The End We Start From

by Megan Hunter

  * * *

  The otherworld will be beneath the ocean, forty thousand fathoms below. In that place, there will be no pain, nor death, nor mourning.

  * * *

  The others are H, O’s friend from college, his wife F, and their children B and W.

  Family trip, O says, clambering across the boat. The children hold on to her legs as though they know her.

  They are much, much older than Z. They are a different species. Their limbs are long, like insects, and their eyes are huge, as though they’ve been stretched by something.

  At night, they sleep against their mother; they are too big to melt into her. They prop their hard skulls against her bony shoulder. They bump down and jolt, and then do it again.

  * * *

  F looks more fearful than us. Her mouth has puckered with it.

  * * *

  The island is safe, O used to whisper in my ear, all those nights in the camp.

  We felt fifty people shift around us, the reality of human smells we kept hidden for so long.

  There is none of this there, O would say.

  She knew a way to get a message. Knew someone going. Knew someone. The insistence of her hot words in my ear, the yeasty foreign blast of her breath.

  * * *

  It is safe, H repeats now, his arms pulling on ropes, turning handles, dealing with the endless diversions of cloth and wind and wood. The most complicated machinery I have ever failed to understand.

  Safe now. Maybe not forever. He casts the words off the side like pebbles, pats his fingers on the edge of the boat. He has taken to this well. He is tanned. Healthy.

  * * *

  In that place, honey-sweet fruit will touch your lips with gold. Sunshine will lay you down and bless you, and moonlight will fill your bones.

  * * *

  We arrive in the morning, in a salty sun starting to break. Z knows something is different. He pushes his arms and legs against me with astonishing force. He wants to be put down.

  On the beach he lowers his head, raises his rear like a crab. He lifts his pearly hands up, and shrieks when I stop him filling his mouth with sand.

  I hold him over the water. We watch as a wave passes over his shell-skin, washing every grain away in its foamy rush.

  * * *

  The house was built for this, for the highest sea and the strongest winds the world can make.

  From its windows, all you can see is miles and miles of it. The shimmering green-grey-blue terror. Orange in evening, then gone.

  * * *

  The first night, Z cries through every hour. We are swallowed in his noise.

  O and C are in the next room. We have divided here, hidden behind walls that feel like bodies to touch: dense, filled with something.

  I hold my breast in my hand like a medieval painting, pushing the nipple towards his clenched mouth.

  It is all I have. I am a one-trick mother.

  He turns away. He cries himself down for the first time, dragging himself to the unconscious wail by wail. Once he is asleep, I stare at the flushed oblivion of his cheeks.

  His crying rings in my ears like a distant alarm, like something I’ve forgotten, left on by mistake.

  * * *

  This is the place where snow never falls, where there is no thunder or lightning. All days are silent, and covered in a clear light.

  * * *

  O sees it before me, sees the new white glint in his mouth, the waiting mound that has finally pushed through. A tooth.

  * * *

  I cannot see the pirate map any more. I cannot trace R’s steps across Z’s belly with my fingers in the bath.

  Z has a bath now, and a room. He is a real boy, I think. He is no longer a puppet dragged through chaos. He has form.

  * * *

  Soon I love F, the gentle drape of her sleeve from her arm, the way she leans across to spoon stew onto my plate.

  I love the long children too, with their breezy forgetting. I am careful not to love H too much.

  I can love O all I want, with her swinging-arm walks on the beach and our babies perched on her hips. One each.

  It seems that Z has done something to my heart. Loosened it. Opened up a gap.

  * * *

  Z and C sit in the bath, their skin reflecting us. The taps drip. It feels like a Sunday.

  Z and C sit up, and we watch for falling. They clap their hands together, nearly missing. They tip back. We catch them.

  Outside the steamed windows the island continues, its trees rising in the wind, its weather swirling above us, unmoved.

  There are ruins everywhere. Remains of other runaways, hundreds or thousands of years ago, H says. Monks, hermits, wild men with bees in their hair.

  Now it is almost certainly empty, H tells us. We don’t go far, just in case.

  * * *

  Sleep when they sleep, went the old advice in a book far away and underwater.

  But as soon as Z is asleep and the door is closed I am more awake than I have ever been in my life.

  The white walls have a friendliness, a pattern of faces, more features every day. There is an old lady close to our bed. She seems to have a beard.

  I wonder if I might find R, made of textured paint effects. Or if I can trace him a path to us this way.

  When I try to see his face all I get is Z, who pushes his bald head into my neck at night. I wonder if he misses R somewhere in there.

  Synapses are electrical messages, didn’t they say. Crackling colours like northern lights or deep-sea creatures, floating miles below and right inside us.

  * * *

  Night speeds by, and we lose it in lamenting. Here comes the place, the right turn, where they all live untouched by sorrow.

  * * *

  Of course, he likes it when I cover myself in a tea towel, and reappear.

  Like my mother reappeared. Like her mother did.

  The revelation that something can come back, again. And again. And again.

  * * *

  We actually grow things here. We put seeds in the ground and they grow. Sometimes. The wind is strong and the soil is something. Too much something.

  There is no electricity, but there is the old magic – wood and wick and spark, flames of all sizes.

  The taps turn around and around to nothing, but there is a well, with a rope and bucket, like in a nursery rhyme.

  * * *

  When I wake up in the morning I do not know where I am.

  My body registers nothing at this. Where doesn’t seem to be the question any more.

  * * *

  I take a rug from the house and put Z on it. We sit in the rough field under the sky, which races away from us towards the happening.

  We have arrived at the non-happening, it seems: the invisible growth of Z’s body, the tiny increments of our meals coming out of the soil.

  * * *

  One night, H gets an old radio working. We hear static, a fruity, post-coital crackle. What was left of the beginning, I heard once.

  The mainland is on fire, they say in so many words. After the flood, the fire. I am losing the story. I am forgetting.

  I am covered in babies: C and Z are both asleep on me. O is knitting, of all things. The candles thin and fizz. The long children are in bed.

  O and I like to imagine our husbands together, on a raft or another island.

  Luck is one of those words that has no meaning any more, if it ever did.

  Sometimes, I tell myself R is on top of Big Ben. He is clinging to the point.

  * * *

  One day, I take my clothes off and walk into the sea. I leave O with Z and C, with her eyes on my bare back.

  I put my hand over my belly, on my breasts, light for once, drifting in the water like anemones.

  When I come out, I am tingling. The cold doesn’t leave. It has taken root.

  viii.

  The transition is gradual, then absolute, like always. One minute Z is scraping in the dirt, his paws scurrying onwards
to nothing, like a mole held by the tail.

  His middle is so round, so filled with milk and potato and beach and fluff that he seems to have no chance. His wrists are pinkly tender and circled in fat.

  * * *

  Spring comes in the same way. One day we are seeing our own breath above the bed, my cloud big and diffuse, his small and segmented, like a train.

  Then there are flowers poking up in the garden, and Z is crawling.

  He defeats the grass, pulls a dandelion so hard it comes out with the roots attached, flailing like a hello in the breeze.

  * * *

  It is hard to believe that this is only temporary: that Z must progress on, to walking and then running. It seems that this, rather, is another kind of person. The crawling kind.

  * * *

  C is not crawling. She likes to stay in one place, to spread her eyes over her surroundings slowly. It seems then, that she is a different kind. The sitting kind.

  * * *

  How quickly the everyday fills up time again. Glugs upwards from the earth, invisible until you’re splashing in it.

  It seems it would be like that anywhere. Living on the moon, or hanging upside down from the ceiling, and arguing about teabags and hairs in the bath.

  The enraging facts of other people’s existence.

  * * *

  The stars will dim and fade; the fire demons will be led across the rainbow bridge. The enemies will gather on the plain, too terrible to see.

  * * *

  H rolls up his sleeves at the table. His knees move up and down. Sometimes they wobble our plates. He talks about going to get more people, about rescue missions, refugees, hospitality.

  He doesn’t go. We all have our own rooms here, and enough food. Stockpiles. We can leave some at the bottom of our bowls.

  Here, when Z and C throw food at each other, we don’t tell them off, or pick it up from the floor any more, to be rinsed and tried again. We carry on talking.

  * * *

  Everyone has their theory, their own scratched-out map that helps them into the long days nowhere.

  For H it will all be over soon, for O we are here forever.

  As for me, I see R in a vessel on the ocean, and then I don’t.

  It’s a mirage, an illusion, a piece of dirt over my cornea.

  I blow on Z’s belly and he curls his toes. I like the way his fingers stick to me when I carry him, like a bath lizard.

  * * *

  When I do the washing-up, I turn the radio on. Z crawls around my feet, picking up a spoon, a crust from last night’s supper. We listen to the crackle like the wind.

  Occasionally, a word gets through. We welcome each one as a friend. I repeat it. Z repeats it, gives his version.

  We are learning our own language.

  Supper, dignify, project, plan, note, grasslands, plastic, riots, ceasefire, moment, returners, recovery, guidelines, soup.

  Some are in bold.

  We arrange them in a line, like lottery balls.

  * * *

  Ceasefire, I say to Z, when I change his nappy. Recovery, I murmur, when I wipe his face, pull a vest over his head.

  I think of the fire damped down with tartan picnic blankets.

  Ceased with watering cans, cool showers on the flames.

  * * *

  At work, I used to take minutes. Professor X stated that he thought the Wednesday meat pie was surprisingly inadequate. The incident between a squirrel and cricket spectators was agreed to be unfortunate.

  I find myself wondering what the minutes of this would say.

  * * *

  Often, I am unsure whether something is a bird or a leaf.

  * * *

  Z likes to eat butter in chunks.

  * * *

  We are overrun by mice. They leave their droppings in our cutlery drawer, small and brown amongst the steel.

  * * *

  B and W have become wild children, only returning for meals. Their faces have baked to a crust of sun and dirt.

  To keep them in the house for minutes we teach them baby-care skills. F, O, me. Down on our knees, wrapping cloth to make a nappy.

  Then we say the secret: there is no skill. There is only another person, smaller than you.

  W does a roly-poly as C watches, adoring.

  B gets on her hands and crawls with Z. She lifts things and lets them fall. A jumper, a pencil, a potato.

  Z yells and his limbs strike out, electrified, his wonder at gravity reaching every part of his body.

  * * *

  Sometimes, Z sits with O or F and watches my steps. He rocks forward to join me. And I walk five, ten, two hundred feet away.

  Then, he is out of sight. He is not-here, a new state of its own.

  But still on my fingers: his cheeks, and the soft orange scabs under his hair. A cradle covering, a honeycombed husk.

  One day, I leave even this behind, but something remains, at the corners. His shadow, perhaps, a slip of the light. A phantom something, felt more when gone.

  * * *

  I remember this from early-period R, stepping out of his flat, expecting to re-form, to be one mind in one body.

  Then, the taste of him, the dense scented grain of it.

  It came from my pores, transferred onto books, handle-bars, a coffee cup.

  * * *

  On the headland, I try a run. I try to make my body into a running shape.

  A rabbit passes me, mockingly. A real-life rabbit, like a cartoon. Maybe a hare. And it seems that this is R, all at once, moving, a streak of fawn. Finding his cavity, beneath everything.

  The rabbit dives into turf; it disappears. And I lean down, stick my wrist in. Expecting teeth. Expecting the bump of ears against my fingers. Something to capture, to take back.

  * * *

  The earth will shake, and the mountains will tremble. Some will hide deep in the ground, and the fire will not scorch them there.

  * * *

  London, I say to Z as he feeds.

  I tell him our street name. Our postcode. He reaches into my hair, spins strands around his thumb.

  * * *

  Often I watch H’s hands, the routes he makes with his fingers across his palms. Lifelines.

  His children are too tall to carry around, but he holds them upside down, shakes sand from their pockets.

  Every morning, he runs around the house, over and over. He comes back damp, hollow, covered in himself.

  * * *

  One broken night, I open the window, lean over the sky. Z has rolled back into his milk fog, his sleep-breath matching the growls of the sea.

  I drink fresh air like alcohol, every sip a pulling cool that reaches my waist.

  At the straightest edge of the world I think I can see a hulking thickness, a black mark growing. The mainland, I like to think.

  It hovers over the water like a boat. It grows, I imagine, blooms rows of houses with lit windows and lives inside. If I squint, I might make out R, waving.

  Carried by the waves, he is coming towards us. He is moving away.

  ix.

  The idea came from nowhere. For weeks it was not there, and then it was everywhere.

  It came from the distance, or from sleep, from those nipple head-twist urine-musk times we spend in the dark.

  Any chance they get, my dreams unfurl in their allotted small space. They are origami, they are Japanese pod hotels. They fit it all in.

  The idea came as a miniaturized image, a crisp packet in the oven. It is all I need.

  * * *

  Most mornings, I wake with Z’s elbow in my eye, his knee on my mouth. Some mornings, his face is above me, a shining son, dribbling.

  One morning, we find the world split apart.

  The sky has peeled away from the sea, and between them there is only a soft bank of peach, a touchable arcade of light.

  Another sunrise.

  Z reaches a dumpling finger, makes his sounds.

  Towards R, I have to think. R back at the
camp, finding archaeological clues, looking for evidence of life.

  A shred of cloth banana in the mud, the cloth boy long gone.

  * * *

  I’ll take the boat myself, I say at breakfast, into the jam spreading itself out across the bread.

  I imagine Z lying on a sheepskin on deck, wearing a perfectly white babygrow, kicking his legs into salt spray.

  I see my hands on the rigging, letting the sails out into knots of wind like sheets.

  I can see it, and this means it is possible. This is a fun logic. It makes sense the way the steam from my tea does. Effortlessly.

  * * *

  Z sees them first: feathers drifting from the sky. First one, then another. Then another, and another.

  I call it a sign. I try to catch them.

  It’s just a bird fight, F tells me. An altercation, way above our heads.

  * * *

  O doesn’t ask me why. She persuades H to take me, tunes in to his rescuing-frequency, to the way he taps out frantic rhythms at mealtimes.

  She calls my logic stupid in the friendliest way possible. She uses words like drown.

  I say it is pathetic that we are relying on men to transport us around, again. I say it but I do not feel it.

  This is how it comes to be, H with his complicated knowledge again, untying ropes. Packing supplies. Making ready.

  * * *

  O decides to stay. This is the short story.

  The minutes would say: after extensive discussion, it was decided that O and C would stay on the island for now with F and H (on his return) and their children B and W. It was agreed that they would attempt to stay in contact with those leaving if possible. It was noted that B and W are unusually self-contained children. It was further noted that they have developed proficiency in infant care.

  O tells me she won’t say goodbye. She hates goodbyes.

  * * *

  After the six days and nights of fire all was still, the sea returned to liquid, the earth lying silent beneath the water.

  * * *

  When we face the whole wet hole of the sea-sky again H and I sit on opposite sides of the boat.

  Z clings, a joey in the pouch of my arms. I am almost ashamed to bring him here, to float his small flesh-pocket on the water again. Almost.

  I nearly reach for H, for his arms above the fathoms. Nearly.

  The thoughts fly off, passing seabirds swirling away.