How I Live Now: Chapters 11–20

None of this bothered me too much since no one ever tried to call me but I guess it made Osbert nervous because it was getting harder and harder to stay in touch with his spy-crazy friends who spent their lives organizing illicit jaunts down to the pub for exchanges of information.

Then just when we got used to our new life and our daily walk to town and waiting hours for a couple of loaves of bread and half a pound of butter and four pints of milk (because we’re children) the whole countryside was quarantined due to an outbreak of smallpox or should I say an Alleged Outbreak of Smallpox because these days we didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t...

Anyhow, the upshot of the so-called Smallpox Epidemic was that you weren’t supposed to be out on the streets at all and now big black trucks went around and left bags of food twice a week at the end of the drive, and if you had any special requests you could write them on a piece of paper.

But because everything was getting worse by little daily increments and you didn’t know what was true or not true it seemed easier just to treat this news as another fact of life and nothing particularly to worry about.

And everyone’s saying It’s the most beautiful May we’ve had in years and Isn’t it ironic?

But we’re still talking about a few nice trees here and there whereas in England I was drowning in fertility.

And of course being me, now that there was a war on and rationing and all, I was in deprivation heaven and hardly needed my father screwing Davina in the next room to help me lose my appetite for a few years.

The rest of them ate eggs and goat’s milk and greens from the garden, and there were baked beans that we’d stockpiled and Piper was getting incredibly good at making things with the dried beans and rice and bacon they put in our package most weeks.

According to what Osbert picked up in one of his clandestine spy-boy meetings down at the pub, the Smallpox Epidemic was just a rumor spread around to keep us all quiet and scared and out of the way.

The hospitals are on skeleton staff and trying to deal with casualties coming in from the cities and have confiscated most of the drugs from the chemists so local people with basic problems like high blood pressure or diabetes are experiencing difficulties.

We’re a little desperate, especially for antibiotics, and we’re asking everyone to check around to see what they might have.

This leaves me and Dr. Jameson all alone and while he’s looking me up and down I’m reminiscing about what a nice time I’ve had here in England completely free of doctors and what a crying shame it’s come to an end so soon, and after a little silence he says, How long has this been going on?

It turned out that we were being Sequestered which had to be explained to me since I’m not exactly in the habit of having people take over a perfectly private house to send the inhabitants off to live god knows where for The Duration, and all I could think was this would not happen in America but of course for all I knew the Green Berets were already holed up in Bloomingdale’s.

First Osbert went off in the truck with the army guy and came back all beaming with a job, so I guess all those hours learning Morse code and playing spies turned out not to be in vain.

By noon the house was starting to fill up with army types and at first we were outraged to see them putting all their stuff into OUR rooms and setting up radio equipment in the barn and moving the animals out without even asking and then we decided the better part of valor was discretion and if we made ourselves scarce they might not get the feeling that we were the sort of kids who needed to be Taken Care Of elsewhere.

We even went so far as to offer them lunch which I’m sure is what the collaborators in France did to the Nazis to keep them happy and I felt pretty much like a pathetic groveling turncoat even though we were supposedly on the same side.

I’ve probably missed some important parts of the explanation but that seemed to be the gist of it and whenever anyone went into more detail I found my brain wandering to things like I wonder if he dyes his hair and Whatever possessed them to choose that color wallpaper?

I started making up a mnemonic the way I used to do in school but it was hard to keep it straight since I had to keep adding words on as we went along, and whoever named these places wasn’t doing it with any particular pattern in mind.

Other things, I recognized from our village, like most of the shops either had broken windows or were all boarded up and lots of houses had boarded-up windows too, presumably for when the marauding hordes swept through the Back of Beyond and wanted to rape all the housewives and pillage their dining room sets.

He sounded amazingly calm and reassuring but I could hear an occasional hoarse gasping kind of cry like an animal choking to death in a noose and when I looked through the door I could see Mrs. M shaking all over and him with his arms around her looking exhausted and patting her over and over saying Now now, love, and I decided to live without a glass of water that night.

All in all I felt a little guilty about the fact that while us kids had been living the Life of Riley, a whole bunch of other people had been scurrying around like lunatics trying to keep the Social Fabric from Unraveling and my personal belief was there were too many problems to think about and not enough people to sort them out.

I had to be in a certain state of mind—quiet, distracted, sometimes half asleep—and then I might feel a kind of aura, a lightening of the space behind my eyes and I’d know he was there.

Sometimes I could just feel his eyes on me, holding me with his quizzical wise-dog gaze, and I would push off with one foot and try to coast for hours on that feeling.

Whether I could feel his presence or not, I talked to him constantly, telling him about Piper and Jet and the McEvoys and our life the way it was now, and then in the middle of some rambling monologue I might get the feeling that he was there listening, as if I’d conjured him from thin air, pulled him out of a hat by the ears like a magician’s rabbit.

You hear about siblings adopted at birth into families thousands of miles apart who both name their first child Vera, dogs that begin to howl the instant their owner is killed in a war, people who dream plane crashes.

Ouija boards and black cats are way down the list of neuroses I suffer from.

What was interesting about this little insight was that I could see the army had a point, but it still seemed like a sneaky trick to perpetrate on all those simple country folk.

He looked kind of pensive for a minute and said he would think about it and get back to us.

Piper gave him a pat and looked as smug as she was ever likely to look and I thought YES we are on our way, now if only I can figure out some possible use for me before they stick me in some out-box marked Cannon Fodder.

Thank god I have years of Emergency Deadpan Practice because you wouldn’t have guessed that Gateshead Farm meant anything more to me than Porridge Oats but like any good undercover agent I now had two names to put together to make an address and Major McEvoy thought we were still talking about dogs.

We started early in the morning and worked until it started to get dark and after only a few hours we drifted into cliques like we were all back in school.

Sometimes I thought I might implode if I didn’t talk to another human being about the events of my new life, especially the parts someone my age wouldn’t be allowed to see in the movies.

I told her she should borrow Alby for a few days if she wanted to appreciate how great it was to be childless but when I looked at her she was just managing to smile and her eyes were kind of bleak and I wished I hadn’t said anything at all.

One night we were driving home through the usual checkpoints and Piper and I were asleep and Joe, who sometimes came with us to stay with his parents in the village, suddenly took it into his head to stand up and get show-offy, and I guess thinking war was some kind of open discussion forum where everyone was really interested in your opinion, started shouting a whole bunch of obscenities at one of the checkpoint guards...