How I Live Now (10 page)

26

O
ur footpath finally came to an end on a winding paved road just wide enough for a single car. The road was sunk deep down with high banks on either side and hedges on top of the banks so it was like standing in a ten-foot trench with a low gray lid, which was the sky.

Birds were zooming in and out of the hedges singing and squawking and probably wondering what we were doing here since the wild world had been mostly theirs for months now. Neither of us liked being on a road all exposed so anyone could drive up behind us at any time because there was no place to hide without scrambling up a ten-foot slope. But along with being nervous there was a secret feeling of exhilaration to think we might almost be Somewhere.

From the map it looked like we were less than a mile from Kingly, but unless we found a nice policeman or a friendly milkmaid to give us directions to Gateshead Farm, we didn't have a clue what road it was on or where to find it.

We walked about a quarter of a mile past a handful of empty boarded-up houses, and came to a signpost that pointed toward Kingly and Hopton and Ustlewithe so we just kept walking hoping for the best when what do you know, the next turning had a faded wooden sign on it saying it was called Gateshead Lane and by now Piper and I were almost running.

Neither of us wanted to speculate about what we'd find when we got to the farm but no matter how I tried to calm down I couldn't stop the hope and excitement in my chest making my heart crash against my ribs and Piper seemed unnaturally flushed.

After about half a mile we thought maybe it wasn't the right road after all, but we kept going because there was nothing else to do and finally there was a sign and a gate and a couple of farm machines like threshers marooned in mid-thresh and the nervous excited feeling began shifting into something anxious and dark as we walked through the gate because I did not for one second like the atmosphere of the place.

You couldn't really see the farm from the road but we saw a lot of birds flying around to the left so we walked forward carefully and finally came around a bend and saw the main barn and still no signs of life and now all I wanted to do was run away as fast as I could because you didn't need to be a child genius to get the feeling that all those birds were circling around for a reason.

I'd been imagining what we'd do if the farm had been taken over by The Enemy and Isaac and Edmond and everyone were taken prisoner but I had to pretend they were still alive because there's no way any person with an ounce of sanity is going to walk on starvation rations for almost a week believing in the possibility of bad news.

You don't always get a chance to choose the kind of news you get.

Put yourselves in our shoes for a minute, walking into this deserted place on a glowering gray September day when it should be filled with animals and people and life but what you find is nothing, no sign of people, just the eeriest lack of noise possible and nothing moving except the big black birds in the air and legions of crows standing absolutely still, watching you.

And then we see the foxes.

My first thought was that they were beautiful, sleek and well fed and vivid orangey red with sharp little intelligent faces and it didn't occur to me till second thought to wonder why there were so many of them and why they didn't run away.

Well why would they. It was paradise. Dead things everywhere and when the stink hit you it was like nothing you ever smelled before and when you hear people say something smells like death trust them because that's the only way to describe what it smells like, putrid and rotting and so foul your stomach tries to vault out through your throat and if your brain has any sense it wants to jump out of your skull and run away as fast as possible with or without the rest of you so it doesn't ever have to find out what's making that smell.

Having come this far I didn't know how not to keep going. My legs kept walking forward and when I got a little closer I could see that some of the bodies were human and then a kind of coldness came over me and no matter what I discovered I wasn't going to scream or cry or anything.

I was ice.

The birds were pecking at a dead face in front of me, tugging at the skin and using their beaks to pull jagged purple strips of flesh free from the bone and they flew up into the air for a few seconds when I waved my arm so I could see what was left of it and by that time I knew from the size of the body and the clothes that it couldn't be Edmond and if it couldn't be Edmond it couldn't be Isaac and it wasn't Osbert either.

There were more bodies.

Seventeen in all that I could see, and only one I thought I recognized. I was pretty sure it was Dr. Jameson and the shock of seeing someone dead that I knew set off a new attack of panic. My legs started to shake against each other so hard that I had to squat down in the dirt to keep from falling over.

One by one.

One by one I approached the bodies, nice and methodical, saw how dead each one was and sometimes how young, and one by one each turned out not to be the person I most feared it would be.

They were all over the farmyard and all looked like they'd been running away, or crouching down trying to hide, or protect someone else, and when they still had faces you could even see the looks of fear and dread at least in the shape of their mouths because the eyes and lips were the first things to go. I started out trying to scare the foxes away from the bodies and I ran at them crazy with rage but they barely seemed to notice me unless I actually kicked them and then they retreated a few steps still holding on to whatever body part they were biting and looked at me dispassionately and I'm sure they could tell I was afraid.

Altogether I found nine men, three women and five children. One of the children was a girl, younger than Alby, still with her mother's arms around her. The woman looked young, but like all the women was fully dressed in dirty and bloodstained clothes so whatever funny business you expect in a war hadn't happened here other than murder in cold blood.

As for how long ago they died, I couldn't tell. Long ago enough, I guess, for their insides to start rotting and the crows and foxes to call all their friends and family around for a party.

Beyond in the covered paddocks were the animals, mostly cows and half-grown calves, nearly a hundred of them crammed together with no food, mostly dead but a few still standing and some lying down making a harsh moaning kind of noise when they breathed and when I took a few steps closer clouds of birds launched themselves a few feet into the air and then settled right back down again and went back to pecking and fighting over the best parts and now that I was a little closer I could see the rats crawling out from inside the dead animals and foxes tugging at stinking intestines exposed through holes torn in the flesh and a feeling came over me that if I didn't get as far away from there as soon as possible I was going to start screaming and never stop.

I started to run and heard myself panting with panic and I looked around for Piper who was nowhere to be seen and I yelled PIPER PIPER PIPER barely drawing breath or giving her time to answer and there was no sign of her anywhere and the hysteria rose like the sea until I was drowning in it and I ran into the only place left which was the barn and there she was just kneeling there tears streaming silently down her face with her arms around an animal and it wasn't until I heard a faint ding when it moved that I realized who it was only I never would have recognized him because he was covered in shit and as thin as the thinnest thing that could still be alive and I guess he'd been left in there with no food for much too long and his eyes were dull but he recognized Piper and me and dinged his bell and rubbed his baby horns against Piper as best he could given that he was mostly dead.

Ding.

He was too weak to stand up and too sick to care about the water Piper brought him.

So I covered him with a grain sack and shot him in the head.

Then I took Piper back home.

We didn't even bother camping but just walked along the road as fast as we could with the strength we had left, scrambling into the bushes whenever trucks went by and staying there until it was safe.

It was never really safe. There were men with torches and we heard shouting and the trucks were passing pretty often and under different circumstances we might have felt scared.

We made slow progress.

We didn't speak but I held Piper's hand and told her over and over that I loved her through the blood beating in my veins and running down through my hand and into her fingers. Her hand started out limp and cold like a dead thing but I willed it back to life until after hours of walking the fingers started to grip mine, a little at first and then harder, and eventually I knew for sure it was still alive.

At sunset the sky cleared and turned orange and gray and pink and the temperature started to drop but to compensate there was a bright moon so we wrapped ourselves in our blankets and kept walking and following the map and what with all the stopping to hide and occasionally to rest it was nearly morning but still dark when we came through the deserted village, past the pub and the village shop, and started up the familiar long hill to the house. I expected the landscape to be barren and dead but it wasn't: the hedgerows sagged under the weight of life, berries and flowers and birds' nests. The optimism of it should have cheered me up a little but it didn't. It was like seeing a vision of some past life, a life so recent and so distant that I could remember the exhilaration without being able to remember what it felt like.

In my new incarnation, I expected nothing, good or bad.

The house looked deserted, dark and silent, even the honey-colored stone had the feeling of something abandoned. The old jeep was parked off to the side where we'd left it when the gas gave out. There were no signs of life.

No signs of death either.

I wish I could say my heart soared at the sight of it but it didn't. What heart I had left no longer felt like flesh and blood. Lead, maybe. Or stone.

I told Piper to stay outside and she sank down with her head cradled in her arms while I crept in and looked around but I didn't have the energy or the courage for a room-by-room search so I went straight to the pantry and in the back of a low cupboard found a can of tomatoes and one of chickpeas and one of soup and a glass jar labeled Chutney that looked like it would be the last thing you'd find in the pantry when everyone was starving to death in a war but at least it was food. I smashed a hole in the top of the can of tomatoes and gave it to Piper who sucked out the juice and handed it back to me to finish.

Then as the sun started to come up we made our way slowly, wounded and exhausted, to the lambing barn.

There must have been thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of places in England that hadn't been touched by the war: the bottoms of lakes, the tops of trees, the far corners of forgotten meadows; little remote corners where no one ever went in peacetime because the place wasn't important enough or on the way to anything else or no one could be bothered to ruin it.

The lambing barn was one of them. Although it was nearly October there were still enough leaves on the trees to hide it completely from the path, and the blood froze in my veins until we pushed through the overgrown path and saw that it was still there.

It was still there, despite all the death and disease and misery and sadness and loss everywhere else. Inside it looked mercifully untouched. No one had been here since the night a thousand years ago that we all slept together, happy.

The good news was that we'd been too lazy at the time to lug everything back to the house so there were blankets still laid out on the hay, and even a few clothes the boys had left behind—T-shirts and spare jeans and socks, worn back in a universe where you wore things once and then put different things on.

Exhausted as I was, I said to Piper that I had to make sure there was nothing left of the smell of yesterday anywhere on my skin, so in the pale weak sun of early morning I rubbed myself all over with freezing water from the metal trough and put on a pair of Edmond's jeans and a T-shirt and though there was nothing left of the smell of him on them I felt better wearing his clothes. I couldn't face the filthy sweater I'd been wearing every day to keep warm and although the new clothes were a little musty, when I crawled in between the wool blankets and put my head down next to Piper's I felt almost clean and safe and best of all, home.

That night I slept the deep dreamless sleep of the dead.

27

W
e could have moved back to the big house but we didn't.

Maybe it was too close to the road or maybe we'd turned a little wild and couldn't live in a normal house anymore. Whatever it was, we stayed up at the barn doing nothing but sleeping for almost three solid days at first, only getting up to finish off the rest of our provisions and for water and to pee in the bushes.

And then when we'd slept enough but needed a fire and something to eat, I suddenly remembered the bag Isaac brought to the barn that we hid from Piper five months or was it five years ago.

Even at the very worst times it had never occurred to me to pray but I did now.

I prayed that the mice hadn't invaded the feed bin. I prayed that the food hadn't all rotted in the summer heat. I prayed to all the gods I never believed in my whole entire life that there would be enough for Piper and maybe some left over for me.

I guess this means I now have to believe in god.

The cheese was hard and moldy on the outside but otherwise fine and there was lots of it. The fruitcake stayed perfect in the tin and the apple juice was fizzy but not totally undrinkable and the dried apricots were fine, as was the huge thick slab of chocolate wrapped in brown paper. The only thing I had to throw away was the rotten ham, which smelled enough like the awful smell at the farm to make me start retching again.

Clear October nights were turning into clear October days and though it was cold in the barn, it warmed up outside by midmorning and Piper said it was because the earth still held the heat from summer. So we laid our old blankets against the south wall of the barn and sat in the warmth of the stone wall like old ladies, drinking fermented apple juice watered down with rainwater to make it last, breaking off small pieces of cheese and fruitcake and trying to eat slowly so we didn't throw up from the shock of real food. It tasted almost too rich to eat and made our stomachs feel dizzy and we just sat there not moving, trying to repair our brains and our bodies with slow swallows of food and water and with peace and idleness and familiar surroundings.

After a few days like this we went to bed deciding that the next morning we would walk back to the house and see what we might find there so I guess that meant we were turning back into something human again.

In the middle of that night I woke up and heard something rustling down below us in the barn and my first thought was Edmond! and my second was Oh god here we go again and my third thought was that maybe it was a rat and we should check that the food was safe but there was something about the way it sounded that was familiar and as I went to sit up I saw Piper's eyes suddenly wide open and awake and the first smile I'd seen on her face in so long and she whistled in a soft way and The Thing gave a little yip and I almost laughed out loud being the last one to realize it was Jet.

We raced down to him and he was much thinner with a ragged-looking coat but otherwise he seemed fine and happy to see us and he just lay there on his back in the most undignified way, wriggling with pleasure as we rubbed him and hugged him and kissed him and told him how much we'd missed him.

Then I left Piper with him and went over and got a chunk of cheese and one of fruitcake out of the feed bin and fed it to him as slowly as I could though it didn't seem to matter since he wolfed it down without chewing and it was only not knowing how long we were going to be living on this food that stopped me from giving him all of it, he seemed so hungry.

We were too excited to sleep and neither of us wanted to let Jet out of our sight so we half carried half dragged him up into the loft which he wasn't exactly wild about but in the end we all three lay down, Jet a little separate from Piper and with Piper's hand around his front paw for security and me with my hand around Piper's front paw also for security and that's how we slept.

The trip down to the house took a lot of strength, physical and mental, and we didn't have much left. Without saying anything I braced myself for the worst and what we found wasn't the worst, but the house was pretty well trashed and it was a little like being kicked again when you're already down.

The lights and telephone were still out. There were no messages, no notes, nothing that told us where to find Edmond and Isaac but on the good side there were also no smashed windows or shit spread around on the walls just for the sake of it. A lot of the furniture had been thrown out in the barn and most of the rest was shoved into the corners of rooms or turned upside down and there were broken dishes everywhere and the ones that weren't broken were caked and filthy and the toilets were overflowing and there was mud and dirt all over the rugs and I guess the only reason our clothes hadn't been touched was that they were too small for anyone to have bothered with.

The kitchen was the worst and I guess even army guys like to spend lots of time in the kitchen and the big table was covered with heaps of paper. There were maps drawn on the wall and no food except what I'd found in the pantry that first day and when Piper and I went to check the barn next door there was no sign of the chickens or sheep or any other animals, which didn't tell us whether they'd been set loose or taken away or served up to the army for lunch.

In the main bedrooms things were a little better with furniture just pushed to one side and fairly clean. I had to hold my breath before opening the door to my little room but stepping inside I was surrounded by those walls pure white and centuries old and everything pretty much the same as the day I left except the daffodils dead and papery in the bottle. I picked up a blanket from the floor and smoothed it onto the bed and looked out the window at the world outside and remembered arriving in a jeep with Edmond.

I could still hear our voices in the walls.

Before I went out I opened the little chest of drawers to find clean clothes all neatly folded and right then I forgot about everything except wanting to be clean.

I looked in the big mirror in the hall which was a mistake because for a minute I didn't recognize the person I saw there, including how thin I looked and how dirty and how matted my hair was and the next thing I did was to check the water in the taps which it turned out didn't work without the pump. Piper helped me lug buckets of water up the stairs from the rain barrel in the garden and I filled the bath a little way and with a bar of Aunt Penn's soap, a bottle of shampoo and a room full of clean clothes I started to reinvent myself as a person.

If you've ever worn the same clothes day and night for weeks, you'll know how amazing it feels when you make your skin silky and smooth again, and how happy you can be just cutting your fingernails and scrubbing the dirt out of your hands and feet with good soap that smells like roses and then putting on clean clothes and brushing your CLEAN hair and letting it dry all soft and whispery-sounding in the sun.

We filled it again for Piper's turn in the bath and then she made me go up to her bedroom to choose some clothes for her because she didn't want to go herself. I don't know what she was scared of but she was adamant that she wouldn't go, in the way little children are adamant that there might be something hiding in the closet in the dark. I guess she was scared of the ghosts that were creeping all around the house and I couldn't blame her.

I picked out some clothes for her including a clean white shirt, which I knew was completely impractical but the luxury of being clean and impractical was too much to resist. I also packed a bag with sensible things like jeans and sweaters with hoods and underwear, and socks to wear at night on our hands and feet in case of bugs.

When we were both clean and dressed in new clothes and had moved the furniture back where it belonged as best we could in the sitting room we felt pretty cheered up. I think the best feeling was throwing away the filthy sneakers I'd been wearing every day for over a month now and putting on a pair of loafers from my previous life that felt new and expensive and smelled like leather.

We had to do something about Jet because he kept biting at the burrs stuck in his coat but he was definitely against the idea of a bath and the best we could do was find his dog brush in the mudroom and take it up to the barn and try to clean up the tangled mess of his coat which didn't please him much either. We also took a bag of dry dog food that was still in the pantry because feeding ourselves was enough of a problem without having to figure out how to feed Jet. It was heavy and a pain to carry but neither of us knew whether he could manage for himself catching squirrels and rabbits.

Back up at the barn I carefully stowed our booty: matches, soap, clean clothes, more blankets, dog food, a single candle I found under a chair, and some books. Collecting anything more than that would have required a second trip and when you're tired and underfed, two miles cross-country feels like more than enough.

That evening Piper disappeared while I was still sitting outside in the last warmth of the day and after a while I went to find her and she had gone on her own into a corner of the barn wrapped in a blanket hugging Jet and was crying almost silently, her nose and eyes red and swollen and her mouth open as the tears flowed out of her like a bottomless well.

I didn't have to ask why she was crying. The fact that we were clean and more or less safe just made the absences more glaring and for all my longing after Edmond at least I'd come to terms with losing my mother a long time ago but all Piper had left out of a mother and three brothers was me, a dog, and a whole lot of unanswered questions.

I wanted to tell someone that this was it, the last straw, I couldn't go on anymore with my own misery plus Piper's, which was so much worse. I felt full of rage and despair, like Job shaking his fist at god, and all I could do was sit with her and stroke her hair and murmur enough, enough, because that's what we'd both had.