by Katie Hale
Harry Symmonds, who I didn’t like or dislike, but tolerated, because I found that thinking was easier when there was someone to talk at. Harry Symmonds, proving even then that survival is easier in pairs.
*
This morning I buried a sparrow. I don’t know what made me do it.
It was outside a once-whitewashed crofter’s cottage at the foot of a mountain. I thought there could be food in the kitchen – instead I found a table set with two tea cups, each one lined with a fuzzy green and white mould. Upstairs, damp curtains blew at an open window, and something lay sprawled in the middle of the bed. As I entered the room, I upset the flurry of crows that had gathered to steal its softer parts. They cawed and scuffled and scratched at me as I barrelled backwards.
Scarf tight over my nose and mouth, I checked the empty kitchen cupboards and left.
As I stepped back onto the road, I crunched something into the tarmac. A sparrow – a small speckled bump on the wet black road, trying vainly to lift its head and chirrup. I bent down to scoop it up. It was soft and firm, like a tennis ball. It quivered in my hands – a bundle of terrified warmth.
At the end of the last century, London lost three-quarters of its sparrows in just six years – one of those facts I read and inexplicably remembered – and nobody really cared. So what difference did another sparrow make?
But it was as if a cloud had stuffed itself into my throat – I struggled to breathe, felt my eyes go sharp. I fell to the road and clutched this ordinary bird to my chest.
Maybe it was because of the broken wing, or the matchstick feet dangling from its juddering stomach. Maybe because this was the first living body I had touched in weeks.
I put it out of its misery with a rock from the edge of the road, then buried it as best I could in a dip by the wall. I didn’t leave a marker – who was there to find it? I carried on walking south.
*
Growing up, I never understood the need for touch, for desire, for other people’s bodies – the way these things gushed into everyday life, unstoppable, till they permeated every layer of people’s existence. On television and on the sides of buses, people kissed or embraced or touched parts of their own skin. In my mother’s magazines, boys strolled along the beach sporting swimming trunks and superhero muscles. The girls posed in skimpy bikinis and pretended not to look at the camera.
When I was thirteen, my mother sent me into town with money for my birthday. I snuck into a clothes shop on the high street, thrilling with trepidation. The halogen lighting and bulging rails seemed to be everywhere, till they were a barrage, pushing in at me on all sides. As a shop assistant in heavy eye make-up sashayed over, I grabbed the first bikini I saw and ducked into the changing rooms, pulling the curtains tight up to the edges to make sure nobody could see in. With my back to the mirror, I changed.
I cannot remember what I wanted. I do not know what I expected to happen, or what part of me had thought this might be a good idea. I only remember looking nothing like the girls in my mother’s magazines.
The top sat flatly over my chest. In magazines, the women always had long hair that cascaded over their shoulders and made everything else look curved and in proportion. My short rough hair made my neck look too long, and there was too much bareness. My skin was pale and mottled. In the shop lighting, it was almost blue, except for my face and arms, which were red from sun and windburn, and made my body look disconnected. The bikini bottom cut into the line around my groin. It made my legs stick out, like those branches that grow too big in the wrong directions and need propping up with wooden stakes to stop the whole tree collapsing. In the gusset, the protective plastic strip was hard and uncomfortable, and crinkled when I moved.
I bought it out of spite. At home, I stuffed it down the gap at the back of my chest of drawers, where it haunted my teenage years like the ghosts of all the women in my mother’s magazines.
At school, some of the boys had started to spend their lunch money on newspapers with pictures of topless girls in them. These pictures would end up stuffed in people’s lockers, or tucked unexpectedly into exercise books, or shoved at you as you walked between classrooms to raucous yells of ‘Tits on your face!’
I hunched over, avoided their eyes. I stopped watching films and I avoided looking at the pictures of models in shop windows. I learned to walk without attracting attention.
*
Open ground has given way to forest. Not the kind of nurturing, ancient treescape found in children’s adventure stories, but a sprawling pine farm, all evenly spaced trunks and a dark floor drowning in needles. I follow a dirt path, just wide enough for a four-by-four, although I doubt a vehicle has driven along here in years. Not since the War hit British soil and the construction industry collapsed along with so many others. Now, this forest is turning wild. Ferns and saplings sprout from the earth, while weeds inch their way through the hardened dust of the path. A fallen tree sprawls across it at an angle, its branches and bare twigs brittle. I clamber over it, then stop a few steps later to pick brown pine needles out of my clothes and the cracks between my boots and socks.
About a mile further along, I come to a clearing. It is not big – only a widening of the path, perhaps once meant as a passing place or to park a single vehicle. But the break in the trees means the air feels fresher, and more light filters through to illuminate the scene below. Which is probably why they chose this spot in the first place.
Three tents are grouped across the path, sagging and torn, their poles bent out of shape. In the shelter of the trees beyond, five rusty camping chairs surround a circle of stones that must once have formed the edge of a fire pit. Out here, away from towns and cities and the ferocity of the War, after the Safe Centres were full and shut their doors, these people must have assumed they had escaped. The Sickness could never reach them here, so far from the dispersing bombs and packed communities that allowed it to spread.
I wonder how long they were here before they realised they were wrong. Was it wildlife that brought it to them? Or did one of the people carry it with them from their old life like a live wire, just waiting to be touched? Or perhaps they managed to outrun the Sickness after all, only to be crippled by starvation.
Five people, sacrificing home comforts in an attempt to survive, but still unwilling to sacrifice each other. Discovering too late that near-isolation and living minimally in the open air was not quite enough to save them.
I hurry through, holding my breath even though I tell myself the Sickness cannot still be here. I do not stop until I am certain there are at least a couple of miles between us. I wonder if this vagabond life will be enough to save me.
My hair has grown long. It brushes my shoulders and catches under the straps of my backpack. It has been months since I owned a hairbrush, and my scalp itches. I could try cutting it, but hair dulls blades and I need my knife to be sharp. Instead, I cut a length of string and tie my hair in a fat clump at the nape of my neck. That will have to do for now.
*
I was eight when I first cut my hair. I stole the kitchen scissors while my mother was on the phone, then locked myself in the bathroom. With the small mirror leant against the bath taps to keep it from falling, I stripped down to my knickers and sat in the empty tub. I cut close to my scalp and the hair tumbled down me and stuck in my creases. I nicked the top of my ear, and blood ran down my neck, flowing freely, the way blood does from the head – but I folded toilet paper across it and continued. I kept cutting steadily, determined not to leave the job half done. I brushed myself off and got dressed, then gathered up the dead hairs into the waste-paper basket.
Only then did I let myself explore my new head. I mapped its contours with my fingertips. It felt cold and shocking to the touch. When I examined myself in the mirror, I saw how my cranium was not round as I had always assumed, but had little bumps and dips like a landscape. For the first time, I thought a part of myself was beautiful.
My mother shrieked when she saw me. Her
hand flew to her chest like a startled bird and her breaths came loud. ‘Oh, Monster!’ she wailed. ‘What have you done?’
I ran my hand across my beautiful head.
That night, I sat upstairs with my collection, listening to my parents’ voices oscillating through the floorboards as I tried to get to grips with the mechanics of a circuit board stolen from the school skip.
As I entered the kitchen next morning, my father greeted me with a watery smile as my mother banged down spoons and breakfast bowls on the table. She pursed her lips, but said nothing. She kept her silence as she tidied away the cereal and drove me to school, though her eyes and lips were still narrow.
Of course, the children in my class laughed, but that is because children are idiots. I ignored them and they soon grew bored. They went back to their games and glitter pens, and I sat with Harry Symmonds and folded models out of paper.
*
I think about all the people I ever knew. Every day I remember someone else, as if they’re all buried inside me like books in a library, just waiting for my brain to pick one out. It’s shocking how many people you encounter in a lifetime.
Yesterday, I thought about the woman who ran the roadside café I worked in one summer, whose name I can’t remember. She had a flat high voice like a fork scraping across a plate, and she used to raid the table where the surplus cakes were kept. I can still hear her suck and slurp at her fingers as she pushed broken biscuits into her mouth.
Sometimes, I catch myself thinking about Joe. Joe was the school caretaker. When my mother was going to be late picking me up, or when I didn’t want to spend breaktime outside with the other children, I would sit with Joe in his office and drink strong tea.
It was not what my father would have recognised as an office – there were no banks of computers or overflowing stacks of paper, no yellowing pot plants. Joe’s office was a workshop, a forest of shelves and half-fixed electricals. Tools hung like artworks from the walls, and the only computer was a salvaged Acorn Archimedes he had spent the past twenty years trying to restore. Joe’s jumpers were always stretched in odd places where he had pegged them on the washing line, and tufts of grey hair sprouted from his ears and nose. But he could reassemble a fuse box blindfolded in twenty-three seconds.
When I was a child, first learning to talk, I used to sit on my father’s lap and go through all the names I knew: Mummy, Daddy, Monster, Ganny, Alfie, Joan. I used to say them over and over, demarcating the limits of my little world.
As I got older, my world became so huge that I couldn’t remember everybody even if I tried. My life is full of people and places that I’ve let slip down the back of my brain.
When my head gets so cold my face goes numb, I try to run through all the things I can remember. I try to list them, like descending the rungs of a ladder. Sometimes, as I go deeper, I remember things I’d forgotten even existed.
There was a quotation – I forget who said it, one of those things that flitted about the internet with a black-and-white picture and quirky font – that history is just a set of lies agreed upon. Now nobody needs to agree on anything. Now all of it is mine.
This is what I remember:
I remember that the Normans won the Battle of Hastings in 1066 – though what that means I don’t know, now that there are no more kings, no more place-names, no more dates.
I remember my fifth birthday with a cake that looked like a lion.
I remember that my mother’s birthday was 9 October.
I remember her fingers hovering over the keys of the piano that always needed tuning.
I remember the sounds of a person in the next room – the small eases and beats like a murmuring of the heart.
I remember train stations at rush hour.
I remember how most people lived crowded together, how there was never enough space.
I remember satellites. Sometimes, I remember that they’re still above me, tumbling through orbit, all screws and wires and metal.
I remember planting a time capsule in the school garden, sealing it in a Tupperware box to stop the worms getting in.
I remember Luke Denham, who sat next to me at school and had a birthmark on the bridge of his nose, and whose dad won the village darts competition six years in a row.
I remember Luke Denham wiping his nose on the sleeve of his jumper.
I remember my dad’s caterpillar eyebrows.
I remember faces – how beauty was in the petite and symmetrical, and ugliness was in the unexpected.
I remember Erik’s face, its drawn-out anguish as we waited, the terrible hunger in his eyes. I remember the helpless desperation of him.
This is always where I try to stop remembering.
*
Sometimes I think I’m being watched. If I sleep badly, I wake to a feeling like a hand grabbing my shoulder and the urge to turn and look. I spend the whole day thinking of eyes – countless unblinking eyes, following my progress along footpaths or staring from the hedgerows. They press me under their gaze like the ghosts of all the people who died in the War and the Sickness, like the ghosts of my parents, or blue-eyed Erik. I have never believed in spirits or an afterlife, but still they swirl around me like a current, dragging at me as if my survival was somehow a betrayal. At night I dream about the vault.
*
The Seed Vault is a metal and concrete blade jutting from the permafrost. Look at it too long and your eyes start flickering from the snow-glare and the sun on mirrored steel. The first time I saw it, I thought it looked like the perfect piece of that icy world, like the final bit of a jigsaw puzzle that suddenly reveals what the picture is supposed to be.
Inside is different. Through the heavy doors, all the elegance of the landscape is gone, and the mechanical insides of the structure are on display. Here is a grey and white world of pipes and covered wires, concrete and corrugated metal, and a long cold tunnel that leads to the vault.
When I was a child, I always thought of vaults as exotic places, secret stashes, stacked with glimmering treasures like Tutankhamen’s tomb. Places just waiting to be broken into.
The Seed Vault is not a treasure trove. Instead, it looks more like a warehouse: metal racks stacked with hundreds of uniform black plastic boxes. It is a place of order and purpose. A place where time has no jurisdiction, where everything is suspended. It is a place for waiting out the end of the world.
I was posted to the Seed Vault two years before the Last Fall, when the dying population still believed the Sickness could have a cure, before the Safe Centres shut their gates and left anyone outside them to die. When the vault was still a scientific exercise and not a military target, when people still thought the future might be a thing worth striving for.
When I first got off the plane, the air was sharp and biting. Despite the summer Arctic sunshine, already I could feel it scouring my ungloved fingers. I hesitated at the top of the stairs, taking in this stone and concrete world.
Waiting just inside the terminal building was a blond man holding a homemade cardboard placard which just said: MEKANIKER.
That was me. The woman brought in to fix things.
I walked over to him and held out my hand: ‘Monster.’
‘What?’ His accent was sharp, like an ice shard. He had blue eyes and skin pale as the walls.
‘Monster,’ I repeated, ‘my name’s Monster.’
‘Monster? What, like a monster?’
‘Yes. You?’
‘Oh.’ He tucked the placard under his arm and shook my hand. ‘Oh, OK. I’m Erik.’
‘Erik.’
‘Biologist,’ he said, ‘up at the vault.’
The vault. I learned later that Erik did not believe in God or religion or spirituality, but the way he spoke about the Seed Vault was as if he had found a higher purpose through which to orientate his own life. He was devoted to it. Cataloguing its contents was his rosary. Putting out calls for unrepresented species of plant-life was his version of prayer, and the Seed Vault it
self was his church.
*
It used to be said that walking was good for the soul, that tramping for miles and miles created a rhythm in the body that opened the mind to the unconscious and all sorts of crap.
I have seen too many dead people to believe in a soul. Walking is only good for one thing, and that is survival. One blistered foot in front of the other. Getting through the day one step at a time.
I wake, I eat, sometimes I wash, I pack up my sleeping bag, warm my hands by the dying fire, bandage my feet, lace up my boots, put on my pack and start walking. I walk until my feet are hurting too much for me to ignore. I sit, take off my boots, rest a while, rebandage my feet, lace my boots back up and keep on walking. I avoid the towns, most of them whole and eerily empty, where the Sickness spread through them like a purging fire, leaving only buildings and possessions in its wake. On the outskirts, there is always a patch of blackened earth, marking the bonfires for burning the dead.
A couple of times, I pass towns blown apart by bombs. They hunch against the landscape like unattempted jigsaw puzzles. Here and there, a single street or row of shops is still standing. I avoid these too. When the War constricted everything, the places that survived became prime targets for looting. The people that survived with them became the worst versions of themselves, struggling against their own inevitable collapse.
I stick to scavenging from the smallest villages. Even then, I leave as quickly as I can, and always before dark.
When the light starts to fade, I hunt for shelter, build a fire with whatever I can find, eat whatever I have or can easily get, take off my boots, bury myself in my sleeping bag, and sleep. My dreams are filled with walking. They have a rhythm to them, now, a one-two-one-two circular flow.