Due Preparations for the Plague
From the author of ‘Oyster’ comes a powerful and gripping literary thriller that is as timely and relevant as it is chilling.Lowell feels contagious with doom. A divorced father with young children, he dreads the anniversary of a hijacked Paris-New York flight on which his mother was killed when he was sixteen years old. Samantha, a survivor of the disaster, is plaguing Lowell with phone calls. She says she has information from declassified documents and is obsessed with learning the whole truth about Air France 64. 'What can be worse than not knowing?' she asks. But Lowell only wants to forget.When his father dies suddenly and mysteriously on the anniversary of the hijacking, leaving Lowell the key to a locker in an airport terminal, a terrible story unfurls before him. Together, he and Samantha find the inescapable truth bearing down on them with the force of a jumbo jet. Janette Turner Hospital's electrifying novel probes with astonishing acuity the murky worlds of espionage and intelligence gathering, the experience of terror and the meaning of survival.
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DUE PREPARATIONS
FOR THE
PLAGUE
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL
First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
Fourth Estate
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Janette Turner Hospital 2003
The right of Janette Turner Hospital to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007149285
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007485338
Version: 2016-06-15
I have often asked myself what I mean by preparations for the plague … and I think that preparations for the plague are preparations for death. But what is it to make preparations for death? or what preparations are proper to be made for death?
Daniel Defoe, Due Preparations for the Plague (1722)
To state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.
Albert Camus, The Plague
Contents
Book III: CODE NAME: BLACK DEATH
Book V: JOURNAL OF S: ENCRYPTED
P.S.: Ideas, interviews & features …
Hamlet (to the ghost of his father):
Well said, old mole! cans’t work in the earth so fast?
Hamlet, Act I, Scene v
Nobody chooses his parents,
but everyone invents them.
Adam Phillips
Brightness falls from the air, and so do the words, which rush him. They swoop like starlings from the radio hooked to his belt, though before brightness, before Queens have died young and fair, the broadcast was blurred murmur, bits of music, bits of talk, voices heard but not listened to. Now the phrases flock about Lowell and he bats at them, distressed. Dust hath closed Helen’s eye, I am sick, I must die—but no, Lowell thinks, I must not—Lord, have mercy on us, and yes, Lowell prays, Lord have mercy, because in spite of the fact that the reader has a mellow voice, a soothing and expensive poetry-reading voice, an unmistakably National Public Radio voice, what Lowell can hear is his own father in shadow duet, word for word and line for line, and then suddenly, with a sharp change of tone, Forty thousand feet, he hears, severed fuselage … the fatal plunge …
Shocked, he almost loses his balance on the ladder. Death, he hears, and it is plummeting at him, no question, final cure of all diseases. The news commentator says these words. (Does he really say them? Is it possible?) The paint can, mad rudder, swings wild and a length of eavestrough comes away in Lowell’s hand. He throws himself forward across the steeply pitched roof and lies sprawled there. The tiles beat against his heart like frightened birds.
Oblivion has taken to offering herself this way, quick and shameless. She tries it once or twice a week. She sickens him because he is not immune to her whorish charms. He can feel the ladder with his feet and if he puts his weight on the top rung, he thinks the whole contraption of self-erected scaffolding will stay firm. Probably. Perhaps. The brush is still in his right hand, the can of Milky Way White (high gloss, oil-based, exterior finish) in his left. There is a comet’s tail of spilled cream across the cedar shakes and he will have to climb down for the turpentine.
Later, he thinks, looking below. He feels queasy. Anniversaries of the airline disaster are a very bad time. Every year, every September, this sort of thing happens, even though every year, as September approaches, he believes he has put it all behind him, he believes he has laid the ghosts, he believes he will feel nothing more than a dull, almost pleasurable sort of pain, like a toothache. And then: Shazam, he is a wreck again.
Have the words really come from his radio? Or from the messy attic of his mind? He supposes he could check, call the station, order a cassette, replay the show, and if they really had been spoken, what would that prove? A convergence of inner and outer worlds? Thoughts and fears escape, Lowell thinks. When the pressure inside the head builds too high, thoughts fly the coop and speak themselves back at us through other people’s mouths. He dips his brush in the can and paints a long wide stripe on the fascia board. From two storeys down, through the window, he can hear the phone ring. The house is not his, but even so he fears it will be that girl again, that young woman, the one who will not let sleeping dogs lie. He knows this is irrational. He knows there is no possible way she could reach him here. Even so, whenever he hears a telephone, he trembles. He fears it will be that young woman. Samantha. That is her name. He never returns her calls.
