by Darby Harn
“Hello? We need help.”
The house is empty. A family lived here, by the pictures. A pretty young couple and their baby. A boy. On the mantelpiece a wooden block engraved with the word GAGHERTY. I tear up some magazines and books and toss them into the fireplace. We sit in front of the fire a long time in blissful warmth.
Sumi stares into the fire. “Mairead? Are we dead or alive?”
“Try and rest. We’ve walked a marathon.”
“How would we know?”
“I’m going to see if there’s any food.”
Rotten, withered fruit and veg frost over in fungus on a platter on the kitchen counter. Nothing to salvage. Shriveled bags of sugar and flour guard some traces. A box of stale cereal. A packet of tea in an old Barry’s box. I fill a teapot with some snow and hang it over the fire. We drink some shite tea and munch on cardboard corn flakes. She nurses the baby.
“Thank you,” I say. “I just wanted to say thank you again. For helping me. I don’t know if I did before.”
“I was alone and afraid.”
And there’s no Santy Claus. “Thank you all the same.”
“If I had not been, I might have been that man we saw with the scissors. I might have left you to die.”
“You didn’t. You’re strong. You hear me now? You’re going to make it. We’re going to make it, the three of us.”
She blinks. Tears skip down her cheeks.
“It does not matter if we live or die. We are the dust of a dead star drifting across the empty field of the universe.”
She was so kind to me. So caring. And she’s disintegrating. She must have been before. What caused her to stop at the coach? She was afraid, I suppose. It’s no deep mystery. Fear motivates everything. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help her. I put my arms around her. I kiss her wet cheek. Such a pathetic gesture compared to what she did for me back on the road.
“Get some sleep. Do you want me to hold the baby? Why don’t you let me hold the baby, and you get some sleep?”
“It is all the same,” she says, and passes the baby to me.
Sumi stretches out in front of the fire. I pull the blanket over her. Later I’ll go up and bring a mattress down. I’ll try and seal up some of these doors and windows and insulate the room as much as I can. All that can wait. Right now I’ve got all I need. Right now I’m holding you. Ma’s holding you.
Mo leanbh. Mo stór.
In the fields behind the house I find a cow in the snow. Her ribs form a fence in her hide but I get her back to the stables. Milk comes hard and thin and but there’s enough for me to boil and then churn for butter. Back in the corner of the stables I find a dog. A Labrador, like. She reminds me a bit of the dog back on the island. Border Collie. I miss him. Strange. It’s been weeks now since I left. Months. It’s near Christmas. I’m sure of it. The dog is very pregnant. Barely able to move. I give her some of the milk.
“I’ll be milking you next,” I tell her.
I pick a day I think is Christmas and we celebrate with some bread and butter. Christmas without you. I never thought I would make it this far. I give Sumi my thanks. I have only my gratitude. Sumi gives me the baby and stares into the fire.
We have been in the house for over a week.
The sky falls in snow. The towels and blankets I line the windows with grow hard with cold. Our dishes and trash pile round the mattress. The toilet crusted with our waste and my sick and Lord God the smell. I wake up sick every day. I wallow in fear. Sumi disappears into this haze in front of the fire. Our entire world reduced to this room, this clutch at the hearth, staring into the light but it’s not light she sees but the darkness it begets.
It’s not hard for me to imagine her headspace. Still I can’t know it. There is no measure in grief. Every person’s grief is its own world. It’s own universe. She’s trapped, in one of her universes, living and dead at the same time. All I know is she’s lost. We’re both lost. The longer we stay here the darker your mind gets. Your soul. The house groans with complaints we can’t voice. This is the worst winter I’ve ever seen in Ireland. Snow to make New York blush. We have to get on. I can’t make it with all this snow. The snow hangs around like a bad lover. The days slip through my fingers.
The weeks.
The dog gives birth to seven puppies. She struggles and I help her along, pressing them down out of her, pulling them into the chill of the world. I name them after Snow White’s dwarves. Such tiny things. A pinch of life. They moan for a tit and she lies there in the straw, arm curled in the air, letting them find their own way.
I rub her head. “Ah, they’re class. They’re class.”
All the books are gone.
Newspapers and magazines and inn tables and chairs we don’t use. Most of the hay in the barn. I leave some for the cow and the dog and the puppies. The runt died. I couldn’t help it. I go out to the trees lining the field and hack off some limbs. We are destroying the house and the world around us to feed this room and this room is a stomach of fear. A cave of shadows. Sumi stares into the cold fireplace.
I can’t take this anymore. “We can’t wait for the snow.”
She shakes her head. “It is all the same.”
“Sumi. I think if we can get to proper help, for the baby and… I have people, back home, waiting on me. Depending on me. And I need to get back to them. I do.”
“It makes no difference if we are here, or Shannon, or this island. The past or the future. Alive or dead.”
“It makes a difference. We need to think about the future. For your baby. For mine. My future is waiting for me back home.”
She blinks. “You have hope. Even now.”
A dirty word, hope. I never let myself think it and yet what was I sitting there at the shore for, if not hope?
“We need to get on, Sumi.”
“My mother once said hope is ignorance.”
Sounds like her ma and mine would get on. “We need to go.”
“There is no hope. I have seen cities burn. The sky burn. My country no longer exists. It is lost to volcanoes and tsunamis and now nuclear anger. Japan is a myth now. I regret I married him. Do you regret your husband?”
“I regret…”
I regret everything. All of it. But it happened. God help me, it happened. I can’t change it or rewrite history. We’re not living in the history branded on us, or the future still hot on the poker. We can still choose. We can make our lives. All I can do now is get home and make what I can of what’s left. I wish you never died, I wish he never came but I want to go home. I want to be home with my family. Please God let me get home. Let me make peace of this.
I want peace.
“A couple months ago… I was where you are now,” I say. “I was staring into the fire. And then… I didn’t want anymore in my life but… I opened my heart for a moment and now here I am.”
“Lost,” she says.
“I don’t know. Maybe I am. Maybe I should be angry. But I was going to die there. I had tried so many…”
“Then why go back?”
I don’t know what to say. “It’s my place.”
“You are living to die,” she says. “I am dying to live. I think about killing myself. I want to die, but I am dead.”
“Then why bother feeding her?”
She winces her smile. “You are feeding her, Mairead. The same milk and butter you are feeding to the dog I smell on you. You are wrong to put a dog before yourself. Or a baby.”
There’s no telling her. She’s lost. Part of me thinks I can talk her out of it the way Gavin did me, but she doesn’t want out. I wanted out. God help me. I wanted out.
I stack the limbs in the fireplace. I rub our flinting sticks together and breathe fire into the wood. Nothing changes on her face or in her demeanor. There is no difference to her now, between warmth and cold. Light and dark. I scoop up the baby and I sit in the recliner and I rock her to sleep.
The next morning I go out to the barn to milk
the cow. The puppies float in the pail. Bloated chunks of flesh like doughnuts left in coffee. I want to scream but I don’t scream. I have only thanks to give Sumi.
She will get nothing more.
I go back to the corner. The dog rests on the hay. This shame on her face. The glue of tears in her eyes. I sit with her and I stroke her saggy belly. There’s no way.
There is no fucking way.
Out at the tree line I hack up the wood for her fire of the universes. Nice, thick clubs of kindle. Full up I march back to the house and in the bunker we made of the Gagherty’s living room I set down the bundle of sticks, less one. Sumi stares into the darkness of the fireplace. The stick trembles in my hand.
I drop it. “I’m taking the baby.”
I grab up some butter and bread and everything I think I need and Lord God I’m leaving. I’m leaving with the baby. Someone else’s baby. She never tries to stop me, Sumi. She never says a word. The snow hasn’t melted. The cold hasn’t lifted. If I go now, I go on foot in the frost of winter’s last breath. My chances of getting far are slim.
I don’t look back.
Chapter Twenty-One
Hours I walk.
A lidded sun makes embers of clouds over the countryside. Forget going back to the M6. I can’t go so far out of my way just to track back. We’ll find a way south. I will get you to a better country, I swear to God. I cut through fields. Branches of developments. I go house to house searching for food. Sometimes there’s a forgotten bag of crisps or bag of coffee grounds and I make due. I don’t feel hunger as I should. Once a person reaches a certain stage in starvation, you stop feeling the need for it. Your body digests itself. I must be starved. You must be. I have to stay strong for you. I have to stay healthy. I think about going back and doing what I need to do with the cow. The dog, even. But that would mean dealing with Sumi and I’m hungry and I’m furious with her but I’ve no stomach for blood.
All the signs and markers have gone to snow and water. Branches scratch cracked windows. Downed power lines slither across pavement. The fields mud. Every step a battle. Every mile a war. I win, but what do I lose. Days. Hope. I limit our walking to only a few hours each day. The days grow longer but they aren’t proper days, like. Gray hangs in the sky. Ash streaks the snow. I don’t know if this is the ash of bombs or volcanoes. Radiation terrifies me and we lose full days inside one house or another but I can’t risk us getting sick. There’s no getting to Shannon if I get sick. There’s no getting home.
I’m coming home.
You get used to your now.
The torture of not being home, of not seeing their faces every day gives to this acceptance. Your mind mimes the shape of your hell to protect you, to insulate you in another layer from the daily shock, the constant pin and prick of waking up hungry and cold and alone out of dreams where he’s come to get you. I wake up in the dead night and he’s there, Gavin, come from the island to find me here. I found the pilot, he says. We’ve flown all over searching. He lifts me up in his arms and carries me out of the country like he did the shore and he’s carrying us, the both of us.
I have to get on.
The drip of melting snow plops from the roof down to the front stoop. Ireland shines in the crystal of shrinking snow. The road goes slush but we get good walking days. The air warm, and the breeze invigorating. Birds drop pins on where mice and other little bitty things come out their burrows and I become a bird in mushy fields, waiting, watching and diving. So long as there are birds there’s no radiation.
Steady on now.
I roast rabbit and squirrel and mice and I’m good with a knife. Da taught me a thing or two, throwing lines off the shore. We will be good and full on the road tomorrow. We will be sturdy on our legs and we’ll make up all this lost time. We’ll get home. Hold on for me, baby. Buddy. But you’re here.
You’re here with me.
In the morning I see the first people since Sumi.
Limping ghosts under dirty blankets. A man and a woman, I think, walking north toward us on the road. Fear surges through me out from behind some door I didn’t even know I had yet. I’m a woman and an infant trying to get home in a shambles of a country at the end of the world. I have everything to lose. I hide in the ditch with the knife in my hand and wait for them to pass.
Why are they going north?
From the road I see smoke.
A town. What town I don’t know. I think I’m past Craughwell now. I’m reluctant to go into town, but we need supplies. Out in the country people keep to their houses and shelters but in a city, even one so small as this, I fear it’s going to be Henry St. in Dublin the day before Christmas. Everyone will be pushing and shoving and grabbing and no one can move because there’s nowhere to go. There’s nothing else for it. We need food. I can find a bike. Something. I can keep us going. I don’t know what day it is. It’s been a week since we left Sumi. Since what I thought was Christmas. Is it the New Year?
Lord God. It’s Gort. I’m in bleeding Sort.
I’m on the N18. I’m south, like. I let out this squeal. It’s embarrassing. I’ve never been so glad to be so embarrassed. The river flooded over the banks. Security fences curl up in tatters over the busted doors and windows of all the shops in the town square. I don’t bother going in. Mousetraps. I go through the refuse bins. I follow the dogs. I might have to do with one of these dogs.
People make lumpy figures out on the steps of the church. A man and a woman under ash stained blankets. I think it’s the two I saw on the road the other day. But they were headed north. We all look the same now. They see me. No point in hiding. The woman waves at me, meek like. I wave back.
How easy you forget.
Lord God. The state of them. Someone bandaged their burns, or they bandaged themselves. Either way they did a shite job of it. Jealousy greens their eyes. I am long in need of a bath and a change of clothes but I have health. Strength. The frayed ends of posh clothes flare out from under the borders of their layered fleece. Once polished and manicured shoes flop like the mouths of dead fish off the edges of their soles. These are people who lived in condos and river view apartments and did not look at me on the train but down into their mobiles, listening to their sounds or updating their status.
The man coughs. Gavin’s age. Under weeks or months maybe of dirt and scabs and sorrow he looks a much older man.
“Have a seat,” he says.
I shake my head. “Thank you, no. I have to get on.”
“Sit down. You’ve been walking a while.”
“Just a Sunday stroll. And yourself?”
“Couple Sundays worth. Where you from, then?”
“I don’t suppose you know where I can find any food?”
“You some kind of comedian?”
“Shall I tell you my life story?”
“Can I see your baby?” the woman says, and just invites herself to do so. She peeks under the blanket I’ve got over you and I take a step back. “Is that your baby?”
“I have to get on.”
“Where did you get it?”
“A stork. Don’t you know?”
“You’ve come out of the north,” her man says.
There would be no telling my direction from their perch here. These are the same two. They’ve followed me. Why am I so afraid. The two of them are sacks of potatoes on the steps, like. Bags of air inflating and deflating with weak breaths.
I keep the knife tucked in my sleeve always. The blade against my arm. The grip in my hand.
“I’ll be going,” I say.
“Where?”
“All the best to you.”
“You don’t want to go south,” he says, and coughs again. He spits scarlet on the walk in front of me. “Trust me.”
I take a step back. “You’ve come from the south?”
He rubs his hands. “We seem to be talking past each other.”
“Did youse come from Shannon?”
“Don’t bother with Shannon.”
&
nbsp; “Why not?”
“There’s nothing back the way we came.”
“I heard there was a command post.”
“There’s nothing. No one.”
I don’t know if I believe him. “There has to be…”
“It’s not safe, a woman being on her own as you are. You should come with us.”
“Can’t think of a single reason why I would.”
“We can use a laugh.” He says it like it’s already decided. Like I’m going with them whether I like it or not.
“I’ll be leaving you now. Slan.”
He sheds the blanket like it’s a cocoon and passes it off to the woman. A sliver of a thing layered in three or four hoodies and still she shivers to her bones.
He has a gun in his hand.
“How about we do this,” he says, cocking and uncocking the hammer. “I ask you a question, you answer. You ask a question, I answer. Seeing how that’s all either of us have got right now.”
I grip the knife in my sleeve. “If we had answers, we wouldn’t be here on the steps of a church, now would we?”
“You are a comedian. Funny lady.”
“I kill people dead.”
The woman shifts under her blanket, a wary look in her eyes. The man dangles the gun nonchalantly.
“You’re not seeing the big picture here. Maybe you’re a little foggy in the head, yeah? All those days walking in the cold without food. Maybe you’re spent. Tell you what. How about you give us the baby. We’ll take care of it.”
He’s serious. “Now who’s the comedian?”
“It’s not your baby,” the woman says. Angry, like.
“What do you want her for?”
The man points the gun at me. “If you would.”
“Over my dead body are you taking this baby from me.”