The jobs that the Labour Exchange assigned to Iris were really no worse than those she'd been given when she worked on the Work Experience Programme in East London. She was far more fortunate than those allotted the decidedly more risky jobs. Iris' most frequent assignment was to organise the distribution of fruit and vegetables from the borough's borders to the supermarkets and grocery stores that sold them to people who, like Iris, had earned sufficient work credits to be exchanged for food, clothing and other necessities. Eustace and Yolanda were most often assigned to distribute batteries to those who had no privately installed source of electrical power.
Most people needed to earn a living by whatever means they could during the crisis. Only a few of those who lived in Uxbridge had places of work within walking distance of their homes, so they mostly had to exchange their labour for work credits. Whether consciously or not, it was apparent that the local government was discriminating against some and showed preference to others. Those who were black or brown or had difficult-to-pronounce names were those most likely to be allocated jobs which Iris, despite her burgeoning social conscience, was pleased to have been excused from.
The White Death was no joke. Those who had the closest contact with the people and places where it had struck were inevitably those most at risk of contracting it and then becoming part of the statistical 95% whose fate was to die in a crowded hospital ward after several agonising weeks of suffering. And it was precisely to such places as hospitals, crematoria, border defences and quarantine zones that people like Juanita Mendez, Tammy Zenawi and Bobby Nidal were assigned. No statistics were issued of the relative proportion of those so assigned who subsequently fell victim to White Death.
The countless public service announcements issued by the government emphasised a very curious kind of Englishness that was as alien to Iris as it was to the majority of Uxbridge's residents. The bulldog spirit invoked to confront the crisis was resplendent with references to the music of Edgar Elgar, cream teas, warm beer, cricket pitches and old-fashioned tea-shops. The implied message was that an alternative England that might include dance music, mosques and skateboard parks was no longer wanted.
All the same, the White Death's tight grip on England's throat couldn't last forever. Nevertheless, despite the many assurances from the government and the many apparent breakthroughs, no cure was ever found for the disease. Sheep Fever remained incurable to the end. It was still a disease from which only one in twenty people were likely to survive. The news stories became less about the search for the killer cure and more an account of how science and medicine, even in China and Russia, but most certainly in England and America, had at last met its match.
Iris was no disinterested observer with regard to this particular news story. Her study at university and her research in biotechnology had given her experience and expertise in the rather older disciplines that three centuries earlier had resulted in the first ever inoculations against smallpox in England. The microscopic entities that infected every human being on the planet had ever since been evolving at a rate that now surpassed human ingenuity in finding a cure. Before the advent of the White Death, every bacterial or viral mutation had been countered, usually at great expense, by an antidote that subjugated the menace to little more than a few hundred unfortunate deaths and yet another government-backed investment in the pharmaceutical industry.
The pace of evolution had now overtaken human science and human material resources. The ultimate defeat of the Sheep Fever pandemic resulted more from the ancient policy of separating the infected from those not yet infected and of allowing the virus die with its host. From Ipswich to Penzance, from Carlisle to the Isle of Wight, and from Shanghai via Nashville to Stockholm, this was a plague whose demise simply illustrated the prosaic fact that no parasite that kills its hosts can continue to spread when there are no new hosts to which it can spread.
It was several more weeks after the White Death pandemic had subsided that the Metropolitan Line could reopen and the makeshift crematoria alongside the Uxbridge canals could at last close down. It was also a time of fresh employment opportunity though not necessarily of the type for which Iris was best suited. There was much that needed to be done and there was a shortage of people able to do it. In London, as in all the world's great cities that had suffered the most from White Death, such as New York, Paris and Johannesburg, there was the inevitable sharp bounce back from the poverty and fear that had been associated with the plague.
Like most of her friends, Iris wondered whether a government that had profited so much during a crisis where small minds and small horizons could flourish was really best suited to engage with a period of new hope, new expectations and new opportunities. But for now she was just pleased that she could at last travel by underground train into the city centre to work in an office or restaurant and that she no longer had to walk around all day with a strip of cloth strapped over her mouth.
