Sanctuary

We are too many, she said, leg swinging. One battered yellow sneaker banged against the dining table, making the forks rattle. Her sock was blue and white striped, her ankle chubby and pink. We are too many and there’s not enough to go round. She said it often after that: on the walk to school, the road humming beside us; in the park, hanging off the tyre swing, her long yellow pigtails dangling in the dirt. In the white-masked line of people waiting to be vaccinated. She was too young for a vaccine and too young for a mask but she stood next to me, scuffing her feet and singing. She held onto my skirt and pulled the necklace she wore tight round her face, like she always did, so that the heart-shaped locket dangled like a tiny silver soul patch and covered the dimple on her chin. Her reedy little voice piped up. Mum, we are too many aren’t we? And I just said yes, darling, like I always did to everything I didn’t know the answer to, and craned my neck to see how many people were in front of us in the queue.

I hadn’t known where it had come from, then, this idea of we are too many, but I’d never asked her because there was always something else to do: a meal to cook, the bins to empty, a TV series to finish. I couldn’t know what she was seeing and hearing all the time, even if we were under the same roof for days and weeks and months at a stretch thanks to the global quarantine. Maybe it had come from all those nature documentaries she used to watch about global warming. Perhaps it was one of those CrowdVid things and she’d snuck a screen into her room, logged in somehow and joined in the writhing dances with all those teenagers. Possibly the news pictures scrolling on the TV had started it: the packed rows of stretchers carrying white-swaddled shapes; the crowds loading their shopping trolleys for when the food ran out; the panicking stampede of the vaccine shortage.

I saw Miss Lever in the supermarket today. Miss Lovely, James always called her. How was Miss Lovely today, sweetie? he’d say, pulling a pigtail on his way to the fridge. Did she ask after me? And she’d just giggle, Dad, it’s Miss Lee-ver, and roll her eyes. She's the type of teacher everyone wants for their kids, Miss Lever: young, full of energy and ideas, and just the right side of pretty. I feel for her, I really do. It can’t have been easy for someone with a vocation like that, to be trapped inside for so long, just instructing the kids over screens, seeing all the horrors of what goes on in people’s houses when no one else is there. Trying to reach targets and talk commas and long division when outside the world spirals. No more singing or playing or sports day or sticky hugs, just sickness and panic and heat and rain. And then afterwards, when the kids, nearly all of them - well. It was just me and Miss Lever in the supermarket, and all we could do was exchange nods over the veg aisle. My fingers found the locket in my pocket and my sweaty thumb stroked the notch at the top of the heart. The smell of all that abundance rotting in the heat - even through a mask - makes you just want to do a quick in-out-and-done of the supermarket these days. Nobody hangs about chatting. I wouldn’t know what to say to her anyway, and she wouldn’t know what to say to me. You can’t even make small talk about the weather anymore.

After I’d got out of the supermarket I drove home via the petrol station and filled up the car, because the sign at the petrol station said STOCKED for once. Since the time I found myself on the wrong side of a newly formed lake between my car and the doctor’s surgery, I try to always have a full tank. Today as I drove away from the petrol station and up the slip road to the flyover I saw a scrawl on the concrete posts that hold up the road: We are too many, white spray-painted in spindly writing against the grey surface. I heard the reedy little voice say it in my memory, her small pale face raised to mine in the vaccine line. My hands were suddenly weeping sweat despite the aircon and it was all I could do to keep my hands on the wheel but I managed to control the car enough to stop it at an uneven angle at the side of the road. I wrenched the door open, jumped out onto the empty road and ran to the column where the words were painted. The heat on the road was fierce: I was bathed in sweat just taking those short steps and the hot lungfuls of air didn’t feel like breathing. I knew it was mad and pointless and all the rest but I just wanted to see those words, her words. I wanted to touch them.

I reached my hand out and traced the shape of the paint sprayed on the concrete, as if my fingers would listen to the words as my ears had not. Beneath the scrawled We are too many was more paint, half-dissolved and flaking, unreadable except for the last word, ...round. I knew what it said. I’ve heard it enough times now, repeated on the news and muttered in the parent support groups. And here, round the side of the concrete post, stuck nearly out of sight, was the laminated poster that had showed up everywhere in those last few days. I pulled it down and held it in front of me. Just a black square with white writing: CrowdVid.com/sanctuary. I’m not sure why whoever sprayed the message and placed the poster there chose that spot, on the underside of the flyover. Who did they think would see it there? But it didn’t matter, of course. The message got through and that person is long gone, along with all the others. One warm raindrop fell, thudding on the plastic and splashing my hand. Then another splatted to earth beside me and another landed heavy in my hair. As it fell faster and heavier I ran for the dry car, still abandoned in the road.

The first I heard was a news report about a 12 year old boy falling from a bridge into the river. An accident, I assumed. But the accidents became more and more frequent and even the news readers began to sound puzzled. Warnings to keep medicines out of reach as three children in one day ate too many painkillers thinking they were sweets. An Illegal sleepover at which 15 children died from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. A rash of primary school kids mistaking cleaning fluid for cordial. So many children falling under trains.

I’ve watched CrowdVid before, everyone does, but the mysterious algorithm never showed me the sanctuary video before I sought it out. I was too old and irrelevant. I’ve seen it now, of course; it’s still on the site as both a warning and advert. Never has a video reached such a numerous audience, precisely targeted, and never has a video been so effective in achieving its aims. I watch it, clutching her locket, every now and then, as far as I can bear it. It begins with a techno beat and a quick sequence of images. A forest on fire. Cloth-wrapped bodies, burning. A child drowned on a beach, face down. Rows of young people wearing drab uniforms in a dusty room, marching to the beat. A dog and a bell. The rotting remains of an Orca in a dry desert landscape. Then the beat speeds up and the images are interspersed with bright yellow words on a dayglo pink background. WE A boat stranded on cracked brown earth. ARE A dog in a boat floats in a flooded English churchyard. TOO two men with laden shopping trolleys fight, faces grotesque in anger. MANY A boatload of people. Men hang from the sides and a child cries on its father’s shoulders. The music speeds again. THERE’S Medics in blood-soaked scrubs surround a young woman clearly dying on a stretcher. NOT A crop field, dry and blighted. ENOUGH Chickens in a battery coop, piled high on top of each other. TO A woman and a baby sit grubby in blankets at the side of a city street, arms outstretched. GO The vaccine lines, snaking around a sports pitch and out of the door, and a solitary nurse with a hypodermic needle tiny at the front. AROUND Needles. Food. Water. A burning oil rig. The putrefying orca again. The drowned child. The fighting men. The needle. The needle. The needle. Then the music stops and the screen is filled with a calm blue. Euphoric strings start up. Then letters bloom on the screen, in a black, looping, flower-like font. The word SANCTUARY grows, blossoms and fades from the screen. Then IS appears, in the same swirling, curling letters, and that fades away too. The last word to grow on the screen is DEATH. Flowers bloom from the letters. Vines grow and curl around the screen and just as you think it will never stop blooming the techno beat starts up again. Then come the unspeakable pictures. The means of death. A knife slices through shining dark skin and blood begins to seep. A pale girl lies on a bed, her red hair spread out, eyes wide and unblinking, flowers and empty pill bottles scattered around her. A little boy wearing a yellow t-shirt and shorts, his legs grubby, swings by the neck from a noose. And that’s as far as I ever get. I've never seen the end.

That day, I arrived home and the front door was already yawning open. Jack in the doorway, hunched and ashen. The lurch of my heart as I threw myself from the car. The dark rings of his eyes as they met mine. He held his arm out, shook his head, pushed me away from the threshold. No, I said. Please, no. I fought him. I wanted her. He would not let me past. But over his shoulder I saw into the house. There, suspended and swinging, were chubby pink legs. Blue and white striped socks. Battered yellow sneakers.

When it was all reckoned up, they said 50% of adults aged 20 - 60 worldwide died from the disease. Jack was one of them. I'm sorry for him that he didn’t die before he had to cut his little girl down from the ceiling. The over 60s were almost wiped out. Two thirds of children under 18 saw that video, and three quarters of those ended their lives or were helped in doing so by their brothers and sisters. It was because they were too many and there wasn't enough. There's plenty to go round these days.