by Katie Hale
I read their emails – frequent at first, full of optimism and denial, then growing briefer and more sporadic. I didn’t reply.
Two weeks after the final one, I had an email from a neighbour telling me they were dead. Her own son had caught the Sickness too, she said. It had emptied the village, everyone already dead or dying, or doomed by proximity.
I closed the window on one of the last emails I ever received. Two weeks later, the servers crashed, sending what little infrastructure remained skittering like a deck of cards. In its place, information became a rare bird. The Safe Centres and military hubs shared news via what was left of the internet, leaving everybody else to root out dusty wind-up radios and spend fruitless nights searching for something to tune in to. By that time, I had got the job at the Seed Vault. Two years later, everyone was dead.
*
I am close now. Even with the fields overgrown or rotting and walls and buildings turned to rubble, I can still recognise bits of the place, like a familiar picture seen through wavy glass.
I pull myself to the top of the hill behind my parents’ house. My calves are tight from the climb and under my layers I can feel my T-shirt sticking to my back. The sky is the same ambiguous grey it has been for days, the air cold and thirsty. In the distance, the familiar mountain range blurs into the clouds.
The drystone walls that divide the fields are mostly intact, grey mossy ribbons segmenting the landscape the way they have for hundreds of years. Here and there a section has crumbled. I remember seeing them like this at the end of winter: lengths of wall reduced to a tumbled pile of stone, where the water had got in and frozen.
Sometimes at the local summer fair, there would be a waller demonstrating his trade. He would set up his markers in the middle of a field, two pairs of wooden posts, each with a string running between them. Then he would build the wall up, starting with the big solid rocks at the bottom, using the string as a guide to keep the wall from bulging. He would turn the rocks in his rough hands, checking their size and edges, selecting just the right one for the space it had to occupy. He would leave the flat round ones for the top, standing them up on their sides to crown the wall, like a parade of soldiers puffing out their chests.
I used to love the fair. It was an annual tradition – one of the few my family had, alongside afternoon tea for my mother’s birthday and church on Christmas Day. One morning in August, my mother would assemble a picnic, pack my father and me towards the car, and we would drive the busy road to the fair.
It was held in a big field on the edge of town. It was not a city fair, the kind with ferris wheels and dodgems and candy-floss. Ours was a country fair, an agricultural fair. It was the time of year when everyone – even the non-farm people in their spit-clean wellies – gathered to remember the area’s past and to celebrate what remained of its industry.
There were no fairground rides, just a bouncy castle that came every year with a man from the next town – but it was only something to occupy the children while the real business of the day took place. This was the exhibition and judging of animals. Mostly that meant dogs and sheep, but sometimes also a coveted prize bull.
After he had parked up in the neighbouring field, my father would head straight for the judging ring, where he would sit for most of the day, making notes on the quality of the animals and the judges’ decisions. He understood the slight distinctions of dogs and of livestock, the stance and colour and distribution of weight that made one animal more worthy of accolades than another. As for me, I would look at the ring of stubbly old men and quivering terriers, and think they all looked the same, animals and owners alike.
My mother, like me, had no interest in livestock. She would make her way to the marquee, where flower displays and vegetables and sponges had undergone their own eagle-eyed judging process. If my mother had won a prize, which only happened two or three times that I can remember, my father and I would be dragged to the tent to admire her achievement in loud, carrying voices. Otherwise, she would spend around an hour studying the exhibits, before bustling across to the tea tent, where she would inevitably find a group of women she knew.
With a parting gift of five pounds in my pocket, I was left free to wander. I rarely spent the money – even when I was small, I had no interest in the bouncy castle or the face-painting. Instead I would watch the drystone waller giving his demonstrations. His name was Ted. Over the years, as the world grew more complicated and the War circled ever nearer, Ted was an unerring constant. I suppose he became a friend of sorts.
‘Morning, Monster,’ he would say when I arrived by his plot, ‘you’re here early.’ He said this every year, and every year it was true.
I would watch him set up and lay the first few stones, then I would wander off to check the other exhibits: the chugging vintage tractors, the man who could carve animals out of tree trunks, and the stick-dressing competition, where old men exhibited their carved walking sticks and shepherds’ crooks. Every now and then, I would circle back around to check on Ted and his progress with the wall. Sometimes he would even let me put one of the crowning stones on the top.
I wonder what happened to Ted. I wonder whether he built any of these walls above the village. I take off my backpack and clamber across one, dislodging a couple of stones as I do. They tumble loudly as everything shifts under me. I consider putting them back, but what would be the point? There is no livestock left to segregate, no claims to be made on arbitrary squares of land. Just bigness, spreading out in all directions. If I had time, I could demolish every single one of these walls. It would make no difference to anything.
*
My parents’ house sits squat and grey at the bottom of the hill. The whole village looks as I remember it. For all I know, my parents could be in the house still, waiting for somebody to burn or bury them. A lot of Sickness victims were left like that, everyone around them too afraid or too ill to do what needed to be done. For a moment, I almost turn back – but then I see the charred circle of earth at the edge of the village, and all the hair follicles on my head prickle.
I pull my pack higher on my shoulders. I stride down the hill.
When I reach the little road that runs through the village, the signs of neglect push themselves forward like boisterous children. Unmown grass along the verges. A broken window at a neighbour’s house. Untended flower beds that were once kept so prim and proper.
The gate to my parents’ garden is stiff on its hinges. I consider oiling it, just to feel the rightness of it opening smoothly under my hand, but that would be stupid. I’m not planning on staying.
The front door opens more easily. I had expected it to be locked, but of course there was nobody to lock it.
Inside, the hallway is dark and grey, and there is a smell of damp. It rests at the back of my throat and festers.
I check the downstairs first. It’s strange, walking through these old rooms, exactly the way I remember them, down to my mother’s china ornaments on the mantelpiece and my father’s cluttered papers. Like I’m observing my childhood through someone else’s eyes.
I search the kitchen, but the cupboards are empty, raided by our neighbours once my parents were dead, the way it was everywhere once quarantine was enforced. I check the secret cupboard at the back of my father’s desk, the one that only opens when you pop a slat of wood from its notch. As a child, I thought this was a hiding place worthy of an adventure novel; as an adult it just looks obvious. I pop out the piece of wood and the cupboard creaks open.
Inside are two envelopes, one big, one small.
The big one contains documents: the deed to the house, birth certificates, and my parents’ wills. I cast them aside and open the smaller envelope.
Stuffed inside it is more money than I’ve ever held in my life. There must be six or seven thousand pounds in twenty- pound notes, crammed inside this little envelope.
I run my thumb across their edges. They make a soft burring sound as I flip through them. My parents’ ra
iny-day fund. I never knew they kept so much cash in the house.
I have an urge to take it with me. Even now, this amount of money inspires a kind of awe. I can’t seem to put it down. It sits in my hand as I hover between staying and leaving, crouched on the patterned carpet in front of my father’s old desk. It’s a kind of power, tying me to this spot. The things this money can buy . . .
Could buy.
I look at the fat wad of notes in my hand and force myself to see a stack of useless coloured paper. I stuff both envelopes back in the secret cupboard. Out of habit, I close it up again.
I start upstairs, the musty smell still latched onto the walls of my throat. Even though I’m climbing, there’s a feeling of going deeper into the house.
I check the bathroom and the spare bedroom. Nothing but a few dead moths on the windowsill. When I can put it off no longer, I open the door to my parents’ bedroom.
There’s a lump in the bed.
I cover my eyes with my hand and force myself to count to ten. I feel foolish, like a child playing hide-and-seek with nobody to search for. I open my eyes.
Nothing. Just the bundled duvet and a couple of pillows. I take deep breaths and scan the room. Nothing to show that this was the room my parents sickened and grew weak and died in. Nothing but a smell of damp and empty house.
I step back along the landing into my old bedroom.
The walls are still the same garish green I chose when I was twelve because I knew it would upset my mother’s muted tastes. On top of the chest of drawers is a wooden automaton of a man riding a bicycle, which Harry Symmonds gave me for my birthday and which I used to like to take apart and put back together again.
The unmade bed is piled with cardboard boxes: all the books and tools and instruction manuals I wouldn’t let my parents throw away after I moved out. The brown parcel tape is cracked and flaking. On one of them there’s a half-dead fly buzzing on its back.
I catch sight of myself in the mirror beside my bedroom door. I look thin. Where before my face was a globe lit by the sun, now it is all squares and triangles, where all the weeks of walking and not enough to eat have carved me into the narrowest version of myself. My limbs are too long for my reflection – tough and gangly like the branches of an old tree, so that my movements look forced and unreliable. The dusty film across the mirror makes my face dead and grey. It is the face of a woman in her forties, not one in her late twenties.
I reach under the bed, into the dust and carpet fluff, and pull out the shoe box.
I sit with it unopened in my lap, holding all its memories of childhood and weekends, of the pestering of raindrops on the window, of long hours building complex circuits like race-tracks, of Harry Symmonds hovering, desperate to touch. I hold these past days close to me, too afraid to open the box and let them out.
I do not know how long I sit like that, in the room where I grew into my adult self, not even daring to open a tatty fucking shoe box. I only remember about time and lateness when the wind picks up in the trees in the back garden.
I do not want to spend the night in my dead parents’ house. Through all the days of walking here, home sparked within me like something electric, drawing me on. Now it is an emptiness, a house without a purpose. My parents are gone. I do not need to be here any more. I pick up the shoe box and shoulder my pack, and leave before it gets dark. I oil the gate on my way out.
*
I am halfway down the road when I hear them behind me: a low growl and a padding of paws on the tarmac. It takes a moment to place the sound, but when I do it sinks into me as if I had always expected to hear it. As if it had been waiting for me to dare to come home. If I had been the sort of person who placed some kind of value on proximity to other people, who gravitated towards family in their hour of need, if I had been the sort of person who cared, then this village is where I would have died. I should have known it would not let me leave so easily.
There are three of them, old farm dogs slinking low across the ground.
Farm dogs are always tough, bred for work on the unforgiving fells, but these three are something more. Shaped out of need and a fierce holding-on, they are more wolf than dog now. Like me, these three are survivors.
They prowl towards me in formation, eyes fixed, growls rumbling deep in their throats. The leader pulls back his lip in a snarl and the others follow him. I resist the urge to run, to let them give chase. I imagine those wet yellow teeth in my leg. I clutch the shoe box to my chest and plant my feet on the tarmac, claiming my territory.
I bare my own teeth.
The dogs keep coming.
I start to growl, a deep feral humming at the back of my throat. For a second, they pause, and I growl louder.
The leader steps out with one hesitant paw, and I lurch forward, spare arm whirling, a sudden explosion of movement and noise: ‘Fuck off, you bastard little shits, fuck off!’
There’s barking – the noise is everywhere. The dogs split and scatter and I try to keep my eyes on the leader, on his jaw snapping at my calves. I try to kick out but he’s a quick dancer, and suddenly there’s no noise, just a kind of wind tunnel in my head and one thought – Be bold, be bold, be bold . . . So I yell, ‘I am bold!’ and as I yell there’s a pain in my left calf like a nail gun and a sudden weight, and a bitch with her teeth stuck through my trousers, and everything spins. My scream cuts the air and I smash the shoe box on her head with my whole body-weight behind it.
The bitch lets go. I can still feel the tooth-grip, but she cowers and slinks and she is on me and not on me, beaten and not beaten. The other mutts continue to growl and snap and I kick out. There’s a sick crack as my foot connects with the leader’s snout. He whimpers and backs away, making small noises like a broken child.
The others stop snapping. They look to their wounded leader. Everything hangs in the air. Then they follow him, low to the road, and away, away.
I’m breathing hard. My back and underarms are soaked with sweat, my T-shirt stuck to my skin. I become aware of my heart, the undimmable batter of it. I become aware of my veins and capillaries, the blood’s flood-rush through them. I become aware of every part of me that is alive – and then I become aware of what is broken.
I put my hand to the wound and it comes away wet with my own blood and the dog’s saliva. I take a step. The injured leg shakes, sends spasms rippling up through the rest of me, then gives. My body crumples and I hit the tarmac.
I do not know how long I lie there. Five seconds. Maybe ten. It feels longer.
I let the hurt run through me, testing this new pain, chalking it up alongside the blisters and the sores from my backpack straps and the deep cramps in my stomach and thighs. I stare at the million grits surfacing the road, and I build my injured leg into the rest of me.
Slowly, thinking through every movement, I stand. I test the weight of myself. The leg shakes a moment, then is still. I take two deep breaths and look around. The dogs are gone. I check the shoe box. The corners are scuffed and battered, and along one side where it hit the bitch’s skull there is a cave I have to push back into place. The brown tape I once shut it with is barely holding, but the elastic bands are still intact. It isn’t broken. Nothing is lost.
I step out. I force myself to continue as though nothing happened, as though the dog pack is still watching, as though my whole body isn’t pounding. Hugging the shoe box to my chest, I follow the road. It rises steeply out of the village, its broad curves cutting across the fell where once I used to search for bones, or for tufts of wool caught on the stiff brown reeds. The wind through them makes a sound like a river in flood, and the sky has turned a thunderous lead. When I turn to look back, there is only the grey village and a thin strip of light between clouds and horizon.
At the top of the hill, the road forks. To the west, it dips into the next valley, where the military once guarded a hydroelectric plant, before it was bombed with the dispersing Sickness that spread and killed my parents. I cannot go there, just as I
cannot stay here, with the village so keen to grab me in its jaws and add me to its horde of dead.
But I have to go somewhere. I have to find shelter far enough away that I can rest.
I head east, away from the dogs and the village, away from the sliver of light at the edge of everything, and into the vast dark sky.
*
The evening comes cold and blue. In the musty interior of an empty barn, I root in my bag for bandages. I ease off my boots and trousers.
My leg is a bluish white. There’s a raised purple circle on the side of my calf, and around it, a collection of deep red puncture marks, crusty and already secreting that clear liquid that means they’re healing. The skin is unnaturally shiny, filmed with a dried reddish smear. I use the smallest amount of water possible to clean it. When I wrap the bandages around, it stings.
I eat two digestive biscuits then climb into my sleeping bag in the flatbed of an abandoned truck. In the drive to reach my parents’ house, I forgot to look for food. My rations are thin.
I try to think about my parents, try to remember the way they filled the house. I try to picture my father taking off his glasses to rub tired eyes, or my mother perched on the edge of the sofa rubbing cream into her hands. I try to picture their faces, smiling or cross or indifferent – but every time I try, my mind goes blank. I wonder if I should have brought a photo with me from the house, but it is too late now.
For a long time, I lie awake with my leg throbbing, listening to my stomach complaining.
*
In the flatbed of an abandoned truck, I wake to a crushing dark and a rich hot pain in my leg like a welding torch. My face in contact with the air is cold, but the heat from my leg pushes through me till it fills my head and I think my skull is going to break apart. I lean over the side of the truck and vomit up the meagre contents of my stomach. It comes up thin and stinking.