Beaches

Part 6

The room was dark as night. A blackout blind covered the large window. Jacob waited for his eyes to adjust and reveal the horror that was waiting for him. There was a wardrobe in one alcove next to the fireplace, a chest of drawers in the other. Her cot, however, was gone.

He took a step back, closed the door and opened it again, as if his first impression might have been his mind playing tricks on him. When he looked again it was exactly the same. This time he went in, walked to the window and pulled up the blind. The sunlight revealed four square impressions in the carpet where her cot had been.

It didn't make sense. Unless Emma had died first, while his parents had still been well enough to clean her room. It would have been the best outcome for her but didn't explain why his parents hadn't told him.

He closed the door and went back to the kitchen, feeling that nothing had been resolved, that no questions had been answered. He found the medicine box, it smelled like childhood. He moved automatically to clean his wound with a sterile wipe, apply antiseptic cream and a cloth plaster. When he had finished he sat at the table and let his mind wander.

Night came suddenly in a world without electricity. As Jacob became aware of the lengthning shadows, he jerked out of his formless reverie and came too with no memory of what he had been thinking. He only knew that he didn't want to still be there at full dark.

He went to the stairs, looked up into the growing dark and remembered all the times his mum had told him to be careful running up and down them, and all the times he'd told her that he would. They were particularly steep, and led straight to the very hard cornered telephone table, but his eventual undoing was the result of wearing socks on a carpet worn smooth with age. He'd broken his arm in two places that summer and earned a telling off from his dad.

It felt strange not to take his boots off, but if he fell and hurt himself now, there was no one around to come to his rescue. He couldn't afford to risk it. Taking hold of the banister, he began to climb.

There were paintings on the wall, scenes from a farm life that neither of his grandparents had experienced, but somehow still felt connected to. They weren't so different to how things were now, and he wondered whether his grandmother and grandfather would have fared any better than him had they been young enough to survive. Further up there was a Victorian bed pan. When he'd been younger he'd thought it was a musical instrument and been horribly disappointed to learn the truth. Now it was something that he would consider taking when he left, the winter nights could be long and cold.

He checked the bathroom first and found nothing. The next door led to his grandparent's room and he didn't expect to find anything there either; his grandfather had died at the very start of the outbreak, before anyone had realised the extent of it, before funeral parlours had closed their doors and undertakers had thought it was nothing more than an extremely profitable summer. He opened the door, saw nothing and closed it again. His grandparents room had been even more out of bounds than the front room, and he already felt like he was trespassing.

Jacob checked the spare bedroom next. It was where he'd slept when he'd come to stay, and the rest of the year it was where they kept bulk bought toilet paper and tins of food. There was unlikely to be anything worth keeping, but he wanted to be sure. And, also, to avoid the final door for a little longer. The final door led to his parent's room and there was no getting away from the certainty that they would be in there.

(Where's the smell then?)

He could believe they'd lived long enough to bury Emma, and at a stretch, one of them might have been able to bury the other, but no matter how he looked at it, that still left one body waiting behind that door.

There was nothing in the spare room except boxes of food long past edible. He checked them anyway, might have spent all night doing so if the growing darkness hadn't made his consider the final door and the horror of coming across their bodies by moonlight. He closed the door and turned right, not even needing to take a full step.

His hand on the brass handle. It was cold and slippery. He was being silly, he knew, building it up in his mind to be worse that it could possibly be. He'd seen bodies before. He'd handled them, moved them into the mass graves that had been dug outside the towns that wanted to keep functioning. A corpse held no horror for him and these were his parents. They deserved a more dignified end.

Jacob turned the handle, pushed the door and went inside.

Nothing.

Their bed was in the middle of the room, behind the door. It was neatly made. He checked the floor, thinking that one of them may have collapsed and died there

(Then why is the bed made?)

but the only thing he found was two pairs of slippers, lined up neatly beneath the window. A vase of dead flowers on the windowsill above.

He stood at the door and tried to take it all in. There was no sign that anybody had died here. It looked as if they had gone on holiday.

Jacob wondered if that could be the explanation. Had they gone away thinking they could escape the virus? It seemed ridiculous now, but at the time it would have made sense. If the number of cars on the road was anything to go by, then plenty of people had tried the same thing. It would even explain why Emma's cot was gone - they would have had to take it with them - although not why they hadn't told him.

He sat on the edge of the bed, sending a cloud of dust into the air. If they had gone, then where? He still needed to find them, to know what had happened. This was worse than being back to square one; at least he had known where his grandfather's house was. If they had tried to get away, then they could be anywhere in the country. They might not even have made it wherever they were going, they could be in one of countless cars clogging up the roads. He might have walked straight past them.

It was hopeless. He might as well give up. He buried his head in his hands and didn't look up again until he heard the front door open and then footsteps in the hallway.