With my bare hands and the knife I dug a shallow hole. There was no ceremony except for laying the rabbit in it and then filling the grave up. There were no words to be said. It was stupid to care about anything.
From the boot of the car I pulled a bottle of water to drink from, to wash my hands. I stared at the other things I was carrying there: the tent, the sleeping bag. I rinsed my filthy hands and broken nails, racked with disgust, and drove on.
5
In a quiet diner as night started to fall I sat in an orange leather booth and waited for something, for anything. A sign, I wished silently to the dark feeling, to the baby. Just tell me what to do. The sky outside was deep violet. The walk from the car to the building had smelled powerfully of rain. A small woman brought me a laminated menu. Sandwiches lay behind glass at the counter, illuminated in a sickly way. On the wall were black-and-white photos of famous people who had died.
There were two other women in the room, one with long black hair and the other fair-haired, greying at the temples. They spoke quietly to each other. The dark-haired woman’s face was lean, her lips compressed into a tight line. She was beautiful enough for me to feel jealous of the fair woman, even though I didn’t know if they were together. The waitress came back, and I ordered a cappuccino, a stale-looking croissant, though when it arrived I could only break off pieces of the pastry and place them very carefully into my mouth, chew for a while, then spit into a napkin. My eyes kept skidding to the faces of the women, over and over. I tried not to show that I was looking. Other women had become objects of anxiety for me, even the waitress, who wasn’t paying attention to the shape of my body, swaddled under loose fabric. I knew I should go but I wanted to watch.
In the bathroom I was washing my hands when the dark-haired woman came in, the doors swinging behind her. I froze; unfroze. We made eye contact in the mirror. The bathroom was painted an ugly brown, one lamp burning in the corner. Pale tiled floors, with dirt accumulated at the edges. I felt faint, put both my hands on the fake marble counter. The woman kept looking at me in the mirror.
There’s something wrong with you, she said.
No, I said, though it was pointless to deny it.
Sit down, she said.
Who the fuck are you? I moved to go, then turned back to face her directly.
I saw you looking at me, she said. What were you looking at?
Her hand was in her pocket. A knife, I thought, stepping back.
Nothing, I said. Can’t you just leave me alone?
I felt dizzy. I let myself fold, leaned back against the wall and slid down. She put her hands out to my arms. She knelt on the floor so we were eye to eye. The smell of her hair was overwhelming. Something changed in her eyes.
You are, she said. She indicated a bump with her hands.
No, no, I said, pushing her away.
It’s all right, she said to me. Look. She grabbed my hand and placed it on her stomach, intimacy that struck me like a bolt of electricity.
Are you? she asked, indicating my locket. I looked away with shame. It seemed obvious that I had a blue ticket, that if I opened my locket she would see through the counterfeit at once. She didn’t make to show me hers.
Where are you going? she asked, lowering her voice, putting her mouth to my ear.
I don’t know, I admitted, whispering back into hers. I’m just going.
Wait here, she told me. Don’t move at all.
She went into a stall. I got up and washed my hands again for something to do. The skin was reddening and drying out. The nail beds were raw from where I was chewing them constantly, as if I were a teenager again.
The toilet flushed and she emerged, washed her hands next to me. I told you not to move, she said, and I thought it was a joke but she wasn’t smiling. We looked at each other in the mirror again, side by side. She was a head smaller than me. Eyes huge and black in her skull.
The border, she said.
She took out a map from her back pocket, an A–Z. It was creased and warm from her body. She unfolded it and showed me briefly—an orange line, slightly thicker than the others, near the edge of the paper, indicating change, indicating before and after. Do you have a map? she asked.
Yes, I said. They gave me one. It’s in the car.
She raised her eyebrows. Next to her I felt soft and stupid. I felt like someone who should have been killed a long time ago.
It will be out of date, she said. Buy a new one. The most recent edition you can find. Then you just go north.
Wait, I said. I didn’t want her to leave, but she was already turning away.
I have to go, she said. Good luck.
What’s your name? I asked her. I’m Calla.
She surveyed me. Marisol is what I’m calling myself, she said. I’d pick a fake name, if I were you.
I returned to my seat after her, watched the two of them get up and leave, still talking urgently. The fair-haired woman stared at me as they moved past my table, so she must have noticed me looking too. I kept my eyes on the table so she would know I wasn’t a threat. It was almost black outside now, but I didn’t have anywhere to go or be. The woman behind the counter turned off the coffee machine, the light of the glass sandwich cabinet, started wiping down the surfaces. She reluctantly showed me to a room upstairs when I asked.
When she had left me alone I listed things that I had done right. I thought about shelters built on my first journey to the city, scraps of tarpaulin. I thought about wire traps for rabbits. I thought about the efficiency with which I had got myself pregnant. I thought about slowing my breath and hiding so well that nobody could see me, so that I was dead but still there. About jumping into bodies of water and staying under the surface until my lungs burned. I am a creature of instinct, I told myself. I am a creature flinging herself forward. Tomorrow I will make a real plan.
In the night I dreamed of being an animal of the dark, and it was a comfort, for it was confirmation that I belonged. Owls swooped around me, and they were my sisters. The light of the moon cooling, like rain. Then I was galloping, not flying. My body came to rest on wet grass. My mouth nipped at dirt and leaves, my skin was alive, and I was a deer, or a badger, or a mole inside the ground, and I could run for miles.
6
I was still driving and the road was changing all the time, the landscape was changing, I could not get a handle on it. The half-remembered roads, the slips of language, the climate which was familiar and yet not. I had two brains inside of me and two hearts, and the baby-brain and baby-heart wanted to take me over. Tendrils through my blood. Everything was made of glass. It had been like this always and now it was just that I was noticing it, the shimmering precariousness of life, and the death-filled underbelly just out of sight.
Border, I thought, when the panic threatened to take me over. Border.
A sign for a bed and breakfast was nailed on to the side of the road, pointing half a mile down a dirt track. I was in the middle of nowhere again, in spare and rocky alpine country. As I drove down the track, birds threaded the sky above the car. I rolled the window down to get some air. Red rabbit. A field of sunflowers.
The bed and breakfast was a tall mushroom-coloured house set into trees, with a wooden porch and pale blinds. It felt like a place I had been to before, an idea of a place. When I knocked on the door, a woman answered. She was old, her hair cropped close to her head. A room? I asked her. Yes, she said, unsmiling, letting me in.
We walked past wallpaper with a muted floral pattern, the baseboard painted dirty white. A staircase reached up through the centre of the house, a small desk next to it where she thumbed through a guestbook.
Are you busy? I asked her, though it was clear the house was empty.
We’re never busy at this time of year, she said to me. Too early still. She peered at me. You’re not from here, are you?
; No, I said. I’m taking a trip. I’m meeting my husband at the end.
I see, she said. Let’s go find your room.
As we climbed the stairs, two cats ran across the landing with a shriek. They stopped when they saw me and the hackles rose on the backs of their necks. I knelt down, tried to put out my hand to them, and they hissed.
In the room she turned to me. Why don’t you come down for a cup of tea, or a nightcap?
All right, I said, as if hypnotized.
She withdrew and I sat on the edge of the bed. I kicked my backpack underneath it and lay down fully clothed, even wearing my shoes, with my arms folded across my chest.
The living room smelled damp. Forest-green wallpaper peeled at the top of the wall. The woman had laid out a tray of small pale biscuits and a steaming pot of tea, a dark glass bottle and a small glass next to it. She poured me hot tea into a china cup. For herself she poured tea and also a glass of the liquid in the bottle, which looked like water but was not.
You can’t have this, she said. Not in your condition. I made to stand up and leave but she took hold of my arm and pulled me back. Next to her chair I saw a carpet bag, the shine of metal implements inside. My teeth knocked against the cup. She was wearing a locket but did not show me what it held. Follow me, she said. She did not let go of my arm.
The dining-room table was dark, polished wood. I lay flat upon it with an embroidered cushion under the small of my back and another under my head. She was setting out the cold tools, one by one, on a small silver tray like the one that had held our biscuits. Things to lever me open, to do other things. I considered running. A grandfather clock marked the seconds. If she could help, I would give my body over to anything. I would do dark bargain over dark bargain. My arms were bare, my T-shirt rolled up. The woman put on disposable medical gloves, the same brand that Doctor A favoured. She put the orange collar of the blood pressure machine around my arm like so many times before. She did not say the numbers out loud but instead wrote them in a small notebook that lay on the table next to me. She listened to my heart, my stomach, with a stethoscope, and then she straightened up.
Why would you want to do this? She sounded disgusted. Oh, I’ve seen it all, and yet I still cannot believe it.
The blood rushing to my skull gave me an underwater feeling. I wriggled my toes. You girls, she said. You could have done yourself real damage just taking out the device. Blood poisoning. Your whole body all septic and green. Stupid!
I stared at the ceiling. I agreed with her, privately.
Have you noticed any symptoms? she asked. Are you sick? How about bleeding?
I really do feel fine, I said to her.
I could do the procedure here, she said, looking at me. I can do it right now and you won’t feel a thing. It’s not too late.
My heart was pounding very fast. My heart moved up, into my mouth. No, I told her.
Fine, she said. I won’t push it. It’s your body.
Is the baby all right? I asked, almost stumbling on the word.
Healthy and happy, she said. As far as one can tell.
She lifted her hands up slightly, as though playing piano, held them there for a second, then pulled my T-shirt back down, took the gloves off and stood up.
I sat up and inspected the skin of my hands. Four small bloody marks on each palm. I tried to hide them from her but she took disinfectant and cotton wool and dressings and cleaned the wounds, bandaged up my palms lightly, and then she held each finger individually as she clipped my nails. She gave me a nightgown of her own. Pink, sprigged with the buds of white flowers. She left a map on my bed. Do it right, if you’re going to do it, she had written on its front page. The shape of our country seemed sharper than I remembered from school, different even, with many more roads. Before I went to sleep I drew a route. It was just a line meandering upwards on the smaller roads, essentially meaningless, but it calmed me. Back roads, uncharted territory. One step at a time.
In the night I walked out of the door and down the road into a field of sunflowers. They were taller than me. The dirt was loose. In the dark their faces were not cheerful. I held on to their stems. In the centre of the field, a dark animal with glowing eyes. It grew bigger, and then smaller. It grew human-shaped, small, like a child or a teenager. I ran back to bed in the nightgown and slept for a long time.
The cats woke me, leaping on to the bed like demons. They wanted to suck out my breath, the way that cats always do. I batted them away. The natural world was hostile. The animals saw what the humans didn’t want to see but I was different now, and I could see it too. The old woman was taking her coffee in a narrow garden out the back. I did not disturb her, did not want her advice or her warnings, so I just left her some money on top of the guestbook and walked outside. It was early morning, wet and sharp, and I drove one-handed, the other hand on my bump, and I was alive, I was alive, it was irrefutable. There was a clarity that lived within me, and this clarity came with every breath.
7
In a service station I filled a can with petrol and then ordered a hot dog with crisped onions from a man with a white hat pulled over his sweating hair. He barely acknowledged me. I was sweating too, gleaming brightly as a person in fever. I ate the hot dog in the car, feral, in a dark spot of shade so that nobody could see me, but afterwards I had to throw it up, on my knees despite the sodden rest-stop tiles. My jeans were filthy. The high wheeze of the fan unit was like a mosquito, an auditory protest.
Somebody came in and I pulled my knees up to my chest, watched the shoes pace the length of the room then retract, choosing the stall furthest away from me. I heard them making a noise that could be crying, blowing their nose, the toilet flushing. Please do it elsewhere, I wanted to tell them with the greatest compassion I could muster. I had to be sick again, quietly. My body was in revolt. When the person left I rinsed my mouth with the tap water and spat pinkly into the bowl, washed my hands three times, splashed water on myself. I knew that I had to go, that I always had to be going.
There was a middle-aged woman on the till of the gift shop; I saw her as I passed, folding T-shirts into slippery plastic bags. Her locket was just visible under her T-shirt. I wanted her to open it, wanted to press my pistol to her head and see what she would do, what she would reveal. These violent urges had been taking me by surprise for weeks now and they were not distressing in the way I would have expected them to be. Perhaps this was what motherhood did to you, why it was not suitable for every woman to go into. I imagined the metal, hot in my hand, and my other hand twisting in her hair.
I drove until dark fell, and then some more. My headlights snagged on a person pushed into a hedge. Whoever it was flung their arm across their face and I saw they were dirty, scratched. It was a young girl, I realized, and I stopped the car. She remained motionless, so I opened the door of the driver’s side.
Where are you going? Can I give you a lift? I asked.
She looked at me but didn’t answer, eyes swollen, as if she had been crying. I pulled my loose shirt over my stomach, though she wasn’t going to do anything. She did not resemble me or my younger self in the slightest, but I looked for myself in her and found it anyway. It was in the dark marks on her sweater and shorts that could have been blood. It was in her hair, unbrushed, matted in places.
I’m looking for a city, she said, finally. I glanced at the locket around her neck, untarnished, knew how the weight of it would remain a foreign object for some time.
I’m going the opposite way, I said.
Can you just drive me for a bit? she pleaded. Just a bit?
Wait, wait, I said. Don’t move. I’m thinking.
I went to the boot of the car, stuffed everything into my backpack, strapped the sleeping bag to its side. She watched me as I emptied the car, leaving just some food and the old map. When I went up to her and opened my hand she flinched, but I presented he
r with the keys.
You stay quiet and stick to back roads, I told her as I strapped the pack to my back, ungainly. Gather rainwater. Do you know how to drive a car?
Yes, she said. My father taught me.
Do you know how to skin a rabbit? I asked.
Yes, she said.
Down the stomach and open it up; spread the ribs and tip the insides on the ground, I said, just in case.
I knew how they would steam in the air; how she would stay up all night next to them, rank copper scent in her nostrils. Owls overhead, bats. The dripping of rain enough to make you prick your ears, run as far as you could.
I know, she repeated. Thank you.
Her ankles were a mess from moving through the undergrowth, calves swollen with bites. My heart pulled and released. Good luck, I told her, walking across the road. She stood there, disbelieving.
Don’t just watch me, I called back to her. You have to drive.
I waited until she pulled out, unsteady, and into the road. If she sat up straight and tied her hair back she could pass for an adult. She could pick up other girls on the way. She could find safety. And yet part of me thought Why should she have it easy when I did not? and another part was horrified at this thought, because the blood showed it had not been easy, the locket showed it was not going to be easy whatever she did. We were so careless with our girls. Defence was a learned behaviour. I had learned it. I was passing it on. My hand stroked the pistol in the deep pocket of my denim jacket.
When a car passed me I folded over into the grassy ditch. My backpack dug into my shoulders. I felt strangely free without the car. Now there was no shell from the world. Now there was just me.
8
I walked through the night. Without Doctor A’s guidance, I spoke to rocks. I spoke to dirt. I climbed into a field and sat in the long grass and spoke to the sky as the sun rose. I spoke to the palm of my hand, pressed right up close so there was only the hot tickle of my breath and my own words, reflected back at me.
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