The Second Cure Read online

  ‘– You’re upset, I understand.’ But he was still keeping his distance.

  ‘I have to go.’ She lunged for her crutches, pulled herself to her feet. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No, please stay. Don’t leave like this, Winnie …’

  In her mortification, Winnie couldn’t even look at him. She took long strides on her crutches, mumbling a farewell at Georgina in the hallway. She ignored Phillip’s calls to return, ignored the rain beating on her head, and reached her car.

  She drove down the street too fast, realising almost too late that the traffic lights ahead were red. Her right foot slammed down on the brake, her left responding the same way through reflex. Pain shot up her ankle as she skidded to a stop.

  A shudder ran through her as she watched the traffic crossing ahead of her, aware that she’d very nearly driven straight into it. The windscreen wipers were on full, but between each swipe of the blades, the white and red of the car lights beyond were fractured splashes of colour, distorted by the rain pounding obliquely on the glass. The percussion on the roof overwhelmed the sound of the engine. She shouldn’t be driving, she knew that, especially not in this weather. She was a danger to everyone on the roads.

  A sharp complaint from the horn of a car behind her made her jolt. The lights had changed to green. Panicking, she accelerated, briefly slewing at an angle before getting both herself and the car back under control. She took deep breaths, determined to focus on driving, determined not to think about – Oh what have I done? Stupid, stupid! Was this the parasite’s doing, making her behave like a fool? Could she make it carry the burden of her guilt? Or was it like too much wine, in vino veritas, and all the parasite had done was make her reckless, acting on her own impulses, revealing her own true, feeble, hopeless self?

  What must Phillip think? Was he even now sitting with Georgina, talking about her, laughing? No, not laughing. They were too kind, too good to laugh at her. And that made it worse. Would he understand? Could he? How could anyone understand who wasn’t also crippled by this Plague, this monstrosity that unleashed madness?

  Unless. Unless Phillip was also infected. He’d seemed so defeated. His words about keeping to the path, about going through the motions … Was he talking about himself? And if God had been wrenched from Phillip, the most Christian Christian she knew, what hope did anyone else have? Did anyone still believe? Was everyone just pretending?

  The traffic stopped, and she realised that despite herself she’d driven the last ten kilometres without even noticing. There was an accident ahead. She could see the flashing lights of an ambulance. Car accidents were on the rise, she’d heard. And industrial injuries. The parasite, again. It was making people clumsy and rash, and some were dying. As she inched past the crumpled vehicles, trying to stop herself from looking at what might have been a corpse on a trolley – oh dearest God, blood – she knew that this wretched Plague was changing the world. Not just her, but everyone. Everything.

  The solid rain had broken up into showers by the time she reached Cowan. Her crutches sloshed through puddles, and she let herself inside, relieved no one else was home. Apart from Goblin, of course, whose tail wagged hello to her. She sat at the kitchen counter, feeling numb. The quote she remembered earlier was still echoing in her mind. Pulling out her phone, she put some keywords into Google. Shakespeare … Hamlet … Claudius … words to heaven. The soliloquy was the first result.

  O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven;

  It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,

  A brother’s murder.

  She scanned the speech, memories of the play returning. Claudius couldn’t pray because of his sin, because he was still benefiting from it. He’d murdered his brother the king and so he couldn’t repent. Seeking absolution required regret, and he couldn’t regret what he had gained – marriage to the queen and the throne itself.

  But what was Winnie’s sin that made God punish her the way He’d punished Claudius? She was not the best of people, she knew that, but she was not a bad person. She couldn’t repent if she didn’t know what she’d done wrong. Why was God doing this to her? How could he punish her like this? At least Lot was told, eventually, what the point of his torment was. Would God ever get around to it with Winnie?

  She closed the browser app and rang Charlie. It went to voicemail. She left no message and tried Richard. The same. She tried Brigid’s number, but hung up as soon as it rang. What would she say to her? What would she say to any of them? She was alone in this.

  At that moment something shifted within her. She put the phone down on the counter. She had already lost her faith in her heart. Now, she lost any sense that the God she thought she knew even existed. She lost the belief in her brain. God did not exist. He couldn’t exist, not if he was a good god, and if he wasn’t a good god, what was there to worship? A good god wouldn’t allow good people to lose their faith in him. A good god would show himself, he wouldn’t torture those who sought him. That was why He wasn’t present when she prayed. Not because he was ignoring her. But because he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere.

  There was no God.

  If there was no God, there was nothing. There was no meaning. There was no point to anything. Winnie felt the breath escape from her lungs and the walls of the kitchen close in. A black fog of claustrophobia engulfed her, squeezing the blood from her head. She hobbled to the back door, crutches abandoned, and opened it, letting the air in. She flung open the flyscreen and went down the stairs, and the rain, now returned, buffeted her face. Thunder grumbled around the sky and unfocussed lightning illuminated the low clouds. She sucked in the moist air.

  Limping, stumbling, welcoming the pain, she made her way through the back garden. Goblin whimpered, following her for a while, then he returned to the dry sanctuary of the house. Her ankle ached as she took the stairs down to the parapet. There was wind, just as there had been on the day her father’s ashes flew back into her face. There was no ash now. Just water, so much water, the throne shrouded in spray. Her hair was sodden against her scalp. Her tears mingled with the rain on her cheeks, blurring her eyes.

  She took a step forwards, looking down at the finely carved rock at her feet. Every strike of her father’s chisel was recorded in the stone, a memory retained over the decades. His immortality. Beyond the parapet was a platform far below, hazy from the splattering waterfalls that had formed all around her, consuming all other sounds, and quashing her thoughts. Oblivion.

  She felt her shoe pivot on the edge of the rock. There was no reason not to. There was no reason to stay.

  Her father had been where she was now. Her raw need for her father made her ache and shudder and howl with loss, her voice lost in the cacophony of the storm. She wanted his presence and his reassurance. Not that of her dead husband, who to her was now as contaminated by the lies as were Phillip and God. Her father, that pragmatic man who had fought a war, built a house, hewn his dreams out of the sandstone, and who didn’t go to church on Sundays. For him the process had been a slow recognition, not the dreadful jolt she’d felt, but the result had been the same. For him, just as for her, God did not exist. Yet he felt no despair, at least none that she’d seen. He’d loved and lived a good life, the life of a good man. He found meaning in his family and friends, in his house and his garden. In creating this beautiful, foolish throne.

  He had a reason to live. A reason to stay. Here, on this parapet, his ashes had fought against his leaving. What he had found, she could find. She could –

  Winnie had never heard of side-splash lightning and now she never would. Rushing down at a hundred million kilometres an hour from beneath the anvil of a cumulonimbus cloud that had formed a kilometre above, the bolt of one billion volts and twenty-eight thousand degrees Celsius was no wider than her little finger. It plunged into the Angophora beside her, cracking its girth in two, and then, just above her head, the current split. The side-splash. A lower voltage entered at her right temple, bursting her eardrum and
detaching her retina as it travelled along blood vessels to her heart, and along synapses and neurones to her spinal cord. Her heart stopped. The current ran through her torso, convulsing her arteries and veins, bursting her capillaries and painting fractal tattoos upon her skin. Less than a second after it had left the cloud, the bolt had passed through Winnie to the rock below, grounding and dissipating. The roar of its energy echoed through the valley.

  Winnie was already dead when she fell into the void.

  The secession of Capricornia from the Commonwealth of Australia to become its own sovereign nation was thought by many to be a legal and practical impossibility, despite the overwhelming electoral success of the Capricornian referendum seeking it. Jack Effenberg and his National Conservative government had previously triumphed in winning Capricornia’s secession from the State of Queensland through that state’s infamously re-gerrymandered voting system. It left the rest of Queensland to the moderates of his party and the progressives of the opposition. Capricornia seceding to become its own country was a far more complex matter. The defection of a state from the nation was not anticipated by the founders of Australia, as the Preamble to the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act makes clear. Constitutional experts advised that the only legal means by which it could be effected would be by way of petition to the Parliament of Australia for a national referendum to be held. In the unlikely event of the federal government agreeing to this, a majority of voters in a majority of states would need to vote for Capricornia’s secession, an improbable event despite many on the progressive side of politics being keen to rid their country of the ‘canker’ of Effenberg’s regime.

  Once again, however, Jack Effenberg acted with the shrewdness and audacity that had characterised his premiership. He acted unilaterally. The Sovereignty of Capricornia Act was passed almost unanimously by his state legislature, asserting Capricornia’s secession and rebirth as an independent nation. Effenberg effectively called Australia’s bluff. Capricornia was leaving the union. And there was nothing the Commonwealth could do about it.

  The response from the Australian state and federal governments was predictably apoplectic. Lawyers and lawmakers insisted as one that it was illegal under the constitution, and the Commonwealth sought writs and an injunction in the High Court of Australia. Effenberg shrugged that off. No jurisdiction. There were calls for the Australian armed forces to invade, but no one seriously had the stomach for a war against those whom they still saw as their own country-folk. And even if they did invade, what then? An occupation? It was unthinkable, even in response to the equally unthinkable. Like a broken-hearted lover, Australia was left to plead with Capricornia not to leave, but it was too late. President Effenberg had simply declared the Republic of Capricornia into existence.

  He set about forging formal diplomatic and trade alliances with like-minded nations and blocs, some of which, like the Confederacy of North America and the Islamist Caliphate of South-East Asia, were as newly minted as his own, and for similar reasons – self-protection in the face of worldwide loss of religious faith and growing secularism. That defensive instinct saw the common interest of survival transcend sectarianism, albeit briefly.

  […]

  Much has been written elsewhere about the US War of Secession and it need not be repeated here, but the contrast between its process of shattering into two nations and that of Australia and Capricornia is stark and worth consideration. The separation within Australia led to no deaths or injury, while total deaths on all sides in the USA exceeded two million.

  One explanation for the difference is that privately owned firearms were far more common in the United States, and small militia groups rapidly formed on both sides of the schism. Additionally, the previous years of entrenched and growing division between conservative Christians and more secular progressives were already reaching a crisis by the time the implications of the parasite’s spread became apparent. This discord had long had the potential to collapse into violence and the thete/pure conflict almost exactly matched the existing tensions, pushing them to breaking point.

  Geographic differences also played a part. While the border between Australia and Capricornia was long (approximately eighteen hundred kilometres), it was continuous, and ran through areas of low population density. The disputed regions in North America were not contiguous, with the final make-up of Union of New America incorporating the Pacific Northwest, New England, Alaska, California and the urbanised areas of New York State. So many borders allowed for localised battles to continue to flare up over many years before the peace treaty was finally enacted.

  More than one commentator of the time wryly noted that Donald Trump’s famed wall turned out to have been planned for exactly the wrong place.

  Bayliss, Brigid, The Plague and the Promised Land: Jack Effenberg’s Capricornia, Penguin Random House Australia, Sydney and Melbourne, 2038

  PART TWO

  Nous ne voyons pas les choses comme elles sont, nous les voyons comme nous sommes.

  [We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.]

  Anaïs Nin

  31.

  Cairns, Republic of Capricornia and Sydney, Republic of Australia

  Fifteen years ago today, Winnie Bayliss died. Brigid Bayliss was remembering.

  Remembering her mother wasn’t something she liked to do, especially not those final wretched days. Brigid was a dab hand at burying unwanted thoughts in working too hard, obsessing about politics, drinking too much, and throwing herself into illicit short-term relationships and the odd secretive bout of empty sex. But every year the date would inveigle its way into her consciousness and she’d find herself flung back to that moment when Charlie called her with the news. The moment when her stomach dropped from her body, her throat closed up to silence her shriek, and she and her organs spiralled into a bleakness she’d never known before. Maybe it was worse when you tried to stop yourself from thinking about it.

  She’d asked her vocomm to tell her what the day held – weather report, commute conditions, her appointments, pertinent news – and it began by telling her the time and date. And she remembered.

  In the week between Winnie’s death and her funeral, Brigid, Richard and Charlie had circled, wordlessly blaming each other and themselves for what had happened, condemning one another for the cruelty of accusations they hadn’t even voiced. They were all haunted by phone calls unanswered and by phone calls answered but dismissed. Momentary forebodings that were shrugged off in favour of busyness and self-absorption. Oh yes, guilt. So much guilt. At least, Brigid assumed that’s how the others felt, too. She had spent the week in a fug of disbelief and self-loathing, scarcely talking with anyone about anything other than the arrangements for the funeral.

  She hadn’t spoken the word.

  She hadn’t wanted to feel it in her mouth, its sibilance sliding out from between her teeth into the air around her. She didn’t want to make it real. Of course, she looked at the facts as she knew them, turned them around in her head and examined them, obliquely or face-on, to the degrees her shifting grief would permit. It was the lightning that killed her, not the fall. She didn’t jump. But was that because the lightning had intervened? They couldn’t know. But they did know about the phone calls she’d made. They knew she was out at the throne in the teeming rain for no other reason, and they knew that the ‘what ifs’ would outlast even the vacuum of her absence.

  It wasn’t until the funeral that the three of them had emerged into the world of other people and respectable grief, trying to pretend they weren’t raw like open wounds.

  After the ceremony, outside the church. Her parents’ old friend, Phillip Guthrie – the minister who’d baptised her and Richard – had officiated, and had given a strange sort of sermon that didn’t seem to refer to God much at all, and certainly didn’t veer anywhere near the mode of her death. It was, however, rich with personal anecdote and affection. She had stood with Richard and Charlie while relatives and family friends,
with expressions of mourning ranging from the stiff and awkward to the sodden and hugging, took turns to come up to the three of them. Talking with Winnie’s old friends was almost a respite from the stress of not talking with each other.

  A woman bore down on them. She was wearing a purity mask. Not the makeshift ones Brigid had become used to seeing in Brisbane, but a more stylised one made of soft white fabric, edged in lace. This was someone eager to advertise her piety, about as look-at-me as you could manage at a funeral, and Brigid loathed her instantly.

  ‘Oh, my dears,’ she cried, trying to hold all six of their hands in her two. ‘I cannot tell you how upset I am about your wonderful, wonderful mother.’

  She paused and looked earnestly at them in turn. ‘Richard. Charlie. Brigid.’

  Brigid wondered if she wanted some sort of congratulations for knowing their names. She seemed to think they ought to know hers, but must have caught their blank expressions and looked a little put out.

  ‘Tricia Townsend. I was one of your mother’s closest friends. From the church, of course.’ She introduced her masked daughter, Faith, who looked so pregnant she might drop it any minute. Then she pointed out their husbands, who were lurking in the background looking ill at ease – though that might have been a permanent state if you had Tricia Townsend in your life.

  ‘I am still so shocked. Shocked. It’s times like this I am so glad I have my faith because otherwise how could I cope? Especially since I blame myself.’ She held up a hand to stave off the assurances she seemed to think were coming. ‘No, I should have seen, we were so close. Well, there were signs and, may God forgive me, I didn’t act on them.’

  For the first time since her mother’s death, Brigid felt an emotion pierce the dullness of her grief. Fury. She could see Phillip Guthrie hovering behind Tricia, watching them with a knotted brow.