DAY
ZERO
MINUS
TWO
A NURSE COLLECTS ME FROM THE GROUND-FLOOR LOBBY and takes me and my wheeled suitcase up in the lift. I smell the familiar odours of disinfectant and industrial cleaner, mixed with a kind of hopeful hopelessness. The nurse, whose head is level with my chest, is wearing the ubiquitous hospital top and loose trousers; the same as the nurses wore in the clinic in the hills above Big Sur and in the hospital in Athens. She’s also got on a medical face mask like me but, above her brown eyes, neatly drawn eyebrows arch. She asks whether I had a good journey even though she must know they sent a car and that I sat in the back with a plastic screen between me and the driver. What she doesn’t know is that I was smarting from the argument with Justin while the phone in my pocket vibrated with messages from him and Mum—apologies at first, rising to warnings and then angry admonishments to turn back now. Part of me worried I’d made another bad decision but the more my phone buzzed the more determined I became. I tried to calm myself by watching the empty streets of central London go by and counting the number of pedestrians we passed. When the car pulled up outside the unit, I was up to thirty-three.
The nurse has an accent; Thai, I guess. The lift stops on the second floor, the top floor. She tells me sixteen other volunteers will be arriving, and that I’m the first. “Volunteers” is the word she uses although we are being paid. That, for me, is the point.
“We’ll get you settled in,” the nurse says. “No need to be nervous.”
“I’m fine,” I say, although I’m not sure I am.
The lift doors open to a windowless reception with a long desk behind which sits a young woman in a white uniform. VACCINE BIOPHARM is displayed in large letters on the wall, with YOUR DREAMS, OUR REALITY beneath. An extravagant flower arrangement is at one end of the desk, a dozen tall stalks with orange flowers in a glass vase, and beside the lift there is some soft seating and a low table with glossy magazines fanned across it. The place looks like an advertising company from some American television series.
“Good afternoon,” the receptionist says from behind her mask.
“This is Nefeli,” the nurse says.
“Hello, Nefeli.” The receptionist speaks like a children’s TV presenter, too gleeful.
“It’s Neffy,” I say. “Hello.”
The receptionist’s nails click on her keyboard as she checks me in.
“Room one?” the nurse asks.
“Room one,” the receptionist says as though this is the best room.
The nurse leads me to a wide corridor of closed doors and recessed lighting, a nurses’ station, hand sanitation units at intervals along the wall, and glove dispensers. Our shoes squeak on the vinyl flooring, which is patterned with a sweep of a different colour as though to guide our way. My first name is already on the whiteboard attached to the door of room one.
“I’ll change it to Neffy,” the nurse says as she swings the door open and lets me go in first, like an estate agent showing me around. One of those tricks to make sure I’m impressed.
I’m relieved to see a picture window the full length of the far wall beyond the bed. Three weeks isn’t so long if I can see more than four walls. I can do this. Outside is a view of roofs across to the east, and opposite, an old red-brick building which looks as though it’s been converted into apartments. Behind a row of square-framed windows—what’s the architectural term for them? Justin told me once—a woman shrugs herself into a raincoat and disappears into the depths of her flat. Separating us below is an alleyway and when I peer to the right I can see a sliver of the main road, with a bollard stopping any traffic from turning in. Leftwards, beyond the end of the unit, the alley meets a dead-end road, which turns the corner around the building opposite and out of sight.
Everything in my room might have come from an upmarket-hospital-room catalogue. I don’t doubt that the other rooms are furnished the same: hospital bed, wardrobe with full-length mirror, desk, large-screen TV attached to the wall and two easy chairs facing each other in front of the window as though I might be allowed to receive visitors and offer them coffee. And to my right a door leads through to a tiled shower room.
“I need to go over some things with you,” the nurse says. She unconsciously turns the gold band on her wedding-ring finger. “And then I’ll leave you to unpack. You can take off your mask if you like. Volunteers don’t need to wear one.”
“Okay,” I say. I’ve read through the “what to expect” email many times. My phone pings again as I remove my mask.
“Do you want to look at that?” As though suddenly conscious of her habit, she lets go of her wedding ring.
“No, it’s fine.” I’m here now, I don’t care what Justin and Mum are telling me to do or not to do.
“You just have one case?” The nurse’s nametag says “Boosri” and when she sees me looking, she says, “You can call me Boo.”
“I don’t need much,” I say. The wheeled suitcase is an old one which Mum bought for my first solo trip to visit my father—Baba—in Greece, the summer I turned twelve. Before that, Baba had bought plane tickets for her and for me, and Mum would travel with me, handing me and one of her old suitcases over to Margot at Corfu Arrivals with hardly a word spoken. I would be embarrassed on Mum’s behalf, fidgeting while she hugged and kissed me and tidied my collar, which wasn’t untidy. I never turned to look at her as I skipped out into the wall of Greek heat with Margot; never once thought about what it must have been like for her to walk straight back into Departures and catch the next plane home to England, alone. When I was twelve either Mum decided I could do the trip alone, supervised by a cabin attendant, or maybe Baba questioned why he was buying two tickets when one would do.
Boo takes a screen from a wide pocket in her uniform, taps to wake it up. “So, I need to check, you don’t have alcohol in your bag?” I shake my head. “No cigarettes, no tobacco?”
“No.”
“No drugs, prescription or anything else, except birth-control pills? No food of any kind? Sweets, snacks? Coffee, tea?”
I shake my head at each item.
She asks me to read the disclaimer one last time and indicates where I should sign with the stylus. I skim the information and scrawl a signature. She scans the barcode on a white wristband and has me confirm my name and date of birth, and then attaches it to my right wrist. She asks if I’ve had any symptoms in the last five days, and she lists them. “No,” I answer to each one. Have I kept myself isolated, apart from contact with my immediate household in the last seven days? “Yes.” I haven’t been near anyone except Justin for more than a week.
Boo snaps on a pair of blue plastic gloves and swabs the back of my nose. I can’t help but pull away and she apologizes. “This will be tested overnight to make sure you’re not asymptomatic.” She puts it in a plastic tube, labels it, tucks it back into her pocket. “The doses of the vaccine will be given in staggered intervals,” she explains. “You’re in the first group, tomorrow afternoon. Okay?”
She shows me how to turn on the television and how to lower and raise the blinds on the external window using the voice service, and she explains that the venetian blind on the interior window which overlooks the corridor must always remain up, even at night, and she tells me how to access the alarms in the bedroom and the shower room.
“Mike will bring your dinner at seven. Vegetarian, yes?” She has hold of her wedding ring again even through the gloves.
“Yes, thanks.”
“If I can get you anything else, let me know.” I realize she hasn’t touched anything in the room. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Some paper.”
“Pardon me?”
“Could you get me some paper, please? My laptop broke and I meant to bring a notebook but I ran out of time.”
This morning, when Justin and I were arguing, I’d stepped with my full weight on to my laptop where I’d left it on the floor beside the bed. He was always telling me to put it away but I never listened. I’d been staying with him in his West London flat, paid for by his father, Clive, and taking whatever jobs I could find—bar work, waitressing—determined to pay my way, and then the virus swept through the city, swept through everywhere, and the pubs and the cafes closed. I sat in Justin’s apartment, eating his food, using his electricity. He said, of course, that it didn’t matter but my zero-hours contracts hadn’t qualified me for any furlough scheme and I had debts to pay, or at least one big debt. Justin said he’d pay it off and I should come with him to Dorset, but I’d already signed up for the trial. That’s what this morning’s argument and ultimately every argument had been about. I’d heard the call for paid volunteers on the radio and had filled in an online form and passed all the tests before I even told him I’d agreed to be given a vaccine which was untested on humans, and then the virus which everyone was terrified of catching, and to sit in a room on my own for three weeks. “I’ll be fine,” I told him. “It’s not that different from sitting in your flat. Only this time they’re paying for me to do nothing.” He didn’t think it was funny.
This morning should have been a tender goodbye. Both of us were leaving—Justin in a hired van down to his father’s house in Dorset, me to the unit in East London. He’d begged me again to go with him but I told him to stop trying to live my life for me and that I could make my own choices.
“A notebook?” Boo asks.
“Please. And a pen?”
“No problem.” At the door she pauses. “I want to say thank you for volunteering. It’s a very generous thing you’re doing.”
I wonder if the words are scripted, a phrase she’s been told to say to every volunteer, but they sound genuine.
Alone in my room, I look at my phone. The last message is from Justin: I’m in Dorset. This is where I’ll be waiting for you when you change your mind.
I put the phone back in my pocket and watch another nurse escort a woman to the room beyond mine. I didn’t see the name on her door but I catch a glimpse of her fine blonde hair and freckled skin before the enormous rucksack she carries obscures her face. The layout of her room must be the mirror image of mine with our beds back to back because, once the nurse has left, through the wall I can hear the girl speaking on her phone. She sounds Irish and her tone is bright and she laughs a lot. Other volunteers arrive, including a man who is shown to the room opposite mine. “Yahiko” it says on his door. Later, I see the blue flicker of a screen through his corridor window.
In the evening, Mike delivers my dinner—sweet potato and aubergine curry with lemon rice—from a trolley he parks outside my room. He’s fiftyish and balding.
“Make sure you order extra for tomorrow,” he says as he hands me a menu card. “Everyone always complains they don’t get enough. Management think that just because you’re sitting around doing nothing you won’t be hungry but in my experience it’s the opposite. All you want to do is eat when you’re bored.” Mike is large, soft-bodied. “I’ll collect the card when I’ve delivered the rest of the meals.” I wonder about the other volunteers, who they are and why they signed up. Even if I asked, I know Mike wouldn’t be allowed to tell me. The options are porridge or yogurt and granola for breakfast, sandwiches, crisps and fruit for lunch, and for me either vegetable lasagne or mushroom risotto for dinner. I tick two sorts of sandwiches and both vegetarian options.
I get another text from Mum while I’m eating.
Please don’t do this again. I know you think you have to because of what happened with your father but none of that is your fault. No one will think any less of you if you change your mind and leave. Please, darling, just think about it.
She’s written more but I turn off the screen and put the phone face down on my bedside table. I want the trial to start so that I don’t have time for second thoughts or to analyse my decision any further. I have coated the idea that I might be doing the wrong thing with a thin layer of self-assurance, brittle and flaking where I’ve picked and rubbed at it, so I know if I read the rest of her message the veneer will crumble, and if I reply to Justin he’ll offer to come and get me and I’ll say yes.
I’ve finished eating and I’m still hungry when Mike comes back in. “Nearly forgot,” he says. “From Boo.” He puts a pen and two spiral-bound notebooks on the bed.
That evening, I open one and pick up the pen.
DAY
ZERO
MINUS
ONE
AT THE WINDOW, EARLY, I FEEL MORE RESILIENT THAN I DID last night, and I compose a reply on my phone to Justin which sounds like an angry apology when I read it back. Before I press send, I’m distracted by the woman from the building opposite coming down the alleyway in a wide-collared trench coat, belted around her middle. She’s like a character in a film, something noirish, maybe a French black-and-white detective story. The sun is just up, so where has she been? With her lover overnight? On a stake-out? She uses a key at her street door and goes inside. I wait for her to appear upstairs and, when she does, she comes to the window opposite mine, so that we are only a few feet apart. If we were to both open our windows—if my window opened at all—and we leaned as far as we could, stretching out our hands, our fingertips might touch. I can see the cushions on her windowsill and a blue Roberts radio. Her profile is placed centrally in one of the black-edged square panes as she speaks into her phone. Crittall windows, that’s what they’re called. I reread the reply I’ve written to Justin and delete it. One-handed, the woman undoes her belt and swaps the phone to her left hand to shake off the coat. Underneath, she’s wearing what seem to be scrubs, similar to Boo’s. That’s my answer. She finishes talking and flings the phone behind her, on to a chair or sofa, and sees me watching. The woman raises a hand in a quick salutation of despair, an acknowledgement of what the world is like outside.
“YOU DIDN’T WANT THE blind down?” Boo asks, rotating her wedding ring. “For sleeping?”
“I couldn’t make it work,” I say. I’m sitting in one of the chairs by the window, still in my pyjamas and a white robe the unit has provided. I didn’t point out to her that it was having the blind raised on the interior window which kept me awake even when the lighting in the corridor was dimmed for the night.
“Blind down,” Boo says, and the mechanism starts. “Blind up.” It reverses. “How did you sleep?” she asks.
I hesitate. It feels rude to say that I didn’t sleep well, as though this is her place and I’m a guest.
“No one sleeps well their first night. Strange bed. Nerves. It’s normal. Don’t worry.” She puts on a plastic apron and the snap of her gloves is like gunshots. “You tested negative, so that’s good.” I’m only half relieved. Maybe it would have been better to have an easy excuse to leave. “I need to do some checks, take some blood.” She asks my name and my date of birth, and then, on a stand which she’s wheeled in, she takes my weight and height, recording everything on her tablet. She takes my blood pressure, and then I look away, squeezing my eyes tight shut as she finds a vein and inserts a needle into the crook of my arm to take a tube of blood. She sticks another long swab up my nose and my eyes water. “Sorry,” she says. “It’s not nice but I must do it every day.”
She gives me a clipboard with sheets attached where three times a day I have to record how I’m feeling. They include columns for mood, pain and its location, bowels, urine, sleep, energy, appetite, smell, taste and other. I’m a scientist, or rather, I was a scientist; I know we’re here to be observed and recorded. When Boo has labelled everything she’s taken from me and cleared away the paraphernalia, she says on her way out that Mike will be here soon with my breakfast.
The blinds are down now in the apartment opposite in what I imagine is the woman’s sitting room. I decide to give her a name: Sophia. I’ve only ever known one Sophia and she would have grown, I think, into someone strong and brave.
I write to H some more, and then when I see the blinds go up in Sophia’s apartment, I tear four pages from my notebook and write on them in block capitals, going over and over the lines with my pen. HELLO, I write. YOU ARE DOING AMAZING WORK. Using dots of toothpaste on each corner, I stick the pages to the window.
I SIT IN BED with my new notebook and think about H and what to say, how to explain my actions. When I glance up, I see that Sophia has replied and I clap my hands, delighted. The telly comes on to a programme about a race around the world that must have been made last year before the lockdowns. In black marker pen, Sophia has written: TY. SO ARE YOU. HOW ARE YOU FEELING?
How does she know what I’m doing? But of course she knows, the whole world knows, and since she lives opposite the unit she must have worked out that it’s happening here. How should I answer? That I’m having second thoughts and I’m homesick although I don’t know which home to be homesick for. That I’m here because I’m only decisive when someone tells me I shouldn’t do something, and that’s an idiotic reason.
“Off,” I say to the telly, but it doesn’t change. I wonder if it’s been set to Boo’s voice. “TV off,” I say, but it won’t obey me. A news programme is on with a scrolling tape along the bottom, and when I pay attention, I realize that it’s this clinical drug trial they’re talking about. They show stock footage of the Vaccine BioPharm logo as a presenter says, “Today sees the start of the world’s first human challenge trial to attempt to find a vaccine for the so-called Dropsy virus responsible for the current pandemic, which causes a range of symptoms including swelling in some organs. Healthy, young volunteers between the ages of eighteen and thirty will be exposed to the virus in a safe and controlled environment at a secret location, while doctors monitor their health around the clock.” Dropsy. What a silly name. I don’t understand why they can’t keep to its proper scientific title. Some tabloid came up with it and it’s stuck. It sounds like a Disney character and, as if to confirm this, behind the presenter on a giant screen are cartoonish images of viruses as alien life forms in dayglo colours bumping into each other and pulsing. “The trial, which is due to finish in three weeks’ time, is being delivered by a private clinical drug trial organization. We can talk now to Lawrence Barrett, CEO of Vaccine BioPharm.”
A man appears with the company’s logo behind him as though he might be sitting in reception, except that every time he moves his head, we get a glimpse of what seems to be a child’s bedroom. Lawrence Barrett is a double-chinned American in a suit and green tie with the distracting circles of a ring light reflected in his eyes. He talks about how safe the trial is, how Vaccine BioPharm considers the volunteers’ health as a priority, and he praises us for our altruism. I remember this human challenge study stuff from a lecture in my one year of medical school. No placebos, no double-blind testing; instead we’ll all be given the vaccine and we’ll all be given the virus. Sink or swim. That’s why they’re paying us so much money. The presenter goes on about informed consent, risk mitigation, whether the chance of success is high enough and if the potential outcome is worth the danger.
During the pre-tests, I was told repeatedly, and once more by Boo, that before I’m given the virus I can leave at any time, but something in the way she said it made me sense a subtle pressure to stay. And, naturally, she also meant that after I’m given the virus I’m not allowed to leave; I have to sit out the twenty-one days in my room. How will they keep us in, I wonder, if we threaten to leave? Will they lock us in, and how ethical would that be? I will have both the vaccine and the virus, and I will stay. I could kid myself that I’m doing it to save the human race, but honestly? I’m doing it for the money. The money I owe to the aquarium for their octopus.
While I’m trying to turn the telly off again, my phone pings. It’s Justin and I’m flooded with relief that he hasn’t given up on me. Now he’ll tell me one last time that I shouldn’t go through with the trial, and I can agree to give in.
Justin: Have you arrived safely? Settled in?
Me: I’m here. All good
We’re being polite after yesterday’s argument, careful to get the measure of each other before apologizing. Another ping. Another message. Please say you’re coming to get me, I think.
Justin: Have you used room service yet?
Me: Just the porno channels
I’m too late, I’m beyond rescue. It seems that we’re going for light banter.
Justin: Careful you don’t get addicted. I know how easy it can be. Did you see you made the news?
Me: I was waving but they must have cut it. Would you have waved back?
Justin: Madly
Justin: I’m sorry about your laptop
Justin: I’m sorry we didn’t get to say goodbye properly
Me: Me too
Justin: I know what you’re doing is important to you. I get that now
I sit cross-legged on my bed and feel dejected. The girl in the room next door is laughing again.
Me: It’s ok
Justin: You’re going to save the human race
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