Rona, a tiny spherical bat-kisser, was taken from her home in the jungle to Wuhan animal market in China along with her bat friends. There she jumped from bats to people, and after several adventures fell in love with, and jumped upon, Pete, a young British photographer. At that moment, a policeman grabbed him.
Read on!
Episode 4
History tells of Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the Lone Ranger and Tonto. But Rona and Pete were in a class of their own. Theirs was the joyride to end all joyrides.
Pete, having been booted out of Wuhan animal market, propped an elbow on Wuhan Airport’s ticket counter and asked himself – where to? Somewhere nice and hot?
“No, no,” said Rona, who was telepathic. “Hot’s terrible. Sweat. Sunburn. Fighting over the loungers. Forget it.” Rona had already worked out that temperatures above 20 degrees were a threat to her little life.
“Okay but just get me away from the mayhem of Chinese crowds! Let’s go somewhere nice and empty.” Rona wagged her head in disapproval. Uh-uh. No crowds no good. Just you and me for miles around? No thanks!
“Little girl, you’re hard to please…”
“Tell you what, Pete – let’s go skiing. Northern Italy - lovely and cold this time of year, lots of people, plenty of good stuff to eat and drink.”
“Okay Rony, you’re the boss…”
Pete booked a one-way flight to Milan, and they headed up the slopes. After a few days, Pete was beginning to get the hang of the skiing lark but Rona had already kissed everybody she could find over 3000 metres. “Up and down, up and down – this is an idiotic sport,” she said. “Let’s go to Varanasi!”
“What? Where?”
“You know, the city on the Ganges in India where the Hindus go to die.”
“Why the hell do you want to go there?”
“Hmmmm…” Rona temporised. “…I think it’ll be interesting.”
Varanasi it was. Such crowds! All crammed together! Pete thought it was a horrible place. Every time he put his camera up to his eye, fifty urchins squeezed into the frame, making V for victory signs and asking for pens.
Rona made quick work of the lot of them.
“Right, that’ll do,” she said in her new, business-like tone. “Back on the plane please.”
“Where next?”
They did New York, took a Greyhound bus right across the Mid-West to California, then headed up to Canada then back to Europe where Rona insisted they return to Italy, destination this time Venice. Nice crowds in Venice, at all times of the year.
But when they got there it was deserted. Pete sat in an empty Piazza San Marco and sipped a wildly over-priced cappuccino. “What’s going on?” he asked the waiter.
“Where you come from?” the waiter replied. “Don’t you know nothing? It’s the new plague!”
“The what?”
The waiter thrust a copy of Il Gazzettino, the daily paper, under his eyes. “Look,” he said. “Hundreds die, thousands sick, and the numbers are goin’ up like a rocket. All the tourists are scared stiff, they fuck off ‘ome. No tourists, what we gonna do?”
“Is that why you charged me £8.50 for a coffee?”
“No, that’s the normal price.”
Pete scanned the paper, and laboriously worked his way through the article. Italy was closing down – it was a national emergency. That was on top of the thousands dead in China, hundreds in Korea and Japan, more cases in every country you ever heard of. It was the global pandemic that experts had warned about for years – all due to a tiny little entity called Corona.
He peered at Rona, who had been reading over his shoulder, and he narrowed his eyes. “Rony,” he said slowly, “is there something you’d like to tell me?”
Rona shrugged and gave a little smile. Then she kissed him, hard, on the lips. Pete gave a shudder.
To be continued