We Hear Voices Read online

  “I think we would like a drink, please,” said Billy. “Can we have some hot lemon?”

  Rachel smiled. “Of course you can!” She didn’t pick up on his use of the royal “we.”

  “Do you know what astronauts drink on the space station? They drink their own wee,” Billy said. “It did say so on the telly. And their sweat. Next year’s mission will be to the Rock. It’s an asteroid and a launchpad.”

  Rachel wrinkled up her face. “You’re very well-informed. Seriously? They drink wee and sweat? That doesn’t sound very nice. They must filter it.”

  “Nina will have to drink her wee when she is an astronaut,” he said, and he giggled. “Wee! For a drink! For Nina! Yuck!” He laughed and laughed.

  Rachel sat on his bed and laughed along with him. “They must filter it. And treat it before they drink it.”

  “Yes, but it is still wee.”

  “Well, that applies to all our water, doesn’t it? Sewage gets recycled back into tap water.” She didn’t like this idea, so she stopped talking. Billy needed lots of fluids, and she shouldn’t be putting him off. “Anyway, I’ll get your drink. Any food? You could have a banana, you know.” She could smell their jacket potatoes cooking in the oven. Billy hadn’t eaten anything solid yet.

  “No food. Thank you. Not today.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The next day Billy said: “You know you said there was a banana?”

  It wasn’t easy to get them anymore, but Al had found some brownish ones in the supermarket months ago and had brought them home in triumph. Rachel remembered her own mother feeding her mashed bananas when she was recuperating from anything, and to her they were the taste of convalescence. She had kept them in the freezer for ages, waiting for Billy to be able to eat again.

  “Yes!” said Rachel. “Yes. Would you like one?”

  “Bananas have good things in them, and Delfy says I need to eat food so she can see how my digestions works and so I can get strong again.”

  Rachel laughed. “Who says that?”

  “Delfy.”

  “Who’s Delfy?”

  “Delfy is my friend.” He paused. “Delfy says hello to you, Mummy.”

  “Does he live in your head?”

  “Not he! She! Yes, at the moment, she does.”

  Rachel sat on the edge of the bed. “Oh, good! Tell Delfy hello back from me. I’ll get you a banana, and you can give some to Delfy, too. Shall I mash it up?”

  “Yes. I will have it all myself because Delfy is watching in me. She doesn’t eat food. She wants to see me eat food.”

  “Well,” said Rachel, “that’s perfect. You can eat enough to make both of you strong.”

  * * *

  • • •

  As the days went by, Billy spoke about Delfy more and more, delighted with his invention. Rachel saw the imaginary friend as a way of coping with the boredom of being stuck in bed, and she thought it was a godsend. Delfy, according to Billy, lived inside his head and wanted to find out about the world exactly as Billy rediscovered it. Delfy and Billy read books, drew pictures, and watched TV indiscriminately. As time went by, they tried standing up on Billy’s wobbly legs and fell back onto the bed, giggling. They laughed at things that weren’t objectively funny. They watched the news and wrote down more and more numbers on the pieces of paper beside the bed. They dozed as Rachel read them stories. Delfy was the personification of recovery, and with her voice in his head, Billy got better.

  THREE

  When she woke in the night, though, she knew something was wrong. She had the same old feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  She knew it had been a nightmare but couldn’t remember any details. Just the feeling lingered on. She seemed to be sitting bolt upright, and even when she was wide-awake, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was catastrophically wrong.

  She crept out of bed and made her way to the door, hoping not to wake Al, who was breathing heavy, sleepy breaths beside the rumpled space where she had been, or Beth, whose cot was right beside her. She tiptoed across the landing in the dim light of the streetlamps that shone through the frosted glass pane in the door downstairs. That glass had a crack in it. Everything was falling apart.

  She passed through the strips of plastic sheeting into what had once been the sterile zone and stood on the threshold of Billy’s bedroom. It was still gratingly tidy, as he had barely got out of bed except to go to the loo. Still, there was no longer a flu handbook on the bedside table; now there was a pile of picture books and a piece of paper with the number 633,910,111 written on it.

  She gazed at him. His breathing was even, and his face was untroubled. She put a hand on his forehead and knew that his temperature was normal. There was no fever anymore.

  “All right, Mummy,” he said, three-quarters asleep, and she kissed his hair. His curtains were not quite closed, and as she pulled them together, she saw the unusually starry night outside and wondered whether it could be true that people, including, perhaps, her daughter, were going to go and live up there. Could the human race really abandon the perfect home it had trashed? Privately, she thought the talk of space colonization was a distraction from the awful things going on down here, but she wouldn’t say that in front of Nina, who had started going to some space classes that were, at least, free.

  It was when she came back into her own room, relieved and sleepy, that she saw that her instinct had been right, but that its focus had been wrong. It was Beth. Baby Beth, the unexpected joy of Rachel’s early forties, was panting. She was burning with a fever, and Rachel grabbed her from her cot and held her close. That woke her properly, and her chubby face crumpled as she started to wail. Al sat up.

  Their eyes met. She saw her own dread reflected.

  “She’s . . . sick,” said Rachel. It hurt her to say the word, and for a moment, all her strength was gone, and she sat on the edge of the bed.

  She could not go through this again. She couldn’t. Everything was supposed to be better, and if Beth had the flu, then it would begin all over again. It couldn’t. She couldn’t. She couldn’t lose Beth. No.

  Al put a solid arm around her, and she collapsed onto his shoulder. He took the baby from her arms. Everything about him calmed her, and when he said: “Go to sleep. I’ll do the night shift. We’ll need you in the morning. Sleep. I’ve got her,” she rolled over and closed her eyes.

  * * *

  • • •

  Daylight was coming around and through the flimsy curtains. The room smelled normal. It didn’t have the sick scent that was lingering, just a tiny bit, in Billy’s room.

  She shuffled down the landing to look in on Billy, who was asleep, and then walked slowly down the stairs, following the smell of toast and coffee to the kitchen. She dreaded what she would find, picturing the baby limp on Al’s shoulder, gearing herself up to sterilize Nina’s room and put Beth in there, behind plastic sheets, for weeks and weeks. She would have to get back into the quarantine suit, and Nina would stay away for even longer: it would be weeks and weeks, all over again, and at the end of that, they would need another miracle.

  Beth, however, was sitting in the high chair, throwing toast crusts onto the floor and giggling.

  Rachel tried to compute what she was seeing. “Did that happen?” she said. She checked the wall clock: seven a.m. Al passed her a coffee and half his piece of toast and peanut butter. “Was it real? Last night? Thank you.”

  He kissed her and then put a hand on top of Beth’s black curls. Both of them smiled at Rachel, with their matching dimples.

  “It was,” he said. “I don’t know what happened, but she fought it off. Or it was something else. Who knows? She fussed a bit. We walked around the house, and I gave her some medicine. And then she settled and fell asleep on me. I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to be alert around her, so I just sat right here
, drinking coffee and listening to the radio, with Beth sleeping on my shoulder until the sun came up. There was a World Service program about the anniversary of the plane crash. I could tell you anything you wanted to know about that. Apart from what really happened, I guess.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to know anything the government has to say about anything. Thanks. Do you think my milk made her better?”

  Al stroked Beth’s hair again. “Probably.”

  Rachel had, until last night, attributed the fact that Beth hadn’t got sick to the fact that she was breastfeeding her. And now, if Beth had been attacked by the virus, she had overcome it instantly. Rachel had peered back into the abyss, then woken up and found it wasn’t an abyss at all. It was just a pothole, and it was already filled in.

  Poor Al had to go to work, and she walked to the door with him, as she did sometimes, and waited while he wheeled his bike out of the hallway. It was cold outside. Icy. The blast came into the house, and she knew it would linger because they couldn’t afford to use the heating very often. However, that didn’t matter because Beth and Billy were well. They were all well. The things that had bothered her before the epidemic were negligible trivia, because she was looking at them differently.

  “You stayed up all night,” she said. “And now you’re going to work. Will you be OK?”

  Al reached out and hugged her, and she pressed herself into his chest, holding him as tightly as he held her.

  “Of course I will,” he said into her hair.

  Al was her world. She had never expected to meet someone new when she was forty-one, and yet here he was, living with her, hugging her tightly to him, father of her baby, stepfather to her older children. They made an unusual couple, she white and forty-three, he black and thirty-five; she a divorced and stressed mother, he an eligible bachelor when they met. Yet it worked. It actually worked. Everything about it worked. She adored him, and somehow he loved her, too, and their baby was perfect, and she was healthy.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later that morning, Rachel was sitting on the floor with Beth, admiring the baby’s effortless good health. They were pushing toy cars around, Rachel saying, “Brmm-brmm,” and Beth giggling and blowing raspberries. Eight months, Rachel thought, was a wonderful age to be.

  “Here are Mummy and Beth,” said Billy, and Rachel stifled a scream. He was right there, standing in the kitchen doorway. Billy, who still needed her to support him to the bathroom, who had not walked more than a step on his own for weeks, had come downstairs.

  “Billy!” she said.

  “Delfy said I must come down.”

  Rachel looked up. He was thin and wobbly, but he was there, upright, in his pajamas. He had walked all the way down the stairs alone. She had not expected him to get out of bed for another four days. That was what it said online. Now she would be able to tear that plastic right down. It could be properly over.

  She was on her feet in a second, and a moment after that, he was in her arms, warm and sleepy and, at last, smelling more of little boy than of illness. Beth clapped her hands, delighted at the sight of him. If she could, she would have been yelling his name.

  “You got up!” Rachel said when she could. “How did you even do that?”

  “I did get up because Delfy said. I just told you.”

  “Oh, my darling. That’s amazing. Clever Delfy! How do you feel? You made it all the way down the stairs on your own. You should be resting.”

  “Resting is boring, though, Mum.”

  Beth shouted and waved both arms. Billy wriggled off Rachel’s lap and sat carefully next to her.

  “Red car, Beth,” he said, picking one up and holding it out to her with a trembling hand. He was making an enormous effort. Rachel could see what hard work this was for him.

  The kitchen was tatty, the house rented and neglected by the landlord. The cold found its way around the edges of the windows. The oven worked at twenty degrees cooler than it said it did and often didn’t work at all. Everything needed replacing, and they couldn’t afford to do any of it. Most of their technology was thirty years out of date. Rachel looked at the children playing together and wondered what their future would hold.

  Beth had stayed with Rachel and Billy throughout the illness. They had wondered whether to send her away to live with Rachel’s mother, but Rachel couldn’t do it, and not just because her mother would probably have baptized her into her weird church. She wanted to carry on feeding Beth and decided that she would trust in the immunities that the milk gave her. Until last night’s scare, it had worked, and she supposed that it was probably her own breaching of the sterile zone, on the night when Billy hadn’t died, that had brought the virus to Beth. Well, no harm seemed to have been done. They were lucky.

  And now that Billy had come downstairs, the quarantine was over. Those were the rules. Nina could come home, too. Rachel looked for a phone. She needed to let her know right away.

  * * *

  • • •

  At four o’clock the front door opened, and Nina said: “Hey! I’m back!”

  Rachel was standing at the stove, cooking. She turned to Nina and pushed her long hair back from her face (her hair was half gray now, she had noticed, and she didn’t care) and said, fake casual: “Oh, hi! How was school?”

  They laughed as Rachel opened her arms and Nina flew into them. Rachel held her tightly. She buried her face in her daughter’s hair and smelled the Nina smell mixed with Henry’s house, Henry’s shampoo, Henry’s washing powder. She pulled Nina’s skinny body close and savored everything about her darling child. They hadn’t seen each other properly over the past six weeks (Rachel had only half-noticed her on the night when Billy didn’t die), just talking on the phone while looking at each other through the front window, Nina standing outside the house, both of them pressing their hands to the glass. They had texted every day. But still, apart from that one night, Nina had been absent, outside the cordon.

  And now here she was. She was back, and the nightmare receded a little further.

  “Are you hungry?” said Rachel.

  Nina threw her schoolbag down in the corner. “Starving,” she said, and she picked up Beth. “Bethie Bethie Bethie. Look how you’ve grown! Oh, I like what you’ve done with the paintings.”

  Rachel looked around. She hadn’t noticed, but Billy’s paintings, which she had always stuck up around the kitchen (sometimes to cover patches of mold), were now arranged in rainbow order, starting with red ones by the door and going through the spectrum to purple by the cooker, and they were in a perfect straight line.

  “I didn’t do that,” she said.

  “We did do it just now,” said Billy, who had, indeed, been padding around the room.

  Nina put Beth down and pulled Billy onto her lap.

  “It looks nice,” she said. “Good to see you, mister.” She ruffled his hair, and Rachel could see she was trying not to cry.

  “This is my sister, Nina,” Billy said. He was sitting up straight, with wide blank eyes. “She has been staying with our dad because she needed to not get ill. Now I am better, she has come home.”

  “Erm, yes, I have,” said Nina. “Who are you introducing me to, Bill?”

  “To Delfy.”

  “Remember Delfy?” Rachel said. “The imaginary friend. I told you about her on the phone. We are all in favor of Delfy.” She got out the biscuits. Rachel and Al were so poor at the moment that a budget packet of store-brand custard creams was a treat. She shook them onto a plate to make it feel like more of an occasion.

  “Sure.” Nina took two. “Thanks. Well, nice to meet you, Delfy.”

  Billy was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Delfy says it is nice to meet you, too, Nina. She says you’re good.”

  “Thanks. Tell her she is, too?”

  Again, Billy was silent, and then
he said: “She says thanks.”

  Nina turned to Rachel. “So, Mum? So much has happened. Can I bring Louis over to meet you?”

  Nina, who was sixteen, had never brought a boy home. She had sounded elated talking about Louis on the phone. Rachel knew that she had not shown enough interest in her daughter’s first boyfriend, when her son had been dying. Now she was going to make up for it.

  “Of course!” she said. “We’d love to meet him. You know that. Bring him over anytime. I can’t wait.”

  “I will. You’ll really like him. His family is quite posh, but you’d never know it. Mum, I’ve got to do some homework for tomorrow. Can I clear a space on the table and do it here? I don’t want to go away from you all. It’s too nice to be back.”

  “Of course,” Rachel said, and she was perfectly content. When Al came home from work, she would have her whole family right here. Billy was getting better fast, and she knew that the old banal worries would start to creep back in soon. She was supposed to be going back to work, after her extended, unpaid maternity leave. They had no money, so she had to go back full-time, however much she didn’t want to. Her mother was going to look after Beth while Rachel was at work, and that in itself was a minor worry.

  And if Nina’s boyfriend was “quite posh,” she supposed that when he came round, she would have to make a big effort. She would clear all the junk from the kitchen table and cook something that would somehow be impressive and yet cheap.

  She savored these worries. These were the ordinary things she had thought she was going to lose forever. These were the things that made life real. She relished them.

  FOUR

  On Saturday Nina woke up thinking about Beth; her brain seemed to have made a plan while her body slept. She had a quick shower, dressed in jeans and a jumper, and went down the stairs two at a time.