by Katie Hale
I will have to settle for more traditional outlets. A hardware shop. A supermarket.
Most of the shops are empty. Many have their fronts smashed in. Some are missing their signs. Not for the first time, I find my fingers twitching towards my pocket: a base instinct of longing for a phone, for information.
I will have to do this the old-fashioned way. Not even the old-fashioned way, but the prehistoric way. I have become a hunter-gatherer.
I find seven shops. In one, four broken shelving units. In another, a stack of bubble-wrapped toilet seats. Nothing I can use. Nothing that might save me.
It is a strange idea, being saved. When I picked up broken appliances as a child, I thought I was saving them, fixing them up to give them a new lease of life. I would mend them, even repurpose them, and the best would earn a place in my collection.
What have I been saved for? I cannot fix myself. At school, teachers would urge us to go to college or university or join the army so we could ‘reinvent ourselves’. I cannot invent myself as anything but what I am, waking, eating, shitting, sleeping. I do not know what being saved means any more, or what the reward might be for achieving it.
I move further out, towards the periphery of the city, where the chaos is thinner and the infrastructure more whole.
It is on the western edge that I find it. A retail park. A whole complex dedicated to the buying and selling of things. Of course, most of the buildings are boarded and shuttered, abandoned long before the rest of the city was evacuated, when the War and then the Sickness made international trade next to impossible.
The fullest, most normal-looking is a pet shop. Browsing the shelves stocked with retractable leads and hamster cages, I can almost believe that a bored shop assistant will saunter over to ask what I am looking for. Clearly most of this stock became extraneous once the Sickness set in for good, when people were quarantined and had to eat their pets to stay alive.
I am about to leave when I spot a large crate filled with foil packets of bird seed. Something to feed to the scratty chickens roosting in the barn. I cannot carry a whole one, so I decant some into a carrier bag, tie it off and cram it in my backpack. I put in four tins of dog food and a bag of dog biscuits. The biscuits are over a year out of date, but they will do in case I can find nothing else to eat tonight.
Next to the pet shop is a computer store, packed with defunct technology. On the other side is an empty sports outlet. Across the car park is an outdoors shop, the kind of place that once sold recreational camping and hiking as part of the dream that everyone could be an explorer at the end of a working week.
I tell myself not to hope.
It is dark inside the shop. I fish in the pocket of my rucksack for my torch. It wavers as I switch it on, and everything inside me clenches in a desperate plea for fresh batteries. Let it be like the pet shop. Let it be full.
As I flash the torch beam around the room, my eyes become accustomed, and I take stock.
A bare display unit.
The ripped shell of a tent.
Leaflets advertising loyalty cards.
A bashed-in till.
I move further in, flash my torch over any shelf that might harbour something I could use, but there is nothing. The shop is bare and useless. Around every shelf and hanging rack I think, this is where it must be. But no. Only emptiness and a conspicuous scurrying from whatever rodent life has taken up residence just beyond my torch-light.
Perhaps if I only go further, deeper, then at some point I will strike lucky. Surely, eventually, there must be something.
But then the wall is looming, dusty and grey, pockmarked with clothes hooks. I follow it along. In the back corner of the shop is a door, shut with a combination lock. I press my hand against the lock and it bleeps wearily. Still some battery left. I try a couple of combinations, but none of them work. No matter. Basic combination locks like this are easy to get past.
I fumble to the front of the shop and unstick one of the loyalty cards from its leaflet. Back by the door, I slide it down the edge of the lock, turning the handle until I hear a click. The door opens.
Through it is a metal staircase leading down into a basement. I descend to the sound of more scurrying claws. At the bottom I find another door, also locked. I trick my way through it with the card, and push it open.
When I was small, I stole a book about Ancient Egypt from school. There were coloured drawings of Egyptians farming the land on either side of the Nile and of slaves building pyramids, and on the cover was an embossed picture of Tutankhamun’s death mask, which shone gold and showed up the fingerprints of every child who had read it. My favourite picture in the book was a sepia photograph. It showed Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon standing in the entrance to Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in 1922, looking a little bit overwhelmed by the enormous treasure trove they had just uncovered.
I open a locked door in the basement of an abandoned outdoors shop on the western edge of a dead city, and I find Tutankhamun’s tomb.
I stand for a moment in the torchlight and allow myself just to look.
There are piles of plastic-packaged clothes, and boxes of torches, batteries, bottles, a water filter, sleeping bags, camping lanterns, firelighters . . .
I change into new clothes and boots and leave my old ones bundled in a corner. I swap the batteries in my torch, and pack my backpack with as much as I can carry. It is full and heavy, and I will be tired by the time I get back to the farm, but I know I will sleep well tonight.
*
In the days to come, I raid the back rooms of all the supermarkets I can find, but they are mostly empty. I even try several cafés, most of which closed during the War when people stopped spending money. As I expected, they are all bare. I take a few packets of oats and grains from houses in the suburbs – the ones with closed doors and unbroken windows, which have not already been ransacked. In one I find a tub of salt. In another, a sealed jar of flour with weevils crawling through it, which I can sift clean back at the farm.
At first I consider making the long trek across the city to look for food in the sea, but that would require fishing tackle or crab pots, or combing the beach for cockles, and I know nothing about any of it – and if I close my eyes I can still feel the pitch and swell of the waves, the undertow dragging at my feet. I can picture myself pushed under, scraping along the rough sand, flailing and gasping for air. Better to stick to scavenging.
So I explore the city until I find a garden centre, dark and sprawling next to the remains of a looted supermarket. I wrench the door open.
Inside, the air feels thick and moist. It clings to me with a sense of possibility – even the smell makes me think of things burgeoning, of compost and cultivated growth, and of my mother in her gardening gloves, whispering to a tray of seedlings, wheedling them into the light. For a moment I feel a pang of something for her, for her ability to make things flourish. I shrug it off. I never wanted that – to be the sort of person who poured hours into the painstaking nourishment of an allotment, who hunched over a vegetable patch like my mother and sometimes my father, gauging onions with a tape measure in the hope they might be fat enough to win a prize at the fair. There was no point to that, as far as I could tell. Not when the supermarket had onions bagged and ready to go.
Now, it is different. Now, I think of my mother’s pristine rows of cabbages and potatoes and beans, picked clean of slugs and caterpillars every morning by her attentive hands, and I think about survival.
I wander between the shelves, ignoring the useless decorative items – the sundials and water features and bird baths. Like the pet shop, much of the garden centre is intact, displays brimming as though the shop shut for the night and just never reopened – but here and there, bare runs of shelving tell a different story.
The main central aisle is totally empty, apart from a dusty stack of half-price greetings cards. At the end of it, displayed in faded coloured packets across the back wall, are the seeds.
I
run my hand across them and they swing gently on their hooks, like I am nothing more than a breeze. I have no idea if they will grow. How long do seeds last, protected by nothing but waxy paper? I think of the Seed Vault and its state-of-the-art technology keeping everything in stasis, how even that was not enough in the end. What chance do these seeds have, here in this corrugated shed? Erik would have known. Probably my mother would know, too. Perhaps any attempts at planting are useless. Still, I select an assortment of vegetable seeds from the racks.
I plant the seeds in plastic trays to urge them along. Every day I search for signs of growth, and every day the bare compost is a condemnation, until I want to hurl it at the wall. I try not to wonder how long I can survive on tinned food and dry goods. I try not to wonder how long these foods will remain edible. I tell myself to be patient, but there is less and less hope – until one day, poking through the black, spots of bright green appear like promises. I hold them up to my eye level and stare at the freshness, the real burgeoning life of them. They have succeeded. I have succeeded.
When the plants have grown bigger, I dig over a row of earth along one side of the field and transplant them. I check them every day for snails or aphids.
On my walk upstream from where the water runs past the house, I discover two apple trees. As long as the plants are not diseased, I will have fresh fruit and vegetables when the time is right. I build up the end of the barn and fatten the chickens, so they will start to lay again. With each success, I can feel my roots growing deeper. With each day, the world solidifies around me.
*
I have been at the farmhouse two weeks when I make my second big discovery in the city. It does not seem promising to begin with. I almost don’t even go inside.
It is a corner shop, with a broken awning and boarded-up windows, the kind that used to sell newspapers and cigarettes and sweets. I only check it on the off-chance of finding a stray bar of chocolate or packet of crisps.
I turn the door knob. It’s stiff, but stiffness is a good thing, because it means the dogs and foxes can’t get in.
Inside is an old wooden floor, scratched almost white by decades of shoes. A central magazine stand and a counter at the far end. A row of cupboards on the near wall. There are a few empty packets on the shelves by the counter. Other than that, the shop is bare. It looks as though the place closed before the city’s people died or moved away to the new centres.
At the back of the shop is a door leading into what was once the owner’s house. As I open it, it sets a flurry of dust whirling, and I have to blink through it into the darkness. The windows in here are boarded up, too. I have taken to carrying a long metal bar with me on my trips to the city – something I found in the farmyard, and something that makes me feel safer, like I can protect myself. I use it to pry the boards from the windows, and the daylight comes streaming in.
I am in a small living space, carpeted, with a faux-leather sofa and the far wall stacked with high cupboards. Expecting more of the same emptiness I found in the shop, I check them. There are cans of soup, vegetables, hot-dog sausages. There are jars of jam and pickles and peanut butter. There are packets and packets of dried foods: cereals, biscuits, breadsticks, lentils. There is an enormous cardboard box full of chocolate bars.
On a full stomach, I can build more of a home at the farmhouse. I fix up the outside toilet so it is easy for me to clean out. I cobble together a new table, and pull the least mildewed of the armchairs into the kitchen so I can sit by the fire. I dig up more of the field behind the house, to prepare it for planting. I construct a log store. The shallow wound on my calf scabs thinly, then heals to a toughened patch of pink sheen. My hens begin to lay.
If I have to survive alone, then I will do it in my own world. Here, even if nowhere else, everything will work and seed and grow and bear fruit as it is supposed to.
*
I haven’t bled in over a year. Maybe I will never bleed again. Sometimes I put my hand between my legs and feel the void there.
My mother used to call it ‘the curse’, when I skulked on the sofa once a month, a hot water bottle on my belly and a moan in my throat. My mother was like that – religious in small ways. She called it a curse and I, full of cramps and anger, believed her.
Of course, my mother was wrong as always. Bleeding wasn’t a curse. It was a reminder of possibility, a bodily conviction of the future. Now there is nothing.
Sometimes I wonder if I can still call myself a woman, even though I no longer bleed. Then I wonder if I ever thought of myself as a woman even when I did. Then I remember that there are no women anyway, just as there are no men, so what does it matter? What does any of it matter?
I always stop wondering after that. Until the next time I remember my womb – like a shrivelled fruit – and start questioning all over again. My mind goes round like that, round and round, like a wheeling vulture, swooping in and out, closer then away.
This thought comes most often when I am looking at the moon. I talk to the moon – especially the full moon – as if the shining silver disc is a woman’s face, just as people used to say it was a man’s. The kind of face with smile lines and a double chin, that might belong to a favourite aunt, if I ever had one.
Maybe linguists were right. Maybe women are connected to the moon, like ‘month’, like ‘menstruate’ – a menstrual bond, each circling around and back around to our own womanness: a pale round face; a memory of blood between the legs.
Or maybe linguists were right in other ways, connecting me to the moon. Luna . . . lunar . . . lunatic. Maybe I am finally turning mad. Or maybe I’m just lonely.
*
I sit by the kitchen fire with one leg tucked under the other in the easy chair and my shoe box on my lap. The drying elastic band is the only thing securing the lid. I do not need to open it. I hold it just for the weight.
I close my eyes, and the world contracts to dusty cardboard against my hands, the chair’s lumpy upholstery at my back, heat from the fire, the irregular tick of the broken clock.
*
I never did fit into boxes, back when there were boxes people could be sorted into. I did not have friends, apart from Harry Symmonds, and he did not fit into their neat little boxes either.
‘She’ll settle,’ my mother used to say, reassuring herself as much as the gathered friends. ‘She’ll settle down when she’s older.’
I had no interest in settling. Settling is what sediment does when it falls to the bottom of a sea or lake, right before it compresses for several million years and turns into a fossil. I did not understand why that was something anyone would want.
But still people tried to group and categorise me, the way I analysed, sorted and categorised them. Some of the categories they put me in were kind, or perhaps just optimistic: strong-willed, clever, confident, individual. Some, like ‘weird’ and ‘antisocial’, were less so. I was never sure where my mother’s ‘uncontrollable’ was supposed to fit.
As I got older, there were more categories, more boxes to be squeezed into or have built up around me. More shapes I would not fit. Speculation skittered through the school with a sound like dead leaves: who might be what, who might want to do what, and who with. I took a step back from it all. The idea of human touch still repulsed me, that horrid intimacy of another person’s flesh encroaching on mine – how could anybody desire that?
During my first week at college, I made friends with a girl called Nick. Nick was loud and clever, and laughed whenever I said something cutting. She landed in my new life and made herself comfortable, sprawling across my living-room sofa till she looked more at home in my flat than I did. At first I enjoyed it, the bright and unassuming presence of another person, one who said what she thought and had no hidden agendas. Surprisingly, I found it easy.
A few weeks into this unexpected friendship, we went to an Italian restaurant – the kind of place with candle wax dripping down wine bottles and old film posters stuck to the walls. We ate pasta and drank
cheap beer. We talked – or rather, Nick talked and I kept up a sarcastic commentary. It was only at the end of the meal, when Nick insisted on paying the full bill, that I realised this was meant to be a date, and that she had had a hidden agenda after all. I made some excuse and left. I stopped answering my phone. A couple of weeks later, Nick stopped calling.
I continued to be Monster, setting myself apart from the illogical complexities that came along with other people. Whenever anyone approached again, I felt the fear and uncertainty grip me, and I veered away. My instinct was always to say no. I did not need them. I told myself repeatedly I did not want them. I was enough, all by myself.
I was not ‘asexual’. I had found the word in a glossary at the back of a science book at school. It said an asexual person was free from sexual desires. I remember ‘free from’, as if the sexual desires my peers had fallen into were somehow a trap. An asexual person, the book said, may still have a functional, caring relationship with their partner, but without sexual desire. That is how I knew I was not asexual. It was not desire that I was free from, but caring.
The empty maths room, after the bell had gone and the school day was over. I was bent over the orange exercise book with its crosshatching of squares, the spike of a pair of compasses stabbed into its centre as I measured out an equilateral triangle. I remember the lesson because I remember the beauty of it, constructing such a perfect form from only arcs and lines and a few simple tools.
Which is why I was still there, completing this section of the question book after the rest of the class had packed up its mediocre attempts and left.
A movement behind me. I had thought I was alone.
‘You OK?’ Naomi Dodds, half sitting, half leaning against the windowsill, fake designer bag slung over one shoulder with practised casual perfection. Naomi Dodds: highlighted hair and an arch look, wearing lip gloss and heavy foundation like they were a symbol of her rank. I did not think I had ever seen her on her own before.