by Katie Hale
Mother picks up a packet with yellow and purple flowers on it which she says are called pansies, and which she says I can plant in one of the big pots in the yard. They aren’t for eating, she says, just for looking bright and colourful.
Whenever we plant seeds, I like to hold them in my hands before putting them in the soil, just so I can look at them – little dots that will somehow grow into food that will help to keep us alive. How can such a tiny thing carry so much bigness inside it? I don’t understand how it works, but I love that it does.
I feel the hard bumps inside the packet of pansies. ‘Are there men’s seeds here, too?’
I say it without really knowing I am going to say it.
Mother looks at me the way she did when I came back from the mountain, like she’s a bag full of vegetables that’s suddenly torn, so everything tumbles out and she’s left empty and drifting in the wind. She just looks at me and it’s like she’s forgotten how to speak.
I do not know how I know that men have seeds, the way carrots and pansies do. There are lots of things I don’t remember learning, like the way I sometimes know words without Mother having to tell me. Sometimes, I wonder if maybe I know them the way the chickens know things without being told, like how to lay eggs or that it’s safer inside the shed when it’s dark. But then there is the soft woman on the bridge, and there is the Clinic with its cold room and pictures of dead people, and I realise some of the things I know must be things I was told when there were other people, before it was just me and Mother, which I don’t remember and I don’t really understand.
Mother is still looking at me like she’s trying to see into all the hidden places in my head, so I shrug and put the packet of pansies in my rucksack, and we get on with collecting things.
I think Mother maybe doesn’t know very much about men’s seeds, because all the men are now dead people, so probably she has forgotten. I wonder what else Mother has forgotten. Perhaps there are lots of things. Perhaps she doesn’t really know much about the dead people, or the different kinds of Sickness, or about how vegetables grow under the ground, or about how she created me. Perhaps she only half-remembers.
I won’t tell her. I think it must be frightening to suddenly find out that you don’t know things you thought you knew, like everything pushes you away and there’s nothing there to catch you. I think it must be like when I fall out of bed, like the moment between rolling over the edge of the mattress and hitting the floor, when you know you’re falling but you can’t quite grab the mattress to stop it happening. Or when you’re clambering over the car pile and you feel your foot go through a hole, and there’s nothing to hold on to to keep yourself up.
*
I’m bleeding again, but I knew it was coming. Mother makes me keep marks of how many days there are between them, so I know when to expect it.
Mother doesn’t bleed. I know this because when you bleed you need pads or tampers and before I started bleeding we didn’t have any in the house. Once, I saw her holding one of the new pads in its bright wrapper. She held it like it was something precious, something like an egg, and she stared at it for a long time.
I think it must be something very special to bleed. Maybe I am one of the only people in the world who has ever bled like this. Whenever we collect pads and tampers from the City, there are always plenty of them, so other people can’t have needed to use them very much.
I don’t like the stain the bleeding can make on my knickers and bed sheets, or the way it can sometimes feel as if the blood and mess is collapsing out of me. But sometimes I think maybe it is clean, all the red and dirty things passing from my body. It feels like when I’ve been to the City and I come back and scrape all the dirt and grime from my skin.
*
The light starts to last for longer. Sometimes I think Mother might try to leave again, but she never does, and I think maybe she has remembered her promise to me, or maybe she just doesn’t want to be outside all the time on her own. During the days, we go to the City or mend bits of the farm, or check on the sheep. Mother says they must like our grass because they’re getting fatter. She says it’s a good job winters are warmer than they used to be, because otherwise the sheep would starve like some of the dead people, which makes me wonder how anybody ever stayed warm in those colder winters, because it’s difficult enough now. She says next year we will have to make hay, which is like long grass that the sheep will like to eat.
In the evenings, we stay warm in the kitchen and I watch for shapes in the fire. Sometimes I just sit on my cushion and look at the clock.
The clock is my favourite thing at the farm, even more than the chickens. It’s a shiny wooden box hanging on the wall, with a white circle like the moon and two pointy black sticks that go round and round. Inside a glass cupboard, a metal circle swings from side to side, except when it gets stuck and I have to ask Mother to set it going again. The wood of the box is all in beautiful shapes which I have to wipe the dust off with a yellow cloth, and on top of it are two little wooden people, a man and a woman. They have thin arms that look as if they might snap, and smiling wooden faces. I don’t know how I know they are a man and a woman, because I don’t remember Mother ever telling me, but maybe it’s just one of the forgotten things, like before the soft woman and the bridge. Or maybe I just know it without having to remember, the way I know words sometimes.
One of the wooden people is wearing normal clothes, but the other is wearing a sheet around her waist which goes right down to the floor and makes her middle look too thin, so that sometimes I think her middle might snap, too. When I’m dusting them, I like to make a picture in my head of the two wooden people growing bigger until they’re the same size as me, and then becoming real so they can move and I can teach them how to talk.
Mother says the clock is supposed to tell the time. Telling the time is what it’s called when the clock keeps saying the same small word that sounds like an egg tickerting in the pan. Every time it says it, it’s reminding us that time is still happening and we’re still here. Mother says the time is wrong, but I think she can’t understand what the clock is saying, because time either is or it isn’t, so it can’t be right or wrong.
*
The mornings are gold, now, like the swinging metal circle in the clock cupboard. Everywhere there’s a smell of wet earth that makes the memory of the Clinic seem small, and I want to be out in the field all the time with my hands in the soil. When we walk into the City, there are bright yellow flowers growing at the side of the road. Mother lets me pick some to put in a jug of water in the kitchen, so that even on rainy days it looks bright and sunny inside.
*
On one of these gold mornings, we have a lamb. That’s what Mother calls it. I come downstairs and Mother has it wrapped in a blanket with just the small face poking out. It looks across the kitchen at me and makes a little sound like it’s laughing from inside its tummy and its mouth goes wide like a smile. It has round black eyes like pebbles from the stream.
‘Where did it come from?’
‘One of the sheep had a baby,’ says Mother. ‘It needed warming up a bit. Here, hold it while I do the breakfast.’
She puts it into my arms, this sheep-baby, and I cuddle it close. It feels heavy and warm, not like the chickens which scratch and fuss when I try to hold them, or like the sheep that run in all different directions, but solid and real, like the top of the mountain, the way it’s just there instead of thinking about being somewhere else. Its face is white, cleaner than the sheep’s wool, but there are bits of shiny pink something caught in its fluff like wet threads.
When it makes its small laughing noise I can feel its whole body shaking, so I wrap it closer in my arms and laugh with it. I put my nose to its skin and it smells of the sheep and metal and woollen jumpers.
Mother goes back to the porridge.
When she isn’t looking, I dip my finger in the pan of water we are heating for tea, and try to give it to the lamb. It makes slipping
noises as its mouth moves, and it wraps its tongue and hard gums around my finger as if it never wants to let me go. It makes me smile – I hadn’t expected its suck to be so strong. It’s like it’s sucking all the early morning cold out of me and filling me with warm, like fire heat, or the heat that lives inside thick clothes. Maybe that’s where jumper heat comes from, from the sheep and from lambs. I cuddle it close because I know at some point I’ll have to put it down, and the closer I cuddle it the easier that is to not know.
But I do know it, and once the porridge is ready, Mother moves the pan to the back of the stove and takes the lamb away from me. She starts to take it outside.
I ask her to wait, but she just says, ‘Eat your breakfast. The lamb belongs with its Mother,’ and she’s out of the door.
I sit with the empty spoon in my hand, watching where she disappeared outside. Its Mother.
Mother means creator. But Mother didn’t create the lamb, the sheep did. Which means that the sheep is also a creator, which means that the sheep must be like Mother. Which means that maybe the lamb is like me.
For days and days I watch the lamb. When I finish my chores or when I’m on my way to fetch water, I stop to look at it, but I don’t get to cuddle it again. It skips and jumps around the field. Sometimes it drinks milk from the sheep’s tummy, and its long fluffy tail wiggles till I start laughing. When it’s tired, it cuddles up to the sheep. None of what it does is like me and Mother. Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep, I hold a picture of the lamb in my head and try to find ways we are the same. But I can’t, except that we both have dark eyes.
*
All the cold has gone from the sky. We stop waking up to frost and darkness.
In the mornings, the grass is covered in tiny drops of water that make the bottoms of my trousers heavy when I go to the stream. All the brown things start disappearing, till the plants are green and noisy. There are so many birds. I ask Mother where they all came from, so she says when it gets too cold, they fly away to look for somewhere warmer to live, and then when it’s warmer here, they come back. I ask why we don’t do that, too, but Mother just tells me not to be silly. I wonder what it must be like, to be able to go somewhere else whenever I feel like it, and not just sometimes, like when I went to the mountain. I wonder if I would miss the farm.
*
While I stir air into my hot porridge, Mother says it’s time to plant the vegetables again.
Planting is my favourite part. I love the way the little seeds disappear as if we’re tucking them up in bed, but without even their heads poking out of the covers, so that when we’re finished it will just look like trays full of soil or an empty field. I like the way the seeds aren’t vegetables yet, but just pictures in my head.
Mother says that’s silly. She likes it when the vegetables are finished and we can pull them out of the soil, and she can count them out and turn them into days left alive.
We stand in the yard with the trays balanced on the wall, pushing the carrot seeds into the soil with our pointing fingers. As I plant them, I talk to them so quietly that Mother can’t hear. ‘Grow,’ I say. ‘Grow. Grow.’
*
A lot of the time when I’m with Mother it’s like I’m not with her, because both of us are inside our own heads. On some evenings, when we’re sitting by the fire and working on something that means we don’t need to talk, I try to remember all the things I’ve forgotten. It’s difficult, because I don’t know what these things are, but I know they must be there because of the soft woman and the clock, and the pictures my head made when we went to the Clinic.
Mother doesn’t like to remember things from a long time ago. Whenever I ask her about her life before she made me, she goes quiet and only talks in small words.
So I keep my remembering inside my own head.
I always start with the soft woman, even though it makes me feel all prickly like there’s a wolf-dog watching from the dark. I think of me and the soft woman as if we’re in a clear circle on the bridge, surrounded by the kind of thick white fog we sometimes get at the farm – as if inside the circle are the bits I remember and outside are all the bits I might remember but I just can’t see yet. I try to make the circle bigger, so I will be able to remember before I was on the bridge with the soft woman, or what the bridge looked like after she fell, or getting down from the railing without her, but there’s nothing except the circle and us being there and then her falling, and the harder I try to push into the fog, the more I get the horrible prickly feeling, till it’s as if there’s a whole pack of wolf-dogs watching, or like I’m hiding from the dead people in the cold room in the Clinic, and I have to stop. Sometimes I think I should just leave the circle where it is.
*
All through summer we plant vegetables and pull them up and plant them again. Some of them we cook and eat, but some Mother boils in vinegar and puts in jars so they’ll keep till winter. We use the long days to look around different parts of the City. Sometimes, I wonder what will happen when we run out of new places to search, but the City is so big that we never do.
*
When the larder is so full I think it won’t fit any more food, Mother decides we should explore together. When I ask her what ‘explore’ means, she says, ‘It means not knowing what you’re going to find.’
‘And that’s a good thing?’
‘It’s a dangerous thing.’
The fire is still just a heap of embers from last night. I think about when I can’t remember anything outside the circle in the fog, so I never know what I’m going to find, as if I’m exploring inside my own head. I pull my coat closer around me in the early morning cold of the kitchen. ‘Can a dangerous thing be a good thing?’
‘No, Monster.’
I look at Mother and she’s afraid. She sits in the comfy chair by the kitchen fire, putting on her boots and rolling down her socks, and she is afraid the whole time.
I try to remember when I was afraid. I am always afraid of the wolf-dogs, but that’s different because you can see and hear the wolf-dogs and so you know they’re there. Mother is afraid of not knowing. She is afraid of there maybe being something there, or maybe not. I don’t understand this.
When I climbed the mountain, I was not afraid. What I mean is, I hadn’t learned how to be afraid of things that were only pictures in my head. What I mean is, I think I might be braver than Mother.
She stands up and puts her arms through her empty backpack. ‘Ready?’
I nod. I wonder if maybe we will find more animals, like when Mother found the sheep, but I don’t say anything.
‘OK then.’
It’s still dark outside, but I can see a line along the edge of the world where the sun always comes up. Everything looks different to how it looks in the day. The chickens are locked in their shed during the night so the wolf-dogs and the foxes don’t eat them, and the yard looks empty without them. The big pots with purple flowers in look like animals, curled up and sleeping, but ready to wake up and snap at Mother or me. But I know that they are just pots, and that if I turned my torch on I could see the little flowers in them, waiting for the day to start.
The stones in the yard are shiny and clean, like little bits of grey light that match the grey sky, and I can see where to walk. Once we’re out of the farmyard it’s easy because we just follow the road.
As always, Mother goes first, and I walk behind her. To start with it isn’t very interesting because this is the direction we always walk. But when we get to the bottom of the road we turn the other way, away from the City.
At the end of the next road, Mother stops, looking around her, trying to decide which way to go. She looks like the chickens in the farmyard, the way they bob their heads and hold one leg off the ground when they’re listening for danger.
I say, ‘This is the road that leads to the mountain.’
‘Which way?’
I point to my right.
‘OK.’
Mother sets her should
ers as if her empty backpack is heavier than it really is, and walks up the road to the left.
I stay where I am. ‘Can’t we go to the mountain?’
‘No.’
I want to sit down in the road. I want to make us go the other way. I want to show Mother what I found up there. But I don’t want her to explore new things without me, and anyway, I don’t think she would understand it even if I did show her.
I follow her in the wrong direction, away from the mountain.
Once the sun is up and everything looks light and normal again, Mother decides to leave the road and go through the wood at the side of it. I don’t understand why, because walking on the road is easier than walking through trees, but when I ask Mother she doesn’t tell me.
We climb over the wall, trying to be lighter than we are, because if we put all our weight on the stones they might slip and tumble over and we could trap our fingers or feet in them. It’s good that our backpacks are empty, because if they were full we’d have to take them off and put them over the wall separately, and then one of us would have to hold them while the other person climbed over, because the grass is still wet from the morning ground-water.
It’s darker under the trees, but it’s a little bit warmer as well. I think this is because of all the wood around us. That’s why we always put wood on the kitchen fire – because wood has heat stored inside it the way you can store pickles in a jar, or the way the lamb has its own warmth that lives in jumpers. When you put the wood on the hot embers, the heat comes out as fire, but even if you just walk through lots of trees you can still feel a tiny bit of that heat, like some of it is leaking.
We walk through the wood for ages. There isn’t a path, so sometimes when the trees and bushes get too thick we have to turn around and look for another way through. I don’t know how to get back to the farmhouse from here, but Mother says she can remember the way. Once, we stop and drink some of our water. Then we keep walking.