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Smiling Assassin

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She was a professional. Human Resources. Emphasis on the resources rather than the human. Her colleagues had nicknamed her “the smiling assassin” and whilst she gave no outward expression, beyond that signature smile, that she either agreed nor disagreed with the moniker, inwardly she liked it. Inwardly she also silently chalked up who was a little too keen to keep calling her it. Chalked up, filed away, took a mental note to take them out at the knees when an opportunity presented itself in the future. And it would. It always did.

She had not agreed with the new behavioural framework for the organisation. She’d maintained a steely, tight-lipped smile as her peer, the Head of Employee Experience, had taken them all through the briefing. As a general principle she didn’t believe that employees should be having experiences anyway; experience was something you gained, incrementally, steadily, painfully if necessary. Not something that was gifted to you, wrapped in a bow, from a team trying to smooth out all the rough edges of work. There was a reason it was called work.

The new framework – or “our behavioural contract” to give it full title, complete with the need for mandatory signature to signal “buy in” – was, on the face of it, simple. Be candid. Be respectful. Be brilliant. Be you.

She wasn’t having difficulty with any of the statements individually although was still disappointed that her suggestions of minor tweaks had gone unheeded. For the record they were: be brief or be gone, be good or be gone, be you unless you is insufferable and unable to understand acceptable parameters of professionalism in a modern office. She hadn’t actually voiced that last one despite the new desire for everyone to be candid. She’d judged that it might be perceived as not being respectful and therein lay the issue. Individually the statements were all fine – if a little soft – but entirely contradictory in practical application.

Being candid she wanted to regularly let everybody know that she was singlehandedly covering for their woeful performance. Being candid she wanted, specifically, to tell the Head of Employee Experience that, no, she wouldn’t like to be reverse mentored by a sixteen year old to learn about the lived experience of Gen-Z and how she could extend her profile via Tik Tok with a self-deprecating rap about the menopause. And, no, she didn’t think that giving everybody a day off on their birthday was a good idea and, no, she didn’t want to join in on fancy dress day and come in attired as a pirate. Being candid she wanted to put two thirds of her peers on performance measures, or, in the spirit of real candour, just get rid of them all via a compromise agreement. The compromise, on her side, being that she hasn’t just called security to have them escorted from the building without notice because the in-house employment lawyer (who was within that two thirds of peers) wasn’t prepared to play who-blinks-first at the resulting tribunals. Being candid she thought that the competency framework was better expressed as an incompetency framework given the examples at hand from the people around her. The idea from the Head of Talent to bring in an actual bicycle to brief everybody on the talent cycle (“it’s a metaphor, if people pedal really hard around here and steer well then they can succeed”) was, candidly, the most ridiculous thing she had heard since the same person had suggested that the potential axis on the talent grid could be changed to run from un-nurtured acorns to mighty oaks. She had given up trying to explain that all the potential was in the acorn. Not that she cared about potential: you can either do it now or you can’t and if you can’t then please refer yourself to the “be good or be gone” behavioural standard. Being candid she wasn’t entirely sure that she agreed with dress down Fridays, flexible working, the “Shining Stars” recognition scheme, time to work on your development, and, to be honest, lunch hours. Obviously people need to eat. But do they actually need an hour to do it?

She felt like saying all of those things was her being brilliant, being her. Be brilliant. Be you. So, you could argue that she was completely delivering against three of the four behaviours. Seventy five per cent. Crushing it. And if she delivered all of that candour, all of that brilliance, all of that “you”, with a firm, determined smile then surely that meant that she was also being respectful. Four out of four. One hundred per cent. Exceed on her end of year performance rating, top right box of the talent grid, earmarked for greatness on the succession plan. A mighty oak if we really must use the officially sanctioned scale.

She was a professional. She kept these thoughts to herself and with-held her candour. The Head of Employee Experience was pregnant and she knew that she was the obvious candidate for her maternity cover. Twelve months to unpick this madness and take them all out at the knees.

She smiled.

So this, I think, got caught trying to decide if it was funny or mildly sinister and didn’t entirely settle on either… which is my way of saying I’m not entirely happy with it but am also writing on a deadline and have no recourse to an edit. There are bits that work, I think. It’s probably informed by some past experiences but, thankfully, bears no relation to the brilliant people I work with now.

Anyway, internal critic aside… this is another 1,000 words or so towards my pledged 26,000 words in July for Great Ormond Street. Donation page here

Riffs and variations on loss and friendship featuring crochet, black holes, Fred Again, and the dial of destiny…

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“Did you read that thing about the ‘cosmic bass note’?”

“That link you sent me? I only skimmed it. Lost me at super massive black holes colliding and then I got distracted by some unfortunate fashion choices on Insta.”

“So you’re more interested in the come back of crocheted boiler suits than the signature of gravitational waves from the distant universe?”

“First of all, how’d you know that crochet was making a come back? Second of all, it’s not making a come back in boiler suits but they may well be decorating a few wardrobes this year. When did you become Anna Wintour?”

“Who’s Anna Wintour?”

“That’s more like it. You were worrying me there with your sudden extensive knowledge of haute couture. I thought you were about to start advising me on accessorising and form emphasis.”

“You’re changing the subject. We were talking about how shallow you are.”

“Hey, clothes are a visual expression of us as individuals – it’s no less deep than your back holes just because it’s on the cover of Vogue and not Yay Science!”

“I’m pretty sure there isn’t an academic publication called Yay Science. And the very point of black holes is that they are very, very deep.”

“Is it though? I thought the whole point was the light couldn’t escape from them because matter has been compressed so tightly that it produces a huge gravitational pull. So it might not be deep. It might just seem deep because we can’t see into it. Maybe they’re really shallow but, you know, just kinda sucky.”

“Sucky?”

“Sucky. Liable to large amounts of suck.”

“Thanks, I got it. So you did read the article.”

“I did not. I skimmed it. But I have knowledge of things beyond the next must have from Prada’s showing in Milan. Whereas you, despite your lucky guess on crochet, are still dressing like a Gap advert from 1995.”

Pete laughed, glanced down at his jeans, adjusted the phone in his hand.

“You just checked, didn’t you,” said Jen. “You just checked what you’re wearing?”

“Clothes are a visual expression of us as people,” Pete offered. “And I choose to express myself as a Silicon Valley tech start up kind of guy. From the 90s.”

“The 90s will be back in soon, you can just wait for it roll back around,” said Jen. “Anyway, let’s pretend I had read that article. What note do you think it is?”

“What do you mean?”

“The cosmic bass note. Is it like a B? A flat? Or something more basso profondo. G7, maybe. My music theory is a little rusty.”

“Unlike your Astrophysics which is stellar.”

“Interstellar. So what do you think?”

“I think,” said Pete after a pause. “I think you’re not taking this entirely seriously. If I was to humour you though I’d say it was like the bass in a club. Like a proper dance club where you can physically feel it coming out of the subs. Like a throb.”

“Cosmic bass throb. That’s actually not a bad name for a club night. I could see the flyers now. Georgie would have been into that.”

“She would.” Another pause. “Did you see the Fred Again set at Glastonbury? I missed her so much watching that.”

“Yeah, I watched it. I missed her too. There was just something weirdly moving about seeing all those people tuned in to something at exactly the same time. You could tell he was really touched by it.”

“It was completely her sort of thing. She was also trying to get me to one of her DJ nights, she kept talking about it like it was a community, like there was something different that happened to those tunes when a room full of people were all giving themselves up to them together.”

“You’re more of a sad banger kind of guy.”

“Pretty exclusively now. Even then, I guess. Georgie did the uppers and I took care of the downers. Not, you know, literally. Well, sometimes literally.”

“That set was weird though, right? It was euphoric but there was a thread of… I don’t know, a thread of sadness in it. Melancholy. I don’t know.”

“For me there was, sure. It’s just what you bring to it though, isn’t it? I was bringing all my bereavement and loneliness and hurt so even if there’s just a trace of that there I’m going to feel it.”

“Like a gravitational ripple…”

“Like an emotional ripple from the collapsing black hole that was her death,” finished Pete quietly. “That’s a bit melodramatic. Sorry.”

“I thought it was pretty beautiful,” said Jen. “She loved coming down with you, Pete. She used to tell me that she looked forwards to finishing up her sets, exhausted from the adrenaline, from the rush, as much as playing them. Because she could sit with you, put her head back in your lap, listen to whatever slow burn sad song you had queued up, and just be still.”

“I loved that time too,” said Pete. “Stillness was all I wanted, I think. If I could be her point of stillness then that was all I wanted. She was always on the go, always on the move. I just didn’t want her to escape.”

“Like her personal black hole.”

“Yeah, but a nice one. Not a, what did you call it? Not a sucky one. One with a great playlist, a wide selection of movies, and maybe a crafty joint before we’d crawl off to bed.”

“She’d have hated that Ford’s still playing Indiana Jones.”

“True. She didn’t really like him as anyone but Han anyway to be honest so I don’t think she’d have been on board with Dial Of Destiny. He’s what, 80?”

“Something like that. What even is a dial of destiny? I haven’t seen the film. It’s a clock, right?”

“No idea. Shower dial? Your destiny is to be extremely cold and then scalding hot. Indy has a narrow window to wash his hair before disaster strikes. Maybe a sun dial. The whole film just him watching a shadow pass over its surface, a slow rumination on the passing of time and ageing. And then some Nazi’s show up.”

“It could be a really important phone call he has to make. You know, like when you used to ring someone up to ask them out.”

“That could work. They could franchise it. The Dial Of Destiny, followed up by The Date of Desire, and then the trilogy concludes with The Walk Of Shame.”

“That was me and Georgie. Except we skipped the first two. It was just a messy night that turned into a messy morning but one we both wanted to stick around and clear up. Thanks for calling by the way. I appreciate it. Know that I appreciate it.”

“It’s my destiny to be your friend. Just as I was hers. You’re stuck with me.” There was a pause, the usual pause as they ran short of things to say, ran up against the absence. Jen broke the silence in their usual way. “You alright, Pete?”

“Not today, Jen, not today. But ask me again tomorrow.”

This is the third story in July ’23’s mission to write 26,000 words for Great Ormond Street Hospital – fundraising link on main page.

I tend to return to Pete and Jen talking every now and again. It started as an exercise in dialogue and then, over time, I just kinda like listening to them. Their last outing was here and their other conversations are on this page: here

Trenton, Nebraska

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You were walking up the incline, one hand bridged across your forehead to shield your eyes from the setting sun. I watched you approach, idly running my fingers through the grass I was sitting on. There was a patch of earth where I’d pulled up the blades in chunks, letting them scatter on the breeze. They didn’t go far but then nothing in this place went far. You had stopped and turned back to look down and across the town; I. thought maybe you were worried that Marv had noticed that you’d clocked early and had followed you up here. It was unlikely. Any time past three and he could reliably be found at Frank’s, holding forth on the betrayal of the American heartlands, why the great state of Nebraska deserved an NFL franchise, and how folk who didn’t make it to church on Sunday had no place in his town. If you could get past the MAGA hat and the bluster he wasn’t so bad. His perspective was just a little narrow, that’s all. I was finding it a struggle to stop mine narrowing each day too.

“Do you think we’ll do it this year?”

You’d turned back from looking at the town and called up to me.

“Do what?” I humoured you. I knew what you were asking. We played this game all the time.

“Scratch two off the sign. Welcome to Trenton, population 516. Is this the year we make it 514?”

“They won’t change the sign” I smirked. “Someone will squeeze out two more to replace us before the year’s out. Nothing else to do round here. Frank’s and a fumble on Saturday, repent at church on Sunday, try and find work Monday to Friday. Besides, we won’t leave. We’re never getting out.”

You sat down next to me, frowned, and pushed a fist gently into my arm, a playful punch. “That’s what I come up here for my little ray of sunshine.”

“Hey, if you wanted sunshine then you’re in the wrong State. I believe Florida has that one all sewn up.”

We sat quietly for a while. I leant back on my elbows and let my head fall back, tried to watch the sunset, upside down, behind me but it made me feel queasy. Neither of us had ever said it but I liked to think that we came up here because if anyone was watching us from the town we’d be backlit by the setting sun, silhouetted against the horizon. Probably looked pretty cool. But neither of us had said it and I wasn’t going to go first in case you thought it was dumb. It always seemed like a fine line between what was cool and what was dumb and not many people drew that line in the same place as me. Once, couple of years ago, before we graduated, I told some of the other girls in school that I thought it’d be fun to dig out some old Disney movies, have a sleepover round someone’s house, pretend to be kids again. I don’t know, maybe I thought we could be all ironic about it but if I’m honest I think there was part of me that wanted the simplicity of evil step-moms and brave, impossibly big eyed girls again. It didn’t go well. They started posting pictures of my head super-imposed on a succession of Disney Princess bodies and posting them to Snap, Insta, whichever flavour of social was in favour that day. They were captioned. I don’t remember all of them but it was stuff like Beauty & The Beast: definitely the beast or Frozen: panties. Nothing that was going to trouble their GPA. Nothing too smart. The one of my dismembered head being held aloft instead of Simba from The Lion King was quite well executed though. Props for the photoshop talents. They left me alone after a couple of weeks when Jennifer Harlow bleached her hair blonde but did something wrong with the peroxide and it all turned bright orange before starting to fall out in clumps.

I met you later that year. You were a year ahead but flunked graduation and they held you back. I guess I’d been aware of you through school but the older kids didn’t really mix with the other years and you weren’t actually there that much. Hence, the flunking. It must have been hard for you. I felt like we were both misfits and maybe that’s why we started hanging out. I thought Jennifer might join our little tribe of the ostracised but she dropped out of school and works now at Cindy’s Grooming. There were some pretty funny looking pets for a while in Trenton but last time I saw her she said she was getting the hang of it. So it was just me and you.

I got you through graduation and you got me through the year. That ended up being the deal, tacitly understood but never stated. I worked hard enough for both of us and we spend long evenings where I’d catch you up on George Washington or irrigation systems or algebra or The Grapes Of Wrath. It wasn’t like you weren’t smart because you were; you just didn’t see the point and didn’t want to do the work. I saw the work as the only way out but maybe even then you didn’t think there was an exit and you gave up before giving it a try. I was determined to prove you wrong back then, it’s only this last six months or so that I’ve felt like the off ramp to anywhere else but here has been closed for essential maintenance with no indication of when it might be open again. I owe you though. It’s true that I got you through the exams but you had my back that whole year. Nobody messed with me because it meant messing with you and your no-fuck’s-given persona was just unpredictable enough that no-one was quite sure what you’d do and didn’t really want to find out. Someone started a rumour that you had a pistol, that they’d seen you shooting at birds over in Bush Creek. It wasn’t true but you didn’t disabuse them of the notion and gradually people fleshed out their own idea of you as some sort of troubled outlaw, firing clips at Blue Jays down by the river on weekends and spoiling for a fight in school in the week. The most troubled I saw you was on Wednesdays when we used to try and learn math. Or wait, it was actually when we first stated looking at sexual reproduction in biology and you had gotten so flustered that you’d left and said you thought you should learn this by yourself. I thought it was kinda sweet and also, to be honest, a relief.

Eventually you broke the silence. “Marv’s talking about retiring.”

“Retiring? Doesn’t he do that every day? To Frank’s?” I replied.

“No, properly retiring. Says it’s getting too much for him now and wants someone to take the business on. He’d own it. Just needs someone to run it for him.” He paused, looked at me.

“Truck and car washing? You’re not seriously considering it? What about…”

“What about what?” He cut me off. “What else have I got? I’m not getting out. I’m not smart like you, I barely graduated High School. Where would I go? This is all I know.”

“But that’s not true,” I protested. “You kept telling yourself last year that you weren’t smart, that you weren’t cut out for books and school but it wasn’t true. It isn’t true.”

“I’m not like you,” he said. He shook his head firmly as if to emphasise the point, as if that was the end of it. I wasn’t prepared to leave it alone, to leave him alone. We’d been having the same conversation for the last two years, planning where we’d go, what we might do, how we’d leave all this small town small mindedness and find somewhere we felt at home. I thought I was the one having doubts recently but had always been encouraged by his enthusiasm, his talk of scraping enough together to catch the Greyhound to Denver, find some work, keep heading West over to California. He knew I had my heart set on San Francisco, an idealised romantic setting down of roots somewhere made up of misfits, the original home of the dreamers. Somewhere in my head I knew I wouldn’t be writing spoken word poetry in a loft apartment, sunlight streaming through the skylights in the eaves; it’d be spot work at Starbucks and a waitressing gig at night but, maybe, just maybe, I could carve out the other stuff too. I just wasn’t sure I was brave enough to do it without him and the realisation of that hit me as he told me about his new future.

“Why are you so scared to live?” I whispered it but it was loud enough for him to hear. His face flushed briefly with anger.

“I’m not scared of anything,” he said, voice rising. “You think I’m too good for this town, that it? Too good for some honest work running a business. Too good for a beer on Friday with the boys? I ain’t too good for any of that. Maybe you think you are.”

I was angry now. We hadn’t really had a cross word since we’d known each other, united in our deal at school, united in our plots and plans since we’d left. “Maybe I am too good for that. Maybe I give myself a bit of credit and don’t want to wind up either washed up at Frank’s, picking at labels on beer bottles and drinking away my regrets, or knocked up by some local who once had the run of the town ‘cos he was captain of the hockey team but now binge watches Fox and complains about liberals ruining America.”

“A local like me?” he said.

I stopped, held his gaze. “You were really terrible at hockey,” I said finally.

He smiled. “I really was. You got me.”

“And you don’t think liberals are ruining America.”

“No, I think America is managing that pretty well on its own.”

“So, don’t stay. Don’t settle for this. I do think you’re too good for it. Or, maybe a better way of putting it, is that I think it’s bad for you. There’s someone you could be that you won’t become here.”

“I’m not like you,” he said again. “That person you think I could be isn’t like you.”

“I don’t want you to be that,” I said. “I want you to be you, the widescreen, all possibilities version of you that will get narrowed and reduced if you stay here….” I trailed off, considering whether to reveal more of myself. It was another one of those moments where I couldn’t decide if what I wanted to say was kinda cool or kinda dumb. Maybe I needed to stop thinking they were mutually exclusive or maybe I just needed to stop second guessing myself all the time. “I can’t do it without you,” I said eventually. “I’m the one that’s scared. I’m the one that’s scared to live.”

The sun had set behind us and the dark was drawing in, lights winking on down in the town in front of us. You could see how contained, how small Trenton was at night, a neat rectangle of lights marking its boundaries and then darkness save for the strip of illumination, East to West, where Highway 34 sliced through the countryside. You rummaged in your pocket and pulled out a set of keys on a fob from Dirt Dawg Car & Truck Wash. You held them up between us. “Reckon we’ve got twelve solid hours before Marv notices it’s gone. Maybe more if he has a big night at Frank’s tonight.”

“What are you saying?” I asked. It was quiet now, just a distant thrum from the Highway in the distance.

“I’m saying that we leave now, tonight. Leave it all behind. Run to California, ditch the pick-up, hope that by the time they find it that they don’t find us. It ain’t strictly theft if the owner gave you the keys, is it?”

“I guess not,” I said. “At the very least it’s ambiguous.”

“Come on then,” he said, standing up. He reached out his hand, smiling. “You scared?”

I matched his smile, took his hand and let him pull me up beside him. “I’m terrified but that’s living, right?”

At time of writing, July ’23, I am trying to deliver 26,000 words as part of a fundraiser for British children’s hospital, Great Ormond Street. Link for donations: here

Not sure where this one came from but have been main-lining the brilliant Ethel Cain record so perhaps it was partially inspired by her “A House In Nebraska” song. Her record is much better than my story so don’t let the above put you off.

Graduation

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They had let her out on the morning of her graduation. Two years, four months, and five days after entering isolation and six months after widespread adoption of the vaccine. They’d lied about almost everything on the program including how long they needed her for. April hung on to the only things that she still believed were true: her blood had saved her friend and would vaccinate the globe. She’d spent most of her life isolated and now she was connected to almost everyone through millions on millions of injections of something synthesised from inside her.

She felt awkward and out of place in the Great Hall. It was the first set of ceremonies to be conducted back in the Wills Memorial since 2019, more than a decade ago, the first time that everyone felt safe converging in such numbers in a confined space. They had arranged a gown for her and let her change at the hospital before a taxi had picked her up to drive her into town. She had kept it from her parents, there would be time to call them later and she hadn’t wanted them to come straight away. She couldn’t really explain it but she’d completed her studies shut away, it was hers and hers alone and she wanted to keep them separate from her memories of her time in Bristol.

In the cab on the way over she had dropped a text to Aps, just a jokey thing commenting on the weather: beautiful day for a graduation. She knew they’d all had their ceremonies already as the scientists (even the pseudo ones like Leah) had been earlier in the week; she’d listened to them all chat about it on one of their regular video calls and been bombarded with photos afterwards, the usual shots of mortar boards thrown into the air, friends arm in arm, laughing families.

There was a shot of Aps that she loved, eyes glowing, facing down the camera with a broad smile. There was no trace of the shattered and wrecked girl that she’d seen in the HDU, no vestige of the months and months of rehabilitation she’d worked through, rebuilding her body, processing what had happened. They had clung to each other for the last two years, speaking every day, working through their memories of their shared experiences and talking about what they were facing now. April would read to her in the first few weeks of her recovery, dialling her up on video, and voicing over whatever she was studying. Later, as Aps got better, she took over the lead on their conversations and April was grateful for that; there were only so many ways to describe her day when every day was basically the same in isolation.

The pictures of Leah and Cora also brought her joy. Leah had grown her hair out, falling down across her shoulders. It was how she wore her hair growing up, she said, when they’d first moved to Italy. Her parents had flown over for her graduation and there were several shots of her and her dad pulling faces at the camera before a final one of the two of them, his arm across her shoulders, him looking at her with a quiet pride. Cora was mostly alone in her pictures but looked content and comfortable in herself. April knew she’d met someone in the last few months, they were taking it slow but it was making her happy. Cora had confided in her the day of her ceremony. She’d hesitated a little as she’d said that she would always love Rob but that she thought that it was finally time to move on.

April took a seat towards the back of the hall which was beginning to fill up. Everyone else gravitated towards the front, filling the rows with the best view. She didn’t mind. She didn’t really know anyone, they’d tried dialling her in on seminars but it had never properly worked trying to keep up with the flow of discussion in the room. They had usually forgotten she was there, a disembodied face on a propped up tablet. Towards the end she’d managed with just viewing the lectures and picking up one to one conversations with her tutor. She had hoped to meet him but couldn’t pick him out in the sea of faces and she felt still too uncertain to try and mingle in the crowd. It was only after she sat down that she realised how overwhelming it all was, like she was undergoing some sort of social bends, coming back up into a large group of people too quickly after so long on her own.

She took a deep breath and stood up. This was too much. She turned to leave.

In the doorway were three women. They weren’t wearing gowns and looked slightly breathless, flush in the cheeks, as if they’d just run up the gothic stairs on their way to the hall. One of them saw her and pointed. And then they were all running, all four, them to April and April to them. She felt arms around her for the first time in two years. They stayed like that for a long time.

“Why are you crying?” said Leah, finally. “You got a first.”

“Yeah,” agreed Cora. “It’s us that should be in tears. We didn’t have to study on our own for our degree and you still did better than us. I think the University’s a bit embarrassed about it to be honest, you’ve made them look bad.”

“They’ll spin it as evidence of the effectiveness of their distance learning programs,” said Leah. “And, I don’t know how to break this to you Cora but we are all kind of crying.”

“What are you doing here?” said April. “How did you know?”

“Really?” said Aps. “You think we wouldn’t figure out your cryptic little text. Absolutely classic April, can’t just come out with it and ask us to come.”

“I never was very good at asking people for help. Ask my therapist.”

“Which one?” said Leah. April laughed.

“Hey, now you’ve graduated you could be April’s new therapist,” said Aps.

“I really don’t think that’s going to work,” said April.

“You could be my lifetime study,” said Leah. “Don’t rule it out. I’ve already worked out our first session. Tonight. Classics night at the Kandi. Classics with an x, obviously, you haven’t missed that much. Indie dance therapy. I’m going to get it peer reviewed, imagine it will be bigger than CBT.”

“I never really got on with CBT,” said April. “But screaming Nirvana songs in your face under a strobe light I think I can get on board with.”

Cora gestured towards the front of the hall where some members of faculty and local dignitaries were taking their place on a stage underneath the building’s dome. Someone tapped a microphone and the four of them squeezed into seats on the back row, Cora and Leah flanking April and Aps in the middle.

Aps held April’s hand until her friend’s name was read out. She gave it a squeeze and let go and they all watched her walk to the front to receive her honours.

Alone but not lonely.

April alone

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April like to be alone. Not lonely, that was different, that felt unasked for, unchosen, but alone was fine. This felt lonely.

She had been unconscious for three weeks. There was an old Joe Strummer song she liked called Coma Girl that she’d sung afterwards; nobody else seemed to find it as funny as her but nobody else was carrying as much darkness as she was. Too many dark secrets. In some ways she’d preferred it when she was in the coma. It was more honest at least.

They’d brought her back as her blood levels had stabilised, when they were sure her organs weren’t about to shut down. They’d flustered around her, treated her with kid gloves as if scared that they might break her again but she knew it was less about her and more about what she represented to them. She was vaccine. And based on her first conversations about what happened next she was vaccine and not heard. She’d signed the papers to save Aps, waived her rights, offered up her immunity, and agreed to submit to whatever was required to produce the cure. They said it was for her own protection, that it would be too much of a burden to be known publicly as the girl-that-saved-humanity (her embellishment, they’d said something slightly drier). She wasn’t entirely convinced that Vaccine Girl would be joining the celebrity ranks of the Avengers any time soon but was more inclined to believe their other arguments, notably that she might receive a lot of unwelcome attention from the anti-vax movement. It was still a minority fringe but the idea that the virus was a result of mankind’s desire to immunise itself against disease had picked up some traction. All of the test facilities and labs were anonymous now. And it looked like she was too.

They wouldn’t make promises but said they’d probably need her for a year. Maybe eighteen months to be sure. They weren’t really apologetic about it – there’s nobody else that has shown your immune response so we’ve got no choice – but had said that they would be able to open up her contacts, electronically, as long as she stuck to the script. She could continue with her studies remotely, it had all been arranged, most of the lectures were recorded anyway for people that struggled to make it to campus to fulfil their difficult five hours a week schedule. April hadn’t been one of those people. She didn’t mind about the lectures but she knew she would miss the arguments in her tutorials, the smell of books and the silence in the library which had an almost tangible quality, not just the absence of noise but the particular sound of people consciously not making noise. She would miss the walk down to the University and the bustle of the Union bar on a Friday afternoon and the smell of spilt beer on pub floors and the feeling of dancing through dry ice in a club.

Mostly she would miss her friends. It surprised her how much this was true, how much it had become true in the last few months since they’d met as strangers, shared a house, and formed their little coven. She knew no-one except her was calling it a coven. She wanted Leah’s standard greeting, an exaggerated kiss on both cheeks; she wanted Cora to  braid her hair, feel her tease out her tangles and smooth down the strands; she wanted to walk arm in arm with Aps, listening to her talk and talk and talk. She wanted to touch Aps most of all, to feel that she was really there, that she really came back, that she really did save her. She’d seen them all, part of her new video call friendship community but it didn’t feel real until she could hold and be held.

Her captors (again, her embellishment but, hey, this one was broadly true) tried to sell her on her sacrifice. You stay here, they get to go out, and maybe we get to stop this whole thing. She couldn’t argue with it, with its relentless rationale and logic. She could live with that but still couldn’t live with the deception and the cost. Aps had nearly died. If they’d just asked her then she’d have signed up for whatever they needed. She was sure she would. Mostly she was sure she would.

April, you alone can help us with this. Nobody else has your blood profile, your immune response. The whole program rests on you, so we had no choice. You alone.

Her phone rang. April hesitated before picking up, the screen announcing that it was Aps calling which meant that it would be all of them. This was how they usually called. She pressed the button to answer, turned her face to the screen, the small, circular camera, and waited. There was a brief pause as they connected.

“Hey April, it’s us, we see you… we still see you.”

Baptism

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I was running on hard packed sand, bare feet flying, skirting the shoreline as the tide rose and fell. I felt fine mists of sea spray on my face, the wind whipping my hair in a tangle behind my head. A kind of baptism. I ran until my legs ached and I could feel each step pound up through my heels and my toes. I ran until my lungs burned and I had to slow, double over and gulp at the air to catch my breath.

I was almost gone. That was what they told me later. Not in those first moments when I came back around, swimming up into consciousness, surfacing for air, catching a few snatches of words, and then slipping back into sleep again. When I slept I ran. Always running until my muscles throbbed and my chest tightened and I gasped for air. I never had any sense of where I was running and I never looked back. I just ran until it hurt too much to carry on.

Those first few hours were all like that. Eyes flickering open, feeling the heaviness of my head in a pillow, the impossibility of movement, hearing voices, fragments of sentences, and then giving in again to the weight of sleep. After a while it was the pain that kept me conscious until someone adjusted something on a machine next to me and it receded enough for the weight to pull me back down again. Back down for my body to rest but my mind to run.

They must have told me several times what had happened. I could tell, when I was finally able to hear their words, process the sentences, that they’d said all of this before. They were patient but it was too fluent, too rehearsed. I did process the sentences but I don’t think, then, that I really grasped what they were saying; I was drifting in and out of a dream and surely the story about a girl who caught a virus and developed complications and almost died couldn’t be real. Could it? And yet the evidence was all there for me to feel in my ravaged body, in each rasping, ragged breath, in each attempt to move my legs or my head.

I remembered the ICU and the night that we’d all sung to each other across our video connection was still vivid. After that, it was fractured, fragments of memory as if someone had torn them up and scattered them through my head, a paper trail of clues. Flicking through old photos, a message to James, fleeting conversation with the girls, trying to disguise my demise, and then a jumble. Images of my trip to South America that might have been from the photos but might have been from a feverish delirium. And then nothing until the sensation of running, running, endless running to exhaustion, to standstill, to waking, to lying in this bed, battered but alive.

When they thought that I’d understood they asked me about the pain. I could scarcely speak which seemed to signal to them that they didn’t need to ask; they administered some sort of sedative and let me slide back into a state of restless rest. That seemed to be us for days, perhaps a week, time lost its grip, and the only cycle I recognised was sedated or not sedated. Minutes vanished in a woozy, dislocated haze; hours evaporated; days passed.

They connected me to my family, holding a video call up on a tablet, my parents wearing their best faces of reassurance but I could see the lines under Mum’s eyes and I heard the worry in Dad’s voice. I don’t know how much they’d been told but it was obvious that this hadn’t been a routine stop in the ICU. I didn’t recognise where they were until they told me they’d driven up to Bristol, were staying in a hotel until they were allowed to see me. They couldn’t visit whilst I was in the HDU. I managed to raise my arm to wave. I was still surprised at how thin, how frail and forlorn it looked. It didn’t look like mine.

When I finally croaked out words I asked the medics about my friends. They told me about Leah and Cora’s release and said they were doing fine. There was a yawning gap in the conversation where April should have been; they seemed reluctant to fill it. I insisted, forcing out a wheezing question: where’s April? They moved to a corner of the room and seemed to confer, exchanging whispers before reaching a consensus. That decision meant a deferral to a different doctor, someone I hadn’t seen before, some older guy who peered down at me through black rimmed glasses.

He told me.

He told me that she saved me. That she was immune and they thought that her blood plasma might contain enough antibodies to manufacture a vaccine. That she had offered herself up, a donation paid in blood, to see if it would work on me, an immediate and massive transfusion to pull me back from the brink. That I would have been lost without her intervention, our connection. That it worked. He told me that she saved me.

Where is she?

He paused, looked away briefly, but then he told me that too. The loss of blood had been too fast, they didn’t really understand the reaction, were still trying to figure out what had happened. They had induced a coma to stabilise her. That’s where she was. Unconscious and alone, here but not here, somewhere between.

I tried to cry out but there was no sound, just the hollow rattle from my healing lungs, and then tears running from the corners of my eyes down into my ears. No wind and spray from the endless beach in my mind, just the thin whistle of air and leaking of water from my body. I didn’t want this baptism. I didn’t want to be reborn if this was the cost.

Transfusion

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It helped to think of it as an act of connection. April liked to imagine that they would run a tube from her arm straight over to Aps, joining them together, allowing her blood to flow directly across. She knew it wouldn’t be like that. They had explained it to her as simply as they could, how they’d take her donation and then need to filter it, clean it, then they’d do the transfusion. She preferred to think of it as her giving a part of herself to her friend. An act of connection.

She had signed something to say that she understood the risks. They needed an unusually high volume of blood plasma because of Aps’ worsening condition. It had emerged that the Victory program, as intended, had involved infecting a low risk patient and then testing them with a synthesised vaccine borne from an immune host’s blood. April had listened to the rational, detached description of it all but all she could think was that their low risk patient was currently in high dependency, fighting for her life. Their grand test of whether her immunity was transferable had become pretty binary: Aps lives or Aps dies. In that analysis April weighed all the risks to herself as secondary.

There was more, though, in her blood contract. No disclosure. She wasn’t sure what exactly they would do if she told her story but they gave strong hints that they would just deny and discredit her. Just another hysterical conspiracy theorist to add to the pile. It was true that nobody really fully trusted official sources anymore but they didn’t trust  the alternatives either; truth couldn’t stand buried under lies. She had to submit to an extended stay in the ICU so that they could run more tests, make sure they could successfully develop a vaccine that didn’t rely on permanently draining her of fluid, like she was a bath they had to refill before pulling the plug, sluicing another body full of blood down the drain.

There was a time, not that long ago, where the prospect of the additional stay of isolation wouldn’t have bothered her. Six months, twelve months, make it as many months as you like. She liked being alone and would live inside her own head. It might not always be happy but it was home. It felt different now, it felt like she was giving up a community that she wanted to be part of, people that had coaxed her out of her own head and helped her stand outside, blinking in the sunshine. She knew she could do it, she had the resources to disappear back into herself and hide away, but she wasn’t sure how easy it would be to come back out again. Maybe this would be her last act of connection.

They’d let her see Aps again before they took her to take the blood. She’d stood at the glass and seen a pale facsimile of the person she’d talked and danced and drank and sang and joked with. April closed her eyes and conjured an image of them, the four of them, Leah and Cora were there too. She remembered them walking arm in arm by the harbour in the early evening, winding their way to another pub, laughing about some guy that had just hit on Leah, anticipating another night out. She remembered them in a circle on the dance floor, baiting each other to pull some ridiculous shapes, watching Aps always, always default to the Watusi because she’d seen Uma Thurman do it in some 90s movie. The one time they’d persuaded her to join them in some star jumps she’d slipped over on a stray spillage and had just lay on the floor laughing until they’d helped her up. Movin’ On Up had permanently been rechristened as Fallin’ On Down from that moment on. And look at us now. April opened her eyes. We’ve never been this far down before.

They took her to another room in HDU and waited whilst she changed into a loose hospital gown behind a screen, fumbling at tying a bow in the draw strings behind her head. She lay down on a bed in the middle of the room and stared at the ceiling, grimacing slightly at a sudden scratch on her arm and the feel of something sliding under the line of her skin. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the chatter of voices from in the room, calls to monitor her blood pressure, someone calling out measurements, litres upon litres. The voices faded as the numbers rose higher.

 

Immunity

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As the entered the HDU the doctor was still talking to April but she didn’t hear him, her senses screening out everything except the window in front of her. Behind the glass a girl lay on a bed, a thick, snaking tube lodged in her mouth, her eyes closed. Her chest rose and fell slowly, steadily. Her heartbeat pulsed out in a regular, luminous green line on a monitor next to the bed. April placed her hands and forehead on the window and whispered Aps’ name over and over again.

“She’s stable,” said the doctor. April turned towards him, took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. Tried to think.

“What does that mean?” she said. “Is she going to be alright?”

“It means that her condition isn’t deteriorating at the moment.”

“Is she going to be alright?” repeated April.

The doctor didn’t break her gaze but remained silent for a few moments. He walked over to stand next to April at the window and they stood looking in on Aps. April caught a faint scent of his aftershave, an incongruous soft hint of sandalwood amid the sanitised, sharp bleach smells. She stated to repeat her question a third time but he stopped her.

“We don’t know. Honestly, we don’t know. Her condition was not supposed to worsen like this, it’s not something that we had expected when she was infected…” He paused, “…when we infected her.”

April felt her chest tighten and all of her senses sharpened; it seemed too bright, too loud all of a sudden. The hint of his aftershave filled her nostrils and she was hit with a wave of nausea.

“…what do you mean?” she managed, turning to face him. Her initial shock was rapidly turning to anger. “You can’t be serious? You infected her with this?”

The doctor folded his arms. “What do you know about the vaccination efforts in the last nine years?”

“I don’t give a fuck about the vaccination efforts,” shouted April. “I want you to tell me what you’ve done to my friend, then I want my phone, and then I’m getting out of here and going straight to the police.” She was shaking, close to tears but met with a steady, implacable stare.

“Vaccination Initiative, Covert Transmission. Project Victory. For the past decade we have chased shadows trying to cure the Covid outbreaks, every time we got close it mutated and eluded us again. The longer it has gone on the more people lost faith in medicine to protect them and the fewer and fewer people would come forward for testing programs. Nothing like enough…”

April was shaking her head in disbelief. “…so you give people the virus without them knowing?”

“Put bluntly, yes,” he said. “We are at war. And we are losing. There are choices that we have had to make that none of us would have wanted to but they are necessary.”

“Go tell her they’re necessary,” said April, jabbing her finger at the window. “Now give me my phone.”

“I don’t think you understand,” said the doctor. “Who would you ring? The police? Who do you think manages the covert transmission for us?”

April reached for something to steady herself, she felt the room lurch slightly as she was flooded with another jolt of adrenaline. She remembered them picking Aps up after her arrest. Remembered them all talking later. What tests? What did they do to you? Just bloods I think. Just bloods I think. They hadn’t been testing her for a prior infection, they’d been injecting her with a new one.

“This is unfortunate,” said the doctor. “We were very careful who we arranged to be in the house with you. Everyone had to be the right profile, the right age, previous exposure to the virus without complication, healthy. We didn’t foresee this.”

“What do you mean?” said April. “Why would you arrange people to be in a house with me? What do I have to do with this?”

“You’re the key to the program,” he said. “You have been ever since you left ICU when you were fourteen. We weren’t sure then but later tests confirmed it. You’re immune to every mutation we’ve ever seen and we think that you are the key to the vaccine.”

“I want no part of this,” said April. “I want no part of your experiments. You can’t play games with people’s lives.”

“Then all we can do for your friend is hope.”

April turned back to look at Aps through the glass; almost peaceful, sleeping. She remembered that first time they met, how she’d blundered into the conversation about her childhood ICU time, how April had liked her despite her clumsiness. She’d had a hunch then that there was something honest about her, something decent, and nothing since had changed her mind. Us April’s got to stick together.

She didn’t turn back to face the doctor, she didn’t want to look at him anymore.

“What do I have to do? What do you need from me?”

“Your blood, April. We need your blood.”

Breakout

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April had tried to force them to talk to her. At first, when they said they couldn’t tell her anything, she had pleaded, insisted that she just wanted to know what was happening to her friend. It had been almost three days since anyone had heard from Aps. When that didn’t work she grew increasingly angry, pulling repeatedly at her emergency call cord and yelling for someone to speak to her. They stationed a nurse at her door who would peer in through the porthole window to check she was okay; rarely she would key the code to unlock the door, the airtight seal would hiss as the room decompressed, and she would try to reason with her patient.

The next morning April reached for her phone. If they wouldn’t tell her anything then perhaps the others could search Aps’ things, contact the University, try to get hold of her parent’s details and find out from them what was going on. Her phone wasn’t there. She fumbled around on the floor, swept her arm under the bed: nothing. The room was so small it only took a couple of minutes to search. There was no sign of it. She started to slap the window in her door, shouting for attention, until eventually someone came.

April knew the protocol. In six months in ICU as a kid she must have seen someone unlock the door, release the seals, pull the door slightly towards themselves and then slide it across. When they knew you, when you’d been there for a while and you weren’t showing symptoms, some of them would get a little lax in sliding the door back behind them and would carry out their checks with it open to the corridor. Some of them never did that, even when they’d gotten to know her. None of them had this time. If April had been thinking straight she probably wouldn’t have even tried but fuelled with rage and worry she jumped straight at the nurse as the slid back the door.

As April moved she had a vague thought that maybe she would be able to duck under an arm, squeeze through the gap between person and doorframe. As the door began to slide open she could already see that wasn’t going to work, the space was barely more than a person wide, designed to be either filled with a shut door or a person. There wasn’t supposed to be a gap. In sheer frustration she jumped at the door as it opened and screamed; a combination of her weight and an instinctive, protective, backward step from the startled nurse carried both of them out into the white-walled corridor. April moved quickly, not knowing which way to go, but heading away from the nurse who had started to shout for help.

They’d brought them in separately. They’d all been taken together to a waiting area and then individually led down to their own ICU rooms. She had no idea where Aps would be. April started to frantically look through windows, aware that the nurse was approaching from behind and two other people, both dressed in blue scrubs, were walking towards her from the other end of the corridor. She remembered coming down from that end when they’d brought her to the room, there was a nursing station further up, at an intersection, she thought it just led back to the waiting area. She wouldn’t be there.

The nurse she’d barged past on escaping her room was close, holding her hands up and reassuring her that everything was okay, that she just needed to calm down and return to her room. April nodded her head and raised her own hands in response and took a step back towards her room. As the nurse lowered her arms April broke into a run, sprinting past her up the corridor. She heard footsteps behind her also break into a run now. She didn’t stop at the windows but pounded down the length of the passage, towards a set of double doors at the end. She pushed through those and a set of plastic strips hanging from the ceiling behind them into a room that seemed to be set up as a disinfectant area, a run of showers along one wall, sets of hazmat suits along another. On the opposite side of the room was another set of doors, above it a biohazard symbol and the letters HDU. She didn’t notice the grey box set in to the wall, a small red light above it. The doors wouldn’t budge. People spilled into the room behind her.

April sank to the floor, her back against the immovable door, and wept. They watched it for a moment, wary, before a doctor she hadn’t seen before crouched down in the middle of the room. He pulled his face mask down from across his mouth and nose. April hadn’t seen him before, older, maybe mid fifties, thick black rimmed glasses. He was staring intently at her, mouth fixed in a straight line, expressionless.

“Just tell me she’s okay,” said April quietly.

He was silent for a long time, eyes never leaving her. Eventually he stood up and walked over to her, pulling an ID card from his pocket and swiping it against the grey box on the wall. April shifted forwards slightly as she felt the doors open behind her. He offered her a hand and helped her up before he pulled his mask back up over his face.

“Come on then,” he said. “Your friend is in high dependency. I can tell you more there.”

April looked at him. “Like this?” She gestured at herself. “Shouldn’t I put a suit on or something. A mask?”

He shook his head. “There’s no need, April. Not for you. You’re immune.”

Suspended

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It was harder being out, separated, than being in, isolated. At least before they had shared experience to rally around, something that connected them. This shouldn’t have changed anything, not really, but it didn’t feel like that. Leah and Cora had been allowed to leave quarantine on day seven, neither of them testing positive, neither of them showing any symptoms. They’d both argued against it. None of them had spoken to Aps for two days, everyone repeatedly stone-walled with standard responses when they asked how she was: her condition is stable, we can’t give out more details except to immediate family, her condition is stable, she is getting the best care, her condition is stable, you can’t do anything for her, her condition is stable. April hadn’t been released but she didn’t know why. She was also asymptomatic and testing negative, they’d told her they wanted to run some more diagnostics.

Cora had suggested they go for a walk. They had seemed to swap imposed confinement for self-imposed confinement, the two of them not sure what to do while they waited for news. April had encouraged them to get out: I was built for this, you two flakes need your fresh air and nature and real world stuff, you’re useless living in your own heads. I’ll call you if they tell me anything. I promise. They had relented and set out on a circuit of the Downs, the nearest green space, still dotted with groups of people in the late afternoon sunshine. They didn’t speak much at first, just walked, neither taking the lead. That Spring the four of them had quite often picked their way down past the zoo and sat overlooking the suspension bridge, sometimes taking a bottle of wine, to watch the sky fade into greys and pinks at sunset. By unspoken agreement Leah and Cora retraced those steps and sat down a bank of grass overlooking the brick towers and curved iron chains of the old bridge.

Cora lay on her back, feeling the grass press into her neck, one hand over her eyes against the sun, the other twirling a daisy between her fingers. Leah sat cross-legged looking out at the view over the gorge. She was thinking about the time they’d tried to drag April across but she’d refused to move from the viewing platform by the first tower and watched the three of them traverse the narrow walkway. They’d signalled at each other across the divide when they reached the other side. She couldn’t remember it exactly but she thought they had attempted to spell something out with their hands; April had just blown them a kiss and asked them why they were doing YMCA when they got back.  She took a photo of the view on her phone and sent it to April and Aps as a message accompanied with a waving emoji.

Cora propped herself up on her elbows. “Have you heard anything?”

Leah shook her head. “Sorry, no, I was just taking a picture. Thought I’d send them something to try and cheer them up.”

“April refusing to come across with us?”

“Yeah,” said Leah. “What were we trying to signal to her from the other side? I’m not sure if I’ve remembered it right.”

“We were trying to spell out ‘loser’ but no-one could agree on how to do the ‘s’,” said Cora.

“I was hoping it was something more supportive than that but that sounds like us,” said Leah.

Cora rolled the stem of the daisy between her fingers, watching the petals spin, before she flicked it towards Leah. “It’s okay, she knows we love her. And besides didn’t she drink most of the wine while she was waiting for us to cross back? I think she knew what she was doing the whole time.”

“She usually does,” said Leah.

They sat in silence for a while before heading back to the house. As they approached they could see someone standing on their doorstep, he’d rung the bell a couple of times and as they turned into the pathway up to their front door he was bending down, leaving something by the matt on the floor.

“Isn’t that James?” said Leah to Cora, leaning in towards her as they walked. Without waiting for confirmation she called out. “Hey, James. It is James, right?”

He stood up and tugged at his fringe. Leah fully recognised him then. Aps had told them about this habit he had of smoothing his hair when he was nervous, as if he could tease his curls straight if he pulled them enough. It fell back into its unruly tangle.

“Hi, yeah I’m James. You’re Aps’ housemates, aren’t you? Maybe you can help me.”

“Did you just get out?” said Cora. He looked blankly at her. “Like us,” she added. “Did you just get out of ICU?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” he said. “I haven’t been in isolation. Has something happened?”

“You must have been in,” said Leah. “Standard protocol on a contact trace.”

James held up his hands, gestured that they should slow down. “Hold up, I’m not following. I just came round to drop Aps’ Medlet back.” He held up her old health tracker. “She left it at mine after… after, well after she stayed over. She said she’d call. I thought she was playing it cool, you know first few days, but then I didn’t hear anything and wasn’t sure where I stood. She tried to contact me a couple of days ago but I missed the calls and then she just sent me a weird message apologising.”

Leah moved past him and opened the front door. “You’d better come in. Aps is in ICU, she’s got the virus, and we’ve only just been released from quarantine. It was the day after she spent the night at yours. They must have contacted you.”

James shook his head and followed them into the house. He held up his wrist and showed them his own Medlet. “I’ve been green all week, nothing has changed. I found her tracker later that morning. It was still green too. I think they hold a three hour memory of your last reading so she must have been fine when she left mine.”

“Why didn’t you call her?” asked Cora. “When you found her Medlet?”

He looked away, down at the floor. “I’m sorry. I thought she’d call if she didn’t have a spare. I figured she’d have a back-up, everyone does. Listen, honestly, I’m not too good at starting things with people. I like her. I’d wanted everything to be perfect that night but I don’t know. She seemed a bit off in the morning. I felt a bit embarrassed about calling…”

“This doesn’t make sense,” said Leah. “She got tested at the police station and she was clean. Then she picks it up in the afternoon and they don’t isolate someone she literally slept with the night before.”

“The police station?” said James.

“They picked her up walking home from yours,” said Cora. “No Medlet so they took her in for a standard check. She was lucky she just got a caution.” She touched his arm. “Listen, that’s not your fault.”

“You could have called though,” said Leah. “Whatever, that doesn’t help us now. I think we should contact April, get her to tell them that something might have been missed, that they might have not done the contact tracing properly.” Cora nodded. James looked apprehensive, he had started running his fingers through his hair again.

Leah’s phone vibrated. April had replied to her message, the picture of the bridge, with an ‘x’ and a bottle of wine emoji.

“Yes, let’s ring her,” said Leah, making up her mind. “April will know what to do.”