by Megan Hunter
We live on tinned food, and we wait.
* * *
The water rose and rose, and they could not recognize each other in the torrent, in the endless rain from above.
* * *
The vegetables are still seeds. The cupboards reveal themselves more by the day: their wooden backs, the greying corners we never used to see.
And yes, R goes with N to get food.
R wants to leave N here, but N insists. And yes I scream and hold their clothes and tell them not to go. And yes they go.
* * *
On our third day alone Z laughs for the first time. I am leaning over him, singing an emotionally confused song about his father and grandfather.
And Z cracks his empty mouth open and out it comes as though it has been brewing for weeks: a tremendous cackle. The upsurge of the genuinely amused.
And I put his head against my head and smell the point just above his ear, the smell that makes me want to eat him.
* * *
We watch the talent show channel for two to three hours a day. We watch the earth, as though it might suddenly sprout vegetable matter. We watch the drive, in case it sprouts a car.
* * *
I carry on with the skin to skin, like the midwives showed me, stripping our two bodies in the silent midday sun, letting the bed sheets hold us, letting the chemicals work.
It is true I am filled with a certain calm. Bovine or not, I cannot tell.
It is true that he moves his mouth to the nipple with a skill seen nowhere else. He still jerks his limbs without control. He is doubly incontinent.
And yet – here is his serious reaching, his controlled opening and sucking and swallowing.
It seems that he is feeding me, filling me with a steady, orange light.
* * *
This is how his body curls: like a shrimp, like a spring, like a tiny human yet to straighten out.
One day we are looking for the talent shows and we flick past the news, like catching a glass on the edge of the sink with your sleeve. That is a good one. It is just like that, all the smashed glass on the floor, all the pieces of what we knew laid out in front of us. Sharp.
I flick the channel onwards, sweep it away before it can cut us: the quickness, the confusion, the way dead people’s feet stick up like that under sheets, as though giving a final salute.
* * *
I have come to admit that I love the smell of his nappies. There is little else to love here, or everything. The way the kitchen table shines when I have cleaned it.
The earth that R turned. Recently disturbed.
Z loves milk so much it sends him into a stupor. He falls back from my breast like a drunk.
* * *
Every beast perished, every moving thing. Only one man and one woman survived on the waters, their bodies kept in a wooden box.
* * *
Once: the smell of G’s wardrobe, of light through slats and moth wings, I imagine. Of tented skirts Z and I could lie beneath.
Twice: G’s mascara on the sink, in the sculpted well for the soap. It rolls there, slightly.
* * *
When I met her for the first time, G hooked me by the elbow. She squeezed my fingers until they hurt.
She spoke words onto my shoulder, thanked me, said pleased, said R.
Her breath was salmon caught leagues away. Salmon smoked over oak, like it says on the packet. Hanging there, in a cabin in the woods, I thought.
Hanging for days, for weeks or months, until it changed.
* * *
On the talent shows, they torture the contestants. They pretend they are rejected, dangle them by their ankles above the abyss. Then, with a sharp tug, they are back in the sun. Glorious. The elation.
All of them still ten years, eight years, three years away from all this.
* * *
I try not to listen for the engine, for the way it will hum through me like a heartbeat. This means I listen constantly. Through the 10,000th rendition of ‘I Will Always Love You’. Through Z’s breath: heavier now, more solidly alive.
I no longer worry about crushing him in my sleep. I sleep like a shark, swimming on through the night. Never stopping the movement, quick as fins in the dark, between complete terror and complete devotion.
This is the closest I have come to bravery.
* * *
The mountains were covered, and every land under the heavens, and nothing moved there.
* * *
There are so many different kinds of quiet, and only one word for them. The quiet in the house has matured from quiet as lack of noise to something else, a textured, grainy quiet, a thickness to stumble through.
Z seems to sense the shift: he no longer cries when he wakes, as though the quiet were lying on his mouth, a thick blanket.
Or perhaps this would have happened anyway. Consciousness is no longer a shock.
He wakes to my sour breath on his cheek: I wonder what this is to him, this shark vapour, the nightly turning of my jaw.
* * *
R told me to stay here.
* * *
As for food, I have started to think of it all as milk.
Tinned potatoes suspended like specimens and lentils in smooth beads through my hands, frozen fingers of sausages and scurrying rice: all of these are nothing but milk.
I taste it: it is sweet and thin. It billows from me like winter smoke in the bath.
For now, there is an excess, a honeyed pain as it rises through me. Sometimes, when Z pulls his mouth away, it arcs a foot in the air, a white fountain that falls on his nose, his chin, his eyelids.
I wonder how long we would survive, how quickly human milk runs out in famine. I itch to google.
* * *
A dove was sent to see if the water had left the face of the land, but she found no place for her foot.
* * *
Memories are starting to leak: the faint, perfumed waft of the photocopier in my office. The cold room filled with machines, the small window, like a cloister.
The bones under the skin of R’s hands when he played the piano, their crackling, their quick moves like spiders.
The first sip of an iced margarita, its meeting with tongue, throat, chest. The moment of a swallow: so final, so decisive.
These are the remains of a life, it seems. The unsavoured, the savoured.
Days are thin now, stretched so much that time pours through them.
Yesterday, like today, I had a full stomach. My breasts were hard or soft, a kind of clock of their own.
Now, without Internet, without phone reception, there is this: the filling, the emptying. The lumpiness of an engorged breast. The tingling of its release. There is this.
iv.
The car arrives when I am not watching or listening. I am asleep in the soaking light of our bedroom, with Z sprawled on my belly, snuffling into motherflesh. We are beasts in the sun. We are, for seconds, oblivious.
R is in the room like a man with a machine gun in a teenage bedroom in the middle of the night. He has no gun but somehow this is what he is like. I think I saw this in a film.
He is shouting that we have to leave, now.
I am nap-blank; I have forgotten. R’s words move in and out of focus. Something is nearly happening, he seems to be saying.
Z lifts his head, a heroic effort. He does not cry, but regards his father as you would a fly: curious, irrelevant.
* * *
In the car I realize I have no nappies. The stacked supply in the cupboard that grew shorter every day, like a reverse child. I have left it behind.
Nappies, I say to Z sotto voce. He is squashed against me froggily, the seat belt wrapped over his shoulders.
I imagine the curdy shit flowing through his clothes, gathering in my crotch as we drive.
They’re in the back, R manages through the grip of his mouth. He is driving the car like a tank.
I turn my neck. The whole back seat is filled with tins stacked in wholesale
rows of three. At the edge I spot the optimistic colours of nappy packaging, a glimpse of a cartoon giraffe’s neck.
R is yellow-white. He is wearing the same clothes he was wearing when he left two weeks ago. I don’t ask him.
* * *
We see no cars for a while, but that is almost normal here.
Z falls asleep, his spell-breath pulling me down. Every time we see a car R flinches. There is rain, and the noise of the wipers, and that is it. Some of the road lights still work; their colours seem antique.
* * *
When I wake up R is sitting straighter and there is a tiny rub of pink on his cheeks.
We’re over the border, he says, and smiles. The words are a gap, a meaning distance I can’t cross.
I can see people by the roadside, walking in groups. Like mass hitchhiking with no lifts. Some have children balanced on their shoulders. Some are limping.
Their clothes are covered with bright, smart waterproof jackets bought for Sunday walks. Orange, purple, turquoise. They stick out of the gloaming like flags.
* * *
We sleep in the car, somehow, our seats reclined, R’s fingers draped over the gearstick. Sometimes our hands touch.
Z just has to move his mouth down slightly and I slide the nipple in. He grunts happily. He needs nothing more.
I have been an orphan for ten years. Neither of us have any siblings.
The window is completely black, the darkness total. We are the only people here. The truth: we’ve always felt like this.
* * *
From a handful of clay he was made, and she was made after him. They were placed in a cave, and told to fill the world with children.
* * *
When R asked me to marry him we were at the centre of the earth. The guide took us to a line on the ground. He showed us how water ran down a funnel in one direction on one side of the line, and in the opposite direction on the other.
I found this hard to believe.
Once we were alone, R started rummaging. He thought it was a good spot, a good story.
I realized this was one of the tucked moments I’d forgotten about: the proposal. I wondered how I’d remember it: the strange, clear heat of the equator, R’s face rounding up at me like a souvenir.
* * *
It is colder up here, and living in a car makes me ache.
R is afraid of the official facilities, the churches and schools lined with mattresses. He doesn’t trust the camps, the white tarpaulins that billow at us from fields.
We have everything we need, he says. He carries Z around and my arms feel light, almost floating.
At school we used to hold each other’s arms down for so long they would drift upwards when we let go.
Once I tied a piece of string around my finger until it turned red, then blue.
* * *
When Z is down for the night, nestled in blankets in the back of the car, we light a fire in the scrub. R uses his boy-scout skills and I pretend to learn them.
It is now that I ask R about N, and put his heavy wet head in my lap. He tells me how it happened. How quick things became.
I touch his curls, relics from somewhere far off. R’s charmed curls, his toddler-smile. None of it worked.
I can see every star in the sky. They look straight through us, a sparkling indifference.
The words lodge in R’s throat, in his chest, in the joints of his fingers. He couldn’t stop it. His hand shakes, gently, against my leg.
Nowadays, these things can happen in two minutes. They can happen in two seconds.
It turns out that G was right in a way, about the war. I never gave her any credit.
* * *
Here are some of R’s words for what happened: tussle, squabble, slaughter.
R has N’s watch, he tells me. He has it somewhere. He doesn’t put it on.
* * *
Z develops a cold. His very first illness. R says fresh air will clear it up. He takes him for long walks in his arms.
Back at the car, I rearrange the tins.
* * *
N is not gone from here. He would never have been here, with damp bark in the morning. The grass is wet, waiting for our shoes.
N would raise his wide rear from the sofa and let out rippling farts. Unembarrassed, it seemed. Like Z. Free with himself.
R misses him from somewhere else. From when N lifted him up and threw him in the air. From the moment of the catch.
* * *
I hover over Z, looking for signs of stopping. His breath is on-off, like it was after his birth. He is full of thick liquid.
* * *
Man was formed from dust, and the air of life was breathed into his nostrils. It spread through his body until he took a breath, and became a living being.
* * *
One night Z sounds like a rasping old woman or a tiny dog. A memory from a baby advice book, something about the bark of a seal. I have never heard a seal bark, but this could be it.
When Z was born he got stuck for hours, but on the last push he came out all at once, like a seal on a wave.
He is still growing. His toes strain against the cloth feet of his babygrows. I cut through the fabric with a bread knife. He wears them with socks.
* * *
In his second poorly week Z stops drinking my milk. He turns away from the softness as though he is tired of it. He sleeps all day. At night, he is still a seal.
* * *
In the dark, I tell R what we have to do. When I tell him in daylight he shakes and turns yellow-white again. He wants to stay away from people, always.
I am hoping my voice in his ear will work like hypnosis. All night I do it, leaning across the car until my back hurts and he pushes me lightly away.
* * *
In the morning, things speed up. Z’s lips turn slightly blue at the edges. His eyes close with a resolution I haven’t seen before.
R drives at a hundred miles an hour.
v.
We are back in a hospital, thousands of miles and thousands of years away.
The years stretch forward or back, it isn’t clear. The hospital is just a white roof, large rooms with beds and chairs and people spilling out at the edges.
R faints when we see the crowds. He has become allergic.
The doctors think he is the emergency. Thin, shining R. But I say no no and push Z into their arms.
They react. I am unsure, I realize, if they do this any more. If a baby is still something. It is. They react.
* * *
R is told he cannot sleep here. He is relieved.
At night I stare at the blank ceiling until my eyes win and I let them close. I do not miss the stars.
They have injected Z, which made him sob with some vast, rare sorrow. But now his breathing is happening again, and the old woman and tiny dog and seal have gone away.
* * *
The child was born from a golden egg. When the egg split in two, the halves became everything: the heavens and the earth.
* * *
Only one night, we are told. Z’s lips are red and he drops onto the breast, a resurrected creature.
We are back in the car, in the never-ending journey that has become our life. It is cold. Z coughs, just once.
Enough, I tell R, and he stops the car.
* * *
He has not researched the best camp. He has not spent hours poring over comparative reviews of refugee camps. He wants none of them.
So we stop next to the first one we see after I say enough. After the crying and the mess of logical statements, punctuated by Z’s snores.
We arrive tear-thirsty, with a car full of tins. R says we will be mugged.
But they have medics here, and beds, and heaters, and winter is coming, I say.
These are our boring statements, back and forth into hours of thinning time.
This is how we make it to Shelter 26, with its camp beds and cot. Its blankets and smells of wet dog and grass. Three meals ser
ved, day after day after day.
* * *
R lasts much longer than I expect. By the time he leaves, Z has learnt to hold things.
* * *
Everything was made from the soil of the earth. Tree, ox, human. Out of pity they were given warmth, and told to be kind and good.
* * *
Z stares at the things put close to him. Keys, a toothbrush. A toy provided by a charity – a cloth boy emerging from a cloth banana. Z stares and his voice gurgles through his chest. His eyes flash with frustration.
Go on, my boy, R coos, holding the toy close enough for Z to reach. I think of the complicated Baby Play System I bought when I was pregnant, all its attachments floating free in the rooms of our flat.
* * *
One day he makes it: he forms his fist with the necessary power and is holding the cloth banana, triumphant. The cloth boy dangles out, helpless.
* * *
Z and I can tolerate the camp. I went to boarding school. He is sixteen weeks old.
There are rules and rotas and porridge daily: very Scottish. There is even a baby and toddler group, held in Shelter 4 every Wednesday. I have not known the day of the week for ages, but here it is displayed outside the catering tent every morning.
I try to feel the solidity of the date beneath me, try to make the day and the month and the year mean something.
It is never quiet here. Z learns to cry loudly again. He is not the only one.
* * *
R drives away on a sunny day, the day it is our job to help with breakfast. He has not been sleeping. He eats like a feral cat I once had, stealing scraps to hunch over in the corner.
G and N.
The calamity, and the further calamity – disasters breed like rabbits – and now this, crowded by strangers every long hour.
I count the reasons.
* * *
He says it will only be for a week or so. To get a break. To look into other options.
He says we should stay, that it is safer. The relief is hanging from him, a loose shirt.
I look at the car before I lose it. I try to take in all of its details.
Before he leaves, I put his full hand over my face, like a mask. I do this even though there is no point. Even though smells can’t be held.
* * *
The first man and woman met, and became one flesh: they were naked, and felt no shame.