essentially faster and more vicious smallpox-like symptoms produced what the already crumbling WHO described as a “malign entourage effect” where the body became swiftly depleted by fighting the lesions and oedemas that characterised the pox, and so left itself open to the worst outcomes of the coronavirus.
It was a one-two punch, cruelly bio-engineered by fate, and delivered with shocking effectiveness.
Just because mankind’s luck had run out along with its ability to reproduce didn’t mean it got any special favours from fate; maybe luck may be a lady, but fate isn’t.
Fate is crude, blunt and mannerless and has no regard for fairness.
Fate had no problem kicking humanity when it was down.
The knock-on effects were as brutal as they were unwelcome, but the headline was that the timetable for extinction accelerated as the graph of world population mapped against time plunged sickeningly sharply down to the right, as almost one in two people were killed by the global rampage of the murderous pair.
The Outer Isles had already lost their ferry services, and self-sufficiency had become a necessity rather than an abstract green virtue to be aimed at in the comforting knowledge that the shops would always be restocked once a week from the mainland, and so could make up any shortfall.
The mainland had become another country that was still heard from, but which only provided necessary goods if a journey was made to collect them.
Since fuel was no longer delivered, that became less and less effective as only sailing boats could make the trip, weather allowing, and the sailing boats on the island were not designed to carry large amounts of freight, being leisure craft.
A Relocation Outreach Team was sent from the government’s relatively new Department of Mitigation on the mainland.
It travelled north from the isle of Barra in the south, all the way up the length of the Long Isle, Eriskay to South Uist to Benbecula and North Uist and then on to the community hall on Berneray before heading over the Sound to Harris and Lewis, having meetings with the small communities along the way and making the case for bringing the population back off the island on to the mainland so that they could at least be sure of access to food and shelter and what healthcare remained.
It was a well-meant initiative, but its nickname of “Doing a St Kilda” raced up the island ahead of it, triggering a folk memory of a once populous and close-knit island community being lifted lock, stock and barrel by the government and then spread to the four winds.
Nobody who was left on the outer islands by then had much interest in abandoning what they had to get closer to a society that already seemed to be in the early stages of falling apart.
And by the time the appointed date for embarking the few households that had decided to take the government up on their offer of rehousing them came round, it was academic.
Firstly, because the last pandemic had put the logistics of the transfer on what was hopefully a temporary hold, and secondly because the Relocation Outreach Team had unwittingly brought the doubled virus and pox along with them, and in their conscientious efforts to spread the word as thoroughly as they could, had also inflicted an almost mediaeval visitation of the plague upon the community.
So even if the promised boat had come to the pier at Lochmaddy as initially planned, more than half of those who had accepted the idea of relocation had already moved on to the next life and would not have been travelling.
And now, instead of working together and pooling resources the remaining islanders looked at each other with suspicion.
The Girl had not gone to the meetings with the Relocation Team, since the government was the very thing she was hiding from, and so avoided the first wave of infections.
She finally moved back into the childhood holiday house across the causeway from Berneray because it was even more isolated than that small island, which still had just enough households on it to make her uneasy about bumping in to infected people.
She turned in on herself even more than usually, focusing on just keeping going, fishing from her boat and trapping the rabbits that were overrunning the machair.
She also tended her vegetable patches and those of the vacant houses strung here and there long the increasingly untravelled road to Berneray.
It was in fact so untravelled that one day she bicycled down to the junction with the main road that circled the island and discovered a telegraph pole had been felled and laid across the cattle-grid that protected sheep from wandering off the long peninsula where she now lived, a hermit among the abandoned crofts and farms. Someone had nailed a board to the pole and written DANGER – INFECTION!
across it. She could tell it had been there a while without her knowing it.
She stood bemused for an hour, watching the main road beyond, waiting for anything or anyone to come past in either direction.
They didn’t. Lack of fuel had put paid to island road traffic too.
Then she turned her bicycle and pedalled home, realising for the first time that things might be coming to a close faster than she’d imagined.
But she still believed he would come.
He had, after all, sworn it, and he had never yet broken his word to her.
She decided her time would be best spent picking her cabbages and fermenting them for the coming cold months.
Life would be hard enough without getting scurvy, and she knew sauerkraut was a good way to boost your vitamin C and thus avoid it.
So even in the somewhat dazed and dreamy state she often felt herself drifting around in, she stayed practical and oddly focused, despite herself.
The hard winter that followed thinned out the population once again and come the following spring the island lost more families to the pull of the mainland, and still he had not come.
And though there was no more fuel coming there was, thanks to the small wind turbine at the edge of the machair and the photovoltaics on the roof, power.
So she had a radio with which to listen to the world spasming beyond the empty horizons around the island, and was aware of the unrest and dislocation spread like a rash between his last known location and her.
But still. If he had survived the pandemic which was still blazing its way across Europe and Asia like a hungry fire that doesn’t want to go out, if he had kept his word, he could have walked to her by now.
That’s what she told herself when things felt bad.
But hope, treacherously, does die last.
Now the final people on Berneray had survived the pincer movement of pox and coronavirus, she began visiting them on a semi-regular basis.
They were from an old island family that had known her parents, but were a generation younger than her, so they had few shared memories with which to rebuild a deep friendship.
Nonetheless they got on, and so the day she went to visit with some sauerkraut as a gift and found their house empty and their boat gone was a shock.
She found herself weeping on the edge of the small boxy harbour, and then realised she’d dropped the jar, as she looked down at her boots, now garnished with pale strands of fermented cabbage.
She carefully picked up the glass shards and crunched away from the concrete hardstanding that ran round the perimeter of the dock, towards the bottle-recycling container which had always been there throughout her childhood.
It was there still but had been crammed and jammed with glass many years past, when the recycling services stopped, and people began burning their rubbish once again.
The rusting container was surrounded by buttresses of empty bottles, and the portholes with their rubber flanges to protect you from smashing glass flying back at you as you dropped your empties in were blocked with old bottles.
It was only then that she realised what she was doing, the impulse to recycle as ridiculous as some ritual from a long dead and now irrelevant religion, and threw the jar at the side of the container, which did at least give her the satisfaction of hearing the pleasing childhood noise of broken glass.
And then she cried, standing at the centre of what had become the island’s discarded midden, feeling more alone than she ever had.