Last One at the Party Read online

  Instead, I began to doubt myself and all of the choices I had made. Sure, I travelled the world and experienced things people only read about (in my articles) but I’d never properly paid rent or bought a TV licence. I’d gone directly from childhood home into university halls and then back to my parents’ again. I should probably have moved out, but what was the point when I was hardly ever there?

  I’d always thought I was strong and independent. I’d always been happy with who I was and hadn’t required the approval of others. I didn’t need a gaggle of girlfriends to discuss my latest purchases or conquests with. I wasn’t prolific on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, I didn’t post for likes.

  But now I wondered if this was all by choice. Was I alone and independent because I wanted to be, or because I had no other options?

  I started poring over other people’s Facebook accounts. People I’d known at school and university were settling down, getting married, having kids. They were being bridesmaids and organising baby showers. My best, and pretty much only, friend was gay and didn’t believe in marriage or children, so I wasn’t likely to be called upon to offer up these services anytime soon.

  I began to sleep badly, drink more, and have a constant knot of fear in my stomach.

  I knew I wanted to change my life, but was too paralysed by indecision to know what to do first.

  It took about three months for the knot of fear to develop into low-key panic attacks, and another couple of months for those panic attacks to wear me down to the point where I thought I was going to have to admit to someone that I was having trouble leaving my room in the morning.

  And just then, into my strange dark world, came James.

  James was the new advertising manager for the music journal, and he became the office golden boy within a week. Good-looking but not unattainably so, funny in a sarcastic, throwaway way that was confident but also completely self-deprecating, good at his job but not so good that he made other people look bad, friendly with the management but not so friendly he couldn’t take the piss out of them.

  He was ten years older than me, embodied everything that I wasn’t, and had everything that I didn’t: a career, a house, a car, and a washing machine that kept breaking down. He talked of long-term life plans, career trajectories, of saving for a mortgage deposit, of two-week summer holidays to places that cost half my yearly salary. He also had a long-term girlfriend whom he lived with and who was angling for a proposal, but I chose to gloss over that part of his enviable lifestyle.

  His grounded and adult world made mine seem even more transitory and baseless. What was I doing with my life? If anyone had the answer it was James.

  Without even acknowledging it to myself James became my reason for leaving the house each day. At least during the working week.

  He was the balance to my chaos, a calming centre of normality and routine.

  We discovered we got the same train into work and so started to sit together.

  Those train journeys were when I fell in love.

  Squashed together for forty-five minutes we talked of everything – past, present and future. We compared childhoods, school, first time having our hearts broken, our jobs, dream homes. We talked about work and how he wanted to move into something more creative. I talked about having my novel rejected – something I hadn’t even told my parents.

  We had absolutely nothing in common. James had started work at sixteen, wanted to work his way up the career ladder and then invest in property; I, obviously, still lived with my parents, had fallen into my one and only job by accident and spent all my spare money on going out and travelling.

  But, somehow, it worked – we worked.

  I memorised every physical detail of him. The length of his eyelashes and the laughter lines that wrinkled the corners of his eyes when he smiled. The way the sun would catch the lighter ginger streaks in his hair and the smattering of grey in his sideburns. How on a Wednesday he would have a layer of stubble before he shaved again on Thursday. The tan that he returned with after a two-week holiday. The smell of him in the morning, fresh from the shower, aftershave sharp and citrus. The smell of him on the way home, a slight tang of sweat, the residue of the office still on his skin. The warmth that came from him as we sat close together.

  I lived for our train journeys. James got the train three stops after me and I would save the seat next to mine, frantically apologising to people who tried to take advantage of the space. Sometimes people sat there despite my protests, sometimes he wouldn’t get on my carriage, sometimes he would get another train. These were dark days. But, on the days he sat next to me, he made me feel better. He made the knot in my stomach loosen and the fog lift slightly. When I was with him I didn’t have to think about me because I was too busy thinking about him. When I was with him, I felt okay. I felt normal. I felt safe.

  As I said, from the very beginning, James made things feel better.

  James made me feel better.

  Why did James get 6DM and I didn’t?

  Was it because he went out in those three days? Did I miss some weird contraction window? Maybe we both had it, but my disgusting hangover symptoms had expelled it from my body? If doctors had induced extreme vomiting in the early stages of the virus could they have purged it from everyone?

  Maybe I really am the ultimate anomaly, the only person with immunity in the whole world. Maybe I am actually the cure.

  Whatever.

  James sneezed at 4.36 a.m. on December 3rd and I knew he was going to die.

  December 3rd 2023

  I hate clocks.

  I hate the flickering numbers and constant shine of digital clock faces; the scary omnipresence and constant tick, tick, tick of grandfather clocks; the shrill alarm that always interrupts your best moment of sleep; the ever-present reminder that all clocks observe your life slowly ebbing away second by second.

  I hate having them anywhere in the house, but the bedroom is the worst. It’s like having a prison warden at your bedside – go to bed now, get up now, finish doing your make-up now, don’t spend too long in the bath, fall asleep in the next nine minutes or you’ll not get the recommended eight hours’ rest.

  James was obsessed with being on time and liked to set all the clocks in the house ten minutes fast to give him extra leeway. So, on the morning of December 3rd the clock actually read 04.46, but I automatically subtracted the extra ten and there it was: 04:36.

  The sneeze.

  We both jumped, went rigid, and then made a big display of relaxing and pretending to sleep.

  Never have I hated a clock as much as that neon devil, and the eternity it took to click through the next three hours that needed to pass before I could get up without raising suspicion.

  Even 7.30 a.m. was early for me, but by then James had been up for nearly two hours and I couldn’t wait any more.

  I stood outside the living-room door and arranged my features into a normal, bland, early-morning expression.

  Opening that door was the most frightening thing I have ever done.

  He looked up and smiled brightly.

  ‘I think I have a cold. Must be because I went out without my big coat.’

  ‘I told you to wear a hat you idiot. Want tea?’

  I wept in the bathroom. Quietly.

  Then I made the tea.

  We spent the day on the sofa watching movies and studiously ignoring James’s cold, which was worsening by the hour.

  By 3 p.m. he was radiating heat but shivering uncontrollably. We had Die Hard on, because he loves Die Hard and it always makes him feel better, when his first stomach cramp hit. He crunched up in pain and I squeezed his hand so hard he cried out.

  ‘Sorry!’

  We had been avoiding looking at each other for the last hour, focussing our attention on the Bruce Willis mission, rather than facing the reality of death in our own living room.

  ‘Don’t break my hand as well!’

  I turned to look at him.

 
His eyes were huge and frightened. He looked like a sick, sweaty, twelve-year-old boy. He tried to smile and burst into tears.

  I held my forty-six-year-old husband as he cried. The man I had loved and lived with for eleven years. The man I had thought, at one point, I’d have kids with, grow old with, be with for ever.

  And, in the end, I was with him for ever.

  It was just his for ever, not mine.

  The next twenty-four hours were the worst.

  James became delirious. But not out of it enough to be unaware of his pain and suffering. He rolled around our bed shivering and vomiting and shitting. I mopped his brow, held his sick bucket, dragged him to and from the toilet, changed the bed sheets after he soaked them through with sweat.

  I crushed up every over-the-counter painkiller I could find, dissolved them in water and trickled them into the corner of his mouth. I worried that I was exceeding the recommended doses and then realised that probably didn’t matter any more.

  At 4 p.m. on December 4th he finally fell asleep, and I went out to find help.

  It was the first time I’d left the house since the outbreak and I was petrified.

  It wasn’t even that I had purposely avoided it; there had been no reason to go out. James had fetched us everything we needed, and the advice had been to stay indoors.

  I spent nearly twenty minutes fashioning a face mask out of an old bandana before I realised there was no point. I had flecks of James’s sweat, vomit, and shit on my face, in my hair and up my nose. If I was going to get 6DM it wouldn’t be from going outside.

  Films and TV shows about the end of the world always show people taking to the street en masse; rioting, looting, fleeing, rallying against the fall of mankind – much like what had happened in America.

  That is not what happened here.

  There had been no mass exodus from London, no nose-to-tail traffic jam blocking the streets, no gridlocked car park on the M25. Nobody tried to flee – where would they have gone? They had tried that in America. It hadn’t worked.

  6DM was everywhere, you couldn’t escape it.

  For the first half hour I wandered the streets aimlessly, unable to comprehend the wasteland that London had become.

  Even though I had experienced lockdown before, this immediately felt different, unreal, like the population of London had just moved somewhere else temporarily and would soon be back. The lights were still on, Christmas decorations still twinkled in shop windows, adverts for upcoming movies smiled glossily on billboards, tables and chairs sat expectantly outside cafés and bars. Everything was waiting for the people to return like they had last time.

  There were few people, fewer cars, no buses or lorries – public transport and deliveries had stopped as soon as 6DM arrived. The only people on the streets were the people like me, scurrying along, face masks on, heads down, intent on getting somewhere and back as soon as possible.

  It was quiet but not yet silent. There was some residual noise from buildings where generators were still working, underground vents, street lighting, soft music being piped from the open doorways of shops left abandoned.

  There had been images on the TV in previous days showing huge army trucks moving bodies to mass burial sites. The trucks were always accompanied by stricken relatives, sick themselves, but alive enough to mourn the passing of those they loved and the injustice of the impersonal transport taking them to their final resting places. There were no trucks now and, when I thought about it, I realised the news hadn’t reported anything about the burials in the last twenty-four hours.

  The shops were empty of people but most still had some goods in them. Some had windows shattered or doors smashed in but others simply had their doors open; an invitation to take whatever you wanted. Goods and money were worthless now.

  I stopped outside the local church on the high street. In the entrance was a big wicker basket filled with small, cheap handmade wooden crosses. The sign next to the basket read ‘Remember your loved ones’.

  I walked around to the back of the church. The lawn and graveyard was covered with the crosses. Some ornately decorated and lovingly inscribed, some with names scrawled on them in biro. Some had one name, others had three or four. One had sixteen names with ages ranging from seven months to eighty-two years old – an entire family of four generations. There were hundreds, maybe a thousand crosses. Each one placed there by someone who had watched their loved ones die and was now dying themselves.

  I was horrified and transfixed by the makeshift graveyard until I heard a cough at my elbow. An old man, doubled in pain and clutching a cross in his hand, stared at me with sharp, watery eyes, his nose streaming with snot.

  I made the mistake of reacting as I would have at any other point before 6DM.

  I smiled.

  ‘You’re not sick?’

  I backed away shrugging, unsure what answer he wanted from me.

  ‘You’re not sick?’ he repeated, louder.

  I turned and started to walk away from him.

  ‘YOU’RE NOT SICK!’

  He screamed his accusation this time, and I began to run, frightened of what he would do next or what others might do if they heard him.

  I buried my face down into my scarf and kept to the shadows of the buildings.

  I went to the chemist first and was hugely relieved that the door was open so I didn’t have to attempt to break in. You could still get your fill of expensive perfumes and face creams, but the shelves were empty of cold, flu, and stomach medicine. All the children’s meds were gone. No one had bothered taking the antibiotics – you can’t fight a nuclear war with a water pistol.

  The only painkillers left were morphine tablets that I found behind the counter in a cupboard that had already been broken open, so I took them all.

  They still had boxes of T600 at the front of the shop. I didn’t take any.

  Our doctors’ surgery was closed and a handwritten sign on the door said that they couldn’t help anyone, and that T600 was available at the local pharmacy.

  Pretty final.

  I thought at first that the hospital was open.

  The car park was rammed, and a queue of ambulances was lined up outside A&E. A paramedic was smoking on the back step of one of the ambulances. He looked up as I walked past but didn’t say anything. Still, his very presence cheered me and gave me some hope.

  The automatic doors to A&E were still working, but as soon as they slid open I knew that small amount of hope was worthless.

  I’d never smelt death, but I am willing to bet my entire fortune (which is pretty considerable, seeing as I may now be the ruler of the whole world) on it smelling like the blast of warm air that greeted me when the doors parted.

  It smelt of vomit and faeces and disinfectant and hand sanitiser and – something that I had never smelt up until that point, but am becoming quite used to now – slowly putrefying flesh.

  A brief glance told me that everyone in the room was dead or dying, there were no medical staff, and that, if I did want to try to catch 6DM, this was the place to do it.

  As I turned to leave there was a low moan from somewhere in the room that haunts my nightmares to this day. It was something that had once been human, trying to communicate its pain and suffering. For a moment I almost believed that I had stepped into a world where the dead would soon come back to life and try to eat me. But then the moan turned into a cough and then into a retch and then into the more acceptable sound of someone dying. I clapped my hands over my ears and jumped back through the doors into the car park.

  Outside, the paramedic was vomiting.

  I know I should have rushed home to James, but I had never needed a drink so badly in my life, and, if I am honest, I didn’t know if I could face going home to watch James die if I were sober, so instead, I went to a bar.

  I went to my favourite bar.

  I didn’t expect it to be open, but it was, and a sign on the bar said, ‘Help yourself’. If it hadn’t been my favourite bar a
lready, then that would have made it so.

  The fact that it looked like nothing had been drunk or taken was as much an indication of the death of the nation as the state of A&E.

  I had a whisky. I hate whisky, but I needed something that would get me drunk straight away. So, I had a whisky and then a bottle of beer. In fact, I had two whiskies and then a bottle of beer.

  I sat at the back, away from the windows, so that no one would see me if they walked past. No one did walk past though.

  I had another couple of whiskies and another beer, and then I made a phone call, and then, a while later, someone else came into the bar.

  It was obvious that he was dying too.

  Later , on my way home, I stopped at the pharmacy and picked up two packs of T600.

  The next morning James said he felt better. He wasn’t as hot, didn’t feel sick any more, and was able to move to the sofa. He said he had a banging headache but otherwise felt okay. He drank a cup of tea and ate a banana.

  He staggered to the shower and when he came out, I was changing the sheets on the bed. I was bent over and he came up behind me and rubbed his erection against my arse. I wasn’t wearing knickers underneath my nightie, so he yanked it up and was in me in seconds. I normally enjoy being surprised like this, but this was the first time we had had sex in over six months, and the complete lack of foreplay and fact he might be infecting me with 6DM-ridden sperm pissed me off.

  Until I realised he wasn’t making love to me, he was fucking me to prove that he could, as though his life depended on it.

  Which maybe it did.

  So, I faked an orgasm and reached back to stroke his balls and help him come. It was all over in about ninety seconds. Still, he looked pretty pleased with himself.

  I was showering when James called from the front room. I rushed in, naked and dripping, fearful of what I would find.

  He was on the sofa, pointing at the TV screen.

  Television by this point had been reduced to emergency broadcasts on all channels with a five-minute pre-recorded newscast repeated at the beginning of each hour on the BBC.

  This was different.