by Katie Hale
I get tired of the dark. The trees are so big and thick that not enough light gets through the leaves. I start wishing I could just chop the tops off all of them, as if we’re trapped walking for miles underneath the farmhouse kitchen and then someone could lift up a floorboard and let all the light in. I say this to Mother, but she just tells me not to be silly.
My feet are tired and it feels like we’ve been walking all day, but I’m only just hungry so it’s probably not even lunch-time yet.
I blink. I blink twice. I think I can see the sunlight. I think I can see the edge of the wood.
I run out of the trees into a wide grassy area, and suddenly I can see for ages, all the way to the sky in both directions. Across from me is the most beautiful building I’ve ever seen, made of glass, with thin white wood connecting the panes. The way it glitters, it’s like a cobweb on a cold morning, and I catch my breath. How could we have been so close to something so beautiful and not have known about it?
I’m running towards it. I hear Mother shout at me from the trees, but I don’t care. The glass building is shining so brightly.
Up close, the glass is less clear. It’s covered in green, and the wood is cracked and grey. Inside is some kind of garden.
I walk around the edge of it until I find the door. I have to rip off the leaves growing over it and shove it with my shoulder, but then I’m in.
It’s warm inside, as if somebody’s been having a bath. It smells of soil and of green things. There’s a stone path that twists and winds, and on each side of it are bushes and trees. It’s strange seeing trees inside a building, like someone has trapped the outside under a glass, the way Mother sometimes does to spiders. I wonder how they got here. Did someone grow the trees and then build the building up around them, or was the glass building already here and someone brought the trees inside? They’re not a kind of tree I know. A short hard trunk like the willow twists we grow beans up, and a big round bush balanced on top. Bright orange balls hang from the branches.
The door creaks behind me. Mother, her face sweating and eyes wide.
‘What is it?’ I ask her.
Mother is quiet, looking around at the strange garden. She picks one of the bright balls from the tree and holds it to her nose. She closes her eyes and breathes in, and the glow from it lights up her whole face.
She picks another and gives it to me. It sits heavy in my hand, firm but soft underneath. Its skin feels like candles. I bring it to my face to smell it, as Mother did. It smells sweet and sharp, as if the whole air has been boiled down to this one small fruit. It tastes bitter on the tip of my tongue.
‘Like this.’ Mother plunges her thumbnail through the skin and peels it away.
I copy, and the skin gives way to soft fruit that’s sticky on my thumb. I try one of the pieces. I have to close my eyes just to take in the taste of it. The juice tingles on my lips and where it dribbles from the corners of my mouth.
Mother tells me it’s called an orange, like the colour. She says that this place is an orangery. The trees need the glass building to help them grow.
We sit on the winding stone path and eat four oranges each. Then we pack our rucksacks with as many as we can carry back to the farmhouse.
*
We eat oranges every night till they’re gone. We sit without talking in the kitchen with darkness at the windows, eating our beautiful orange fruits by the beautiful orange fire. When they’re finished, I want to get some more, but a storm comes and blows the roof off the chicken shed, so we have to stay near the farmhouse to fix it so the chickens don’t freeze in the winter, and then we have to wash our clothes and clean the rooms and go to the City and do all the other normal things, and then the days are too short for the long walk. So we stay at the farm and I collect the eggs and help Mother chop the wood and dig up potatoes and carrots. Sometimes, when I pull them from the ground, I imagine for a second that the bright stick of orange is a fruit and I will taste that sweet, beautiful taste again.
*
I start to think about the dead people and what it must have been like before they were dead. I try to make pictures of it, but all I can think is that it must have been very noisy with all of them speaking and walking about at the same time, and they must have had to fight for food because it’s hard to find food just for me and Mother and the chickens and sheep, and there are so many more dead people. I wonder how they all remembered each other’s names.
I ask Mother what it was like, but Mother just puts another log on the fire and says it’s a good thing that all of the dead people are dead.
‘Why?’
‘Better we don’t exist.’
I try to understand this, but Mother doesn’t always make very much sense. Mother cannot like humans very much, but Mother is a human and I am a human, so maybe she only means the dead people. I think Mother is selfish, the way she sometimes tells me I am selfish. What I mean is, I think she finds it easier to hate things than to want them.
Sometimes she says to me, ‘A survivor does not want things, she only needs things.’ But Mother is not a survivor, she is a creator. I am the one whose name means survivor, that’s what she says, and I do want things. I mean, I want things that I don’t need. I want the shiny woman back. I want eyes like hers that are as warm and wet as milky tea. I want more sweet and good things in the larder, like jams. I want to stand on top of the mountain again. And I want more humans who are not dead people. I want someone to talk to who isn’t Mother.
*
The sheep that Mother calls a ram has started standing on the backs of the other sheep. Mother says this means we might get more lambs next year and I want to say that I know, but I don’t. I just pick up a stack of wood and follow her inside, and I don’t say anything at all.
Every day we have to come inside earlier because of the light. Some days it stays so dark it doesn’t feel like daytime at all, but more like night pretending, and when I go out to fetch water from the stream I have to be careful where I put my feet so I don’t slip down the muddy bank.
I start to get used to it again. Some bits of the day are longer than before and some bits are shorter, but the pattern is still the same, like the pattern of straight lines on the blanket that goes over my bed, where the order of the colours never changes.
We go to the City. We look after the chickens and the sheep. We cook. We eat. We wash. Everything happens in straight lines which means we can survive.
And all the time I carry what I want inside me, the way I carry the soft woman and the memory of the shiny woman. I work hard to keep all these things on the inside, but sometimes I wonder if Mother can see them on the outside, too.
I look at Mother. She’s standing in the yard pushing seeds into the black plastic trays so we can try to grow vegetables on the window-shelf in the kitchen. Her back and shoulders are round like the top of the hill as she bends forward. She handles the seeds gently, like she is one of the chickens covering its delicate chick.
Mother says that when human people are first made, they are tiny. She says they’re smaller than a marrow. They are called babies.
Once I found a baby. It must have been a baby because it was smaller than me or Mother, but it was one of the dead people. It was only bones, lying on the grass outside the City, next to some normal-size human bones. It must have been ground bugs that ate it and not the wolf-dogs, because the bones were all still in their right places. Most of the baby’s body just looked like the chicken bones that Mother crushes up to sprinkle on the vegetable plants to help them grow, but its head bone looked like a human head bone, only smaller.
I picked it up. It sat in the middle of my hand, just the right shape to fill it, not heavy, more like holding a turnip or one of the round metal bowls we use in the kitchen. It made me remember lying on my bed and filling my hand with the round bump of my chest, and how my skin felt warm and like a shiver, like I was hot and cold at the same time. The baby’s head bone wasn’t hot, just cold. Once I suppose it must have been warm,
when it was a real baby. The head bone was thin across the top, like it hadn’t had time to get its proper thickness yet. I ran my fingers across the thinnest bits, careful not to accidentally break it.
But then Mother called me away from the next road, and I had to put the baby’s head bone down and run over to her.
I put it down as quickly as I could without breaking it, but I didn’t have time to put it in its right place. At first I didn’t mind that it was a hand-space away from the stacked bones of the baby’s neck and back, but by the time I got to Mother, collecting more tools from the front of a shop, I only wanted to run back to the baby and move its head bone. I wanted to fix it, the way Mother fixed the door to my bedroom when the handle broke. I want it to be a whole baby again. Sometimes, even when I’m not trying to think about it, I remember that baby with the gap between its head bone and its body bones, and I wish I knew the way back to it.
*
I’m going to grow a baby. Not a dead baby, but a real living human baby, which is going to grow into a person like me or like Mother.
I know this because Mother is wrong. Mother says that there is only us, that one day there will be no people at all, because we will be like the dead people. But there can always be more of something. What I mean is, I can become a creator and grow another person, the way Mother grew me.
I will not tell Mother. Instead, I am going to pack up my rucksack, ready for a journey. I will do this when Mother is outside chopping wood or fixing the wall around the sheep field or collecting water in the red plastic bucket. Then tomorrow night I will wait until Mother is sleeping and I will tiptoe out of the house. I will have to walk down the stairs in my socks and only put on my boots at the last moment so she doesn’t hear. I will open the big front door very slowly, careful not to let it say the creaking noises it sometimes makes, and then I will walk quietly across the yard. I hope the chickens will not hear me and start clucking, because then Mother might wake up and come outside to check it isn’t a fox, and she’ll find me and I’ll have to tell her why I’m standing in the yard in the middle of the night in my boots and rucksack.
But if I get across the yard without being heard, I will climb over the stone wall so I don’t accidentally clang the heavy metal gate. Then I’ll wait until I’m on the other side of the hill before I switch on my torch, just in case Mother is looking out of the window and sees the light. If there are no clouds I might be able to see without my torch.
The nights are long, now. There will be plenty of time to walk to the City, and I will be back at the farmhouse before Mother wakes up.
Maybe Mother will like having another person to talk to. Maybe the only reason she doesn’t want other people is because she doesn’t know them yet and that makes her afraid, the way she was afraid of not knowing on the day we explored and found the orangery.
I think this is another reason I am braver than Mother.
*
The next day it rains. It makes loud noises on the windows like someone knocking on the glass with their fingertips. The wind sounds like a great big tree brushing its top branches all over the side of the house.
The sheep cuddle each other next to the stone wall, and when I go outside to check for eggs and feed the chickens, I come back with my clothes and hair stuck to my skin like I’ve fallen in the stream. It’s a cold rain, as if someone has taken the cold from the metal tools when we leave them in the yard overnight and turned it into water and made it sting when it falls. Mother puts a pan outside the back door in the morning and by the time it gets to evening there is enough water for our cups of tea.
It’s like the snow, except louder, and we don’t go outside more than we have to. We spend the day sitting by the kitchen fire. Mother sorts through all the food in the larder and tries to work out what we should eat when, so that nothing will go bad and we won’t run out. I sew bits of old sweatshirt together to make a blanket.
We go to bed without washing, because it’s too cold and wet to go to the stream for the wash-water. I pile extra blankets on top of me to keep out the draughts, and I try to sleep listening to the rain making patterns on the roof and the wind shaking at my window. It’s too wet to go to the City tonight.
*
It rains all through the night and into the next day. And the next day. And the next.
I wake up every morning and my tummy has this sad flat feeling like someone has squashed it with a boot. When I go to bed, I fold the pillow over my head to block out the noise, and I hope if I listen hard enough to the quiet inside the pillow, I’ll hear the end of the storm.
*
We come downstairs on one of the rainy mornings, and the kitchen is full of tiny wriggling things, which Mother says are called silverfish, though they’re not proper fish like the ones in the stream. They are shiny grains of rice with two long eyebrow hair stalks that Mother calls feelers, and when they move their whole bodies wriggle from side to side. They wriggle across the floor and the arms of the comfy chair and into the cupboards. Mother goes into the larder and shouts when she sees them trying to get at the food.
We spend the morning squashing them, until my back hurts from always bending over to chase them, and my eyes sting from looking only at small things. Every time I think we’ve got them all, another one wriggles out from somewhere. I want to leave two of them, a Monster and a Mother silverfish, but Mother says no, so we squash them all.
*
When I went away and then came back again, when I climbed the mountain, before the shiny woman and before I knew I was a bridge, Mother wanted to know where I’d been, and I didn’t know how to tell her. I didn’t know the words to describe it, because nearly all of my words come through Mother and Mother wasn’t there. Even if I did know the words, I don’t think she would understand, because Mother doesn’t understand the kind of thing I saw – but maybe that is about words as well, because maybe I just don’t know how to put the right words together.
So I told her I went to the mountain because I didn’t know what a mountain was up close. Which is true, but that is just a little bit of it. Like when I’m doing something really difficult like trying to unscrew my torch to put different batteries in, or remembering a tricky word, and Mother says I stick my tongue out to concentrate. But what she means is that I stick a tiny bit of my tongue out, and most of it is still hidden inside my mouth. That is what I did when I told Mother where I’d been. I told her a tiny bit and kept the rest of it hidden in my mouth.
*
The rain has stopped.
When I woke up this morning, for a moment I couldn’t work out what was different, and then I realised it was quiet. I ran to the window and looked out. The sunlight wasn’t much because it still had to push through all the clouds, so it looked grey and weak as if it had been watered down, but all the branches and wall stones and roof pipes were covered in little drops that looked like they’d trapped some of the sunlight inside them, so everything shone.
All day, I keep looking up to the top of the hills at the back of the farmhouse, where Mother says the weather comes from. Each time, I think I might see purple in the sky, or a dark-grey smudge that means more rain, but there’s nothing. The clouds get whiter, and the sun tries harder and harder to push its way through.
I ask Mother, ‘Will it rain again?’
I don’t want to say ‘tonight’, in case she asks why. Even so, I hold my breath in case it starts coming quicker and she realises something is different. My eyes start itching and I want to blink a lot. I try to keep them open.
But Mother is busy clearing the yard from everything the storm left in it.
‘Not till tomorrow at least,’ she says, and I can’t see her face but she speaks quickly so I can tell she isn’t really interested. ‘Help me shift this branch.’
*
We spend the day clearing the yard and the fields. Mother fixes the log store where the roof has collapsed. I check on the chickens and the sheep.
That night, I sit with my b
ack against the metal bed so I don’t accidentally fall asleep before Mother comes upstairs. I wait a long time after I hear her stop moving about.
*
The night-time animals are making small fidgeting noises in the grass at the side of the road. Sometimes I think it might be the wind, though there isn’t very much wind tonight – but maybe that is what not-much-wind sounds like at night – small animals. Mother always says that things sound different in the dark.
Some of the noises come from bigger animals though. I can tell because their noises are bigger. They sound like footsteps or like a person talking in a high voice. As I turn onto the main road towards the City, I hear a fox which sounds like someone coughing.
Even without the water falling on me from the sky, everything is wet. My trousers are damp up the inside of my leg from where I climbed over the stone wall. The stones were dry but the moss holds water like a towel, and when you touch it, it lets the water out. Mother says if you get thirsty you can drink it, but she says it’s hard work and doesn’t taste very nice.
I’m trying to keep on the road and not step in any puddles. I don’t want to walk all the way to the City and back in wet boots. I zip up my jacket all the way to my neck.
Night is always cold. Even when the sun has been shining all day, it doesn’t stay warm the way the embers stay warm after the kitchen fire has gone out. When night arrives, it’s as if everything just forgets it was ever daytime.
The first time I spent a night away from the farmhouse, when I went to the mountain, I slept under a blanket with my back against a wall. When I lay down the grass and stones were warm, but I woke up later when it was still dark and the grass had gone cold. At first I thought I was lying on the big stone slab in the larder, and I had shivers all the way through my body. When I remembered where I was, I got up, packed up the blanket and started walking. Mother always says that moving makes you feel warmer.
I slept again during the day when the sun was still shining so the ground wasn’t as cold.
On the second night I found some trees that still had their old leaves underneath them. I pulled lots of them into a pile so it would be a bit like my mattress at the farmhouse, and that helped.