by Katie Hale
I hope Naomi Dodds died of the Sickness. I hope she caught one of the early strains, the kind that burgeoned slowly, that let her live in false hope of a cure while she hacked and coughed and grew crooked like an old woman. I hope it hurt her, that Sickness. And when, close to the end, she vomited up her insides, I hope they came out white and gelatinous, like undercooked eggs, and I hope she saw that this was all that she had inside her, and I hope in her dying moments that she hated herself for it.
*
Monster is gone.
*
I go to wake her one morning and her bed is empty and her shoes and backpack are missing from beside the door.
I dash out of the house, my boots only half on my feet. ‘Monster! Monster!’
Her name echoes back at me from the barn wall.
‘Monster!’
I venture out along the lane, but she’s nowhere in sight. I scan the horizon, hoping to see her small silhouette. I check the field and the stream. I open the barn door, hoping to find her huddled with her beloved chickens, but their eyes just glint shrewdly out of the gloom.
For a while I can only stand in the yard, staring at nothing, until the cold creeps inside my jacket and I can’t deny it any longer.
Monster is gone.
Monster has left me.
I go back inside to see to the fire. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, I was alone before, I can be alone again. As I prepare the porridge, I try to wrap myself in my aloneness as if it’s a fine fur and I can revel in it. Refuge – isn’t that the word? A breaking apart from the noise of other people? Monster disappearing has given me back my refuge, the refuge I felt on that first morning at the farm, when I stood in the doorway and watched the sun coming up over everything that was now mine.
Monster can stay away or Monster can return. It doesn’t matter either way. I say it in my head, and then again out loud: ‘It doesn’t matter either way.’ What’s important is the farm, this refuge of stone and soil and stability which I must tend and nurture. Monster no longer matters. She does not matter.
I scoop my half of the porridge into my bowl and decide not to think about her.
Still, all day I listen to small noises.
I start to build the chicken shed I’ve been planning, to free up the barn for storing food in the winter – although since the War, and especially since the Last Fall, the seasons have been unreliable, bleeding into one another like an abstract painting.
I measure and saw the planks we collected from the building yard at the edge of the city, and which Monster and I wheeled back along the lane on an industrial trolley. As I take each one down from the pile, I remember Monster’s frown, the serious concentration on her face as she struggled to make the trolley steer straight, how I wanted to laugh because it seemed so ridiculous that even here, at the end of everything, we got the trolley with the wonky wheel.
In the quiet spaces between saw-strokes, I hear footsteps, the cries of a small voice. Every time this happens, I turn to look, and every time the yard is empty. Only the chickens, pecking between the cobbles. Once, the sound of boots scuffing along tarmac makes me run to the edge of the yard and squint down the lane, but Monster isn’t there.
Darkness comes. I bank up the fire and go to bed. For hours I lie awake, listening to the faint gurgle of the stream, the rustle and call of night creatures.
When I sleep, I sleep in fits and starts.
*
The rule of three lurks at the back of my mind as if it could pull me under. Three months without company. During the day, I tell myself that I lasted for three months and more before I discovered Monster. I can do it again. I’m a survivor, I was made for being alone.
But at night, when the work is done and there is only the fire to talk to, I think too much about her. Sometimes I think I see her in the flames, her sharp face and bony limbs like kindling. I see her diminutive body curled up at the edge of a road, or broken from a fall, or caught by wild dogs, or drowned.
It isn’t until the fourth night that I realise I’ve started to think of Monster as dead. The thought has crept up on me slowly, like a tide cutting me off from the shore – until suddenly I look around and realise the land is gone, and I am being pulled out by the current.
I lie in bed shivering. I take the extra blankets from Monster’s room, which smell of her, and I pile them on top of me. But still I can’t stop shivering.
I shake. At one point in the early hours, I half think that with all this shaking, I ought to be rattling, and I wonder why I can’t hear anything, until I realise there’s nothing inside me to make a noise. So I just shiver – except I must sleep at some point because I dream. They are narrow dreams, deep as wells. I fall into them and batter against the sides until they spill me back out into more shivering and a wakeful dark.
*
I dream of London at rush hour.
I’m standing outside a station in winter, in the sparsity of leafless trees, bundled in the kind of stylish wrap-around coat I have never owned. It’s still not properly light, the way December can go for days and still the grey edge of darkness will never leave the sky.
Suited commuters stream across the square from the station, a dark river breaking onto the pavement. I try to walk over, to join them in their ceaseless flow, but I can’t get through – there are iron railings, and my coat gets caught on gateposts and branches and in the chains of a parked bike. The harder I struggle, the further I am from the river of commuters, and the faster the river flows, until they’re gone, trickled away into coffee shops and offices.
I’m alone in the not-quite light. The silence that fills the square is deafening. It rebounds off the tower blocks and through my head, and I’m screaming and screaming till I’m awake.
I wake and for a moment the big room in the farmhouse is Euston Square, with a grey morning leaking in and an awful deafening silence. Then a bird starts to twitter in the creeper outside my window, and there is the scratchy feel of woollen blankets and the smell of Monster, and I remember.
*
I get up before it’s properly light, before the dreams can pull me under again, and I make my way downstairs. Through the kitchen doors I can see the flicker of warm light where the fire must have reignited in the night, as if it could be aware of the turmoil in my dreams and has lit itself up in sympathy, although I know this thought is probably the madness taking root.
I open the door. Squatting in front of the fire is Monster.
I have to grip the handle to steady myself. I force myself to take two deep breaths, and the words blunder out of me like a train: ‘Where were you?’
Monster turns to look at me. The toes of her socks are wet and there’s dirt all up her right side as though she’s been lying in it. Her hair is a tangle of knots and bits of leaf.
‘I went for a walk.’ Her voice is hoarse from nights spent out in the cold.
‘A walk?’ A fucking walk?
Something passes across her face, but she shrugs to cover it. ‘I wanted to see a mountain,’ she says, and the way she says mountain makes it sound like something holy, as if her walk was a pilgrimage. ‘Properly. Up close.’
‘A mountain!’ Before I know it I’m rushing at her, because this girl, this little bird-like sack of skin and bone, this is the reason I’ve barely slept, why I’ve spent the past days teetering on the edge of madness, and I want to throttle her or crush her or crack her head against the metal stove – but then I think of Erik and the way he talked, with that same reverence, so I don’t. Instead I grab her and hold her to me, fold my arms around her angular body so tight she wriggles, but still I hold on.
I hold her like that for a long time, until the fire starts to dim and Monster breaks away to add another log.
I adjust my jumper and take my place in the armchair. ‘Never do that again.’
And Monster hesitates as she looks at me, but she says ‘OK’, and I force myself to forget about it.
We cannot leave each other, Monster
and me. We are one unit now, like bonded atoms, each incomplete without the other.
We have our rhythm and our roles, a rhythm of planting and growth and harvest, a rhythm of cooking and eating and washing, of waking and sleeping. Our world runs on rhythm, the way the whole world must have done before clocks and factories and twenty-four-hour opening, before the flurry and frenzy of the digital age and globalisation and flights across the dateline. Before the War and the Sickness blasted the last remnants of our rhythm away.
The world feels at home in its rhythm, as though it’s glad to get back to it: everything measured, from the rapid beat of a vole’s minuscule heart to the orbital path of the Earth.
We wake, we work the ground, we collect what we can from the city, we eat, we talk, I teach Monster a little, we wash, we go to bed. This is how we make it through the days, existing in time with one another like the two hands on a clock face. Part us and the rhythm would break. I could not go back to how I was before she came, not now I have eaten and worked and lived beside her, not since we became part of one another’s rhythm. There are some things you can never go back from.
*
We find ourselves outside a shop. One of those glass-fronted places that existed on high streets across the country, with gaudy posters in its windows to lure in passers-by. Except that the entire front of this shop has been shattered. A steel girder hangs from the broken upper floor, and strands of coloured wiring reach into the space below like tentacles. Glass fragments carpet the inside of the shop, glinting.
Shattering is good. Shattered glass means bombs, whereas bigger shards would mean looting and nothing left inside worth stealing.
‘Is it safe?’ asks Monster, her eyes on the tilting steel girder.
‘Yes,’ I tell her. The back of my neck prickles, but I ignore it. ‘It’s safe.’
We step over the threshold.
Inside the shop is bare, stripped of most of its stock. Only the magazine stands are still full, their once-glossy covers sun-bleached and curling with damp.
‘Look around,’ I tell Monster. ‘I’ll check the back.’
Monster pulls her pack up onto her shoulders like a bearing of responsibility. She starts scouring the remains of the shop floor.
I cannot shake the feeling of being watched. Even though I know there cannot be any other people out there, still there are always wild dogs and rats and the feeling of something lurking. I smash the CCTV camera with my iron bar, and the noise of shattering glass is loud in the empty room. Still the feeling does not go away. I did not really expect it to. I catch sight of one of the magazine covers, a young man with gelled-up hair and a daytime-television smile, and eyes the same brilliant blue as Erik’s.
At the back of the shop is a pair of dusty swing doors padlocked with a chain. It takes me a minute or two to dismantle it.
There is another reason I always take the back rooms of shops and let Monster search the fronts; the danger is only secondary. What comes first is the intimate satisfaction of a locked door, the beauty of picking it. There are some things that I need to be alone for, even now – to savour the achievement, this opening up of space, without the presence of another person.
During the early nineteenth century, there existed such things as unbreakable locks, unyielding to hair pins and pick guns and torsion wrenches and all the other tools of the trade. They were the complex constructions of Joseph Bramah and Jeremiah Chubb, advertised as unbeatable, perfect security, gauntlets thrown down to the thieves and lock-pickers of the world.
Plenty took up the challenge, from respectable gentlemen right down to convicted criminals – but the only man to succeed was neither thief nor safe-cracker. He was A.C. Hobbs, an American locksmith, creator of secure locks of his own. Hobbs was not the enemy. He was the competition.
I always liked this story, the puffed-up pride of the two English lock-makers, resting on their laurels for thirty years with their so-called unbeatable locks, only to be beaten by one of their own. Which was inevitable, of course. To understand a thing on such an intimate level, you have to experience that act of creation for yourself. To break a lock, you have to know how it is brought into being.
The back room of the shop is grey and smells of damp. Even the carpet has been removed. There is only a thick layer of plaster dust on the bare floor, and two dead mice in a nest.
On the off-chance, I take a closer look. Sometimes animals squirrel things away.
Nothing.
I turn back towards the door and it’s there again, that awareness of space at my back, the feeling of something coming through it. Inexplicably, I think of Monster, how she came back to me across the void. Monster went out into the world and found it wanting, and so she returned to me.
‘Monster?’
No reply.
I retreat to the main shop. Monster is not there. For the briefest of moments I am tumbling, driven down by my own weight. My voice comes half-strangled. ‘Monster!’
‘Mother?’ She emerges from behind a shelving unit, face glowing and eyes shining, and I have to stop myself from grabbing her.
I swallow my deep breaths. ‘There you are.’
‘Did you find anything?’
Still breathing hard, I shake my head. I am about to suggest we move on to the next shop when I notice Monster has something – a slip of paper – clutched in her left hand.
I nod towards it. ‘What did you find?’
Her hand twitches, as though she might hide her discovery. Then a smile starts to creep across her face, up her cheeks and into her eyes, till she’s biting her lip to stop all her excitement spilling out. With a trembling hand, she offers me what she’s found.
It is a scrap from a magazine, glossy, the kind of paper that always made me think of wasted time. I take it from her, turn it over so I can see the picture on the other side. A naked woman. A splay-legged, fake-breasted, orange-tanned woman, seductively eyeing the camera. A hardness in the woman’s eyes.
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ says Monster, her puppy-dog eyes desperate for my reaction. ‘Look at her, Mother – don’t you think she’s beautiful?’
I look at her. I look at them both, the fake woman touching herself, the eager girl before me. ‘No, I think it’s disgusting.’
Monster’s face collapses. ‘But—’
‘It’s filth,’ I tell her, and I screw up the picture in my fist.
Monster lets off an untamed cry, like she has momentarily forgotten about words. For a second I think she might try to grab the picture from between my clenched fingers – I see the unfolding battle in her eyes, the fight between obedience and desire. I force all my will-power towards her as if it could scoop her up and reel her back in and that way I could keep her close.
Then her eyes harden. She sets her shoulders and says, ‘Sorry.’
I watch her for any signs of wavering, but her face is blank. ‘OK,’ I say, and throw the scrumpled picture into a pile of broken glass. ‘Now let’s go.’
I turn away and leave the shop, and after a couple of stubborn seconds I hear Monster begin to follow. I remember the farm dogs outside my parents’ house a lifetime ago, and force myself to walk without looking back. Monster is with me. Monster is still here. Monster has not left.
I lead her away from the blown-out shop, back towards parts of the city we already know. Here, with no new discoveries to make, there is nothing to tear Monster away. I hear her pattering behind me.
The wind picks up. Dead leaves and old papers whirl across the road. They whip at our ankles. To the south of the city, storm clouds are banking. We will be quick with our collections today.
The urge for haste follows us home, like the rain, which breaks only seconds after we make it back through the farmhouse door.
All through dinner I can barely keep my mind from leaking away. My face feels heavy and hot, my head dropping onto my chest. My skin itches. There’s something like a shadow shifting at the back of my eyes. I’ve felt sharp and jumpy all day, bu
t when Monster says she wants an early night, I barely hear her. She has to say it again, and even then I’m sluggish to rise.
I heat the washing water on the fire and carry it up the stairs for her, Monster climbing in front of me with the torch. I stay while she gets ready.
Once she’s in bed, I tuck the blankets around her shoulders and under her chin, so she’s bundled and warm for the night. I move on autopilot. Through the fog in my brain, I notice the length of her under the covers, how much she’s grown from the feral stick-child I found in the shop.
I kiss the top of her head. ‘Night, Monster.’
‘Night, Mother.’
Her eyes are closed before I shut the door, and I’m back to that old feeling of being alone in the house, a one-woman world, like I’m rattling.
I can feel that shadow trailing me. All the way down the stairs I can feel it at the nape of my neck. I dash down the last few steps. When I reach the kitchen, I slam the door and press myself against it, breathing hard. The little kitchen flickers warmly back at me.
Stupid. I sit back in my armchair by the fire. My fingers are fidgety; they won’t settle to anything. I try forcing them to sew, or to fix up the broken trowel handle, but then my hands go limp and the fidget shifts to my eyes, flitting between the doors.
I go through to the storage room. I take out my shoe box full of bits and pieces and bring it back to the kitchen fire.
This is what I have always done in moments like this. When my hands twitch and flutter like insects, when my body raises questions I don’t know how to answer, it is always my collection that saves me.
For the first time since I left home, I pull away the tired elastic band. It snaps. The battered cardboard lid falls away, and I am back in my teenage bedroom, feeling angular and out of place, re-enacting my own confinement. It is as though all the days I have channelled into these assorted objects are stacked inside the box alongside them.
I lay out the pieces one by one, in neat rows segregated by purpose, type and condition. Correctly wired plugs kept apart from the ones without fuses. Circuit boards distinct from defunct batteries. Separate categories for chisels and tapers and reels of wire. Their little shadows dance in the firelight. When I pass my hands across them, I soak up their shapes through my fingertips.