by Katie Hale
But sea doesn’t connect to anything. It just sits on its own in a big empty space. And I don’t know how it connects to me.
I wonder if this is what it’s like to be Mother, to be afraid of things that might not be there or might not be connected to anything else. I wonder if I am afraid.
I try to feel around the edges of this new and not-new word, but there’s nothing except the sound of the word itself and the picture it makes in my head. It’s like at night when it’s so dark I can’t even see the moon and it feels like my bedroom isn’t there any more – it’s just me in my bed and nothing but dark all around me, and it isn’t frightening, it just is. I decide it’s the same with the word sea.
I make my eyes narrow to try to see the other side of it, to see if there is a wall or a fence or a hedge where the sea finishes and the sky starts, but I can’t see anything. So I look at the line between the sea and the ground instead. It twists and wiggles like the road from the farm into the City, like the sea and the ground can’t decide where to put their own edges so it’s all different in different places. I follow the shape of it with my finger.
I stop. My finger is still pointing at the line between the sea and the ground, but where my finger and the sea and the ground all meet, there’s a tiny curl of smoke. Except that it’s quite far away, so really it must be a big curl of smoke.
I watch it till my eyes hurt, in case it goes away, but it doesn’t. It just keeps curving from the ground up to the sky, then disappearing into nothing.
Smoke comes from fire, and to get fire you need either me or Mother, because fire can’t just happen on its own. But I’m here so it isn’t from me, and I’m sure it isn’t from Mother because she’s at the farm and anyway I don’t think she knows about the sea and the smoke is right next to it. I try to make a picture in my head of fire without any hands to make it happen, where the flames just make themselves out of nothing, like the word sea, but it’s too hard. I can’t work out how to start the picture off without me or Mother in it, without a match or a lighter or the embers from the kitchen grate. I try to find different ways into making it, the way Mother says to find different ways of getting past a problem by using tools. I try to start with wood opening into a flame, or with a built-up fire, or with a lighter waiting for someone to flick its little wheel, but it all needs hands, and I screw up my face and stick the end of my tongue out because I’m thinking so hard. I think harder and harder, until I’m thinking so hard my head is full of pictures of hands starting fires – and that’s when I notice the noise.
I notice it so suddenly it makes me jump, like I’ve heard a loud crash, or a howl – the kind of noise that makes me think there might be wolf-dogs near – though it isn’t a crash and it isn’t a howl. It isn’t any noise I recognise.
I stand on top of the mountain and listen as hard as I can. I try to make a picture in my head as if I’m pushing my ears out, all the way to the edges of the world, but there’s nothing. And I realise the noise is silence. The silence is enormous, like the sky. It goes on and on and on and I’m standing right in the middle of it. Like the whole world and all this great big silence belong to me.
Mother tried to explain it to me once, the sound of not having noise. She said, silence is what happens when things end.
‘What sort of things?’
She said, ‘Anything. People, animals, days. It’s the noise a fire makes after the ash is cold.’ When I still didn’t understand, she said, ‘The noise the dead people make.’
I thought about this when we killed the chicken to cook the meat. I listened for the silence, but all I could hear was the scratchy twitch of its body, then the soft phut as Mother pulled out its feathers, then the bubbling and crackling as we put it in the big metal cooking pot over the fire.
But then, on top of that mountain, when the wind stopped and I held my breath inside me, I heard it. The sound of hearing nothing. I listened and listened and the silence was so loud it shouted over everything else.
Mother thinks that silence is a sad thing. She thinks that silence is all about endings, but it isn’t. All the other noises are about endings, because they start and then they stop, but silence just keeps going and there isn’t a way to know how long it lasts. It just is. I can hold it in my head like I hold the picture of the shiny woman, both of them not changing. I think the shiny woman is a kind of silence too.
Sometimes, when Mother is sad, I want to take her to the top of that mountain and let her listen to the silence, but it wouldn’t work, not really. You can’t have silence with more than one person, because other people have a beginning and an ending and that is a kind of noise. Even the dead people have noises – they have buzzing flies or the little bits of air that squeeze out of them, or they are just made of bones that rattle and crunch. You can only hear silence when you’re on your own.
And Mother is afraid of the dead people so maybe Mother is afraid of silence. But what I learned on the mountain is that silence is beautiful. Silence is like smoke, filling the space till it is everywhere. It is not the sound of endings and dead people the way Mother thinks it is. Silence means beginnings and things carrying on. It means not just me and Mother, but other people who are not dead people, too. It means another moment and another and another, because in silence there is no start and stop, just the kind of always that Mother calls hope.
I listened till the silence was so loud I had to make a noise. I shouted as loudly as I could, and a rabbit ran out of the long grass towards its hole. A breeze came and lifted my small neck hairs. The silence disappeared.
Once the silence had gone, I started to look for the other city, the one with the bridge. I turned around and around, trying to look hard in every direction, but it was nowhere. Only the City and more hills and mountains, and a forest, and a few stone walls and buildings like the barn, and the smoke curling up to the sky, and next to it, the sea.
The world is big. Maybe it goes on for ever.
*
The farm is turning green again. Mother stops letting me do things. She says I have to think about the baby, but the way she says ‘baby’ is like she can’t stop all her angry thoughts from pushing to the front of her mouth and tumbling out, like the word ‘bridge’.
When I look at the separate trees and fields and bushes, it’s as though nothing is changing, but then if I stand at the top of the hill behind the house and look at everything at once, I can see the way all the bits of the world are suddenly brighter at the same time. It makes me think of the kitchen fire in the mornings, how it’s all grey ash and just a couple of sparks, till we blow on it just right and hold the bits of book paper to it, then suddenly the whole thing catches fire and is bright and warm and beautiful.
Sometimes, I can feel my baby moving and fidgeting inside me. I imagine her pressing the insides of my belly with her small hands, trying to feel the edges of her small dark world. Sometimes when her arms or legs kick out, it feels as though she sweeps through my whole body, like summer, like stepping out of the shade. When I rest my hand there, I picture her leaning her head into my palm, like she can feel the extra warmth from my touch.
I will not let that warmth disappear. I will not let Mother be the bridge that pulls me and my child apart.
My belly is bigger now. I’ve burst out from all my spikes and angles to become round. Mother says round like the moon, but I think my body glows brighter and warmer than that. I think I am round like the sun.
*
Every morning, there are so many birds outside my bedroom window that I have to hold my pillow tight over my head to not think about the noise.
All the little flowers have appeared at the side of the stream. Outside the gate, the long grass is full of colour and flying bugs. The bigger my belly grows, the more ground bugs and tiny animals there are, and the louder the air is. It’s like the noise and the plants are all growing with me – as though the farm wants to be like me, the way I wanted to be like the shiny woman, which is sort of beautiful, b
ut sometimes I just want all the noise to stop.
I keep remembering the orangery. Even more, I keep thinking about the oranges inside it, sitting in the trees like brightly coloured birds. Sometimes all I can think of is picking one of those oranges, peeling back the hard skin, and the sharp sweet taste of the fruit. I wake up thinking of oranges, and when I try to sleep my mouth goes dry with needing them.
After two days of this, I announce, ‘I want to go back to the orangery.’
‘No.’ Mother is kneading dough into bread on the slab in the larder and doesn’t turn to look at me.
‘Why not?’
She pushes and presses with her knuckles. ‘You’re too big. You can’t climb over walls in that state.’
‘But I need oranges.’
‘No.’
I can feel her ‘no’ fizzing inside me the way our apple juice fizzes when it’s gone bad. I go back to the kitchen and stuff my feet into my boots. I have to sit in the chair to tie them up because it’s difficult to bend over my belly. Then I find my coat and my backpack. It’s late to set out for the orangery now, but I don’t care. If it gets dark before I get back, I’ll use my torch. I’ve walked at night before.
‘What are you doing?’ Mother has come out of the larder. She stands in the doorway, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, her hands red and shiny from kneading the bread dough.
I jut out my chin the way she does when she’s arguing. ‘I’m going to get oranges.’
‘You can’t.’
‘I can,’ I tell her. ‘I am.’
She looks as if she wants to say something, but doesn’t know what. I wait, but she just stands there looking red and angry, so I turn around and start to open the door.
‘Wait!’
I turn back to Mother. Something else comes through her anger, like worms wriggling up through the soil after it’s rained.
‘Don’t go,’ she says.
‘I need oranges.’ And I do. I don’t just want them, I need them, and because I am a survivor I know the difference.
‘Then I’ll go. Not today,’ she says quickly, ‘but tomorrow. I’ll go first thing tomorrow and bring back all the oranges I can find.’
I hesitate. Tomorrow is a long time to wait, and if Mother doesn’t leave until tomorrow morning then I won’t have oranges until tomorrow night. But Mother is right. Sometimes my feet ache just walking around the house. I’m too big and heavy to climb over walls and walk all the way to the orangery and back. So I say, ‘OK.’
I put my backpack in its place by the door, then sit in the comfy chair by the fire. Mother waits till I’ve kicked off my boots, then she nods and goes back to her bread. I close my eyes and lick my lips, and try not to think about slices of orange bursting with sweet juice.
*
The house is quiet with Mother gone. I make a picture of her in my head, walking through the trees that block out nearly all the light. It’s warm. She stops to take her water from her backpack.
I think about the time she found the sheepfold, how she left with a full backpack, ready for a journey, and I don’t know if she came back because of me or because of the sheep, or maybe just because she realised she had to.
Mother won’t try to leave this time. I know this because Mother is not a survivor like I am. What I mean is, she is good at keeping alive, but she is not good at being away from the farm. Away from the farm, things have a different pattern, and Mother is always afraid in case she becomes one of the dead people. In the picture in my head, she drinks her water and puts the bottle back in her bag, and she never stops looking behind her for something in the dark that isn’t there.
After I’ve fed the chickens and collected the eggs, I sit by the kitchen fire and feed it with wood to keep it burning, because even though it’s warm outside, the kitchen gets cold without the fire. When I get hungry, I cook a tin of meat soup. I try to finish the blanket I’m making, but my fingers feel too fat for the needle and I can’t concentrate. So I just sit in the comfy chair and watch the flames.
I think about my child and what she will be like. Will she be beautiful like the shiny woman, or a different kind of beautiful like the soft woman? Or will she be sharp and small like me? Maybe she’ll be big like Mother, with her arms and legs all looking like separate animals.
I try to picture her face. I wonder if it already looks like her face, or whether she hasn’t grown into one yet. I don’t like this picture of my child without a face, with just a sheet of skin where her eyes and nose and mouth should be, so I decide that she does have one, and that this is the face I will see when she comes out of me and I hold her for the first time. I make a picture of her with a tiny nose, a small bump like the end of my little finger, and cheeks that bunch up and shine when she smiles. I imagine her smiling a lot.
I imagine stroking a finger along her pale eyebrows, so thin and soft because every part of her is so small, even her eyebrow hairs and her eyelashes. Her eyelashes won’t be dark and prickly like mine, but beautiful, and if she blinks they’ll flutter against the back of my hand like the dandelion clocks in the field.
Her eyes will be brown like the worn floor by the kitchen fire, and they will look at me the way I remember the soft woman looking at me. They will look at me with so much warmth and joy that we will want to stay with each other for ever.
This is how I imagine my child. I won’t tell this to Mother – it is a private thought. When I put my hands on the bare bump of my tummy, I pass these thoughts through them to my child, silently, without words, so it’s just between the two of us. I imagine she can hear me thinking this way, and I wonder what she thinks about, and whether she imagines I can hear her thoughts, too.
I sit like that in the comfy chair by the kitchen fire and I feel something like silence. Not the silence from on top of the mountain, because I can hear the fire and the clock and the chickens clucking in the yard, and the creaks and tapping that the farmhouse sometimes makes when everything else is still. It’s a different kind of silence, like the silence is inside me, because it’s just me and my baby and we can think to each other without using sounds.
And in that sort-of silence, I realise how to spend the afternoon while Mother is gone.
*
First I take some cans from the larder and pack them into the bottom of my backpack. I add a packet of biscuits that hasn’t been opened. Then I clamber with it up the stairs. In my bedroom, I pack all my clothes and the spare blanket from the drawer. I will need more than this, but it’s a start.
As I pack, I think about possession, about what Mother said when she taught me that something could be mine or hers – and how something could also belong to nobody, because nobody could just do what they like with it. Mother says the towers in the City are nobody’s, that once they belonged to somebody but now they belong to dead people. She thinks the Clinic and everything inside it belongs to nobody too.
I think she’s wrong. I think it belongs to me now, because possession does not mean you can do what you like with something. Possession means knowing. I think my arm belongs to me because I know the details of it, the hard bumps and bulges, the soft dark hair covering it. And I think the field and farmhouse are ours because we work them and care for them together. And the Clinic with its shut doors and cold tubes of seed is mine, because I have climbed into the belly of the building at night and have pushed those seeds deep into myself. The same way the mountain and the silence at the top of it are mine because I have stood in the middle of it and Mother hasn’t.
I belong to my child and my child belongs to me. Together, we could make everything ours. We could walk away from Mother and the small belonging of the farmhouse, out past the City to the edge of the land where it butts up against the sky. We will be like the wandering packs of wolf-dogs, my child and me, and we will go wherever there is food and shelter and wherever there is new ground to learn and claim. And if the smoke I saw from the mountain is still there at the line between the ground and the sea, and if the hands th
at made the fire are really other people’s hands who aren’t dead people, but alive like me and Mother and my baby, then maybe we can go and find them, and I can teach them everything I know about how to plant vegetables and collect eggs and find food in the City. And maybe these other not-dead people have different words to me and Mother, because they’re not connected to the farmhouse like we are, so their words can’t be either. Maybe all their words are unconnected, like when I stood on the mountain and thought the word sea. It must be frightening, to have no connections at all. If I find them after my baby is born, maybe I can teach them some of our words too.
And if I really am a survivor, and if my child is a survivor too, I will plant more seeds in my body and become even more of a creator. I will create enough children to fill all the spaces left in the world by the dead people. They will all belong to me and I will belong to all of them, and it will be so much better than living with Mother who is a bridge and full of lies and can’t belong to anyone.
After I’ve packed my rucksack, the journey feels real, almost like a thing I could touch. My skin tingles, which might mean I’m excited or might mean I’m afraid. I can’t tell the difference.
The light is getting bluer, so I gather the chickens and lock them up for the night, and then I go back to the comfy chair and put another soup tin on the stove top. I put more logs on the fire, and from the slopes of the wood and embers I can make pictures of mountains and valleys, of little streams and crouching cities. In my head, I can make pictures of me and my child exploring them together.
These pictures burn so brightly inside me, that when Mother comes home I barely notice her in the dark doorway.
She comes and stands in front of the fire. For a long time she says nothing. She watches me, as if she knows I’m keeping something inside me, but she doesn’t ask. She just sighs. Her face is closed again, like crossed arms, and her bag looks empty.