by Katie Hale
The girl stands behind me, skinny in one of my oversized T-shirts, her eyes wide and staring as she takes in the empty yard at night, the still, blue dark of it.
I usher her back into the house. I leave the washing water for tonight.
I lead the girl upstairs. At the top I hesitate, deciding – but I need to keep my own private space somewhere in the house, so I lead her into the smaller bedroom. It is dark in here, and cold after the warmth of the fire, and the girl wraps her arms around herself and eyes me doubtfully. I switch on my torch and the room is filled with a dusty yellow light.
As I take spare sheets from the airing cupboard and make up the bed, the girl pads after me. She watches me stuffing the pillows into their cases, her face blank and unresponsive. As soon as I am done, she climbs in, curling into a ball and tucking the blankets under herself, pulling them up around her neck as though settling herself into a nest. She smiles at me again – that soft smile with nothing held back – and her eyes flutter closed.
In my own bed, I lie awake, letting my eyes adjust to the night the way I used to as a child, trying to spot shapes in the dark and enjoying the way everything becomes unfamiliar, like sounds heard underwater. I think about the girl and her sudden appearance in my life, like a gift from the city, how everything has shifted with her arrival.
In the quiet, there is a creak and the clicking of a latch. I listen. Feet on the stairs – so quiet I almost miss them, as if she is an imagined noise conjured from the silence by listening too hard. Then the door opening at the bottom of the stairs. Quiet.
Perhaps she is running away, sneaking out into the night while she thinks I am asleep, to leave me alone again and always wondering. For a moment I grip the sheets and cannot move. Then the downstairs door clicks shut and I hear those ghost-quiet feet on the stairs. Another pause in which I lie there, breathless, waiting – until my bedroom door is open, and there she is: the shadowy outline of a girl, her eyes faint spots of some unknown reflected light.
‘Mother.’
The name takes me by surprise. ‘Go back to bed.’
Still the girl stands there, staring.
I get up and half push, half encourage her back into the other room, back into her nest of blankets.
As I leave, she watches, her eyes still those two faint silver reflections.
I shut the doors and clamber back into my own bed, seeking out the scant patch of body-warmth left in the sheets – but almost before I have closed my eyes, the girl is there again, standing and watching from my doorway.
‘Go back to your own room.’
She doesn’t understand. Of course she doesn’t, but I am hopeful that something in my tone might help her see what I want. Instead, she walks over and tries to climb in under the covers beside me.
I push her away. ‘Get out.’
She is still for a moment, then tries again, her cold limbs burrowing under the blanket.
I get out of bed and she stops, watching, waiting. I take my pillow and all my covers and pull her back through to the other room.
‘This is your bed,’ I point, and I can hear the bite in my own voice. ‘I’ll sleep here. But only for tonight.’
As I arrange my bedding on the floor, the girl finally seems to understand. She gets back into bed and curls up with her face turned towards me.
‘Mother,’ she says, and her voice is almost not a voice but a breath.
I think of my own nights at home in my bedroom in my parents’ house, in the small cocoon of my single bed. I try not to, but they are carried towards me in the silvery reflection of the girl’s eyes. I think of my mother’s eyes in the dark, and the night I first learned about death and the unavoidable terror of it. Refusing to go to sleep in case I didn’t wake up. Pulling the covers closer to my small body, my own protective nest. My mother curved around me on the bed, the duvet a fat barrier between us, her voice washing over me, like a whisper, like a breath.
I had forgotten that, till now.
The floor is hard and cold and the dry smell of dust is everywhere, but I do not care as long as I can sleep. The girl lies awake, watching me.
*
I have decided to call her Monster.
I want her to be a survivor, and so my name will survive with her. It is the talisman I have carried with me, jostling for space with my water bottles and socks and scraps of food, proving its usefulness, keeping me distant and keeping me alive. It will be a talisman for both of us, now. The girl will learn to endure.
I will teach her to work the soil and collect food and equipment from the city. I will teach her how to grow vegetables and care for the chickens. She will feed them and collect the eggs, and sometimes we will leave a few eggs to hatch into chicks. I will teach her language, so that she can understand me and the world.
I do not know how she has survived until now. I do not know how I have survived either, come to think of it. I have just kept going. I have paid the right price. I have continued to live. Now, we will survive together. I will be her Mother, and she will be my Monster.
*
I take Monster back into the city to look for clothes. She walks behind me as I name things for her: wall, road, building, tree. She copies me in her sharp voice. Twice she stops to touch the thing she’s just named, laying her hands on it as if naming is a kind of blessing. Then she jogs to catch up.
We go straight for the outdoors shop with the hidden basement. In the stairwell, Monster stays close to me, and when a rat scuttles somewhere in the dark, she jumps.
As I shine the torch over the boxed and packaged stock, I watch her face, expecting the same joyous awe she gave the chickens or the tinned tomatoes. Instead she just looks. A hairline crease appears between her eyebrows.
‘Here.’ I unearth a T-shirt from a box of children’s clothes and hold it up for size.
She takes it and stares at me.
Resting the torch on a stack of boot boxes, I help her into the T-shirt. It hangs loosely from her skinny frame, but, as my mother would have said, there’s plenty of room for growth.
Gradually, over the next half hour or so, I manage to dress her. I find her a waterproof, a fleece and a pair of sturdy boots, then I pack some spare clothes into my backpack. When I look back at her, she’s hugging her arms in the thick fleecy jumper, smiling down at her new apparel.
We emerge, blinking, into the watery light of the retail park. Monster swings her arms and legs, watching the patterns they make. Along the road out of the city, she skips every few steps, and each time she does this she smiles at me.
We’ve almost reached the suburbs when we spot them: four dogs, three smaller ones and an Alsatian, their faces buried in something slumped across the road – a fox, perhaps, or another dog. As we watch, one of the smaller dogs tears a leg from the carcass.
I take another step. The Alsatian looks up and growls, and I fling my arm in front of Monster. All four dogs are growling now, and although three of them are just what my mother would call ‘yappy dogs’, we’re still outnumbered, and we’ve just seen that their jaws are strong enough to tear flesh. I start to retreat, and that’s when Monster moves. Pushing me aside, she runs at the dogs, her arms whirling and a brash wordless yell flailing from her mouth. I shout at her to stop, but she can’t hear or doesn’t hear or doesn’t understand, just runs at the growling dogs whose teeth are bared to attack her – and they scatter, leaving their kill in the middle of the road. They lurk at a few metres’ distance, low to the ground, as Monster bends, picks up the torn-off leg and walks calmly back towards me. The dogs slink back to their meal.
By the time she reaches me, Monster is smiling and skipping again. I want to smack her for her stupidity.
‘What the hell do you think you were doing?’ I don’t care that she can’t understand – my heart is forcing all the blood to my skin so I’m hot and shaking, and I speak just to get the words out. ‘You could have been bitten – you could have been killed!’
Monster simply watches a
s I try to calm my breathing.
I close my eyes, then open them again. ‘Those wolves could have ripped you apart.’
She blinks, looks away from me to the red lump of meat in her hand. She lifts it to her mouth.
‘Stop it!’ I snatch it away. There’s a smear of blood on her lip. ‘You can’t eat that – it hasn’t been cooked.’
Monster frowns, her eyes darting from my face to the bloody animal leg I’m still clutching.
‘Don’t go near the dogs,’ I tell her, ‘and don’t eat raw meat. It’s bad for you.’
We stand in the street staring at one another, and I think of dogs not breaking eye-contact, asserting their superiority over the pack. Then Monster looks back down at the meat I’m holding.
I turn away from the four dogs scrapping over the remains of their meal, and lead Monster out of the city, back towards the farm. Once or twice I look behind to check she’s following. Her expression is placid. Flat. She watches her own arms, swinging them again in her vibrant new clothes, and she watches me.
*
I cook the meat in a pan on the stove, with salt rubbed into it. To mark the occasion, I open a jar of beetroot.
Monster eats slowly. I watch her sitting on her cushion by the fire, turning each bite through her mouth, seeking out every last morsel of flavour.
*
Monster is remembering how to speak – or perhaps she is learning from scratch. I cannot find any vestiges of language in her. Not for the first time, I wonder how she managed to reach such an age without it.
So we start with everyday objects: chair, pan, water, chicken, bed, hammer, nails, saw, wood, spade. She follows me around the farm, naming the things she sees like she’s cataloguing them. I teach her how to fetch water from the stream and how to plant vegetables in the field, and her vocabulary expands to verbs: pour, boil, dig, sow, work.
She learns quickly, as if she wants to drink in the whole scope of this little farmyard world, as if she could consume it the way she consumed the cans of tomatoes. She is all appetite. She fills her little body with food and words and information till I think it can’t hold any more, but somehow it always does.
At first, I try to catch some sign of memory surfacing from the depths of her, but there is nothing. I do not know if she is even aware of her own lost time, though I do not understand how she cannot be. In the evenings, when she sits on the cushion by the fire, she watches the flames as though their movement and this flickering moment are all there is – as though the farm and the city and me are the boundaries of her existence, and always have been.
So I help her fill in all the spaces of this limited world, give her words for everything within it. I need to teach her until I cannot tell where I end and where Monster begins.
What she loves most are the chickens. Frequently they manage to tear her from her task, and she stops to watch their methodical pecking at the cobbles – so occupied in their own little worlds, and yet always ready to be terrified by something outside of them. I teach her the word ‘scratting’ and she sings it over and over, ‘Scratting scratting scratting scratting’, gleefully dancing the word around the yard as the chickens tilt towards the safety of the barn.
So I teach her calm and stillness, how to hold quiet inside her the way the chickens carry their eggs. I show her how to collect those eggs and bring them safely into the house for cooking.
Before long, she makes it her role to watch the eggs in the pan, and to shout as soon as the water starts to bubble. In her own limited way, she asks me what it’s called.
‘Boiling.’
She shakes her head. ‘The noise.’ Then she tuts her tongue against the back of her teeth to imitate the eggs bumping up against the sides of the pan.
I try to think whether I ever knew a word for this noise. I cannot think why anyone would bother naming it, but I do not know how to explain this to Monster, so I just say, ‘Ticking.’
She tuts her tongue a few times on the back of her teeth, then says, ‘Tickerting.’
I’m about to correct her, but then I think, what does it matter? There’s only the two of us, and Monster doesn’t know the difference.
‘Right,’ I say, ‘tickerting.’
Smiling her makeshift smile, she turns and watches the eggs boil.
*
Monster is her own fresh start. She is like a bare patch of earth, ready for me to map her new landscape onto. Perhaps she is also my fresh start.
I take her to fetch water from the stream behind the house. She dips her small hand in, then snatches it back from the cold. Slowly, bracing herself against it, she tries again. She lets her hand go limp, so that the current tugs at it and her fingers waver like water weeds, then she watches, fascinated, moving her hand through the water to see where its pull is strongest.
I wonder what happened to her to transform her into this strange and empty vessel, completely unaware of her own forgetting. I think about all the things that I have seen, and which I still have to remember.
*
The scientists and researchers left Longyearbyen when the Sickness hit, hurrying back to find their loved ones. The locals left because of worry: worry over food shortages, worry over the Sickness, worry that the vault would be attacked. Erik stayed because he believed in the work. I stayed because I had nowhere else to go.
By the time the Last Fall started, there were just the two of us left. Me and Erik: the only two people on the vast Arctic island, and the rest of the world tucked up in the new Safe Centres, hundreds of miles away. At the time I thought that was the loneliest I would ever feel.
During the long northern nights, Erik would show me photos of his home and his wife. Always the same eleven photos, every time. There were nights when I let this wash over me like the lights of the aurora outside. There were nights when I wanted to rip them from his hands and tear them into shreds.
Mostly, we just existed.
When it eventually happens it’s early evening, already dark, and we’re sitting in the yellow glow of the main control room. Erik’s re-reading some old tome about the permafrost; I’m tinkering with the computer system. Since the web crashed, there is only the network used by the Safe Centres and the military, so I’ve set up our machine to patch into this and store news bulletins for when we’re out at the vault or on the Ski-Doos. Erik doesn’t understand the need – he’s been yawning all evening to remind me – but I like the idea of the machine as a collector, gathering and hoarding information the way I used to gather screws and nails and plugs.
He’s just tossed the book aside when they flash up on the screen: two pulsating green lights on a flight trajectory for the town.
‘Erik?’
He looks over.
The dots are too small for aircraft, moving too quickly for drones. ‘Missiles . . .’
Erik’s reply sputters and dies in his throat.
‘We have to evacuate.’
‘Missiles . . . Did you say – missiles?’ It’s as if his brain has become a slug, squelching through information an inch at a time.
I spin myself away from the monitor, my mind already racing through survival strategies. ‘We’ll hide in the vault.’
‘The vault?’
‘Yes, fuck’s sake, the vault. Now, Erik – go!’
He jerks up at my shout and then we’re both cramming things into bags and stuffing our limbs into all the thermal layers we can find, and I’m shouting about keys and grabbing the stove and all the time those little flashing dots are getting closer on the screen, and we still need to make it out of there and all the way up the hillside to the vault, which suddenly feels so far away.
We hurl ourselves outside with clunking bags of provisions which I later realise were never going to be enough – but for now it’s a whirl and a panic as we lurch at the Ski-Doos, and I’m balancing two cans of Calor gas between my knees which is a bad idea, but what choice do I have?
We’re flying up the hillside on the Ski-Doos, snow spitting in o
ur faces, and neither of us took time to grab goggles, so Erik breaks out in front and I’m caught in the fierce tail of his driving and it stings, it really fucking stings, but I keep thinking about those two green dots rushing closer, and who knows if they’re short-range or nukes or packed with a dispersing sickness or what – and we’ve both lived through the War, we know the kind of devastation these things can unleash – but we’re close now, so close to the vault, which is after all the safest place on the planet, maybe the only safe place, and we can make it. We can so nearly make it.
The vehicles skid to a halt in another flurry of ice and snow and Erik’s already at the door fumbling through his jacket for his key. For a second I think he’s lost it and this is it, but then the door’s open and we’re in, a tumble of arms and legs and food and thermals and rolling gas cans. I reach up and slam the door shut and the strip lights flicker out.
For a few seconds we lie in the dark, letting the adrenaline course through us. I can feel Erik’s ragged breath burning the back of my hand.
Then the ground rumbles, and rumbles again, and it’s time to move.
I stand and slap the wall for the emergency lighting panel. The corridor stutters into view: a hundred metres of corrugated tunnel leading deep into the side of the mountain.
‘Now what?’ Erik is still on the ground, surrounded by the spilt contents of the bags, a blank look on his face – like he’s made it this far and can’t see where to go next.
Helplessness has always disgusted me. I turn away, retrieve one of the delivery trolleys, and start loading our things onto it. It looks too small, this collection of supplies.
Erik finally stands, shrugging his skewed jacket back into place. He lifts one of the gas canisters. ‘What did you bring these for?’
‘Heat.’ I take it from him and lay it back in the trolley.