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DAVID HARE

Beat the Devil

A Covid Monologue

Contents

1. Title Page
2. Premiere Production
3. Epigraph
4. Beat the Devil
5. About the Author
6. By the Same Author
7. Copyright

Premiere Production

Beat the Devil premiered at the Bridge Theatre, London, on 27 August 2020.

Performed by Ralph Fiennes

Director Nicholas Hytner
Designer Bunny Christie
Lighting Designer Jon Clark
Sound Designer Gareth Fry
Composer George Fenton

Epigraph

Dr Z. had studied the body and its workings and liked to say: We human beings are, au fond, put together quite simply. Yes, quite simply. The part that is complicated, even we as scientists are ignorant of that.

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

BEAT THE DEVIL

BEAT THE DEVIL

I’m waking and I’m trying to wash the taste of sewage out of my mouth. It isn’t easy to do. My doctor had warned me I might lose my sense of taste and smell. They say it’s a common symptom. I don’t have that symptom. I have a different symptom. Everything tastes of sewage.

When I go to the tap at five in the morning and drink the fresh water, all I can taste is sewage.

Maybe I’m not keeping up with developments, but I haven’t yet seen this symptom listed as common.

When I ask questions of medical professionals, I’m getting used to the answer: ‘We don’t yet know.’

*

A couple of weeks before, sometime in early March, a piece of bad news arrived wrapped in protein.

On Monday, I’d gone into the editing room off Oxford Circus to help deal with Episode Two of Roadkill, a new TV series I’ve written about a Conservative politician who is forward-looking, intelligent, charismatic and popular. It’s not based on anyone in real life.

Television screenwriters will tell you that in any four-part structure Episode Two is always the most difficult. This one has severe bruising from a producers’ pile-on, with a lot of people from all over the place giving contradictory notes. The result is a bugger’s muddle.

I’ve become convinced the whole thing will benefit from my mature and steadying hand.

All cutting rooms are fetid, space is at a premium in the West End, and the complex machinery thrums ominously warm, not enough to fry an egg, but maybe to coddle one. The three of us – director, editor and I – squeeze into the attic space and do an honourable day’s work. At some point the director, Michael Keillor, a strong, rangy young man from Dundee, with Billy Connolly hair, makes us all a welcome cup of tea. We share a plate of biscuits.

On Tuesday, Michael rings to tell me that the previous night, without warning, when he got home, he collapsed.

And this morning he can’t move and he can’t breathe.

*

This thing’s kicking around like I’ve swallowed a Catherine wheel. I don’t know from day to day what to expect.

As soon as Michael told me he’d got it, I knew I had to self-isolate. But first, I had to go to my studio to bring home my work. I noticed as soon as I started walking that I was air hungry. Uh-oh. It’s that quick. Already I’m not breathing so well. From the little I’ve read, I’ve understood that this is a disease which attacks the lungs. Whatever happens, people say, don’t let it go to your lungs.

Even I, who know nothing, know that we have five vital signs. At some point, probably researching for some play or film – it’s the only way I learn anything – I picked them up by heart. Temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate and oxygen saturation – that’s the measure of how much oxygen the blood is carrying. In a normal person it’s around 100 per cent. So, when it drops below 100, when the blood isn’t carrying enough oxygen to the lung, you start to worry.

Except – and this is where things get weird – doctors are already noticing that with this virus the rules don’t apply.

Doctors normally feel compelled to resort to ventilators when patients have oxygen saturation counts in the 80s, because by then they’re gasping for air. Only with this disease, they’re not. One doctor in New York has taken a picture of a woman lying on her belly with oxygen saturation of 54, and she’s chattering away on her mobile phone. What the hell is going on? People who should look ill are looking fine, and nobody understands why. There’s no correlation between oxygen saturation and how much oxygen is reaching the vital organs.

What the fuck?

Another doctor is quoted as saying: ‘The question is whether this vital sign we’ve been relying on for decades has been lying to us.’

He adds: ‘It’s very humbling in the twenty-first century with all the scientific advances we’ve made, and we just don’t really know the answer.’

*

OK, so it may be humbling for the medics, but for me and people like me, a better word is ‘alarming’.

‘It doesn’t resemble any other disease,’ says another doctor. ‘You have to go back to HIV/Aids to find a virus so little understood.’

I mooch around our house for a couple of days, pretending to work, but by Friday I’m feeling really terrible. In the pageant of random symptoms which will soon follow, there’s only one symptom that will remain permanent throughout. That’s exhaustion.

By nightfall, I’ve crawled into bed and forgotten what energy is.

At the beginning, the illness isn’t too bad, some coughing and a weird furriness round my lungs. I’ve also lost the willpower to do anything at all. But then, I’m thinking, that can be quite nice. At this stage, I’m looking forward to what you might call a platonic illness: lots of black-and-white war films in the afternoons with Noël Coward in white shorts, pretending to be Lord Mountbatten rallying the men and shooting at submarines, while my wife Nicole brings me hot lemon, honey and ginger.

My GP has begun to FaceTime me twice a day, though he says he can tell much more from my voice than from my appearance. Because I am confused by the mildness of the onset, I say to him: ‘Maybe I haven’t got it.’ He replies darkly: ‘Oh, you’ve got it.’

But the question is: what have I got?

A third of the patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19 die. And half of those admitted to intensive care don’t make it. But what exactly are they dying of? This question isn’t as simple as it seems. The rush to put people on ventilators is already slowing. With this disease, ventilators aren’t doing the job they’re meant to do. Blood is coming into the lungs without much oxygen, and then it’s leaving without much oxygen. What’s the point? And people are having to stay on ventilators far longer than normal.

Doctors are becoming aware that a lot of people who go on ventilators may never come off.

In fact, Covid-19 seems to be a sort of dirty bomb, thrown into the body to cause havoc. A lot of patients are actually dying of kidney failure. There’s muscle inflammation in nearly everybody. In some cases, patients are delirious or suffering inflammation of the brain. But all this is less pervasive than the blood clotting.

Beverley Hunt, a professor of thrombosis – I didn’t know there was such a thing – at King’s College London, is telling us that she’s noticed an awful lot of sticky blood. In fact, she’s seeing the stickiest blood of her career. ‘And when you’ve got sticky blood,’ she says, ‘you’re much more prone to having deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, which is when one of the deep vein thromboses travels around and blocks the blood supply to the lungs, which adds to the problem of pneumonia.’

Professor Hunt uses an unexpected phrase: ‘It’s almost medieval in what we’re seeing.’

*

After five days in bed, I get up and do something phenomenally stupid. I reach for the wok to make Nicole and me Chinese lunch. My whole family loves my chicken in black bean sauce with bean sprouts. It’s my set piece. So that’s what I do, in my dressing gown, in the kitchen, to prove that I am putting Covid behind me. Nicole even takes a photo for WhatsApp. But I must have misremembered the recipe, because this is the first time it’s ever tasted of sewage. From the first mouthful I’m wondering who made this god-awful muck? And the fact that two hours later I’m rolling around in agony, rushing to the lavatory, spluttering, coughing and groaning, suggests that the disease has just been waiting for a beansprout cue to get its notorious second wind.

On the Friday when I first went to bed, the prime minister has made the first of two decisive interventions, which will take us all towards lockdown. Later, his allies in the press will claim that critics of his performance are enjoying the benefit of hindsight. Not me. From the moment the pandemic was headed this way, the prime minister scares me because I keep thinking, ‘Johnson doesn’t quite seem on top of this.’

He’s spent the middle of February on a twelve-day holiday among the 530 acres of mixed woodland at Chevening – time, it later turns out, divided between celebrating his girlfriend’s pregnancy, negotiating the final details of his most recent divorce and skipping COBRA meetings. He leaves it until 23 March reluctantly to announce the full measures. He seems to be struggling with his own instincts. ‘I do accept that what we’re doing is extraordinary. We are taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub, and I can understand how people feel about that.’

In fact, of course, I hardly need point out, no such right exists. It’s a piece of journalistic invention. Inns and public houses have been regulated in the kingdom since the fifteenth century.

A friend of mine, a journalist, once said to me: ‘I’m a journalist. I like journalists. But, Christ, I’d never put a journalist in charge of running the country.’

*

It’s on the evening of Chinese lunch that my regulator goes crazy. Since neither Nicole nor I are confident of successfully using a thermometer, we assume that my bedtime reading of 40 degrees and then some is down to the thermometer not having been used for years. But then when I wake in the middle of the night, not in a puddle, but in a lake of sweat – I have to change both pyjamas and sheets – we decide maybe it was 40 after all. It feels like it.

Unfortunately, before going to sleep, I’ve started reading about cytokine storms. That’s when your immune system, threatened, goes into overdrive and causes more severe problems than the original virus. The body’s immune system attacks itself.

One doctor is quoted as saying, ‘Everyone’s talking about the cytokine storm as if it were a well-recognised phenomenon. Actually, two weeks ago, most doctors had never heard of it.’

Nicole has thus far defied medical advice. We’re meant to sleep in separate rooms, but we don’t. We share a bathroom too. Nicole’s convinced she’ll never get ill. Her mother lived to a hundred and two.

Towards dawn, my fever has headed dramatically in the opposite direction and I start to shake with Arctic cold. Not even extra bedclothes, two thick pullovers and a hot-water bottle are doing anything to help. But I can’t help feeling maybe Nicole’s pushing her luck with her own immunity to this virus when she climbs on top of me, stretches her whole body against mine and says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you warm.’

My wife doesn’t seem to have grasped the notion of social distancing.

*

So, unknowingly, we’ve slipped into the mad phase and it will be with me for the next eleven days. ‘Mad’, meaning any symptom can appear at any time. One day it’s conjunctivitis. Next day it’s diarrhoea. Then it’s coughing. Then it’s friendly herpes. But just as my illness enters its mad phase, so does the Conservative government.

They’re exquisitely timed to happen together.

Maybe the politicians are inspired by the medicine. After all, if our vital signs have decided that now is the time to lie to us, maybe our government has decided the same.

Over this exact same period, the long list of the government’s mistakes and failures will become blindingly clear to everyone. In this emergency, if you’re looking for the government, you’ll always be sure to find them running along five miles behind the public.

The problems in the UK start when politicians fail to use the space granted by the westward spread of the virus to make preparation for its arrival. On March 12th, even Jeremy Hunt, a former Tory health minister himself, calls the government’s lack of action ‘surprising and concerning’. The country remains mysteriously open to visitors from viral centres like Italy and Spain, who pour in at airports unchecked and unquarantined.

At a COBRA meeting, also on March 12th, the government are still indulging their more fanciful advisers. They have been flirting with a policy of herd immunity – the happy-go-lucky notion that if the most vulnerable among us sheltered and hid indefinitely, it might be possible for everyone else to carry on and take their chances.

Not until the very day, March 16th, that I contract the disease – now this is a happy chance – do our rulers realise that although the theory of herd immunity is conveniently allowing them to let mass gatherings like the Cheltenham Races go ahead, it may unfortunately one day lead to 250,000 deaths.

The government immediately throw themselves into a desperate U-turn by opting instead for a conspicuously late lockdown.

No wonder I’m feeling that I didn’t need to get this bloody thing. It’s somebody’s fault. And I can tell you exactly whose.

*

I’m lying in bed sweating, equally bewildered by why our government have chosen to ignore the World Health Organization’s urgent advice that it’s essential to combine any lockdown with widespread testing, not just among health professionals, but among the population at large. The government are instead – hello, have I got this right? – suspending contact tracing – are they crazy or what? – claiming it’s not scientifically necessary. And yet how the hell are they ever going to control the disease unless they know who’s got it?

It doesn’t make sense.

In fact, nothing makes sense. At this point, I’m not sure whether to put this down to my delirium or theirs.

I keep waking in the night firmly convinced that right now – usually around 2 a.m. – is the perfect time for me to fulfil my mission. That I haven’t the foggiest what my mission is doesn’t seem to make it feel any less vital. One morning, in the middle of this week, Nicole has asked me how I’m feeling. I have replied, ‘One of my bodies is fine, but the others aren’t great.’ I have gone on painstakingly to explain that the virus has divided me into several separate identities which all sleep in the bed together side by side.

Clearly, I am off my head, though, as always when you are off your head, it doesn’t feel that way to you. But am I any more off my head than a government which can’t admit that they are dispatching front-line staff into work with Covid-infected patients without suitable protective clothing or equipment, in spite of the impassioned testimony of those same front-line workers that they are being sent naked to work?

And why can nobody who speaks for the government confess that because they were so keen to monitor the dangers to the NHS, they neglected the equal danger to workers and residents in the care-home sector, where deaths are set to rise to alarming levels?

Why are we moving our most vulnerable out of hospitals, where they are protected, into care homes where they aren’t?

Can anyone explain?

*

I can see this devilish virus seems to be cleverly retrofitted to find Johnson out. It’s smart. It knows how to play to all his worst weaknesses.

The virus is nothing if not adaptable, because it’s meanwhile outwitting the leader of the United States, but targeting quite different shortcomings. In his book The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump has revealed that the best way to do a deal is by denigrating your opponent. This is a man who speaks nostalgically of punching his second-grade music teacher and giving him a black eye.

He’s spent February denigrating Covid-19 – ‘You’re not as bad as the flu, few Americans are at risk’ – but the morale of the virus seems strangely undaunted by his tactics.

Perhaps it’s read his book.

A habitual user of wet wipes, Trump is a man with a lifetime fear of contamination. During the election campaign in 2016, he has spoken in horror of one of his interviewers, Megyn Kelly, ‘having blood coming out of her wherever’. He has also repeatedly characterised Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate as ‘disgusting’.

You may predict that this president is not ideally equipped to cope with something which breaks into your body and violently disrupts it.

Trump can’t conquer his natural disdain for anyone who gets ill. Sick people are what he calls losers. He has described his own brother Fred, an alcoholic who died at forty-three, as ‘a mawkish but lovable loser’.

But I’ve noticed among some of my friends that a similar attitude, though not articulated, is not far from the surface.

A famous film director remarks to me that I’m the only person he knows who’s got it. Do I detect an undercurrent of rebuke, as though it’s not the sort of thing the middle classes are meant to get? Apparently, I’ve crossed class lines by carelessly catching a disease which generally attacks manual workers and ethnic minorities. After all, it’s already becoming clear that you’re twice as likely to die if you’re poor. Diseases follow the social gradient.

And skin colour. In England and Wales, you’re four times as likely to die if you’re black.

*

But, again, am I dying? This is another very good question. I’ve entered the vomiting phase and I would say it’s the worst so far. Six times daily, I’m beating a track to the bathroom. I can’t keep anything down, and the result is I’m losing strength. Nicole is horrified because I’m the colour of Bela Lugosi, but also frustrated because I won’t eat anything. But what’s the point, I ask, if it just comes up again in an hour?

And for the first time, my doctor is seriously worried. ‘I don’t like the sound of you. You need to go into hospital for them to take care of you.’ I say I won’t go. It’s too dangerous. Hospitals are full of people with Covid-19. ‘You’ve already got Covid-19,’ he replies. ‘How can it be worse in hospital?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I just feel it is.’ ‘All right,’ he says. ‘But I’m not letting this go on much longer.’

The doctor is bombarding me with horse pills, antibiotics of industrial strength, which he says may explain the permanent taste in my mouth. Next morning, I wake after a torrid night convinced that Polos will solve the problem. Nicole is so relieved that there is something I actually want to eat that she buys me ten packets. Unfortunately, it’s some time since I had a Polo, and in the interval it’s obvious from the first one I pop in that the manufacturers have changed the formula. They’re now flavoured with sewage.

I can’t believe they sell as many as when they tasted of mint, but it’s a commercial choice, I guess.

*

On the tenth day, my sole diary entry reads: ‘Total despair.’

*

My mood is aggravated by the dense blizzard of cliché which is fogging up my television. You would think, given that by the second week of May more people will have died in the UK than in any other country in Europe, a note of contrition might begin to be heard in the public realm. But no, the preferred route through the crisis is bullshit.

Government ministers must now, every man and woman, toil their way doggedly down the centre of the bullshit highway.

Words like ‘failure’ or ‘mistake’ are forbidden and replaced with the anodyne ‘challenge’.

‘Yes, we faced challenges’ is government-speak for ‘Yes, we failed.’

‘Ramping up’ is government-speak for ‘finally doing something we forgot to do’.

‘We followed the science’ is government-speak for ‘Don’t blame us.’

The word that’s getting beaten up worst is ‘mediocrity’. The only qualification for being in a nodding-dog cabinet is that you must possess a mind vacant of all doubt about Johnson’s scorched-earth approach to Brexit. If you have any reservations, you’re excluded.

This has left the prime minister with as good a statistical chance of forming a strong administration as if he were to insist that all ministers must have ginger hair, or stand in their socks at over six foot ten.

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