"There is something to be said for candlelight. I can vaguely remember the first time I encountered it as asmall boy. There was a thunderstorm and we had a power cut. Being small I was terrified but my parents lit one of a supply of candles that they kept for such emergencies and I soon forgot my fear, fascinated as I was by the small comforting glow of that flame. So much so that I wanted to keep the flame forever and saw the return to the world of electric light, when the power was restored, as akin to being woken from a beautiful dream.
Now where I live, power cuts are as regular as the seasons of the year. In the winter when we most need heat and light we lose it. We have more cuts than my childish mind could have accommodated. And if I am no longer as excited by candle light I am at least grateful for the peace it brings. As I write I can imagine I am an apprentice in a land of poets and storytellers instead of a mere hack. And if candlelight was good enough for Shakespeare then it should satisfy me.
Despite this, I do not know why I continue to write. I have been here so long when originally I intended to stay for a few weeks then file my story and leave this dead zone. In those days I believed in investigative journalism and my own career. Now I realise that what I write no longer matters, never mattered and will never be published. Do I mind this, sitting here in the candlelight in the company of bards? Of course not. When the time comes I will stop, put down my pen, bury this collection of thoughts and leave it for others to worry and argue over. But for now there is the story.
The story is a simple one. It is a part of everyone's story who lives in the days of the Beast and a small part at that. I call them the days of the Beast as affectation, a leftover from my days as a tabloid journalist. But I am getting ahead of myself. The story begins with me working on a newspaper feeling resentful that my efforts had gone unnoticed. By standards other than mine I had done well. I began in the picture archive and had worked my way up from the bottom of the heap. I had progressed to become a feature contributor. To an outsider it might seem that I had everything - an excellent salary, free travel with expenses and the satisfaction of regularly seeing my thoughts in print. But I wanted to write real stories not "pieces" on skiing and Italian cuisine or some other rubbish. I watched as wet nosed kids from public school were given the best assignments as they were promoted over me. Can you be surprised that I greeted the arrival of the contagion with something approaching glee.
No one knew where the plague came from or even much about it. It was said to leave no witnesses because it killed all it touched, even the doctors who tried to cure it. Some said it was nature's or even God's revenge for the mess we had made of things. Hence the days of the Beast. Others favoured the conspiracy theory, that this was a bacteria that had been manufactured in a laboratory and then somehow escaped. Then of course there was always the terrorist theory. Depending on your viewpoint or who you asked the plague originated from America, the Middle East or even China, from where the Black death had originated. Whatever, the end result was that rumour and fear had created wave upon wave of migrants.
For me, the contagion was a chance to boost my journalistic credentials, nothing more. It was a great story, the only story it seemed, and I was going to be the one to cover it. Of course everybody was writing about it, the usual stuff about the refugee problem. Scaremongering over the breakfast cereal I called it. I'd done the same myself but now I intended to get to the source, to seek out the contagion and write about its real effects. We knew so little about it and the fear and rumour it engendered meant most of us knew both more and less than the real truth. I was going to change that.
The Government didn't help. Who knows it may not have been the intention of anyone to prevent us from finding out but once the panic set in and the quarantine laws were introduced it began to feel like we were in a police state. No that's too strong, it felt as if we were in a goldfish bowl with the whole world watching our antics and us looking out. Britain became a fortress intent on ensuring that nothing larger than a rat could enter this septic isle. The rest of Europe was the same, a whole continent of aquaria. It did none of us any good. People still came, or tried to. They hid in the holds of ships, clung to the undersides of railway carriages, froze to death in aeroplane luggage compartments but still they came. Nothing seemed to stop them. Those with money found that overnight there was a whole industry offering them transportation and false papers. Those who had no money sold and dealt in what they could to finance the great exodus, acting as drug mules or prostitutes according to their need or inclination. And as for those who were trying to stop the whole damn show all they could do was stare in wonder at the arcane structure of subterfuge and deceit that crystallised under their noses.
At first I was naïve enough to believe that all this activity and intrigue would hinder my plans as country after country throughout Europe closed their frontiers. I forgot the golden rule in a siege, getting out is easy, it's getting in which is hard. You just needed enough money and the right connections. So like a river salmon I swam against the tide that flowed in the opposite direction, trying not to think what happens to a salmon once the journey was completed. The journey itself took many forms. I wanted to find out more about the contagion, to speak to those who had seen what it could do. I bullied and bribed consulate staff, police and politicians. They helped me to arrange secret rendezvous with the smugglers who traded in human misery. Sometimes they were unwilling to speak to me. Sometimes money made a difference. Sometimes they resented the unwelcome attention enough to kill me although I only had to physically defend myself once. Mostly they passed me from hand to hand each time a little closer to my destination though in truth I had no idea then what my destination was to be. At the time it seemed that to be travelling was enough.
Along the way I spoke to the refugees I encountered in city slums and shanty towns, in crowded seaports and isolated coves to say nothing of the camps that sprang up around the various borders. Everywhere I went there was the same mixture of hope, fear and despair. Money was the ingredient that decided in what proportion these existed. Some I spoke to seemed optimistic about their plans though many had accepted that they were trapped in a limbo like most refugees and would never escape their situation. Some seemed to have abandoned hope altogether. Each time I asked the same questions using the smattering of languages that I picked up along the way or else trusting dubious interpreters. Did any of them know anyone who had the contagion? The answers were depressingly similar. No they did not personally know of anyone though they had a friend or a cousin who knew of someone in another village. When I asked where that village might be they would invariably shrug and look behind them saying "up country".
It seemed like I was on the road for years but in truth it was probably a matter of months. It's difficult for me to be certain. Time has little meaning to me these days. What began by air and sea degenerated into dusty railtracks and potted roads. I became less intolerant of the distances I covered. Where once I could fly a thousand miles I settled for twenty miles in a given day. The road took me southward, always south. Sometimes there was danger but more often from not I encountered kindness. Families who had little would give me shelter and food. Those that had nothing gave me advice or put me in touch with those who could help. Through such as this I befriended the truck drivers who travelled the dirt roads and smiled when I asked them about the contagion as if it was something they were immune from. They too, in their genial fashion passed me from hand to hand and I shared their adventures crossing into countries decimated by famine and civil war, where the only respite was the roadside whorehouses, rife with HIV.
One truck driver, Joseph, offered to take me through the war zone in return for my camera and the last of my money. I accepted and we set off the next morning. Nothing untoward happened for a week but then the truck struck a mine. I was thrown clear but Joseph was trapped and the petrol tank exploded before I could reach him. Luckily he was unconscious and so felt nothing as I watched him burn. I spent the next few weeks dodging army patrols fearful of what might happen should they discover me. For food I ate roots. Occasionally I came across an abandoned house, sometimes a whole village, where the inhabitants had fled from the troops. Still I found no sign of the contagion.
Finally I came upon a red cross station. They took one look at this madman in front of them and put me in a bed. I struggled and tried to leave but the doctors said I that I was suffering from fever and malnutrition, possibly even malaria. Unless I rested I would die. So I stayed and submitted silently to their ministrations conscious that they were keeping me from my goal. One night I could stand it no longer so I dressed and stole a jeep together with some food and water. I drove out of the camp and did not stop until I had crossed the border once more heading southwards.
About thirty miles across the border the jeep broke down. The nearest shelter was a refugee camp. I stayed there, intending to move on shortly, but I had lost my papers and with no means of identification I was just another unwanted stateless person, one of thousands to the officials who ran the camp. Discipline in the camp was slack. The guards did not want to be there any more than we did. That was why when raiders from across the border came they made no effort to stop the massacres. I fled into the night, the gunfire and the screams behind me and kept running until I was too exhausted to breathe. Then I lay there, waiting for death, as the sun rose on the new morning.
I did not die but drifted as one who was no longer alive, like a ghost clinging to the earth through force of habit rather than inclination. Eventually I came to a city and was befriended by Marella, a street whore and junkie. She allowed me to tag along like a stray dog and looked after me in her fashion. Her home was a barely furnished small square room where she entertained her clients. It stank of disease and the men who had been there. When she had clients I slept outside but eventually I was too ill and she took her customers elsewhere, to some other friend I supposed. Her visits home now are more infrequent.
The war spread across the border. As I write I can hear the gunfire in the distance at night. When the electricity fails and there is no light sometimes the only thing you can do is listen. I am not afraid of the war, I have other things to worry about. My cough is worse and I can barely stand to get to the outside latrines without using a chair as a crutch. I hardly eat but when I do I cannot keep the food down.
I never saw the contagion though each night I see its effects on the faces of those I had met on my travels who now return in my nightmares. Regularly they come to torment me leaving me bathed from head to foot in sweat and weak with fever. But the morning after, in that quiet time I am usually lucid. It is then that I consider the nature of the contagion that I so signally failed to find. In those moments I know what I have probably known all along. There is no contagion and if there was one it was not the malaria or plague or HIV or Ebola or countless other diseases I had encountered and seen men die from. No, if it exists the contagion is to be found within the goldfish bowls we have built to keep it out and it is spread at the breakfast tables where people read the lies and half-truths written by men like myself. It has no cure and no possibility of containment because those who have it do not want to be cured. And the worst of the contagion is the fear it breeds of those who do not have it who stand on quaysides, hide in lorries or ride under trains in an effort to come to the one place where they too will eventually become infected.
And in those lucid moments I know that my journey is over and that I will never go home because I am now free of the contagion and will remain free as long as I stay in this foul room. So that is what I now do, writing by candlelight, waiting for Marella to return."