The Migration, page 4
“Not much, I guess. Not enough.” I feel embarrassed, like I’ve been caught out not doing my homework.
“Shall we go for a wander?” She gathers up some papers from her desk and slides them under her arm, gesturing me out into the hall. New College is like a palace. Even the undergraduate residence wings are roofed with golden spires. But for all that it’s beautiful it doesn’t feel like a happy place. More like everyone’s holding their breath, the students and faculty.
While she leads me through a series of arched corridors, she tells me about her work. “Disease shaped our development, not just at a superficial level, but our biology as well. Our genome is riddled with the debris of ancient viruses, invaders, colonizers who inserted their genes into our own. They changed us, and we changed them in return. We twisted them to our own uses. These things, these fossils, they come alive while we are beginning to form in the womb. They defend our cells from infection, and guide us in our growth.”
She leads me out into a quadrangle lit up by the pale January light.
“But diseases have a history as well,” she says. “That’s what I’m interested in. Think about this: it was only when people began to gather in larger communities, during the Neolithic period, that the opportunities for diseases to spread increased dramatically. Diseases require people to be in close proximity to one another, to domesticated animals. That’s when they become endemic, or perpetually present.”
“So disease is the price we pay for being close to one another.”
“That’s a good way of looking at it, yes.” Aunt Irene wears her interests so plainly it seems almost embarrassing at times—but wonderful too. She isn’t afraid of people knowing what she cares about, unlike most of the girls I knew back home. “Disease presents us with the worst picture of humanity we can imagine. It shows us our fallibility, our mortality. At a basic level it makes us fear for our lives, for our communities, and that fear can be a powerful incentive for violence. But in times of plague there are also stories of great kindness, generosity and heroism. It’s the testing ground of a civilization.”
She pauses while a group of undergraduates rush past us, forcing us to one side. One of them offers a wave of apology to Aunt Irene. He has fine features, dark wavy hair and a slight widow’s peak that reminds me of the portrait of Lord Byron in my Selected Poems. I feel a pang of longing that he’s part of this place, part of her life here.
“I’m not upsetting you, am I? Talking about it like this?” Aunt Irene asks.
I hesitate. Seeing the close knots of students here reminds me of back home, Jaina and I waiting in line at school while nurses took blood samples. I was freaking out, and worried about Kira, but I didn’t want to show it. Some of my other friends began acting weird after Kira’s diagnosis. They never said anything, not directly, but they stopped coming over to the house and they got obsessive about smearing on disinfectant whenever I was around. It just made things worse, their fake sympathy and their silence.
“No,” I tell Irene softly. “It’s good to talk about it.”
“Come on. Let’s get you something to eat.”
* * *
—
We hole up in the Senior Common Room, which is a bit like a private club for professors. I’m the youngest person here by decades. The couches are covered with blue and gold fabric that reminds me of chintzy hotel wallpaper. My aunt heaps my plate with cheese, crackers and a giant slice of chocolate cake.
It’s only when she sits me down opposite her and her face goes serious that I realize maybe there’s more to this visit than I thought.
“What is it?” I ask, stomach sinking.
She stares for a minute longer and then shakes her head, smiling ruefully. “You’re smart as a whip, aren’t you?” When I start to push the cake away from me she holds up her hands. “It’s nothing bad, I promise. Or at least I don’t think so. It’s just—I’m involved in a project that might be interesting for you.”
“For me?” My eyebrows inch up.
“I don’t like to go on about my work too much.”
“Because of Kira?”
She makes a noise but doesn’t answer properly.
“Please. I want to know, really.”
“You must be wondering about what’s happening. After the news last night.” A faint look of distaste crosses her face.
“What you’re studying has something to do with that?”
She takes a deep breath and smooths back her hair. “Everyone is searching for precedents for what we’re seeing, anything that might help pin down the mode of transmission or help us to understand the disease cycle. Diseases don’t spontaneously generate. Like I was saying, they have a history, they come from something.”
“From what exactly?”
She slices off a hunk of cake with her fork and smiles. “Sorry. This stuff is always on offer but I can’t bear to take a whole slice for myself. Mind sharing?”
I don’t feel that hungry anyway.
“Did you know that most of the quads in the College used to be burial pits for plague victims?” she asks after a minute.
“There are bodies underneath us right now?”
“There was a team of microbiologists that did studies on the plague victims to see whether there was a bacterium—Yersinia pestis—or something else, something we haven’t discovered yet. My research has to do with that—the potential links between JI2 and earlier epidemics.”
“But, c’mon,” I say half-jokingly, “it can’t be as bad as the Black Death.”
She takes another bite of the cake, not saying anything. In the lull, a sudden wave of homesickness hits me, a longing for normal conversation.
“The issue isn’t just scale. We’ve been processing samples of tooth pulp tissue taken from victims buried in plague pits in the Middle Ages, and earlier. Our original plan was to confirm previous findings, that the bacterium which caused the Black Death was present at those sites. But we found something else. Traces of altered DNA, evidence of a hormone they’ve detected in patients who have JI2.”
I try to work through the implications of this. “You think they had it?”
She looks at me steadily. “Some of them, maybe. What if the bubonic plague wasn’t the only cause of death? What if there were two outbreaks happening at the same time? Think about what JI2 causes: a weakened immune system, which makes victims more susceptible to other diseases. Almost half the population of Europe died in the plague and we still don’t know for sure why it was so devastating.”
“But what about the…” It feels strange to say the words, even comical. “The jitterbug. The Lazarus effect? Do the doctors at the Centre have any idea what it is?”
“That’s what we need to find out. The Centre has decided to fund a project of mine. They’ve offered me a lab at the hospital, space to complete some of my work.” She glances away almost shyly now, as if she’s worried about overstepping. “I thought you might help me with the background research. It’s transcribing notes, mostly, and admin work. But if you really are interested, it would be a chance to learn more. There’s a small pot of money for it.”
“You’d really let me help?”
She nods, a slow smile spreading across her face. For a moment I can glimpse another person there, someone younger. The girl who would clip stories from the newspaper, searching for clues as to why things turned out the way they did. “Sometimes the dead are our only way of finding answers.”
“Even now?”
“Especially now, niece of mine.”
4
As the week stretches on, Mom won’t let Aunt Irene turn on the TV, in case Kira hears about Liam Barrett on the news. She puts an Internet lock on Kira’s tablet too, which leads to Kira pleading with me to let her use mine, just for ten minutes. She whines when I say no.
On Thursday we’re supposed to hear back about Kira’s blood work but no one calls. Friday, nothing. Mom’s nervous about how much Kira is sleeping these days, nervous about the way she seems to blank out for ten to fifteen seconds at a time.
On Saturday morning, the winter sky is drab and dusky. A dull light shines through the kitchen window while the radio calls out gale warnings for all areas except Biscay, Trafalgar and FitzRoy. A fishing boat with a crew of eighteen is foundering somewhere in the Channel. High winds will batter Dover. There are fears that sea walls in London and Devon might falter. Maybe this time, maybe next time. No one knows for sure.
“God, a real tempest is brewing out there,” Mom says. She’s making pancakes for breakfast while listening to the shipping forecast, one of the things she missed most after she moved to Toronto. Kira isn’t up yet but it was cold enough in the bedroom to send me downstairs shortly after I woke. Even though I’ve put on my aunt’s thick padded slippers, my toes are still chilly.
“Has Aunt Irene already left?” I pour myself a mug of coffee, then return to the book she left on the counter for me to read. When Mom’s eyes skate over it her hand freezes. I can see her mouthing the title: The Black Death: A Personal History.
There have been intense whispered conversations between Mom and Aunt Irene since I went to New College with her, the words “A-levels” and “her education” flung back and forth between them.
“It’s nice to see you up and looking so scholarly on a Saturday.” There’s a faint edge to her words, which she tries to soften with a smile. She turns back to the pancakes so I can’t see her face. “Your aunt wanted to put in a couple of hours at work. She’ll be back by lunch, I think.”
I push my luck, hoping to coax a little enthusiasm.
“It’s pretty great that she wants me to help. It’s better than that co-op I did at Toronto East General Hospital, that was nothing but filing paperwork in an office. At least this makes me feel useful. It means something, you know?”
She looks as if she wants to object, but instead she says: “If it’ll help with your history A-levels…”
“I’ve been reading about this little town up north called Eyam.”
“Am I going to like this story?”
“It’s not so bad. In the seventeenth century, a bunch of villagers there realized they were getting sick. They set up a circle of boundary stones, which no one was supposed to cross.”
“A quarantine?”
“Uh huh. They bored holes in the rocks where they left coins soaked in vinegar to pay for bundles of food from their neighbours.”
“Why vinegar?”
“They thought it would disinfect the coins and keep everyone safe. The thing is, mostly the system worked. The quarantine, I mean.” The steam from my coffee makes a pleasant column of warmth over the cup. I take a sip. It’s bitter and burnt tasting—delicious. “They had a pretty rough time of it in Eyam, but at least the plague didn’t spread.”
Now Mom’s scooping up the pancakes and laying them out for me alongside thick rashers of bacon. “That was good of them,” she says.
“It wasn’t like all those apocalypse movies, you know? No fighting, or pillaging or anything. They didn’t all suddenly become lawless barbarians. In fact, they probably saved a lot of lives by figuring out how to take care of themselves. It’s nice to remember that people aren’t always completely savage when they’re abandoned in a bad situation. They made a decision for themselves.”
She sighs and settles herself down on the seat next to me. “Just don’t get too caught up in it, okay, sweetheart?”
“Aunt Irene says I can use it as an independent project,” I reply defensively. “I’ve been making notes.”
When I hold up my notebook, a tense look passes over her face, a tightening of her jaw. “Your aunt used to do the same thing when she was younger.”
“She told me. I thought it sounded like a good idea to have a record of all this. What’s happening.”
“But why do you need something like that? Don’t you just want to focus on other things? You’re so young, Feef, I don’t want you to worry about this. When I was your age—well. Let’s just say I had my mind on other things. Other people.”
Like Dad.
“I want to understand, that’s all.” I trace the spiral edge of the notebook. “Remember what it was like when Grammy got sick?”
It had happened when I was little. She and Dad’s mom had always been close, even when things were rough between them. When Grammy was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer Mom had a hard time coping until Dad converted the basement into a studio. He was good back then but I wonder if that was the beginning of the end, the severing of one last tie between them. Not that I thought about that much at the time. I remember I used to go down sometimes and watch her. She’d create huge collages using hundreds of images from magazines. She’d cut out the pictures, faces mostly, and layer them on top of each other until they took on a new shape, almost three-dimensional. Additive magic, she used to call it.
She made one of Grammy just before she died, when she lost her hair and her face had that gaunt, yellowish sheen. She used all sorts of old pictures, making duplicates of the ones she could find in the old albums. Mom’s collage dignified her, gave her depth—it showed something about who she had been, the part of her the disease never touched.
“Okay,” Mom says at last, relenting. “If you think it’ll help.”
The collages didn’t come with us to England. As far as I know, Dad still has them in the basement in Toronto, wrapped in plastic sheets like mummies waiting to be discovered.
* * *
—
“Pancakes!” Kira shrieks when she finally comes down the stairs, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Soff, you should’ve come and got me.”
“And you should’ve got up when I poked you an hour ago.”
“I was tired.” She slides into the chair across from me and leans on her elbows.
“How tired were you, Kiki?” Mom asks, faux-casual.
“Just tired. I don’t know the number for how tired I was.”
But then that strange look is in Kira’s eyes again. When Mom takes Kira’s plate from the oven she won’t touch it. “I don’t want bacon like this. Why can’t we have bacon like it was back home?”
“That’s just the way they do things here.” I make a grab for her plate, which she yanks away. “C’mon, if you’re not going to eat it then I will.”
“Leave my bacon alone!” This is where we’d normally break into a comfortable sibling squabble, me poking at her, trying to tickle her sides, but the trill of the phone ringing stops us.
“Hello?” Mom’s voice changes when she answers. It’s Dr. Varghese, then. Kira glares at her plate while Mom disappears into the other room.
“Don’t touch me, Soff,” she says, “I don’t like it.”
“Sorry,” I tell her, faintly ashamed. A fog of old bruises dots her arm, the webbing of veins visible beneath. Some days her skin seems nearly translucent, like those cave fish used to darkness.
“What is it?” I ask when Mom reappears but she doesn’t answer me. She turns to Kira who’s just finished scraping her mostly untouched breakfast into the compost bin.
“Sweetheart, can you come here for a minute?”
Kira doesn’t look up. Her hands move mechanically. She puts the plate on the counter next to the sink and starts running the water.
“That was Dr. Varghese on the phone. She’s just been looking at the blood work we sent in and she’s noticed a problem. She wants you to come in for observation overnight. I know it’s a pain.”
My chest tightens.
“I don’t want to.” Kira’s voice is tense as a loaded spring.
“This isn’t about wanting, baby girl. We need to keep you healthy.”
There’s relief in Mom’s voice. Nothing definitive then, just more testing. Not that Kira is happy about it.
“I don’t care!” With a fierce swipe, Kira sends her plate crashing into the floor. She stares at the pieces on the ground. “I’m not ever going to get better. We all know that. We just keep pretending.”
Mom draws in a slow breath. Ceramic shards skitter away from me as I grab Kira’s arm.
“Don’t talk like that to Mom,” I warn her. “You just have to…” I don’t know. Her eyes are glossy with unshed tears. I tell myself I can fix this, I know I can. But this is the kid who used to do one-handed cartwheels in the backyard. She used to fly down the soccer pitch, the best player on her team. Everything she used to love is being stripped away from her.
“Let me take her out, okay? She just needs to get out of the house,” I tell Mom. Before I know it I’ve begun bundling Kira up into her waterproof jacket.
“Where are you going?” Mom demands. She won’t look at Kira, who is furiously tugging on her boots.
“Not far, I promise. We’ll come back if she gets tired. But I can get her calmed down. Just let me—”
BANG!
The door has slammed shut behind Kira. Mom’s hand wanders to her throat. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, “tell her that, Feef? I don’t want this anymore than she does.”
“I know, Mom. She knows too. She just forgets sometimes.”
* * *
—
“Hey, come back!” Kira’s fast but I’m faster.
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
When I grab her hand, she spins around, huffing, out of breath. “I’m not five,” she says, “I can be outside on my own.”
I hate the look of strain on her face, the dark smudges beneath her eyes. “Let me come with you. Just so Mom won’t worry.”
In a small, repentant voice, she asks: “Aren’t you mad at me? I broke a plate.”
“I’m not mad.”
“I didn’t mean what I said.”
“It’s hard for all of us, Kiki,” I tell her.
“I keep scaring everyone. I’m so sick of it! And now it’s just gonna get worse, isn’t it? What happened to Liam Barrett’s probably gonna happen to me too.”
“How do you know about that?” I ask sharply.
She looks away. “I stole your tablet.”
“You know the password?”
