The End We Start From

by Megan Hunter

  * * *

  Landing. From water to land. From moon to earth.

  Or: the beach is the in-between place. The world between worlds, a memory from a book read at bedtime. The rubber taste of my thumb.

  It rushes in and out, deserted, soothing. I remember that you shouldn’t stay here too long. You can forget everything.

  * * *

  I half expect D and L to still be here. Perhaps cooking fish over a fire, their skin freckled by the northern light, their hair long, their speech slowed like surfers.

  H has moored the boat in a groove, a lapping inlet where he can think of it as hidden.

  We don’t mention the sail, the blinking white between the rocks.

  * * *

  We see nothing but abandonment for a long time. We are on foot, passing Z between us like a runaway’s bundle, a handkerchief on a stick. Or not, because he wriggles. A rat in a sack.

  He wants to crawl, and sometimes we let him. Not for transport, but for rest. We put our large legs out on the grass and he uses our bodies as climbing frames, slides, monkey bars.

  * * *

  The same checkpoint, a bad joke. This time they are gentler. No stripping. The same men, I suspect from the corner of my eye, but no stripping.

  Maybe it is H, his manner. They call me his wife. He doesn’t correct them.

  We are in the after. It is tangible, like a smell or a constant background hum.

  The sun looks older, orange, sagging, like it might drop. H says it’s only mist.

  * * *

  The same men tell us there are coaches. To take people home.

  Home is another word that has lost itself. I try to make it into something, to wrap its sounds around a shape. All I get is the opening of my mouth and its closing, the way my lips press together at the end. Home.

  I get Z’s lips too, the force of them, their perfect colour. He still has only one tooth.

  * * *

  We’d heard the change on the radio-wind, but it is a revelation anyway, like the first warm night of the year.

  Unthinkable until you open the windows, take your clothes off, sleep under a thin sheet.

  * * *

  We see our first people. A moment of recognition, a knotted riddle, like passing a minor celebrity in a shopping centre.

  I think I know this woman with red curly hair, stained clothes, a face pulled down by exhaustion.

  Then I remember: I knew someone with red curly hair, once. Someone else. Somewhere else.

  * * *

  It seems that people are moving more slowly than before, as though the air means something to them again.

  I look for clues in their shirt seams, the grooves of their shoes.

  I try to read the sky, to see what the clouds are moving for.

  * * *

  The earth will rise up from the deep one day, from the surface of the waves. Every land will be empty, and covered in morning dew.

  * * *

  H may not be rescuing anyone any more. He seems to shorten with this realization, to become less of a protective bulk.

  Or maybe it is the coaches that do this, with all their surrounding bustle. The neon jackets of the police may as well be the banners of a carnival.

  There is evening light, nearly black, and flashing lights. It’s almost like Christmas, I yelp at H, who says nothing.

  * * *

  Z and I have two seats to ourselves. He presses his cheeks against the window like I used to, making them look vacuum-packed to passers-by, lifting his nose to a snout.

  The coach has the same smell of all coaches since the beginning of time. Chemical mixed with nothing.

  H stands outside and waves slightly. I wonder when he will go back to the island. I have pressed messages into his brain, told him exactly what to tell O.

  I see them scattering, sent across the mystery of H like bottles on waves.

  The coach swings around confidently, and I swing with it, looping myself around Z. We are on our way.

  Outside the windows, the black is pricked, like the first camera.

  Tiny atoms of light shine out from nowhere, reaching for our image, our lit faces, Z’s noble chin, my tangled hair.

  x.

  Whatever I imagine, it is something else.

  Where I expect desolation there is the atmosphere of a jumble sale.

  Where I envisage welcomes and tea, smiles and Blitz spirit, there is grey concrete, wailing people dragging themselves across the road, photo-boards of the missing.

  Our city is here, somewhere, but we are not.

  We are all untied, is the thing.

  Untethered, floating, drifting, all these things.

  And the end, the tether, the re-leash, is not in sight.

  * * *

  We fill out forms. People have come from nowhere to process our X-marks-the-spot.

  I XXX the boxes for flooded-out, for husband-gone, for seeing faces in wall patterns.

  I am given coping pills, more forms to fill in about R, and a space in a women-and-children shelter, created from the shell of an insurance company skyscraper.

  We are on the eighty-first floor.

  * * *

  Z is fine or not-fine, is the daily news.

  His teeth hurt, goes the excuse, or he needs a crap. He is tired-hungry-angsting, the intricate puzzle, a crossword of causes always left half filled out.

  I let him go to the bombproof windows and look down all the way. He doesn’t cry.

  * * *

  The earth was bare, and barren, and no trees grew, and no flowers, and all was still.

  * * *

  In the daytime, we go for long walks.

  We trace the new high-water marks with our eyes. Z smiles at the whole fresh, destroyed place.

  It’s all background to him, painted cardboard scenery falling over.

  * * *

  I never realized that bullet holes in buildings were so much like fossils, punctured marks of a prehistoric life. Worm tracks, an infestation.

  Constellations of scars. They are brand new, I think, or aeons old.

  * * *

  We flick through the photos on the found-boards in double-quick time. We could recognize R just by walking by.

  * * *

  Up high, at night, I see a face-kaleidoscope, a canopy of features flowering above me.

  The missing have thick eyebrows, and thin. They have chins with clefts in. They have blemishes from childhood mishaps.

  I pick out ones I particularly like. I pause them, holograms of somewhere else.

  * * *

  I remember going on a protest when I was fourteen. We sat down in the city’s busiest junction. We stopped all the cars until the police or some thugs dragged us away.

  Now, the streets are not so much reclaimed as holding their breath. A few of us trail through, the returners, tourists in our own lives.

  * * *

  In those days, there were people living under the earth. They began to climb out one by one, holding onto a long, strong rope.

  * * *

  Other things we see on our walks: families, men and women and children who have managed to stay together.

  I want to rush up to them and ask how, but I don’t. Some things are the same.

  * * *

  I speak to the other mothers in the shelter, but none are like O.

  Plus, Z seems too big. He is always calling me away, pointing and making sounds that need my ears to make sense.

  * * *

  The latest idea for the tourist-returners is boats. I think I have had enough of boats for forever but these are different. They will take you across the water to your place, if it’s dry.

  Dry is their word.

  I go to sign up for the boat to our flat, the place we lived once, I am told. I want to show Z.

  If it’s really dry, we can resettle, they say. I whisper it into Z’s catkin ear, his cool canal. Resettle.

  The waiting list is so long we may as well give up, they don’t sa
y.

  They look at Z as though he is a disability. We leave.

  * * *

  Communications are down, says the sign in the long hallway.

  We know the only way to meet friends is to catch them in the street. To hold your gaze out like netting.

  An ear, a cheek. The way someone rubs their nose when no one is looking.

  * * *

  One day, V from work, caught by the way he picks his nails, his permanent distraction.

  He looks like a tramp now, as most of us do.

  He doesn’t seem to see Z, who reaches for his face, squawks, asserts his reality.

  V says things so obvious they almost make no sense.

  Behind us, a policeman adjusts his machine gun.

  * * *

  The people built homes, and made children, and filled the world. But their faces were flat; they had left their joy and sadness behind.

  * * *

  There are chairs in the insurance company skyscraper. Corporate-type chairs, covered in muted brown fur.

  Z’s new passion, which he pursues as faithfully as anyone has ever pursued anything, is to put his arms on the chairs and pull his whole self to standing.

  The first time he does it, I cheer, raising my fists in the air, squealing in a mother-pitch so high I can hardly hear it.

  Z beams, dribbles a fine snail line across the chairs in celebration.

  I surprise myself – even now, I still move to tell R, my head turning to the empty space.

  * * *

  V used to be my boss, sort of. Senior to me. I was his junior all my working days. I often thought of myself as a sort of buffoon.

  I left my job behind every day at five, as they say. I peeled it off like a lining.

  V never stopped working. I wonder what he does now, now that work is frozen in time. One hand held in the air, one leg lifting from the ground.

  * * *

  We thought we were like a family. All the lunches we ate together. All the days of sharing air, of letting ourselves out into the same place.

  Turns out, there was nothing there.

  * * *

  Sometimes, too few people in too much space, in squares where Z and I sit alone by fountains with no water.

  I could find this funny, all the water in the world, and nothing for a stone cherub to squirt from his tiny penis.

  Sometimes, too many people in too small a space. In the skyscraper, every single returner-woman-with-child, it feels like.

  Some of these children are teenagers. They roam around trying to kiss or shout their way out.

  * * *

  I query what the R-equivalent of this place is. I imagine a glinting bank stuffed with men.

  I ask the woman who slaps lentils on my plate with a giant spoon.

  Z reaches towards the food like a super-baby, arms straight in front of him, all-in-one suit gleaming red. He is always hungry.

  The woman ignores my question. She squeezes Z’s cheeks, purses her lips. They gurgle together.

  * * *

  Most past things are ridiculous now.

  Your baby may well be sleeping through the night, the book said, at three months, and six months and nine months.

  Sleeping through the night is something no one does any more.

  * * *

  They went up a large hill and waited for the dawn. They waited for many days, and at last thought they could see the light of the morning star.

  * * *

  Out of the blue of a long night I remember the name for Z’s new moves across the chairs: cruising.

  You are cruising now, I whisper to his sleeping heat. He stirs up from the layers, flings an arm across his neck.

  * * *

  We go to the same square every day for years.

  Or: just one very long afternoon, the dark shape of our double-shadow, this life acquiring a deep flavour, a lasting impression.

  xi.

  The light has changed, I think. It is not all just mist.

  It changed once before, when I first fell under a boy, like under a bus.

  It was that boy who gave light its new jaunty slant, who started the creep of it across tabletops.

  * * *

  This light is slow rather than sprightly.

  It passes over us on bridges, where we stand to pretend nothing has happened. From the best bridge the whole city looks unchanged from most angles.

  You can choose whether the buildings are full or not, turn it off and on, like opening and closing an eye, moving an object from left to right.

  Yes, I tell Z, when he points.

  The buildings are full of people, I tell him. They are on computers. They are doing important things.

  Then I tell myself about the emptiness. The rows and rows of desks lined up politely. The paper left in the wrong places.

  One piece in the middle of a carpet, a white and square aberration.

  * * *

  At the start, there was no sun and no moon. She came from a hole in the sky, and fell slowly towards the water.

  * * *

  I could let Z crawl across the bridges, but then I would have to see it.

  His small body, golden cup of a head, turning in the air, hitting the river like an anchor, sinking from view.

  The scenarios for his death are the most vivid daydreams I have ever had.

  * * *

  I see R’s face in the following objects: empty drink cans, rain splash on river, the heads of spoons.

  Cars left for dead, each headlight an eye that asks me questions.

  * * *

  One morning, I realize the new light might be summer.

  The skyscraper has no curtains, so every day we are woken with it, this blasting sunshine.

  Z wakes immediately, as though sleep was an illusion, an unimaginable blankness.

  He comes from sleep as he came from the void: suddenly, without the slightest suggestion of surprise.

  * * *

  The birds watched her fall from above. She landed beside them, and asked each one to dive for earth.

  * * *

  This morning, he grapples along the side of the bed like a mountain climber, shows me his gums, an eruption of nubs.

  He pushes his fingers into my thighs. I am nothing but material to him, dough for the climb.

  * * *

  I feed Z, I feed myself. We take turns.

  There is a spoon filled with food, and there is its return to his mouth. This is what it feels like: the spoon has always been there, and I am returning it.

  When I eat, my stomach stumbles over. It loses its way.

  Its turnings remind me of Z, of the way he moved inside me. Some days I felt he would escape that way, that muscle and flesh would be sliced by a toenail.

  Pregnancy was the great adventure, it seems now. The great bravery. To allow my lungs to be doubled in size, as it said in the books. To submit to the gulping placenta.

  It is only humans and monkeys who let the foetus feed from their own blood supply, I read.

  Only humans and monkeys who let their young release themselves back into the mother, float themselves into her, minute explorers.

  * * *

  Scientists Discover Children’s Cells Living in Mothers’ Brains, I read, over a bowl of plain rice.

  Z squirmed, some hard part of him nudging my hip.

  I expected the next article to detail the child found spread across the mother’s brain, a sealed film, a complete covering.

  * * *

  The birds dived again and again beneath the water, looking for a piece of earth.

  * * *

  It comes in a letter form. I think it has been written on a typewriter. It is nearly a telegram.

  R has been found. In Medical Shelter 73A.

  I stare at the paper and forget the words and remember them. It seems like they are growing in my brain, that cells of this news will stay there always.

  * * *

  Z has started to let go. For one or two seconds, he st
ands tall on his own two legs.

  This sight gathers up my breath. It takes me like a graze, a sudden rip in the air.

  * * *

  Medical Shelter 73A starts to curl at the sides of my vision. It sits on my tongue like a piece of chewing gum I am trying not to swallow.

  All I can picture for minutes at a time is men with bandages wrapping their heads, plaster-encased legs hoisted to the ceiling.

  * * *

  Dadadadadadadadadada, Z says now. He can stand for two seconds, then three.

  * * *

  The easiest way is to walk, so I put Z on my shoulders (an innovation) and we do the strewn-empty mile or two.

  Z pulls on my hairs, sometimes. Every step takes forever.

  * * *

  Reunions come from television. From sparkling screens edging backwards at the press of a button. Purple, maybe. Glittery, textured.

  From the boom of a presenter calling out the names. From the crush of shoulder against cheek under studio lights.

  From that one brightly lit ecstasy, skin on skin, distance and separation flattened by the everlasting instant.

  * * *

  This is how it really is: seconds of almost nothing, edging readjustment to an old face.

  Squeezing past each other’s words like customers in a too-small shop.

  Polite apologies, and all that lives beneath them.

  * * *

  Weeks and months have gathered in his skin, making it thicker, maybe. Moving his nose one millimetre to the left.

  I try to name the difference, give it a word or two. This will help.

  I try not to remember his old full-face smile, lasting all the way back to his baby pictures, folded corners in a drawer.

  Late summer in the garden, the bath, lamp-grinning out of every single school photograph.

  * * *

  I think of putting his palm over my face, again.

  I try to hold him with my hands, to not squeeze too hard.

  I think of the rabbit – or was it a hare? – its quick eyes, its heart thrumming under its fur.

  * * *

  R will be able to leave soon, the nurses tell me. The key is the afterplan, they keep saying.

  I leap on that, but it seems that the afterplan is me. I am what they have been waiting for.

  * * *

  R is in bed, but that is just for effect. The problem is far from sheets and pillows, wool blankets that scratch.

  It is nowhere, and everywhere, and still lodged in his throat. He swallows it down.