Three Half Lives

It was at mass, attended by only ten lingering faithful, that Gabe had his first post-meltdown meltdown. In the depths of the sermon he’d flung his arms aloft. The priest was initially filled with righteous pleasure as he saw his holy words inspire his congregation to religious ecstasy, forgetting, as many preachers do, the weird contradiction of losing control and speaking in tongues or some such temporal madness inside a religious building and the usual self-control demanded over, for instance, one’s zip-fly and one’s covetous desires. The joy was brief and quickly curdled as Gabe stood and yelled, ‘I’ve had enough of this platitudinous bullshit!’ (a difficult word to deliver at volume – it was only possible due to his rehearsing it in his head many times before doing it) and stormed from the church, leaving the door banging in the brisk north-westerly and the candle flames lurching.

This was four days after the meltdown. Unlikely individual events piled up in a tottering probability pyramid, a bad-luck confluence of failed pumps, ignited graphite rods and explosions in the core. A demon plume, Satan’s beacon for casual cosmic observers, his piss-stain marking his latest hell on Earth, laden with heavy particles of unthinking DNA-shredding capabilities. The unusual wind took the smoke over Gabriel’s town; had the prevailing breeze been a-blowing, it would have taken it the near-opposite direction: another reason for hapless Gabriel to curse his luck.

Thirty workers were killed on the day by explosions and steam jets through the fissures in the ruptured pipes. The authorities poured water from the skies over the reactor, and in desperation brought in the earth-movers to cover and attempt to seal the man-made cave of unholy menace. This just churned up the radioactive atoms and doomed the soil for half a million years. Whenever Gabriel thought of the radioactive waste being spilled and scattered, he pictured that woefully misleading drawing of the atom, with the little circles looping around the cluster of other circles, that symbolised the Progress of the Nuclear Industry, with each part live and fizzing, glowing by turns toxic green and blinding white. In truth, one such isotope could remain harmless for a billion years, or could blast you with radioactive particles in the next instant: it was more unpredictable than the next move of the good lord, and the latter was feeling especially random to Gabe by this time. Sick with the sheer mindlessness of it, Gabriel first sought solace at the Church of the Holy Mother. The priest said the usual stuff about knowing, or rather not, the mind of God. It had relaxed Gabriel somewhat, but unsurprisingly he felt helpless and hopeless. The town was being evacuated. Infantry trucks loaded comrades, one suitcase or shopping trolley apiece, and took them to the emergency refugee centres on the edge of the capital – gymnasia and church halls and so on. Gabriel, along with a few others, decided not to leave.

At the hour of the meltdown, he had been with a group at the church on the hill over the town, the Holy Mother that is. Had they been inside worshipping, the thick stone walls would have reduced their dose of radiation by absorbing some of it, and they may have got away with no more than a significantly increased risk of cancer. Instead, Gabe, the priest and a selection of other volunteers were outside on ladders, cleaning the impressive stained glass window at the head of the nave. Each received around three Sieverts of radiation according to the suited emergency response agent who spoke to the group – about the same as eating 30 million bananas, as it goes – enough to be fatal, usually within a few weeks. Some reasoned they should get out, so the exposure couldn’t go up much more, but for those like Gabriel, a disturbed despondency set in and they thought ‘what the hell’. Gabriel had a history of heading for the dead ends, in his career as a press photographer and in his love life, which was peppered with jilts and slow-burning disappointments.

So he stayed in the mostly abandoned town, to become a desolate orphan of the state, a refugee unusual since the world moved below him while he stayed still.

Gabe hid from the soldiers drafted in to help with the evacuation: he hadn’t clue whether they could force him to leave, but he didn’t want to risk it. With the lights off he lay down on the sofa below the window so they wouldn’t see him. Once the sound of engines and shouting had dissipated, Gabriel walked around. It was thrilling, to feel like the only human on Earth. He noticed, walking through town, that all the shops were unlocked and the stock still on show. He felt an illicit pinch of joy when he took a newspaper from a rack. The front page was about the prime minister’s successful visit with the American president in Washington. Gabriel went and put it back. He stepped into the main square, up to the stone cross memorial, then spun around in front of it with his arms spread wide. He shouted, ‘Meltdowwwwwn!’ at the top of his voice, then hastened for home with his collar turned up as he saw a figure down one of the streets off the square. Even in the madness of the situation, embarrassment – or its avoidance – was always the most pressing feeling.

Others had stayed too, a few of them: the priest, of course – the madness of martyrdom had afflicted him, the noble urge to protect his flock: protect their souls, as their bodies were long beyond protection now. In a way, his calling had become a more pure pursuit, for the asceticism and rejection of requirements of the flesh required by close reading of Saint Paul were made good. Too little, too damn late, said another stubborn stayer, of the priest’s new motivation. Gabriel met her over the telephone initially; he called the number on every lurid card pinned up in the phone booth – she was the only one who answered him. Cleo was a prostitute, yes, or ‘sex worker’, as her social worker had insisted on saying (before she split town), as though they were on the level. Gabriel found out the going rate and said fine. He went to her place, having asked if that was the usual thing. When he walked in, he gave her an awkward one-arm hug, from which she shrugged quickly away. The money was to be paid up front. She was Gabriel’s first prostitute, as he put it. He said: ‘You are my first prostitute,’ in that curious way in which one avoids even a euphemism for sex, to which she retorted: ‘When you first went to the dentist, did you say “You were my first dentist”? Or how about the first time you were served a beer? What did you say to the barman?’

Gabe, flummoxed, over-apologised, as he tended to do. She wasn’t too offended, though, she was used to the causal disparagement of her job choice, even by those who paid for her body, and welcomed his return business. At their third meeting, Gabriel asked Cleo why she had stayed in the condemned town. They were eating withered grapes from a bowl at her small Formica-topped table.

‘I don’t believe in radiation,’ she said.

For the second time in her company, Gabriel was nonplussed.

‘What do you mean? Radiation, well radiation is everywhere, you can’t choose not to believe in it.’

‘You can’t see it, feel it, smell it or taste it,’ said Cleo with finality.

‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t real!’ The finality was lost on Gabe. ‘They still know it’s there. Scientists measure it, measure it with those…’ Gabriel hesitated. He had no idea how they knew it was there. He changed tack.

‘You can’t see or smell or anything things like… democracy. Still real.’ Gabe chose the generic example of an abstract noun, other than love, which would have been a bit much. His brain felt sluggish, fighting uphill.

‘No one’s claiming that democracy will kill me.’

Gabriel heard this uncompromising barrier, and realised that he was really attracted to this woman. He avoided whispering, “Whether you believe in it or not, it’ll still kill you.” His last word problem was a common stumbling block in Gabe’s relationship building. It sat uneasily with his constant apologising and eagerness to please – when it came up, it was a moment where his urge to be right, and to be seen as being right, trumped his urge to be liked. This time, though, with a huge act of willpower, he stopped, became accepting, and gave Cleo a kiss. It was a magic moment for him. This was on the evening after he marched out of mass. There was a niggling sense that his moral downfall was completed by the short walk from church to boudoir, but Gabe felt gorgeously liberated. He was so drunk on the feeling that life was being lived, for that evening he forgot his death was imminent. He was the mess it up, somewhat, but not until a few days later.

In the meantime, Gabriel took some photographs, for the first time since the meltdown. He turned the lens to deserted streets, the loitering plume of smoke that crept through the mound of earth, abandoned cars and an empty roundabout. In truth, it was as obvious as one could get with photos of a deserted, irradiated town, but the papers in the capital were keen for dramatic images of the tragic town. Gabe organised a portrait of every remaining townsperson (except the priest, who he was still avoiding), which won a double page spread in the national paper’s Saturday magazine. He shot them in black-and-white, to give the feeling that he was preserving something already lost.

Cleo was typically ambivalent about Gabe’s pictures. Bored-looking, she sifted through his prints and described them as nice. They aren’t nice, he exclaimed. ‘They’re supposed to speak of desolation! Of… of a town being screwed by a giant faceless, unaccountable company, and the desperate persistence of the remaining few!’

‘Oh, sure, I see,’ she said.

This time, the need to be right was leading.

‘Do you? The paper said they were iconic!’

‘I’ve never been that into photography.’

Gabe was frustrated. He let it show by changing the subject.

‘How long have you been a… prostitute?’

Cleo just looked at him. ‘Don’t start,’ she said.

But after the slight regarding his photos, Gabe felt she owed him. What, he wasn't sure. To be offended too?

‘Well, why did you get into it?’ He could feel the pointless, insulting, patronising shape of the conversation coming into focus, but he couldn’t stop himself.

Cleo sighed. ‘I like being a whore.’

‘Well, good for you, but surely you’d rather do something else? You’re a smart girl, you didn’t need to…’ Gabe managed to stop himself saying ‘sell your body’, but later, when he reviewed the whole talk over and over in his mind, he’d berate himself for the words ‘smart girl’ – who did he think he was?

Cleo gazed at him, not angry, more resigned to the idea that he was like so many men she’d encountered. They fell into two camps: those who had sex with her and saw it as she did, a business relationship. They didn’t insult her, barely spoke to her, and certainly thought of her as beneath them. Worse were those like Gabriel, really, as he turned out. Some men believed she needed saving, looking after, a good man to take care of her. So she was used to this conversation; it made her feel endlessly tired. Cleo was past frustration with this attitude, and besides, she still quite liked Gabe – plus, who else would pay her now? The town was basically forsaken. Not that she particularly needed the money now – you could help yourself to food at the abandoned supermarket. No one except those on radiation sickness’ death row would touch the stuff so it was a free for all. One morning Cleo was in there, collecting the last of the fresh fruit – rot was setting in, appropriately – and she saw a man collecting half a shelf’s worth of tins of sponge pudding. He just shrugged and smiled glumly when he saw she’d noticed him, and headed out with his trolley once he was done.

There was no ‘pulling together’, Blitz spirit, or any romantic sense of an embattled community bravely facing their end together. This may have been partly to do with the radiation sickness itself, which tended to bring feelings of overwhelming lassitude along with the nausea, headaches and bloody shits. So people kept to themselves; there was comfort in that familiarity, anyway. Gabe and Cleo were descending into sickness at about the same rate. Sometimes in her little flat they were queued to throw up in the toilet. The plughole in the shower was becoming clogged with hair: black – hers; faded brown – his. Although each was as pathetically ill as the other, they weren’t much more than strangers to one another, so the implacable feeling of faint disgust at someone else’s fading body – an ancient instinct of self-preservation – set in.

Cleo died first, with her eyes only half closed.

She died one morning, during the lie-in she said she needed. Gabe went in with a cup of green tea, and she was even paler than before, still. He sat pensively on the edge of the bed and sipped the tea. His lined hands shook slightly. He felt weakened by it, and panicked. How the hell did he know what to do with a body? He said to Cleo’s body: ‘Now you’re a corpse. Another dead prostitute.’ His own humour shocked and troubled him. He went to see if the priest was in.

The priest was named Father Simon. He was ambling around the graveyard when Gabriel got up to the church; drawing a tasteless joke about being the walking dead from Gabe.

‘I’m sorry about my outburst last week,’ Gabriel said. ‘I was very upset.’

‘You need not apologise to me,’ said the Father. ‘Have you prayed about it?’

‘Yes,’ Gabriel lied. ‘Will you hear my confession?’

‘My role is to serve.’

The pair went to the booth. Gabriel had always felt more relaxed with the grille between them. In meetings with editors, he’d always hated it when they came from behind their desk to sit opposite him on the big easy chairs they all had.

‘Father forgive me, for I have sinned.’

Gabriel couldn’t get any further, however, due to his sudden and intense need to vomit. He spewed until bile and blood came up, and sat on the linoleum floor by the toilet for a while, panting.

In the booth, the priests head was resting on the grille. Gabe got up and pulled back the black heavy curtain. Father Simon was lifeless, his right hand loosely grasping his rosary. Gabriel stepped back and pulled the curtain back across. He went to the altar and got down on bended knee. He didn’t know what to say, so he just said the Lord’s Prayer. It didn’t feel enough, so he said it again. He stood, genuflected, and walked out of the church.

In the graveyard, Gabriel looked at names and dates on the tombstones. He selected one Margarita del Pilar, who had died 120 years ago; she sounded exotic and fey. Gabe lay down on the grave, with his head by the headstone, and waited. Eyes closed, he imagined he could hear the church organ playing. For the first time since the accident, he felt calm. When the nuclear power station had first been built, Gabe had read a book about nuclear power. Now he recalled one passage from it:

“While the half-life tells us exactly how many radioactive atoms will remain after any given time, it is impossible to know in advance which particular atoms will remain.”

Like life, Gabriel thought. Death: predictable. Who and when? Now you’re asking.