by Katie Hale
I get out of bed. I throw up again.
I keep on throwing up until there’s nothing left inside me to throw up. Then I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand.
I wonder if Mother is the same, throwing up her tummy in her bedroom. Perhaps there was something wrong with the soup-tin I ate last night. Perhaps this is the Sickness that Mother sometimes talks about, the one that made so many of the dead people. Maybe it was still at the Clinic after all and we never noticed, and I brought it back with me on my clothes, or accidentally planted it in myself, like the flowers we have to pull up from the vegetable field because Mother says they’re weeds.
Mother is already downstairs, stoking the kitchen fire. I tell her about my Sickness and she rests the back of her hand on my head. Then she pours me a mug of hot water and wraps a potato to cook in the fire. She tells me the potato will be good at filling the empty space in my tummy.
She sits down beside me and looks at me for a long time.
I look away so she doesn’t see the Clinic and my walk to the City at night, because if I did plant the Sickness inside myself there, then maybe I am not a survivor like Mother says. Maybe I am not a creator either. Maybe I am not anything, like all the dead people who don’t have names any more. I do not want Mother to hate me like she hates the dead people. I drink the water slowly and all the time her eyes do not stop looking at me.
Once I have drunk the water and eaten the potato, I feel a bit better, and we get on with the pattern of the day.
*
I dream about the soft woman. She stretches out her hand to my face, and as she touches my skin I wake up, breathing hard, the blanket scrunched tight in my fist, as if that’s what I’ve been chasing – as if I’ve finally caught it.
But what my dream catches hold of isn’t the blanket but a question: where was Mother?
In the Clinic when I hid from the dead people and their big hard hands, where was Mother? In the city with the river and the high bridge leaping over it, when the soft woman sat me on the railing and we dangled our feet over the void, when I let go of her hand and she fell into the gully alone, where was Mother?
If Mother is my creator, if I grew inside her, then why do I not remember her? Why was she not there to save the soft woman or to keep hold of me?
I look at Mother where she crouches now, toasting bread over the fire, watching the eggs tickerting in the pan. She’s sharp and cold, like a packet of nails. Her body could never be soft or deep enough to grow a child. And she does not bleed.
Before the shiny woman, I did not think about words very much. What I mean is, I thought about them only as rucksacks to carry the meaning of what I wanted to say. And what I wanted to say was always true. The words were like containers for my thoughts. I never looked closely at words. I never thought about the volume of what they could carry, how some words carry more than others, how some carry more than they pretend to, how some do not carry anything at all.
I never understood that Mother’s words might not carry her real thoughts. And I never realised that Mother could be a lie.
*
Another morning. Another Sickness.
And another.
It pushes itself into my days and settles there. Again and again it pulls out my insides into the wash bowl or the bucket or onto the ground outside the house. Again and again Mother washes it away down the river for the fish to nibble. Then she pours me a mug of hot water and cooks me a potato on the fire.
Mother does not say much about it, she just does these things without talking, but when she does talk she says it must be the Sickness.
‘Is this what the Sickness looks like?’
She hands me a blanket for around my shoulders. ‘I don’t know, Monster. I just don’t know.’
*
The day is closing in around us as we make our way back along the lanes from the City. The yellow flowers are back at the edges of the road, but I don’t pick any this year because I don’t want Mother to think everything is the same as last year, and I don’t know how to tell her that it isn’t. And because if Mother’s name is empty then maybe the yellow flowers are empty too, and maybe there’s no point trying to make the farmhouse feel as though it’s full of sunshine when it isn’t, because that’s also a kind of lying. So I try not to look at the yellow flowers. I fiddle with my bag strap and try not to look at Mother either.
Our bags are full of food – biscuits, cereals, even a packet of powder that Mother says works a bit like milk powder and will turn into soup if we mix it with water. Mother insisted on packing all the jars and cans in her own bag so mine wouldn’t be too heavy because of the Sickness. Maybe that’s why she walks next to me instead of her normal few steps ahead, because she’s struggling with it all. But maybe not, because she did it on the way to the City as well, when our bags were empty.
‘Mother?’
She hitches her bag higher on her back as she looks at me.
‘What does your name mean?’
She frowns. ‘You know what it means – it means “creator”. Your name means “survivor”.’
I have to look away from her. I concentrate on kicking a stone along the lane instead. ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why does your name mean creator?’
‘Because I created you,’ she says, and I can hear in her voice that she’s smiling her special just-for-Monster smile – the smile which says she’s older and knows more than I do.
I kick the stone in front of us and it bounces over a hole. ‘No.’
‘What?’
‘No.’ And I tell her what I know, that she isn’t my creator, and that her words aren’t true, and that her name is empty like a cup that’s leaked all its water away.
Mother goes quiet. Our footsteps and the clatter of the stone are suddenly very loud – so loud that when Mother does speak, I almost can’t hear her. ‘How do you know?’
I don’t know how to answer this without sharing the soft woman, which I don’t want to do. I just say, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ and watch my feet landing one after the other on the road.
Mother slows, so I have to slow too if I want to hear this new quiet voice: ‘I said it the first time without thinking . . . and . . . I liked it.’
I kick the stone so hard it flies off into the long grass and yellow flowers at the edge of the lane. I take longer, quicker steps, until I’m ahead of her and she’s following behind, watching me walk away from her and not being able to talk to me or touch, the way I always used to be with her.
*
Mother’s words are like snow. They cover all the good things with a thick blanket, full of shifting grey shapes I can’t quite see. Except when I pull away Mother’s words, the good things underneath them are gone, and the City and the fields and the farm are empty.
*
I think about the seeds that I pushed into my belly, and how they won’t be able to grow into a child now. A child is like a plant and Mother says plants can’t grow in sick soil.
I’ve stopped bleeding.
It’s the Sickness, Mother says, upsetting my body and breaking up its rhythm. Every day I check my knickers for blood but nothing comes.
I think about all the other patterns of my body that the Sickness could break up. The pattern of my fingernails growing and being trimmed, the pattern of waking up and going to sleep, the pattern of my breathing in and out again. What would happen, I wonder, if the Sickness broke my pattern of breathing out? What if I just kept on breathing in and in and in, and none of the air inside my body could get out again, and I just swelled up till my body was as big as the farmhouse? Would I keep on getting bigger, or would I burst?
I ask Mother, but she is busy chopping up wood in the last light of the day. She says I would not breathe in and in, but out and out, so that there was no air left inside me at all, and my body would shrink because I would be empty inside. But that won’t happen, she says.
I tell her I am already empty inside.
&n
bsp; She blows on her hands to warm them and tells me not to be silly.
I tell her my tummy can’t hold anything any more, not water or potatoes. I tell her how it can’t even hold a baby.
Mother goes very still. She rests the metal bit of the axe on the chopping block and leans on the end of the handle as she looks at me. Sometimes when Mother looks at me like this, I feel as if she’s looking right into the back of my head, where the soft woman and the shiny woman and my walk to the mountain are stored.
She asks me what I mean.
So I tell her about the seeds, how I tried to plant them inside my belly but how I didn’t realise I was sick. I tell her about the long corridors and cold cold rooms, how I knew where to go and what to do even though she never told me because I remember from the Clinic and from the dead people and from before Mother was there. I tell her how I wanted to make a child, to be a creator like the other woman wanted, the one in the picture in my head, who I thought was Mother but wasn’t.
I talk for a long time. I tell Mother everything about it that I can think of so that she can understand it all and what I did. All the time I am talking, she stands very still, her hands leaning on the axe handle.
At last I run out of things to say, and it’s quiet. Mother carries on watching me.
‘Mother?’
She tucks the axe away in the log store, as carefully as she tucks me into my blankets at night. Then she picks up an armful of wood and walks back to the farmhouse. She doesn’t look at me. She says nothing.
I watch her long legs and wide back as she walks away. I watch the back of her head. There’s a piece of moss stuck in her hair where she’s bent too close to the log store. It flaps and waves in her jolting steps.
I watch her until she closes the farmhouse door.
The sun left the edge of the sky while I was talking to Mother. The night draws tight around the little farm and there’s a cold wind. I can feel a shiver starting somewhere in the middle of my back. I pull my coat-sleeves down as far as they will go. It will be warm and yellow by the kitchen fire, but I do not want to go inside. I don’t want to think about the way Mother looked at me, right before she stopped looking at me, when she learned about my emptiness – the way my emptiness seemed to leak through me and into her, so that behind her eyes she also looked empty.
I put my cold hands inside my coat and spread them on my jumper over my belly. I imagine I can feel the deep blue emptiness there, like a night sky before the stars come out. I make a picture of it yawning inwards and inwards, so far inside me that it would take days to get to the end of it – only to realise that it was not the end, but a cliff edge, a bridge over an enormous gully, with more emptiness running deeper and further beyond. And I make a picture of myself, tumbling into my own emptiness and becoming lost, and Mother opening the farmhouse door and seeing me gone.
Somewhere a long way away, a wolf-dog barks. Something screeches nearer to the farmhouse.
I pick up some of the logs and slowly go inside.
*
Mother does not speak to me or look at me for six days. I count them on the tally I use to count the days between bleeding. It has been sixty-one days since the last time I bled.
I think I may be like Mother now. I think the Sickness has created this emptiness inside me and the emptiness has swallowed all the blood in my belly, and now like Mother I cannot bleed.
When Mother finally does look at me, she acts as if the silence never happened. She does not mention it, she does not name it, and so neither do I.
It’s lunchtime when it happens, but I am cooking nothing because I do not want to feed the emptiness. Mother is cooking a tin of tomato beans on the fire. They smell sweet and thick, like something turning bad, and the horrible sweetness of it hits the back of my throat and travels right down to my belly. I want to throw up again. I don’t know how to be in the same room with it.
I tell Mother I’m going outside to chop some more logs.
I think she will ignore me the way she has ignored me for the past six days, but this is when she looks at me. She looks at me over the tomato-bean tin cooking on the fire, and there’s something like weather on her face, like a fight between clouds and maybe a storm about to break.
Then it clears and she says, ‘Don’t.’
I look at her with that sweet thick smell in my throat and I want to wait and say nothing and see what she’ll decide to do next – but I can’t just stand here with the Sickness building inside me, so I say, ‘Don’t what?’
‘Chop the wood.’
‘We need more,’ I say, which is sort of true, because we always need more wood because the kitchen fire is always hungry.
‘Don’t,’ she says again. ‘You shouldn’t. I’ll do it – after lunch.’
‘Why?’
She’s quiet again, looking at me, and I look back at her, trying to breathe through my mouth so I can’t smell the tomato beans. We look at each other for a long time, or at least it feels like a long time, and I think maybe Mother is going to not speak to me again for days and that this is going to be our lives now, unless the Sickness takes me and makes me one of the dead people – until at last Mother very quietly says, ‘It’s dangerous for you, chopping wood. The strain. It’s dangerous when you’re pregnant.’
‘What’s pregnant?’
‘Going to have a baby,’ she says. ‘Carrying a child in your tummy.’
I’m sad then, because Mother is wrong and doesn’t know it yet.
‘But I’m not,’ I tell her. ‘I can’t. I’m empty and sick and I haven’t bled since more than thirty days ago so I can’t make a child inside me.’
Mother smiles. After days of not talking, she smiles and she comes over to me and puts her hand under my jumper to touch my tummy. Her hand is warm and sticky from the fire heat and the tomato-bean tin, and the feeling of it there travels right up to the Sickness at the back of my throat so I have to struggle not to let it out. Mother spreads her fingers so her hand sits across my belly.
‘I’ll help you,’ she says, and she puts her other hand on the side of my face. ‘We can raise the child together.’
And that horrid thick smell rushes into my body and I can’t hold it back any more. I throw up on the kitchen floor at Mother’s feet. I throw up over and over and when I’m done throwing up her hand is gone from my belly and she’s sitting me in the big chair and pulling back the hair from my face. And I have to lean close to hear what she’s saying, which is, ‘It’s OK, I’m here, Monster, I’m here, it’s all going to be OK.’
*
Sometimes, when I don’t want to talk to Mother but I don’t want to think about not talking to Mother, I think about the mountain. I like to think about it as if I’m there.
It’s hot. My legs feel heavy like sheep’s meat, like there’s too much of me to climb so high. When I breathe, the air I take inside me gets heavier too. I can feel it falling down my throat and catching on the sides.
Every bit of me is helping to pull me up the side of this mountain. I can’t remember why any more. I just grab onto it with my hands and the bottoms of my boots, and I pull till I can’t feel the rock any more. My hands are hot and sticky, but also cold, and I can’t feel where me ends and the mountain starts. It’s like the harder I try to climb, the heavier I become, till my body starts to turn into stone. What I mean is, I’ve been climbing for a long time and I’m tired.
I pull myself over the last bit of rock where the top of the mountain stretches out like our kitchen table and I fall on the earth.
There’s grass on top of the mountain. It isn’t the green grass we have in the fields by the farmhouse, which smells sweet like the apple tree. This grass is thick and brown. It pokes the side of my face like an animal with sharp fingers. As I lie there on top of the mountain, I start to realise it’s poking the rest of my body too. My hands stop being made of stone and start to feel the small things again. Then my arms and my chest. Last, my legs. I can feel the spiky grass through my
trousers.
Eventually I can breathe again, and the air stops scraping when I pull it inside me. It stops making so much noise.
I sit up.
All around me is the world. I look as far as I can and there’s no edge. It just goes on and on, for ever. It is green and brown, and the sky is bright, bright blue. I have never seen so much of it. I feel as if I might fall into it off the top of this mountain and be lost.
I can’t see the farmhouse, where Mother will be feeding the chickens and taking water from the stream to pour on the vegetables so they don’t get too thirsty. I can see the hill that is outside my bedroom window, but the farmhouse and my bedroom are hidden behind it.
Close to the hill I can see the edge of the City. The City is all grey. From up here where everything is green and brown and blue, it looks like a smudge of ash from the kitchen fire, like someone has put a big sooty thumb over the fields.
On the other side of the City there is just blue. Like the sky but darker, less empty. The sea is enormous.
Sea . . .
I make the shape of the word in my mouth, a hissing sound and a smile. Like see, only somehow deeper, even though it sounds the same. Sea. It isn’t one of Mother’s words, so I can’t think how I know it. It just appears, like when I make pictures of things in my head but without me needing to try. When I make a picture of the word sea, it’s more water than I know how to make sense of. It’s more than the bathtub or the puddles in the farmyard. It’s all the water that was ever rain, that ever smashed into my bedroom window during the storm, that ever rushed away from me in the stream behind the house – and in that water are fish, like the ones in the stream only bigger, and the water is always moving, up and down and over and over.
I let this picture of sea sit in my head, this thing that is all mine and not Mother’s. It feels strange, having this word and not knowing where it comes from. All my other words have something around them, like the way the walls of the farmhouse connect all the rooms to each other, and then connect the inside to the outside, and then everything outside is all connected to everything else outside through the fields and the walls and the lane. So everything fits together and I can fit all of my words into that everything.