by Katie Hale
‘But,’ he falters, ‘but – we can’t use them. We can’t have heat in the vault.’
‘You want to avoid a missile just to freeze to death?’
‘But the seeds . . .’
The seeds. Erik and his precious seeds that will one day save the planet.
If I was someone else, a kinder person, I might pity him. I might try to soothe him, tell him in a gentle voice that everything will be all right, that the planet and the natural world will find a way to endure. But I’m not.
‘I don’t give a fuck about your seeds,’ I tell him, ‘or your precious Sofia, or her baby. I don’t care, Erik – I never fucking have.’
I stand there, breathing hard, waiting for him to throw something back at me, to call me a heartless bitch – god, I even want him to hit me, it would serve me right.
But he doesn’t. He just looks at me, one glove hanging pathetically from his hand, his mouth half open as though it might let words fall out.
I turn away. I start to push the trolley down the long, narrow tunnel, into the vault.
Five and a half weeks later, Erik is dead. The days are tallied on the concrete wall of the vault, thirty-eight of them scratched with a bent iron nail in five-bar gates. Thirty-eight days. It turns out that thirty-eight days is how long it takes the last vestiges of the human race to snuff themselves out of existence.
The seeds are all dying or sprouting in the warmed-up vault, a brocade of green that will wither once the Arctic air gets in.
I let the Arctic air in. After thirty-eight days of scraps of food and pissing in a corner, I can’t stay underground any longer. The mountain is a vast throat and if I don’t let it cough me back up I’ll be swallowed.
Erik’s body is where I left it, wedged in a delivery trolley by the door, now the coldest part of the vault. His left hand juts out into the corridor, frozen blue, his fingers curled in an upwards-pointing death grip, like tree roots waiting to trip me or grab hold. For a long time I don’t think I can pass it.
I break through the snowdrift into the Arctic glare.
The world looks the same, just as vast, just as icebound. Greyer. A thin layer of ash filmed across the snow.
Then I see that half of the distant town is blackened and burned, and the ground around the buildings is snow-free and charred.
The air tingles. For a second I think it might be radioactive, every molecule I breathe poisoning and mutating my cells, but I don’t think it can be – and even if it is I don’t care. I would rather be out here dying slowly than back in there with that curling hand pulling me out of my mind.
I Ski-Doo back to base. Most of the living quarters have been reduced to rubble, but the control centre is mercifully still standing. The missiles definitely weren’t nuclear, then. That much is good to know.
I left my key pass inside, but I know the intimate mechanisms of these doors and it only takes a few minutes to work them open.
I search the systems for the latest downloaded news – nothing for thirty-seven days. The final reports show what is left of humanity clustered in the so-called Safe Centres in a few tight pockets of the globe, clamouring for access to drugs to combat the unstoppable Sickness, hurling blame at each other for its outbreak. A desperate struggle for resources, then the resurgence of the War, one Last Fall, and the final silence.
This is where my story starts. Me, sitting by a window on an island locked in ice, the only human left.
I say my story starts here because endings are always a kind of beginning. I say it also because before I was alone there was no story, because I was not interesting enough to have one. Things happened. I worked, I bought food, I fixed objects that were broken. I was just like everybody else.
Now, there is only me and Monster, and Monster is a part of my tale. Now, the whole world is my story.
*
The seasons close down around us. During the days, we explore the city. I teach Monster the safety of open spaces. I teach her to be afraid of the dogs. I show her how to distinguish the looted buildings from the ones that might yield supplies, how to make a mental map of our route so she can always navigate her way back to the farm. In the evenings, I teach her how to stoke the fire, how to use book pages to make the embers catch and avoid wasting precious matches. We sit in the kitchen, me in the easy chair, her on a cushion by the hearth, and I teach her new words. However many words I give her, there is always room in her for more. The winter is deep and dark and empty, so we fill it with an endless supply of language and learning.
*
We build ourselves a new pattern, a routine that ebbs and flows with the contracting and lengthening of the days. As winter gives way to spring, we take less and less from the city. We plant and reap and preserve. Gradually, like stocking a larder, I help her to understand the small sphere of her existence, and she grows quick and wiry under my care.
*
I teach Monster about possession. ‘Something is either mine,’ I tell her, pointing to myself, ‘or it’s yours.’
We’re walking past the big houses on the edge of the city, the houses that belong to no one. Monster swings off one of the gates. ‘And what is mine?’
‘This.’ I touch her skinny forearm. ‘This is yours. It belongs to you.’
She looks pityingly at me, as though I am the one struggling with the mechanism of language. ‘The arm doesn’t belong to me. It is me. Look,’ she says, waving her arm.
Later she points to a skyscraper, magnificent against the vacant sky: ‘Is that mine?’
‘No.’
‘Then it’s yours?’
‘No,’ I explain. ‘It doesn’t belong to anybody.’
She’s quiet for a long time after that, kicking rubble along the pavement, head bowed as if this broken stretch of concrete could occupy the rest of her life. Much later, when I think she’s forgotten all about it, she asks, ‘If it isn’t yours, why isn’t it mine?’ And I don’t know how to answer.
*
Sometimes, I think about how people died. Not just any people, but the people I knew, people who were trapped on the fringes of my life like refugees.
Here is what I think happened to Harry Symmonds:
After school, he went to university to become what he’d always dreamed of becoming, a scientist of sorts. He studied engines and planes, how to make them fly faster, quieter, less detectable. Once free from the confines of the village where he grew up, once apart from the children who had ridiculed him, he found himself liked. Befriended.
He was quiet and stoic, a good listener. Smart, often top in the class. He was liked by his tutors.
Gradually, he attracted the attentions of girls, who assumed that behind his silence and thick-rimmed, newly fashionable glasses there lay mystery and intrigue. Flattered, and having no precedent to fall back on, he started to date the first girl who suggested it to him, leaving the others to retreat into their short-lived jealousy.
When the War came, Harry Symmonds was posted to an airbase, where he could best use his extensive knowledge of aeronautics. The girl, unwilling to question what she no doubt saw as his bravery and patriotic duty, put up no objections, and they relocated to the military.
For a few years, he was a quiet war hero. He built and engineered aircraft that would be fit to fight the good fight, because in those early years, people still pretended that the side they fought on was good. When praised he would smile a small smile to himself and look sideways at the floor. When something went wrong – an aircraft failed or was hacked or a fleet was shot down – he would take off his glasses, polish them on the bottom of his shirt, then place them back over his tired eyes and start working again.
Harry Symmonds died in the War. That is what I think.
I think that he was too compliant, and that I taught him that – too afraid of minor conflict to avoid the bigger War. I think he died when a bomb fell on the military base where he lived with the first girl to ever ask him out, and that was that. He died quickly, not from ch
lorine gas or a dispersing sickness, but a normal explosive. The kind that hit the ground and burst it apart, and Harry Symmonds along with it. I think Harry Symmonds was lucky this way, in his quick death, surrounded by his beloved planes.
*
And sometimes I think about the bodies, slumped behind the wheels of rusting cars or tucked into beds. I try not to, but they lurk just below the surface, waiting for my mind to drop its guard.
Sometimes in these moments, I think about my own death, and all the times it brushed against me then turned away. I look across at Monster when we’re eating or shelling peas or chopping potatoes, and the thought of our death passes like a shadow across the room. Will it come rushing in a dark part of the city, or will it creep up on us like a mist? I think about our death and wonder, will I recognise it when it comes?
*
I decide that Monster needs to become more civilised. I start to be stricter about the daily rituals of washing, of cleaning her teeth, of using a knife and fork. When she objects to my washing her hair, I slap her leg and upend the jug of water over her. When she tries to dig straight into her meal with her hands, I take away the food until she complies. Sometimes, I think I see something flicker just behind her eyes, like some hidden part of her that wants to battle my attempts to tame her. But when I look again, it’s always gone.
She starts to learn, till she accepts these things, as if she’s forgotten a time before they were ever a part of her life. Over the months, I see the animal in her drop away, until we’re out in the field on the first truly hot day of the year. We’re working barefoot to save our shoes, constructing pyramids from willow twists so we can grow beans, and we have to keep stopping to wipe our brows. I watch Monster reach up to tie the top, and there’s such intelligence and practical judgement in her face that I realise I’ve finally managed to chase out all the feral parts of her. What I’m left with is a gangly human child.
I cut the end of the twine with a knife. ‘Thank you.’
She turns to pick up another willow twist. ‘You’re welcome, Mother.’
*
The farm becomes an island in a drowned world. The pattern of survival is everything.
We wake early. I rekindle the fire from the night before, while Monster goes to the stream and coaxes the chickens from their eggs. I heat oats and water on the stove, and after breakfast we walk into the city to see what we can salvage, or we stay and work on the farm. We plant seeds in trays taken from the garden centre, or we dig the plugs and seed potatoes into the field. We hoe out the weeds and pick off any slugs or caterpillars that have managed to get too close. When the time is right, we reap our crops. We dry and salt and pickle whatever we can. In the evenings, we take stock of our supplies and scratch together a meal. I teach Monster how to make and mend and sew, or we sit quietly, each engrossed in our separate chores. After I have tucked Monster into bed in the small back room, I sit by the fire and do nothing. Surviving is an endless task, but in these moments, I let the last dregs of the day settle into place around me, and the effort seems wowrth almost everything.
*
I’m pegging washing in the yard when there’s a cry from the outhouse – a noise of terror and despair, the kind that exists beyond language, the kind born from the deeper parts of the brain.
Monster.
I drop the bed sheets and run to her, flinging back the door.
The girl sits half-naked, pale legs stark in the gloom, horror etched across her face. She looks at me as if I’m her last hope for salvation.
‘Mother . . .’ she whispers, and the word comes from that same deep, fearful, instinctive place. ‘Help me.’
She looks down at her knickers. Cradled in the gusset is a dark gash of blood.
I stare at it for a long time. This mark of adulthood. The curse. As if womanness, the moon, the whole universe has chosen to back her over me. As if it has chosen her as the future, and I am just a remnant of the past.
‘Mother?’ Monster’s small voice makes me look back to her face. ‘Am I going to die?’
Yes, I want to say, yes, you’re going to die, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I crouch to her level. ‘No,’ I tell her, ‘it’s natural to bleed.’
‘But why?’
‘It means you’ve become a woman. Here, I pull an old handkerchief from my apron and fashion it into a makeshift pad, ‘ put this in your knickers to soak up the blood. We’ll find you some proper pads in the city.’
I stay with her as she cleans herself up and gets dressed again.
She asks, ‘Do you bleed?’
‘Tuck your shirt in.’
‘But do you?’
‘Tuck your shirt in so you don’t catch cold.’
I try to focus on her little fingers pushing the fabric into the waistband of her trousers, but her fingers aren’t so little any more. Her hands are nearly as ungainly as my own. When did I let her grow so much, and how did I miss it happening?
And again I want to snap at her, this curious child, all big eyes and innocence, this not-quite-child-any-more. I take a deep breath. ‘Get dressed and you can finish hanging out the bedding.’
‘OK, Mother,’ she nods, and she gives me her special crooked smile.
That night, when Monster is in bed and there is only me and the kitchen fire, I think about solitude. I sink into the dusty cushions of the easy chair and feel the upholstery give under my weight. The chair folds its arms around me and the firelight folds its arms around the chair and the room folds its arms around the light. Outside there is only wilderness and dark. It stretches away from me like the roots of an insidious plant, sucking in the warmth till the only comfort is here, in this tiny room, in this easy chair. This is what I mean by solitude. This is what I mean by beautiful: me, and the whole world howling around me. Exactly where you would expect to find a Monster.
Sometimes I wonder if, in giving Monster my name, I have given away something else. I rub my thumb across my knuckles, trying to gauge whether my body always felt this loose. The skin there is still rough. My thumb is still calloused. If I have softened at all, it is not in my hands.
I close my eyes and try to picture myself before Monster. I reach for the muscle memory of walking, of hauling myself across a relentless landscape. I try to remember where it sits in my feet, how it spreads across the joints. But I cannot bring back the feeling.
Perhaps this is it. Perhaps after so many months working the farm, I have finally settled, like the dust, into this easy chair by the kitchen fire.
I drag myself up and start to pace the kitchen. As soon as I am on my feet the old motion returns, that circular rhythm of stepping out, of always moving on. It rekindles like the last embers of a dying fire, tentatively at first, then louder and fiercer until I’m blazing and my body is desperate with the idea of a journey. I pace quicker, breathe sharper. I could leave now, set out while Monster is still sleeping. I could stir myself up, become that woman again. I could set out to conquer the world, if conquering only means arrival. My fingers twitch towards the door handle.
I stop myself. Decisions made at night are tricksters, elusive and fickle, slippery as fish. I force myself to sit, to let the firelit room cradle me in its solitude, and I push all thoughts of wandering to the back of my mind. I hold them in the depths of my brain and count my breaths. I feel how the rhythm of walking fills my muscles, and I let it sit there. I wonder if simply knowing is enough.
As the fire diminishes, I watch it flicker then smoulder. I count my breaths.
I remember once at school – I was maybe fourteen – coming back to my locker at breaktime and seeing it open. They were only cheap locks; you could pick them open with an uncurled paper clip. It was easy if you wiggled it the right way and listened for the click. It was me who taught the others how to do it.
I came back from a history lesson and found my locker open, my pens and textbooks scattered across the floor. My classmates stood about in small clusters, watching me
without looking, the way you might guard against a dangerous animal. That was how I thought of myself in those days.
Nobody was taking credit for the vandalism. I bent to pick up my protractor, and someone pushed into me hard so I fell, splayed on the shiny blue floor that smelled of dirty mop heads.
There was a chorus of laughter and I scrambled to get up.
I was hot. My face was red. I could feel it glowing and prickling.
One of the Harper brothers threw my dictionary at me. I caught it square in my chest, a hard thud of knowledge, and I staggered back into a group of girls. Kelly Armstrong. Dawn Simpson. Natalie Rayner.
Naomi Dodds.
They grabbed my arms and shoulders. One of them had a hand on my back. I could feel the gleeful mockery in the pushing and probing of their fingers.
‘Ooh,’ Natalie Rayner crooned, ‘bet she’s loving this.’
Dawn Simpson: ‘She’ll be frothing in her knickers.’
Natalie Rayner again: ‘Bet she stinks of fish.’
Another high shout of laughter as I struggled to get away.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Naomi Dodds, beige-plastered face up against mine. ‘Don’t you want me any more?’
She pushed and I was away from her – trapped in the ring of onlookers, but at least I was away, away—
‘Changed your mind, have you?’ asked Naomi Dodds, her eyes hard. ‘Dyke?’
‘I’m not—’ I stammered, my words caught in my mouth like buzzing flies. ‘I don’t—’
‘Dyke,’ she said again. She said it softly, with a little laugh, a perfectly orchestrated toss of her hair to hide the steel in her eyes. ‘Dyke,’ like it was a throwaway comment, meant to be heard once and then forgotten – but it was a word that built and rose, passed like an electric current around the watching circle until it became a chant, a war dance: dyke, dyke, dyke, dyke, dyke, dyke. And Naomi Dodds in the middle of it, a satisfied glint in her eye, enshrining her own inculpability.
They’re dead now. All of them. The Harper brothers. Naomi Dodds. Kelly Armstrong. Natalie Rayner. Dawn Simpson. Some quickly, hit by bombs or killed in the fighting. Most of them probably caught the Sickness or died in the starvation that followed it. One or two may have made it as far as the Last Fall. There will never be a way of knowing for certain.