by Katie Hale
Tonight, I don’t stop. I keep moving, which keeps me warmer, although that is not the only reason I do it. I have a picture in my head which I didn’t put there, of Mother sleeping in the big bed, under the spotty blanket, then waking up and coming through to my bedroom to tell me it’s the morning, and my bed being empty.
If Mother wakes up and my bed is empty, I think she will be angry because she knows I am a bridge and that I can separate us, and maybe she will think I have left her for ever. Or maybe she will be a little bit sad. Or maybe she will realise she is a bridge as well, and think that she separated us, and that would make her even sadder.
So when my eyes start closing or I can feel a blister rubbing the back of my foot, I let that picture into my head and I force myself to keep walking. I have to be back at the farmhouse before Mother knows I’m gone.
I think so hard about moving and about staying awake, that when I look up and I’m in the City, I almost can’t remember how I got here.
The City at night is darker than anywhere else. It’s as if the buildings and the roads with holes in them and the rusty cars soak up the little bit of light that gets through the clouds. Maybe they are like the moss, and they soak up the moonlight during the night-time, then throw it all out again during the day, and that’s why the glass buildings all shine so much.
I switch on my torch. The light looks small in the big darkness, much smaller than when there are two torches, mine and Mother’s, but I keep walking. I get to a part of the City I’ve never been to before, but I should be able to get to the Clinic quicker if I don’t have to go round by the vegetable-growing building or the house with the bats in.
I try to notice things I walk past, so I can remember the way back. A tower. An upside-down car with its wheels in the air, like a ground bug on its back. A crater, which I have to clamber down and up the other side. A tree with all its wet brown leaves underneath it. Once, I see a wolf-dog a few buildings ahead, but it slinks away with its back low to the ground.
The Clinic appears as if it’s been walking towards me while I’ve been walking towards it, and we both turned the corner and are surprised to see each other.
Being here on my own is different to being here with Mother. With Mother, she’s always the one who decides what to do and I just follow her, but now I’m here because of what I want instead. I followed what I want like following along a road without any places to turn off, the way Mother sometimes says one word leads on to another and then another and that’s how a sentence gets made.
But without Mother it’s like the Clinic lights are even brighter, and they make me feel open and looked at, the way I was warm and full looking at the shiny woman, and then Mother opened the door and all the cold air rushed into the room and I wanted to hide under the blankets. But I’ve come all the way here in the dark, so I can’t just turn around and walk back to the farm.
To push open the doors, I have to take the piece of metal out of the handles, where Mother pushed it to stop the foxes and wolf-dogs getting in, but it’s harder on my own, and I can’t get it out.
Mother always says that if we can’t do something, we need to look for tools that mean we can, like the metal to get us into the vegetable-growing building, or the board to scrub our clothes against in the washtub. I look around for a tool that will help me.
By the side of the road, a few steps away from the Clinic, is a pile of stones. I choose the biggest one that will still fit in my hand, and try to hit the metal out of the handles. Instead, the metal just bends so it’s even more stuck, and in my head I think the sound of one of Mother’s words that she says I’m not allowed to use – but I don’t say it out loud in case there’s an animal waiting somewhere.
I think about the vegetable-growing building, which has the door we use and a smaller door on the other side that we always keep closed. I take my stone and start to walk.
The Clinic is big. I’d forgotten how much of it there is. I walk around it till I can’t even see the road back to the farm, and all the time there’s that feeling at the back of my neck as if there’s a wolf-dog watching. Not a real wolf-dog, but the same one that watches me whenever I try to remember something before or after the soft woman on the bridge.
The door on the other side of the Clinic is really two doors pretending to be one. They’re made of glass, so more like windows than doors, and I can see through them into the little dark room on the other side.
Next to the window-doors is a number box like the kind we sometimes find in the shops. I take out my plastic card and run it down the side of the windows the way Mother taught me, but nothing happens. I try again. I smash one of the window-doors with the stone.
In the quiet city, the noise hits me like a head-butting ram. I stop and listen the way Mother taught me, in case there are wolf-dogs near who have heard me, but there’s nothing new – only the broken window-door where before it was all in one piece. I smash the sharp edges till there’s a hole big enough for me to fit through.
The dark room on the other side is so quiet I can hear a ringing sound, like when you hit a glass with a spoon, and I can’t tell whether it’s the room making the sound or if it’s just inside my ears. I drop the stone and it crashes on the floor.
In my head, I make the picture of that cold cold room again, with the woman who wasn’t Mother. Then I make a picture of it from the outside so I will know which room it is again. I pull together all the things Mother told me and all the things I know on my own or from the dead people, like gathering different kinds of vegetables into the same bucket. I go deeper inside the Clinic and deeper inside my head, and the night-time feels big and heavy around me.
*
Back outside, the air smells different. Air always smells different at the end of the night than at the start of it – more like grass and like water.
I walk back past the tree with wet brown leaves, and the crater, and the upside-down car, and the tower, until I’m in a part of the City I know, and I can get home without thinking too hard. My feet want me to stop and sit down, and my whole body feels heavy from not sleeping. My trousers rub between my legs, but I make the picture in my head of Mother waking up and me being gone, and I make myself keep walking. I think the sky is already lighter.
By the time I get to the hill behind the farmhouse, the edge of the sky is pale and grey, and I can see the road without squinting. By the time I clamber over the farmyard gate, the birds are twittering and starting to fly out from under the barn roof. I open the big farmhouse door, slip into the kitchen and listen. Nothing. No sounds from Mother. Just the birds outside, and the embers and hot ash making their breathing noise in the grate. Mother will be downstairs soon to put book pages and dry twigs on the fire and blow it back into a flame.
I take off my boots and hurry upstairs. I climb into bed. The sheets are cold from not sleeping in them all night, but it doesn’t matter. I think I fall asleep before I’ve even thought about falling asleep.
*
I wake up to Mother’s face. She’s leaning over my bed and frowning. For a moment I think she knows and she’s here to tell me off, but then I see that she’s holding a bowl of porridge and a weak cup of tea.
‘Morning,’ she says, and her frown turns into half a smile, then back to a frown again.
Outside, the sun is already bright and high up in the sky, and all the clouds are gone.
‘How late is it?’
‘Late morning,’ she says. ‘You were so fast asleep I didn’t wake you. Here.’
She hands me the porridge, which I eat sitting in bed. As soon as I take the first spoonful I realise how hungry I am and I gobble it up like a chicken gobbling up grain.
Mother watches me eat. ‘Are you OK?’
I nod, my mouth full of porridge.
‘You don’t feel ill?’
‘No.’ Can Mother tell that I didn’t sleep all night? Do I look different?
She pauses, her hand resting on my stripy blanket next to my leg. ‘We’l
l take it easy today.’
Mother takes my empty bowl and leaves me to get out of bed. I don’t have any wash-water, so I wash between my legs with tea, then put on clean clothes and go downstairs to Mother.
There are still things to be mended and cleared away, but Mother lets us leave it for now. We spend the day doing ordinary jobs. We check the chickens and the sheep, and tie new bits of ribbon to the poles in the field to keep the birds off the vegetables. Then Mother helps me carry up water from the stream, and I stack the wood as she chops it, so the log store is full again.
All day I carry the night before inside me like a precious breakable thing which Mother cannot see, the way all day a chicken carries around the egg it’s going to lay the next morning. Sometimes it feels so big in my chest that I might explode with it and tell Mother, because she can’t stop me doing it any more. But then I remember how she said that humans shouldn’t exist, and the way her voice was flat and hard like a spade as she said it, and I’m afraid to.
So I just work with Mother, and when we finish the logs she says we should call it a day, so we go inside and sit quietly by the kitchen fire and I try not to think about the City at night and the Clinic full of cold and rooms and corridors, in case Mother sees what I am thinking about.
*
We work next to each other in the field or the barn or the house, but we don’t say very much. When we walk into the City, Mother goes first and I follow her, holding the Clinic inside me the way I can hold my breath – or sometimes we walk side by side but with our steps all at different times. When we’re at the farm, it’s like we’re both at different farms, even though we might be close enough to touch each other.
Mother’s words carry only what they need to so we can get the jobs done and survive.
‘Shut the door. Stay right.’
I pull the heavy barn door closed so this sheep we’re chasing can’t get in, and hurry to stand at the side of it with my arms out, making myself as wide as possible. Mother walks down the last bit of the lane clapping her hands, and the sheep runs into the farmyard ahead of her. She shuts the big metal gate. It screeches like a night bird and when it clangs into place, the sheep makes short, sudden movements like it doesn’t know which way to go. Mother keeps walking behind it and I stand with my arms out saying ‘Hey hey hey’ to stop it getting out the other side of the yard, and slowly we push it towards the barn. It kicks its back legs and turns in little bits of circles, till it’s squashed right up against the stone wall and we are close enough to grab hold. It takes both of us to stop the sheep wriggling, but once it’s still I can put my legs on either side of its body so I’ve got it with my knees as well as my hands, and it can’t go anywhere. The sheep’s wool is soft and warm through my trousers.
‘Got it?’
I nod.
Mother crosses the farmyard to get the bowl and the knife. I can feel the sheep trembling. It feels very big and round for an animal with such thin legs, and its trembles run all the way through me so I have to keep holding hard to the sheep’s body till Mother comes back. The sheep tries to fidget away from me, but I’m stronger.
‘Hold back the head.’
I pull back the bottom of the sheep’s face so it has to look upwards and its neck is long and open. There’s a group of small grey marks on the back of the sheep’s head that makes me think of Mother’s wolf-dog bite. I try to count them, but I keep getting lost and having to start again. Mother puts the bowl under the sheep’s neck.
Sometimes, if Mother’s wearing shorts or working with her trousers rolled up, I can see the pink mark on her leg where she says a wolf-dog bit her a long time ago. She doesn’t talk about it much, unless I keep asking her, and then she either speaks only in small words or stops speaking altogether. ‘It’s in the past, Monster. Let it go.’
Mother has always told me to let things go, as though thoughts were objects I could hold and then not hold, like watching something fall from very high up till it’s too far away to see where it lands. I do not know how to let go of thoughts like that, like the thought of the soft woman falling from the bridge, or the thought of Mother smacking my face and taking the shiny woman away.
I used to think Mother might have let go of some of her thoughts, but then I noticed the way her face looks like a shut door, or the way she sometimes touches the wolf-dog bite when she thinks I’m not looking. I think when she touches it, it means she’s holding on to the thought instead of letting go, like when I touch the tally marks on my bedroom wall to count the days, except Mother’s wolf-dog bite is like touching a bit of the past, and my tally marks are always counting forwards to something that hasn’t happened yet.
Later, Mother tips the bowl into the stream and I wash the mess off the cobbles in the yard. We take the woolly skin off the sheep’s body and chop the sheep-meat into bits, some to cook and some to rub salt into so we can keep it in the larder. Mother says the meat might be tough because the sheep was too old for milk or lambs, but she says eating it will make us stronger.
While we work, I think about the sheep’s body after Mother made the cut, the way it twisted and jerked between my knees and made me think of the kitchen clock – how I can hear it tickerting when nothing else is making a noise, and how it’s sometimes faster or slower, but always with a sort of silence in between.
*
It goes like this:
I do not tell Mother until I’m certain it’s worked, until I can feel the seeds I planted sprout and start to become shoots that will grow into arms and legs and fingers and toes, until I can feel them turning into a baby.
On the day I’m finally sure, when I can feel my baby’s small head through my tummy like a round stone, I sneak down the thin stairs before it’s light. I screw up paper for the grate and blow on last night’s embers to make them flicker and burn again. Being careful the pans don’t clang and wake Mother, I pull together the ingredients – flour, salt, some of the baking powder from the tub in the larder, water, leftover eggs from yesterday morning, a bit of the fat from when we killed the sheep. I know Mother won’t mind me using all these precious things, not today, because this is a special day and I’m making it as a surprise.
It’s nearly light by the time I’ve finished working, and when she comes downstairs rubbing the sleep from her eyes, the kitchen is full of the warm smell of fat and baking biscuits.
‘What’s this?’ she asks, as she lowers herself into the big chair by the fire.
I hand her a cup of tea, brewed dark, just the way she likes it, and sit opposite her. ‘It’s your favourite,’ I say, ‘for a surprise. I have something very special to tell you.’
So I tell her. I tell her about the Clinic and how I remember that we used to live there. I tell her about the cold room, and how I watched the woman who wasn’t her, and how I remember the hard pair of hands that weren’t hers either, that taught me where the seeds went even when it hurt. I tell her how I pushed the seeds into myself. And because I know now that it’s worked, I tell her I have a baby growing inside me and it won’t be just us any more. Now we have another human we’ll be able to talk to and be with. I tell her how wonderful it will be once the baby is born.
Mother’s face goes all light and shining. She’s already warm and glowing from the firelight, but when she hears that we won’t be alone just the two of us any more, it’s as if her skin isn’t just in the firelight, it is the firelight, like her whole face is a candle flame and it’s the brightest thing in the room.
And Mother smiles. And I smile. And we’re both candles now, both so bright and happy that it doesn’t matter that the sun isn’t up yet because we’re our own warmth.
‘That’s wonderful,’ says Mother, taking hold of my hands. ‘You’re wonderful.’ And she draws me into her arms and hugs me and holds onto me as if she might never let me go, and her body is warm from the fire as she says again, ‘Monster, you’re wonderful.’
That is how I think it will happen. That is what I plan.
&
nbsp; I like to hold these pictures in my mind when I lie awake on top of the covers, trying to pretend it isn’t cold. I spread my fingers like spider legs across my belly and wonder if I really do have a person growing inside me. I can’t feel anything yet, but if I close my eyes I can picture the seeds I planted, like I am the soil protecting it as it grows. I can picture it sprouting, little arms like shoots, a sapling of a girl. I want to ask Mother how long it will be before I know for certain if it’s worked, but then I would have to tell her about the Clinic at the same time, so I don’t.
I wonder how big my baby will grow, and how I’ll get her out. When Mother digs up potatoes she uproots the entire plant, and when she does this she turns the earth inside out.
I wonder, when my child is born, will I be uprooted like the plant, or turned inside out like the soil?
Perhaps she will burst out of me the way the hen-chicks break out of their eggs. Perhaps I am not supposed to survive. Perhaps that is the rule: to create a person you must lose a person. I will split and break apart as she bursts out of me. I think there’s a sort of balance to that, like when Mother weighs ingredients for cooking, something being created and something else disappearing. I wouldn’t mind becoming one of the dead people if it meant creating a new person – though I will be sad if I never get to see my baby.
But I don’t think that can be right. Mother says I am a survivor – that is who I am and what I’m good at. So I don’t think I will become one of the dead people. I will become a creator like Mother. I will live with my child and plant potatoes and the chickens will lay eggs and we will collect cans and clothes from the City. I am a survivor, and my child will be a survivor, too. Mother says hoping is dangerous, but I lie on my bed with my hands on my belly and hope.
*
I wake in the half-made light before the sun comes up. My face is cold and I can see frost on the inside of the window, but the rest of me is hot and sticky under my blankets. I swing my legs out over the bed. Even before my feet touch the floor, my insides are bubbling like hot water. I throw up my tummy into the empty wash bowl.