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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.”

 

Fever

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I had tried to call James. It was always going to be a bit awkward but me being in quarantine calling him, presumably also in quarantine because they’d contract traced him back from me, just dialled the discomfort up several notches. I didn’t want to see him again but I hadn’t planned on letting him down by having to apologise for, at best, a couple of weeks in isolation and, at worst, giving him the virus. He didn’t pick up. I didn’t really blame him and it was a relief, to be honest. I messaged him an apology.

I was finding it hard in the ICU. I wasn’t cut out for solitude and I felt claustrophobic, pacing the floor, counting steps from one side of the room to the other, each time hoping there would be something after the sixth stride. When I wasn’t connected to the others on a call or reassuring my parents that everything was okay I looked through old photographs, mostly the shots from my trip last year. I kept coming back to the pictures of Salar de Uyuni, the endless stretches of the cracked, white salt flats unrolling to the horizon. On my last day a local lake overflowed and the surface salt got covered in a thin film of water; it was as if someone had polished the earth, the sky mirrored perfectly on itself in the ground. There was a photo of me standing, arms outstretched to the canopy of blue above, in perfect symmetry with my own reflection. I looked like I was suspended in an infinite azure canvas.

I stated to feel tired on day five. I hadn’t done a good job hiding how breathless I was after Cora’s karaoke; I laughed it off as the fact that I was the only one that picked something with any kind of tempo, joked that when we got out we were going to find a proper karaoke bar, neck tequila slammers, and shout our way through ‘Like A Prayer’. (Leah had smirked that she knew I couldn’t do ‘Like A Virgin’ after the other night; I had ignored her). I started coughing in the night and a nurse came to check on me, said it was nothing to worry about, it always started near the end of the first week and usually blew itself out in a few days at my age.  My temperature was up. It was one of the few readings on my bedside monitor I understood.

I stayed off the video call as much as I could the next morning. I didn’t want to worry the others but that didn’t work out so well; my phone just filled up with messages asking if I was alright and why I wouldn’t pick up. When I did join they did varying jobs of masking their reaction to my appearance: April managed it best, barely registering any change in her expression, whereas Cora almost burst into tears and ended up pretending to have dropped something so she could duck out of shot and compose herself. I blamed it on the medical strip lighting bouncing back off a lot of white walls but they weren’t buying it. It would have helped if Leah wasn’t still rocking her usual olive skinned, Mediterranean thing. April broke the silence and said I should leave the pale and ghostly vibe to the professionals.

Decisions were made for me in the afternoon. There was a steady procession of doctors and nurses, a flurry of activity in inverse relation to my own. They told me to go back to bed but they needn’t have bothered, I was drained and just wanted to close my eyes and try to sleep. I dozed, drifting in and out of consciousness. At some point I felt someone lift my hand and slip something on to the end of my finger, the monitor readings by the bed updated. The temperature number went up. I sank further down.

Nothing was clear. My body coiled under hospital sheets, kicking them off, burning. Someone would come in, say something that didn’t really register, and tuck me back in. I kicked them off again. Sleeping. Waking. Sleeping. I slipped between those states, occupied somewhere in between, here but not here. I walked the salt flats in Peru. Remembered drinking in Buenos Aires, cold beers under a South American sun. I lay on the beaches of Rio. Danced the carnival. Exchanged halting Spanish with a guy in a club, distant memory of the pounding bass feeling like my heart thumping, accelerated in my chest. It was hot. In the club. In this bed. In the club. Pounding, pounding, pounding.

I think I slept. I think I was awake. There was a mask over my mouth and nose and I could hear the sound of my own breath; a ragged, rasping sound supplemented with a hiss of artificial air. There was something in my hand, wires and tubes over my head.

I thought of the others. They slipped in and out of focus. Cora’s resolve, her underlying sadness. Leah’s spirit and joy. April. Clever, perceptive, lonely April. I tried to tell them that I was okay, that it was all going to be okay. I tried to tell them about Peru. How I was safe, frozen in the limitless canopy of sky and lake, suspended from harm in a dream and not writhing, feverish, delirious, on a bed in an isolation unit, shackled to an oxygen tube that was inflating my lungs.

I see you

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Seconds ticked into minutes which unfolded into hours that seeped into days. They were apart, locked away in their separate containment units, but together, each of them almost permanently in contact on a four way group video chat. Sometimes nobody even spoke, it just felt reassuring that they could see each other, a slice of the familiar amongst the unfamiliar tangle of tubes, machines, injections and monitors. Something messy and imprecise to break up the clinical precision and routine. Four days compressing ninety six hours folding up five thousand odd minutes tocking hundreds of thousands of seconds.

On the third day Cora had set them all a challenge, something, anything, to keep their attention away from the swirl of questions that nobody seemed to be able to answer for them: how long will we be here, is Aps okay, will we get sick? She’d called it quarantine karaoke, acknowledged that the title needed some work, and told them the rules. One song, each, that they had to sing to each other over the group chat. Original song as backing track accompaniment allowed. Scores awarded based on song selection, vocals, and performance. April had been reluctant but acquiesced on Aps’ insistence that it would cheer her up. Are you guilt tripping me? Yep, 100% but I’ve got the virus so shut up and sing.

Taking it in turns, they sang. None of them had quite known what to expect and it felt strangely raw, intimate, singing to each other through the small screens of their phones. Leah dedicated her song to her dad, said it reminded her of something he used to sing if they caught the early morning ferry down to Como, days when they needed to visit the larger town. Little darlin’, it’s been a long cold lonely winter. She sang it quietly, not really looking directly at them through the screen until they started to join her on the chorus, here comes the sun, and then she stopped, watching them finish it for her, smiling.

Cora declared that she’d only picked her choice for one line, it was the bit in Hotel California about checking out anytime but you can never leave. At the last minute she changed her mind and did a Lewis Capaldi song from when she was a kid. This time none of the others joined in. Cora kept her eyes closed throughout and they sensed, implicitly, that she was singing a lament for Rob, that they were being let in on something private. As she finished Leah blew her a kiss and April clapped her hands quietly. Jesus, Cora, that was beautiful but you’ve made me like Lewis Capaldi. I don’t know whether I should love you or hate you. Cora shook her head and mouthed you-love-it at the screen.

It was Aps that broke up their back-and-forth. The others watched as she sashayed back and forth belting out Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’, pointing at every indication of her infection in her room to accentuate the chorus. Red. Warning light on her Medlet. Red. Biohazard symbol on her door. Red. Virus positive written in the notes hung over the end of her bed. She clowned it up, pirouetting between her bed and the solitary chair that all of the ICUs had, ducked her face out of view before reappearing in extreme close up. It was gloriously funny and inappropriate, the others weren’t sure initially how to react but found themselves caught up in the dark joy of it. They were all laughing so much by the end that it took them a few moments to notice quite how breathless Aps was, ironically how red her cheeks were. She insisted she was okay. No more skipping Spin City when I get out. She nodded at April. Come on, best ’til last.

None of them knew it but it didn’t matter. A solitary guitar chord, a run of bass notes, and then the rumble of a baritone, April whispering over the top of the words, her eyes never leaving Aps through the screen. She told them afterwards that it was Nick Cave, ‘Straight To You’, and that he’d pretty much got her through her isolation first time round. None of them knew it but they heard what it was: a love song, a love-despite-anything song, a towering love-above-all song. Sad songs you can dance to, right? said April at the end. When all this is done I’m going to waltz you round our living room to this. Us April’s got to stick together. Aps just nodded at her. Deal? Aps nodded again.

Day four. Night four. They went to bed, separate in their own contained, isolated rooms, but they left their phones plugged in, switched on, and left the video chat open. They fell asleep to the soft light of backlit mobile screens and the virtual presence of each other.

 

Isolate

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April watched the Community Trace Officer work; she had gone straight to Aps and was talking her calmly through the standard protocol. Spot test, assess, isolate, full diagnostic.  It was essentially the same process that April had been through as a kid, except then, without the early warning indication through the Medlet you only got picked up through the regular spot testing that they ran with high risk groups. She’d registered a high temperature that she was pretty sure was just a combination of her period and a regular flu bug that had been doing the rounds. They’d run the blood tests and found a viral infection. Later they recorded it as Covid-27.

The CTO was peeling apart a plastic, airtight package, shaking free a syringe. She was working precisely, quickly, clearly moving through steps that had become routine. She pulled up Aps’ sleeve and wrapped an elasticated blue band around her upper arm. April looked away as she inserted the needle, pulled back the plunger and filled the syringe with blood. Aps had looked away as well. Leah was asking questions about the test which the CTO was answering, her responses polite but not straying much beyond a yes or no. They were clear despite her mask. Yes, this was a spot test. Yes, it was safe. Yes, it was authorised in law. No, she hadn’t heard anyone call it the bad lover. Fast, small prick, unreliable, clarified Leah. No, we don’t call it that. But yes, it’s not completely reliable.

They waited. Aps’ sample had been spread across a thin slip of paper and inserted into a small machine, it looked a bit like a baby monitor that April had once found when she was helping her parents clear out some old things from the loft. Just a large LCD screen a couple of large push buttons, and a slot to push the paper into. Her old baby monitor had just shown room temperature and picked up noise; it would light up like a firework display if she’d either started crying or the ambient climate in her nursery had risen half a degree. She had no idea what this machine would show. Leah was evidently thinking much the same as she continued with her questions. So, when do we get the puff of white smoke? What are we looking for here? Cora was silent but had moved across to Aps’ side and was holding her arm. The CTO ignored them all and just stared at the blood test machine.

Something changed on the LCD. There was no flashing light or shrill alarm, just a few symbols and numbers that appeared. The CTO pulled a phone from her pocket and dialled a contact, holding up her other hand to signal that they should hold their questions. CTO attending case 29, 687, on the A4176. Female, 19 years old. April Daniels. Request immediate dispatch of ICA for four. Need pick up on Miss Daniels and her housemates. Case positive. I repeat, case positive. She hung up the phone and told them to pack some clothes.

“This must be a mistake,” said Aps. “You need to check the machine again.”

“I’m sorry,” said the CTO. “It’s just the spot test so it could be a false positive but the readings are very clear, I haven’t seen one like this that has turned out to be wrong. We need to get you somewhere safe, make sure you’re looked after.”

“I was tested this morning,” said Aps. “Literally this morning. At the police station. They wouldn’t have let me go if their test had come back with anything.”

“A few hours can be a long time in viral infection. I’m sorry but you really should pack some things. The ICA will be here soon and they’ll want to get you all into containment as quickly as they can.”

They all packed, cramming clothes and essentials into bags. Leah had whispered to April: What’s an ICA? Isolation Containment Ambulance, April had shot back. She remembered the one that had taken her to ICU the last time. It had seemed like a normal ambulance to her if she was honest, just with ICA embossed on its side alongside one of those biohazard symbols. At the time she’d thought that bit was pretty cool but it had been during her black metal phase. A couple of years after she’d come out of isolation she’d toyed with getting it inked on her arm, to cover up all the scratches from her testing, but she’d seen a couple of tattooists and they’d said it wouldn’t take properly on her scar tissue. Now she just thought they over dramatised the whole thing, giving everything its own acronym, its own special virus status. The sign served no purpose. Unless the CTOs were going to start projecting it in to the sky every time they picked up a positive to call in an ICA, like the bat signal. Maybe not the bat signal. No-one remembered much of that DC stuff now, it was all Marvel.

When they came back downstairs there were two men, full hazmat suits, waiting for them. The CTO had disappeared. They were gestured towards the front door which was open but as they stepped through it wasn’t into the short path down to the street but into a temporarily erected tunnel, plastic walls supported by flexible rods snapped into rectangles. The tunnel ran straight, just twenty feet or so, directly into the back of the ambulance. It smelt faintly of disinfectant. They were told to move.

April remembered her first time. They’d given her a sweet, told her not to worry about anything, a nurse had held her hand. She’d worn gloves but still, she had held her hand. The same nurse had asked her about her friends, about school, about what subjects she liked, what she wanted to do when she was older. She was just a child and they’d treated her like one. They’d explained everything. She hadn’t known enough to be scared.

Now they were all adults. Barely. They treated them like adults. Explained nothing and asked nothing, nobody held their hands, nobody gave them sweets. They didn’t know enough but they were still scared.

Trace

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Cora remembered getting her first Medlet a little differently to the others. There had been a steady improvement in health tracking devices from ’20 onwards but none of them ever hit critical mass across a big enough part of a population to be useful in contact tracing. Governments argued with technology suppliers, nobody could agree a common platform, and some people just refused to wear them. Cora’s own view as a teenager was a more attenuated version of the prevailing mood in Scotland, sceptical and slightly distrustful. After the big Covid-27 outbreak in ’24 things changed. They mass produced the cheap but reliable Medlets and legislated that everyone should wear one, public mood had changed enough that it didn’t raise much debate. Scottish law changed later, holding out for an aligned approach across the EU that never came; there was a straight fault line between north and south.

Cora’s memory was acute because the moment she’d worn it on her wrist she’d felt nothing but guilt and remorse. She had sat in pubs with Rob, talked about freedom and the state and a whole load of bullshit about how nobody was going to tag and trace her. He’d been more laid back about it all, like he was about everything, but he’d said he’d agreed with her. She sometimes wondered if he’d liked seeing her all fired up like that: you’ve got the spirit in you, right enough, Cora. And he’d smile, watching her. She had been convinced that she was right, convinced in the way that only a seventeen year old can be convinced, all black and white before the world shows you that it’s grey. She was sure. And then he died, without warning, and she wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

They had told her afterwards that there was no guarantee that it would have made any difference. It was just there as an early warning signal. Most times it’d be a false alarm, some usual temperature fluctuation, some mis-read fever. Most times. The sceptics still said that the point of the Medlets was never really about the personal warning, it was about the geo-tagging and the tracing, the links to the MedApp and what it allowed local enforcement to do in isolating and locking down pockets of communities. It wasn’t just the sceptics saying that, the scientists were too: they just disagreed on whether that was a good thing or not. Cora didn’t much care about the civil liberties arguments afterwards, she just wanted Rob back and if she could have made that happen, even if it meant everyone else had to stay at home forever then she wouldn’t have thought twice.

She watched the others freeze at the sight of the flashing red warning light on Aps’ Medlet. She knew they were torn between their impulse to reach for her, enfold her, reassure her that it’d be okay, that it was just a warning, torn between that and their fear. It was this abstract fear that they all had, that there was this thing out there that they couldn’t see and it might kill them, but now it wasn’t abstract: it was her. It was a momentary thing. Almost like the briefest inhalation of breath, a heartbeat, and then it passed. They all rushed over to her and smothered her in a jumble of arms and hands. Leah had come out from her room and had half run, half slipped down the stairs to join them in the solidarity of their embrace.

Within five minutes Aps’ phone rang. They all knew that it should but the efficiency of it still felt strange, intrusive. She picked up and had a short conversation with a Community Trace Officer, answering a standard set of questions about her symptoms (“none”) and where she was now, who she was with. That stuff was just for show, they knew exactly where she was and who she was with.

“CTO?” asked April as the call ended.

Aps nodded. “Yep, they’ve registered the warning and said that we can’t leave the house. They’ve dispatched a mobile unit to come round and assess me.”

“You okay?” said Leah.

“I… yeah, I’m okay. Just a bit shocked. I feel fine, maybe it’s a mistake.” She shook her wrist. “This is the new one they gave me this morning, maybe it’s not calibrated right or it’s faulty or something.”

“At least you weren’t long without one,” said Cora. “It’s better to know, right?”

“I guess,” said Aps. “I don’t understand. James left me a message, saying he’d found my old one and it was all showing ‘green’, everything was okay. How can it change so quickly? Don’t they normally cycle through ‘amber’ and stuff first?”

“They’re pretty sensitive now, I think,” said Cora. “Better to be safe than sorry. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“God, I’m sorry guys,” said Aps. “You should probably all stay away from me or something.”

“Not happening,” said Leah.

“Nope,” said April. “If you’ve got it, we’ve got it. Anyway, I’m Miss Immunity, remember? They tested me practically to destruction so I’m prepared to take my chances on a probably rogue Medlet reading.”

“Do you think I should ring James? Tell him?” said Aps.

“You won’t need to, they’ll do a full contact trace if they follow protocol. Everyone you’ve been near in the last ten days. If you’ve been enough of a social butterfly you might put the whole town back in lockdown.”

“Jesus,” said Aps.

“Really?” said April. “When did you meet him? That’s going to be a bugger to contact trace. At least you know he’ll forgive you.”

“Hey, lapsed Catholic here,” said Leah. “You don’t hear me making jokes about your religion, do you?”

“Satan’s just not that funny,” said April, smirking. “No offence meant. I was just trying to lighten the mood. It’s a new thing I’m trying.”

“Say ten Hail Mary’s and we’ll say nothing else about it,” said Leah.

They saw the flashing lights through the window, the room winking in blues and reds, illuminating their faces as they turned towards the door. The bell rang and Leah, Cora, and April stood first, forming a barrier between Aps and the world outside. The bell rang again, followed by a knock, and a voice calling CTO. 

“It’s okay,” said Aps. “It’s going to be okay.” She slipped in between them and walked to the door, lifting her hand to open it, red light flashing on her wrist.

Better red than dead

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“Where’s Leah?” asked Aps. When they’d returned from the police station she’d headed straight for the shower. She’d been in there so long that Cora had knocked on the door, asked if she was okay. She’d been leaning against the tiles, letting the water cascade down on to her head, letting it wash her eyes clear of tears, hoping she could just rinse the whole experience away. She’d told Cora that she was fine and they’d left her to calm down and waited for her downstairs.

“I think she went to call home,” said April. “She was pretty shaken up.”

“I know how she feels,” said Aps. “Have we got any wine?”

Cora reached into the fridge. There was a folded piece of paper in front of a solitary bottle of white at the back on the top shelf; someone had scrawled ‘in case of emergencies break glass’ on it. Cora pulled out the bottle and held up the paper to the others: “This must qualify, right?”

“It’s the exact set of circumstances I had in mind when I put it there,” said April.

They drank and talked. Aps told them what had happened the night before with James, she gave them a version that was sympathetic to him, she didn’t even really know why except that the thought that the night before her worst ever morning after had been a bit of a letdown was too much to cope with right now. They poured her more wine and she told them about the arrest, about the journey in the police car, and the subsequent questions and tests.

“What tests?” said April, leaning forwards. “What did they do to you?”

“Just bloods I think. And temperature, it seemed pretty standard,” said Aps. “They had me a secure isolation unit, a nurse did them. I guess she was a nurse, anyway.”

“Can they do that?” asked Cora. “Just run tests.”

“I think so,” said April. “I think it was one of the changes a couple of years ago. If you’re under caution I think they can take fluids and insist on a full viral check. If you’re out without your Medlet then it makes everyone get pretty twitchy.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” said Aps. “I think I was in shock. I just went along with it all. I barely remembered to ask to make a call and then I phoned you guys. Thank you, by the way. Thank you for coming.”

“Don’t be soft,” said Cora. “Of course we would come.”

“Yeah, it was your turn to clean the bathrooms on the rota,” said April, smiling.

“This must get me out of that,” said Aps. “Come on, what’s a girl got to do?”

“Oh, you’d need to have at least spent a night in the cells to get out of that,” said April. “You just had a scary arrest, some mildly intrusive medical tests, and a caution. That barely offsets your night of passion with Jamesy boy.”

“Yeah, and we’ve totally gone easy on asking you about that,” added Cora. “Details will be required at a later date. All the details.”

Aps listened to them talk for a bit, swapping slightly lewd observations about what her night had been like, most of them better than the reality. She picked at the strips of tape holding the cotton wool in place on her arm from where they’d scraped at her skin for a blood sample. She teased up the end of the tape and pulled it away quickly. There was a small, red circle on the inside of her arm. It had all happened in a blur and she tried to sort the fragments of her memory to form a clearer recollection of what had happened. She’d rolled up her sleeve, that part was clear. Then she’d looked away. It was something she’d done since she was a kid, she’d never really liked needles and blood. Just look away. There’ll be a small scratch and then you won’t feel a thing. Just like the night before. When she looked back she was being taped up.

Aps’ phone started to vibrate in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw that it was James trying to call; she let it ring through to voicemail. “It’s James,” she said to the others, acknowledging their enquiring looks.

“He’s certainly keen,” said Cora. “You going to answer?”

Aps shook her head and waited for her phone to ring again if he’d left a message. He had. She picked up. “Hey, er, Aps, it’s me, James. Thanks for a lovely night. I just thought you should know that you left your Medlet here. I can drop it round if it’s easier for you. Nothing to worry about, it’s all flashing green.”

“Voicemail,” said Aps. “He’s found my missing Medlet and wants to drop it round.”

“At least it wasn’t your pants,” said April. “Could have been way more embarrassing.”

“That will be covered in the details required at a later date,” said Cora. ” And, for the record, I don’t believe that what Aps was wearing that night would have been described as pants. The lady has some class.”

“Best pants, then,” said April. “Probably not the ones with the bunny rabbits on.”

“How do you know about those?” said Aps, sitting up suddenly.

“Shared house. Shared washing machine. No secrets,” said April. “They’re cute. I mean, I wouldn’t wear them, not being, you know, seven, but they’re cute. Very you.”

Aps was about to reply when she felt a vibrating sensation on her wrist. An urgent tightening. She looked down at the new Medlet they’d given her at the police station and instead of the soft green light she’d seen for as long as she had worn one – green equals clean – she saw an angry, blinking red pulse. It had been drilled into them for years. Red was a warning. Red meant lockdown, seek help. Better red than dead.

Babbo, bambina

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She could still remember how frightened she had been. She had been thirteen years old, her first time in Milan, a late birthday present from her parents. The stadium tour at the San Siro seemed to be more of a present for Papa but, later, he had followed them first round the shops and then the Duomo without complaint so they had all visited their own cathedrals. The trouble had started as they spilled out into the piazza.

There was a crowd of protesters gathering in the square, maybe three hundred or so people, dressed in a dazzling rainbow array of colours. Hoisted placards for Sinistra Italiana and Giustizia e Liberta jostled for attention and various chants and songs broke out, stalled, and eventually settled on a repeated call for freedom. Liberta, liberta, liberta. Leah’s parents exchanged a glance and her father pointed over to the other side of the square where a similarly sized group was beginning to form. Similar in size but immediately different in tone; scarves pulled up over the bottom of faces, balaclavas, flags, a few signs proclaiming for Lega Nord, some other banners Leah didn’t fully understand. Someone lit a flare, it fizzed into a red, steaming light, and launched it into the middle of the square.

Her parents pulled her across the square as quickly as they could as the groups converged. For years her father berated himself for not thinking, they should have just turned and gone back into the cathedral, waited it out. More flares were thrown and then, unseen by Leah until now, groups of Carabinieri armed with riot shields and batons charged the freedom group. They didn’t bother to disguise their allegiance and the square descended into panic as the ragtag representatives of the left were either beaten or chased away by the police and a mob. Her father wore a small lapel button in support of Sinistra Italiana. It was something he’d taken to wearing since they’d returned from Britain, his small gesture of defiance against what he saw as his country sliding, lurching to the right in the confusion after the outbreaks. As the Carabinieri passed them one lifted a baton as if to strike him. Papa! Babbo! She had shouted and tried to put herself in the way. Another policeman stopped, gestured at the Inter shirt he was still wearing under his jacket, and they exchanged a few words before opting to leave him alone. She heard them repeating ‘Babbo’ and laughing.

Her father had left Britain, taken them all back ‘home’, after the Brexit vote. Leah had never noticed anything really change but she didn’t have an accent, nothing changed in the playground, nobody told her it wasn’t her country. When Italy left the EU in ’23 her father seemed to retreat in to himself, as if he wanted to turn his back on all of it, bunker them down in their little corner of Lake Como and pretend that none of it affected them. And mostly it didn’t, not really, day to day. The lockdown protocols became stricter, the border controls tightened, they got used to curfews, sometimes understandable, sometimes seemingly arbitrary, and they got used to wearing a health tracking bracelet. But virtually the whole world got used to that. Italy wasn’t so special.

For her it had all seemed the other way round. She’d grown up in the Italy that he grew to despise but without any of the memories of how it’d been before. It was hard not to love the mountains around the great lake but all of the rose-tinted nostalgia she had was for her earlier childhood in Britain and she knew that was partly why she’d wanted to come back. It had broken his heart but it was breaking hers to stay.

The experience with Aps and the police station had shaken her more than she was prepared to admit to the others. Too many memories. She read the news, heard the stories, so she wasn’t sure why she’d been so shocked. Everyone knew you couldn’t be out without your Medlet, everyone knew the gist, if not the detail, of the Viral Health Act and the extensions to the Criminal Justice Bill. For her generation it had been like one of those sets of terms and conditions you get when you download an app, something you trusted was okay and clicked ‘accept’. For the greater good. Even when the health services were built back up after the neglect in the early ’00s and contact tracing was sorted out they never seemed to row back the changes in the legislation. She’d just gotten used to it like they all had as they cycled through the repeated outbreaks of the last nine years.

Leah picked up her phone and placed a video call home. Her mum picked up and they talked quietly, just like they usually did. She knew that Papa would appear briefly at some point, wave and then pretend that he had something that he was in the middle of. She’d never called him Babbo since that day in the square, it had felt like that day was her line between childhood and adolescence. It felt baby-ish. Bambina. She’d told him to stop calling her that.

He appeared over her mother’s shoulder, bent down and waved into the camera, almost immediately turning to move away.

“Babbo,” she called, almost without thinking. He stopped, half turned, and looked back at the screen. Leah was crying, the phone shaking slightly in her hand. Softly, over and over, she said ‘babbo’.

He put his hand on her mother’s shoulder, something in his grip must have signalled to her to move as she relinquished the chair so that he could sit and face into the computer screen they had set up on the kitchen table. The one where Leah had sat poring over her homework.

“Bambino,” he said. “Sono qui. I am here. I am here.”

To the station…

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Fifteen minutes. That was if the traffic was good. Could be twenty. Leah looked at her phone again, checked the time, flicked open the Uber app. Still showing five minutes away which, based on the last ten minutes, was a lie. Say it was five minutes that meant a minimum of twenty until they could get to Aps. She thought about ringing the driver. April and Cora were over by the window, pulling back the curtain to keep an eye on the street. A black Tesla pulled up outside. The five minutes wasn’t a lie. The latest five minutes at least.

None of them really spoke in the car and the driver had taken this as his cue to turn his radio up, some rock station that April vaguely recognised as something she’d tried when 6 Music had been decommissioned. Some song none of them knew pushed them out onto the pavement outside the police station; a blast of pounding noise and someone singing about gambling. As the Uber door shut behind them and they were left with just the traffic noise on the street, a muffled don’t forget the joker shouted from the radio in the car behind them, Leah realised she had no idea what they were supposed to do.

In the moments after Aps had called it had all been clear. Our friend is in trouble: we go and help her. Nothing to contemplate, nothing to consider, no doubt. How do we get from here to her? The problem was as simple as that but now that problem had been solved, what now? None of them had dealt with this before. Leah was uncomfortably aware that the others were looking to her to guide them. What? Just because she called me? She wondered at that: why had she called me? But now wasn’t really the time. Leah led them inside, through a revolving door. If it wasn’t for the sign announcing The Bridewell Police Station it could have been any other office block, glass panelled walls demarcated into rectangles by red, steel strips. Beyond the initial door there was a decompression zone that was pretty common in large buildings, an expanse of space ended by a series of health screen machines that you had to proceed through to be allowed access further inside. Standard temperature check and cross reference to the national viral health register.

Leah cleared the health screens last. She should have expected it; her EU registered status always took longer to clear now in the UK, there were just more cross references back to the Italian database where her main health records sat. April and Cora were already at the enquiry window as she caught up.

“…we just want to make sure she’s okay,” Cora was saying to a dead pan police woman. She was ensconced behind a screen, mainly some sort of frosted glass that you couldn’t see through but with a clear window through which her head was visible. They were speaking through an intercom. She looked bored.

“What are they saying? Can we see her?” said Leah.

“No, you can’t see her,” replied the police woman, Inspector Martin from her name badge. “She’s still being processed under the terms of her arrest.”

“Can you at least tell us what she’s been arrested for?” said April. “It must be some kind of mistake.”

There was just a shake of a head in response and a gesture that they should all move to sit in the waiting area, a stretch of moulded plastic chairs bolted to the floor. There was a vending machine but most of the numbers displayed against its range of drinks had been scratched out. The three of them sat down. April got up again, walked up to the machine and looked at it.

“Anyone for a hot drink lottery?” she said. The others shook their heads. She swiped her contactless card and punched three numbers: two, two, three. Nothing. She tried again: one, one, two. This time the machine stirred, dropping a cup and filling it with a squirt of some unidentifiable black liquid topped off with hot water. It passed as black coffee and April cradled it back to join Cora and Leah.

“What do we do now?” said Cora.

“We wait, I guess,” said Leah.

“But we can’t do anything.”

“But we came. I think that’s all we could do,” said April. “We’ll be here when she gets released.”

“If she gets released,” said Cora.

“When,” said April. She blew across the top of her coffee and took a sip.

It was three hours before Aps was released, on a caution. In that time they discovered that 112 was definitely black coffee, 114 might have been a cappuccino, and 220 was the worst cup of tea that any of them had ever tasted. Talking about the drinks was the only thing that had distracted them from worrying about their friend. When she emerged, escorted by a woman dressed in blue scrubs, surgical mask hanging loose around her neck, she broke into a run and the four of us collided in the waiting area, Aps clinging to us in a desperate and grateful embrace.

“I lost my MedLet,” she said, repeatedly, as we held her. “I left it at James’s.”

None of them asked the questions they wanted to ask about that. They could all keep until later, for when it was safe to laugh about the whole thing, and start the enquiry about last night. They all bit their tongues about whether there had been any biting of tongues.

“What now?” said Cora. “Can we go?”

“Yes, it’s all sorted, I’m free to go.” Aps held up her wrist to show them a new MedLet, issued in the station, its warning light softly glowing green.

“Green equals clean,” said Leah.

“Green equals clean,” they all repeated.

Aps arrested

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I had thought about walking the long way home in the early sunshine, taking an extended morning after walk of shame or stride of pride depending on your point of view. I wasn’t ashamed to be honest but it hadn’t been a night to take much satisfaction in either. The amble of ambivalence? Whatever. My desire for a shower trumped all.

I was half way back when they stopped me. Two police officers approached from Redland Park, I didn’t think much about it until they got a little closer and I realised they hadn’t shifted their gaze from me. They were wearing the mask attachments on their helmets, I’d only really seen that in footage of what they did during lockdown, patrolling. You didn’t see it on the streets; if they needed masks you were usually indoors.

“We need to take you back to the station, Miss Daniels,”

I’d read about the CCTV and ID bank upgrades but it still took me by surprise to be addressed by name. “I don’t understand…,” I started.

“We’re placing you under arrest under the Viral Health Act, 2024….” It was the guy that continued talking, reading out my rights, but I didn’t hear the words. I felt exposed, rubbed at my arm and wished that I hadn’t taken my jacket off. It was the other one, the woman, that placed a firm, gloved hand on my shoulder and began to escort me up the street. They didn’t say much and I was too shocked to make much sense, just repeatedly asking what I had done. “We’ll tell you more when you’re secured from the public, Miss Daniels.”

They had a car parked around the corner on Whiteladies Road. I sat in the back, a screen sealing them off from me. It must have been soundproof because I could see the guy talking into a walkie-talkie but I couldn’t hear him. She drove. No sirens, no flashing lights, just me sitting in silence as we passed the University. I thought there was a police station down near the Royal Infirmary so I assumed we were going there. I only knew where the Infirmary was because directions to the nearest hospital had been in the student welcome pack we’d all got, part of the viral awareness literature that had been pushed on us since we were at school but updated a bit now we were older. Mainly stuff about risks through fluid exchange, the old romantics. I was feeling a little calmer, the strange quiet in the back of the car had helped me gather my thoughts. It must be a mistake. Or something silly. It’ll be fine.

In the station they took me straight to a temporary ICU. I didn’t even know they had them but so many places had isolation units for emergencies now that it didn’t surprise me. Technically it wasn’t a cell and they didn’t seem to lock the door but someone stayed outside the whole time, I could see him through the porthole window. They told me that someone would attend to me soon and to make myself comfortable. I paced up and down for a bit and tried to think through what I needed to ask, what I was entitled to. Most of my police procedural knowledge was from that night me and the girls had watched those VSI re-runs and I was pretty sure screaming for my attorney wasn’t going to help. I didn’t have one, for a start, unless Jane Atkins, a girl I’d met in the first term who was studying law counted, and I had a nagging feeling they weren’t even called attorney’s in the UK. All the times someone had asked for a phone call on the show seemed to have worked though so maybe that was legit.

Eventually a woman came in, asked me a few health questions, and requested to take a blood test.

“Listen, you can refuse,” she said. “But then I just have to get a warrant processed as part of your arrest and we do the test anyway and all you’ve achieved is some time and pissing everyone off.”

I let her scratch into my arm, it didn’t seem like a big deal. She even managed a thin smile and a muttered ‘thank you’. As she was finishing up, blotting a small piece of cotton wool onto the place she’d made the incision, deftly taping it down, she moved her hand down my arm and tapped my bare wrist.

“You know why you’re here, right?” She tapped again and looked at me and I realised I wasn’t wearing my MedLet. The good parts of last night came back to me, the kissing parts, the undressing parts, the taking off my MedLet part.

“It’s just a mistake,” I said quickly. “I haven’t got any symptoms, I’m not hiding anything. I just stayed at a friend’s house last night, I must have taken it off to sleep and forgotten it. You can’t be serious?”

She smiled, glanced up at my slightly disheveled hair. “Well I hope your ‘friend’ was worth it because, unfortunately, failure to wear a health monitoring and tracking device is serious and can carry a big penalty. Let’s hope you’re not carrying. You might just get a caution if you’re clean.”

“What do we do now?” I said.

“I need some time to run the test diagnostic. In the meantime you wait here.”

My earlier calm had evaporated now and all I could think to lean on were some of the lines I’d rehearsed in my mind earlier. “Can I make a phone call?”. She nodded, said to use my own mobile but she’d wait while I just made one. I didn’t know who could help or what anyone was allowed to do. I called Leah and burst into tears when she picked up. She listened as I explained what had happened, forcing the words out through sobs and shortness of breath. There was no hesitation on the other end of the line.

“Hang on, Aps, we’re coming.”