Читать книгу My Name Is Monster - Katie Hale - Страница 7

PART ONE

MONSTER

‘I am cast upon a horrible, desolate Island, void of all hope of Recovery.

But I am alive; and not drown’d as all my Ship’s Company were.’

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

When the world is burning, it’s easy to forget about ice.

Easy for most people, that is. I knew nothing but freeze for over a year. I lived with the ice, on the ice, inside it – locked on the island as the rest of the world grew desperate with rage and disease. As the missiles fell and cities were blasted by a thousand-degree heat, I struggled to keep warm.

Frostbite and a chill so keen it cuts right through the heart: that’s the price of survival.

Then what?

After everyone else was dead, I sat by a window for three days watching the glacier creak and break. When I took off my trousers, my skin flaked away and my legs itched. I scratched at the dead skin until I was pink and sore, then I got dressed again.

I thought about the scientists who had vanished into a crevasse twenty years earlier and were never found, how their little bodies would one day tumble out of the glacier’s mouth like babies being born, frozen solid and perfectly preserved in their brightly coloured thermals.

People used to think that ice is white, but it isn’t. There is all kinds of history inside it, waiting to be brought out.

The beach tastes of skin and salt. Sand clogs my mouth and grinds against my teeth. When I move my hand I can feel the grains shifting beneath it.

Slowly, I lift my head. I sit up and cough. It starts in my throat, in the sand and spume still rattling in my oesophagus – then it expands, rising and billowing until I’m coughing from my stomach up, till my whole body is racked with it. I cough till I vomit on the sand, again, and again, and again, till all I can bring up is bile.

Wiping my mouth on my sleeve, I take several deep breaths.

This is where the sea spat me out.

To the right, a broad belt of sand stretches for miles, into the mist and sea spray of the horizon. In front, following the line of the beach, a low cliff is dotted with trees and seagulls. The gulls nestle on ledges and wheel overhead, screeching. Every rock is covered, streaked white and grey. The noise is horrendous. After the deep quiet of Svalbard, it feels like an assault. I had forgotten how noisy life could be.

Beyond the diving gulls, where the cliff meets the pregnant grey sky, is a line of coarse bracken and heather. Like the trees, these plants look hardy and gnarled, gripping onto the rock face with old men’s fingers.

My own hands are red and rough from weeks in the cold, the knuckles inflamed, the fingers sinewy and chapped. When I flex them, I can feel pockets of air clicking between the cartilage. My mother had pianist’s fingers, elegant and slender, her nails shaped and painstakingly buffed. My hands are better.

I look to my left, where a cluster of rocks catches the sea and whirls it around, so the waves come crashing back towards the beach. Which is how I ended up here, of all places.

I turn to the sea and there it is: the boat, my boat, beached and broken on the rocks a short way out, rocking with the swell. Or rather, what’s left of the boat.

If I were a nautical person, I suppose I would say she instead of it. I might stand on the lonely shore and regret that I did not go down with her. But I’m not.

When I haul myself to my feet, the whole right side of my body smarts where the sea and rocks have battered me. I take another deep breath. I have not survived this long only to die on a shit-splattered beach in Scotland.

I wade back out into the undertow. It tugs at my feet, smaller now than the fierce grip of the storm, but still there – an echo.

I expect the boat to be nothing but timbers and a few sodden relics, but for the first time in weeks, lightness fills my lungs like bellows. The cabin is still intact.

I stuff what I can into my backpack and carry it aloft back to shore. I remember seeing a film as a child where a warrior fording a river had to carry his sword above his head to keep it dry, the weapon his most valued possession, raised high like a benediction. This is my benediction: a backpack full of clothes, food, a sleeping bag, two rolls of Elastoplast, a Swiss army knife, rope, a lighter. This is what will keep me alive.

I make four more trips out to the boat, bringing back whatever else I can salvage, reclaiming food then breaking off dry bits of wood. Back on the beach, I kindle a fire above the tideline. Forget mourning her passing – I burn her bones to keep me warm.

Once stripped of my dripping, salt-soaked clothes and changed into ones that are merely damp, I scour the beach for anything else that may have washed ashore. I gather carrier bags, two odd socks that I dry by the fire, a plastic bottle, string. I lay out my collection in military rows in the sand, and the rows become a calendar, marking out the limits of my time. If I do not find anything else, I have only eight days left to survive.

I pull out my sleeping bag and am asleep before the sun has set.

By the time I wake, the fire has died and the remains of the boat have been claimed by the sea. I eat some of the more perishable food, pack my backpack and lace up my boots. As I climb the shallow cliff, the gulls shriek and divebomb, but I ignore them.

I reach the top and start to walk.

*

I walk because somewhere there must be food and water. I walk to seek out shelter. I choose a destination because otherwise the possibility of anywhere is too big.

My parents lived around forty miles from Scotland. The Scottish mainland is roughly three hundred miles long. I do not know where I have washed up, but if I manage an average of ten miles a day, I should be home inside a month.

Of course it will take me much longer than that. I will get lost. As much as possible, I will avoid towns and cities. I will avoid their bombed and broken buildings, and their Sickness-ridden bodies lurking like a virus already in the bloodstream.

I will leave the roads, clogged with the cars of all those who tried to flee from explosions or infestations, those who had not already been claimed by the War or the Sickness that rose out of it, those who tried to reach the so-called Safe Centres before they shut their gates. Who knows how many shells are lying unexploded on the tarmac? Who knows what kinds of explosives or gases or diseases they might contain?

I will stick to fields and moorland and heaths. Nature always was a more predictable place – though even then there will be obstacles to overcome. There will be places to stop and search for food, and the unavoidable ritual of living. Survival is time-consuming.

Still it sits somewhere at the base of my belly, this drive to return. I am like a homing pigeon, pulled back to the place it was fed and watered and kept safe from prowling foxes, even though its keeper is no longer there to care for it. I suppose it is a pilgrimage of sorts. A sacrifice meted out in aches and blisters – an absolution. I need to see for myself that my parents are gone.

I dream about it sometimes. Not home itself, but the journey, the perpetual striving. In my dreams, I climb the hill behind my parents’ house, or I drag my feet along the lane that leads to their village, but I always wake just before I arrive. There is always further to go.

*

My father called me Monster. It was supposed to be ironic, I think – an affectionate joke.

As I got older, my mother tried to change it, but by then the name had solidified around me. It was a shame, she said, for such a pretty child to have an ugly name.

My mother often lamented that I didn’t fit my cherub cheeks and curls. Her name was Beatrice and she wore it like an elegant fur coat. As for me, I grew into my name and out of my curls. I think it takes a monster to survive when nobody else can.

*

I sit on a crumbling rock at the edge of a copse, where the air still smells of sea.

The fields here are wide and flat, and there is a feeling of height. The ground seems to go only as far as the nearest wall, and then into a cold sky beyond. I watch bright clouds scud across the horizon until it feels as though the whole world is moving.

For a moment, I can almost believe there was no War, no Sickness, no inevitable Last Fall. Then my eye lingers on the tangle of weeds growing over the bottom of the five-bar gate, part of the faint air of neglect that has settled over everything, human control succumbing to plant-life as the War forced people into towns and the Sickness swept through what remained of the villages.

A blister as big as a five pence coin has bubbled up on my right heel. I pop it between my nails and a clear liquid leaks across my thumb. I sit with cold air stinging the raw skin, until I’m numb from sitting. Then I stick a plaster on my heel and put my boot back on.

*

When I was five, I started to squirrel things under my bed in my mother’s old shoe boxes. Little things, the flotsam and jetsam of daily life: spare plugs, old phones, the toaster that was supposed to be thrown out. I sat straining my eyes by the desk lamp, fiddling and tinkering until they worked again, or until I could piece the parts together into something new. I fell in love with the honesty of objects, how they thrived or failed based on their own mechanical truth. On rainy days, I would lay out all the pieces on my bedroom floor just to gaze at them. I knew their ridges and grooves intimately.

My screws and wires were my company. In the playground, I fought the girls who whispered behind my back and cold-shouldered the boys who prodded me in the side and sometimes claimed to want to be my friend. When Callum Jenkins slouched over one lunchtime to tell me I was ‘cool for a girl’, I bit his arm until I tasted blood.

As a teenager I became volatile and fierce, snapping at neighbours who asked about my favourite subjects, turning a sullen eye on critical aunts and uncles. I swore loudly at the gaggle of cousins who came to visit. My mother bought me a book: How to Start Conversations and Make Friends. I told her to fuck off.

By the time I was sixteen, I had taught myself how to be Monster.

*

For two days it rains. I take shelter in a bothy, by a gushing stream that threatens to burst its banks. The only wood I can find is rotted through and slimy to the touch, impossible to make a fire from. I spend all day cocooned in my sleeping bag, reliant on the scant protection of four walls and a dripping roof. The flaking plaster is black with mildew and there is a smell of dead rats. In the shut-in dark, it’s too easy to remember the Seed Vault. It’s too easy to think of Erik, wide-eyed and afraid in the pressing underground chamber of the vault. Then the silence, and the world crumbling outside. I close my eyes and focus on the noise of rain.

*

The grass is patchy, the earth wet and cloying. It clings to my boots as I squelch through it, making them heavy with mud. I drop down behind a hill and am confronted by a village. A mean thing – a dozen old stone houses hunkered in a glen. The place still has an air of isolation and hellish winters, and for a while I stand at a distance and just look.

There are no noises except the half-hearted gusting of wind through trees. The village itself is still and huddled as a dead thing. At the furthest edge, a patch of burnt ground like a footprint. If I hold my hand at arm’s length, I can block out the whole sorry lot of it.

I have two days left before I run out of food.

Just once, as a teenager, I caught my mother in my bedroom, her flower-printed back to the door, fingers flicking through the pilfered things in my shoe box, turning them up to the light and putting them unceremoniously back.

That is what entering this village is like. I open doors to the houses and inside them I open cupboards and inside the cupboards I open boxes and tins. At every act of opening, I turn the hidden places up to the light and feel part of myself recoil. Everywhere I look, there are books or photographs or withered house-plants – all the flotsam that once made pieces of a life. If places could move, these would scurry from my entering them like woodlice on an upturned rock.

I try not to look too much, to break down these houses in my mind the way I might break down a machine into its functioning parts, so that I see each building only as a series of potential food stores, so I limit my attention to where supplies might be. I do not know how much I succeed, but I emerge from the last house with half a packet of oats, a tub of lentils, some tins and a box of not-quite luxury chocolates I decant into a bag. My pack is heavy, but my calendar of survival grows a little longer.

I follow a road so rough and potholed it is really no more than a track, skirting the bottom of a hill. A small bridge crosses a brook, and I dip down to fill my water bottles. Two of the tins clink together in my pack as I scramble back up the bank.

A few miles further on, my rutted strip of tarmac arrives at a wider road, with grass verges and a dotted white line along the centre. The signpost points to a town in one direction, a nature reserve in the other. I stop to drink from my water bottle, balancing the possibility of food and shelter against the need for emptiness and open space. I think about what a town might mean – like the village but bigger, an unbearable cavity, cluttered with all the paraphernalia of what my mother might have called ‘normal people’: people who followed the rules, who had families and a community, who stuck so hard to their so-called loved ones they eventually let it kill them.

I think about my parents, like two satellites with incompatible programming, but orbiting on the same trajectory. I try not to think about Erik, his fatal need for human touch. When there is nobody else, it is easier to think about hating people than about wanting them.

In the War and in the Sickness that followed, so many people depended too much on those they cared about. But survival has a cost. It has always had a cost, and the cost is being alone, cutting out friends and family like a cancerous growth and sealing the wound behind them. And if you pay the greatest price, you get to survive the longest – which is why there is only me, and why I must keep walking.

I test the weight of the new supplies on my back, and head away from the town.

*

The ground is icy now. I leave the road and trek across fields. The frozen grass crunches under my boots. All around me, the world is wide and silver, like the painting of winter my parents had in the back bedroom. I walk with my face covered to protect myself from the cold. I can feel it in my toes and the tips of my fingers. Every day I hug my arms around my chest and am thankful for my thermal clothes. At night I light a fire and sleep as close to it as I dare.

When my toes go numb, I stamp the feeling back into them. When my mind starts to wander, when the immense unpeopled emptiness tugs at my thoughts and tries to scatter them, when the wind ruffling the reeds is the sound of Erik’s voice echoing in the Seed Vault – I count my steps. I focus on the rhythm and it almost pulls me back.

*

They used to say survival came in threes, that a person could survive three days without water, three weeks without food, three months without company.

At two months and twenty-one days I stopped counting. I didn’t want to know the moment that loneliness would mature into insanity. I didn’t want to know when I had finally become a madwoman.

Perhaps I am mad now. Perhaps none of this is real, and I’m still trapped in the Seed Vault and this world is all my own construction. I think that only a mind like mine could create such a world. When I look at broken houses baring their pipes and wires and inner workings to the outside world, I think only I could invent such mechanical detail.

When I was a child I did have one friend. Harry Symmonds.

Harry Symmonds built models out of cocktail sticks and cried when other children touched his things. Harry Symmonds, who I smacked on the side of the head one day at school – who decided that a blow to the face was an act of friendship and followed me home.

I made him wait outside on the step until my mother realised and I had to let him in.

‘Take him upstairs and show him your collection,’ she said.

So I did, because I had to. I unfolded all the wires and rawl plugs and pilfered things onto the bedroom carpet and warned him not to touch any of it, and his eyes shone round.

By that time I had started to create my museum in the back half of the garden shed: a motley gathering of old bones from the surrounding fields. Bird and small mammal bones, mostly, scrubbed clean or left sprouting with moss, each one accompanied by a neat little card documenting the date and location of its finding. Once, for two whole weeks, the museum exhibited a dead rat, damp fur and tail still clinging to its bones, until the maggots broke out and it had to be thrown in the bin.

The pride of this collection was the sheep skull: gorgeous and whole and noble, with elegant curling horns like German braids. I showed it to Harry Symmonds and he looked at it for a long time, scuffing up his shoes on the grubby floorboards. I refused to let him touch it.

Harry Symmonds, who took all the meanness I ever threw at him and never threw anything back, who wouldn’t separate himself from me for the next four years, because I smacked or bit any child who came too close, and that protection made it worth braving my battering jibes. By the time we reached secondary school, Harry Symmonds was ignored by everybody, and I had become his hard-shelled beetle with no soft underbelly. Once or twice, some of the boys would call Harry Symmonds my boyfriend and tell me I was pretty, then laugh as they catcalled and pretended to swoon. I spat back. In woodwork, when Robin Fell made a crude joke about nailing, I struck a precise tack through the skin between his thumb and forefinger – and later, Harry Symmonds joined me in insisting Robin had nailed his own hand to the desk by accident.

Harry Symmonds, who I didn’t like or dislike, but tolerated, because I found that thinking was easier when there was someone to talk at. Harry Symmonds, proving even then that survival is easier in pairs.

*

This morning I buried a sparrow. I don’t know what made me do it.

It was outside a once-whitewashed crofter’s cottage at the foot of a mountain. I thought there could be food in the kitchen – instead I found a table set with two tea cups, each one lined with a fuzzy green and white mould. Upstairs, damp curtains blew at an open window, and something lay sprawled in the middle of the bed. As I entered the room, I upset the flurry of crows that had gathered to steal its softer parts. They cawed and scuffled and scratched at me as I barrelled backwards.

Scarf tight over my nose and mouth, I checked the empty kitchen cupboards and left.

As I stepped back onto the road, I crunched something into the tarmac. A sparrow – a small speckled bump on the wet black road, trying vainly to lift its head and chirrup. I bent down to scoop it up. It was soft and firm, like a tennis ball. It quivered in my hands – a bundle of terrified warmth.

At the end of the last century, London lost three-quarters of its sparrows in just six years – one of those facts I read and inexplicably remembered – and nobody really cared. So what difference did another sparrow make?

But it was as if a cloud had stuffed itself into my throat – I struggled to breathe, felt my eyes go sharp. I fell to the road and clutched this ordinary bird to my chest.

Maybe it was because of the broken wing, or the matchstick feet dangling from its juddering stomach. Maybe because this was the first living body I had touched in weeks.

I put it out of its misery with a rock from the edge of the road, then buried it as best I could in a dip by the wall. I didn’t leave a marker – who was there to find it? I carried on walking south.

*

Growing up, I never understood the need for touch, for desire, for other people’s bodies – the way these things gushed into everyday life, unstoppable, till they permeated every layer of people’s existence. On television and on the sides of buses, people kissed or embraced or touched parts of their own skin. In my mother’s magazines, boys strolled along the beach sporting swimming trunks and superhero muscles. The girls posed in skimpy bikinis and pretended not to look at the camera.

When I was thirteen, my mother sent me into town with money for my birthday. I snuck into a clothes shop on the high street, thrilling with trepidation. The halogen lighting and bulging rails seemed to be everywhere, till they were a barrage, pushing in at me on all sides. As a shop assistant in heavy eye make-up sashayed over, I grabbed the first bikini I saw and ducked into the changing rooms, pulling the curtains tight up to the edges to make sure nobody could see in. With my back to the mirror, I changed.

I cannot remember what I wanted. I do not know what I expected to happen, or what part of me had thought this might be a good idea. I only remember looking nothing like the girls in my mother’s magazines.

The top sat flatly over my chest. In magazines, the women always had long hair that cascaded over their shoulders and made everything else look curved and in proportion. My short rough hair made my neck look too long, and there was too much bareness. My skin was pale and mottled. In the shop lighting, it was almost blue, except for my face and arms, which were red from sun and windburn, and made my body look disconnected. The bikini bottom cut into the line around my groin. It made my legs stick out, like those branches that grow too big in the wrong directions and need propping up with wooden stakes to stop the whole tree collapsing. In the gusset, the protective plastic strip was hard and uncomfortable, and crinkled when I moved.

I bought it out of spite. At home, I stuffed it down the gap at the back of my chest of drawers, where it haunted my teenage years like the ghosts of all the women in my mother’s magazines.

At school, some of the boys had started to spend their lunch money on newspapers with pictures of topless girls in them. These pictures would end up stuffed in people’s lockers, or tucked unexpectedly into exercise books, or shoved at you as you walked between classrooms to raucous yells of ‘Tits on your face!’

I hunched over, avoided their eyes. I stopped watching films and I avoided looking at the pictures of models in shop windows. I learned to walk without attracting attention.

*

Open ground has given way to forest. Not the kind of nurturing, ancient treescape found in children’s adventure stories, but a sprawling pine farm, all evenly spaced trunks and a dark floor drowning in needles. I follow a dirt path, just wide enough for a four-by-four, although I doubt a vehicle has driven along here in years. Not since the War hit British soil and the construction industry collapsed along with so many others. Now, this forest is turning wild. Ferns and saplings sprout from the earth, while weeds inch their way through the hardened dust of the path. A fallen tree sprawls across it at an angle, its branches and bare twigs brittle. I clamber over it, then stop a few steps later to pick brown pine needles out of my clothes and the cracks between my boots and socks.

About a mile further along, I come to a clearing. It is not big – only a widening of the path, perhaps once meant as a passing place or to park a single vehicle. But the break in the trees means the air feels fresher, and more light filters through to illuminate the scene below. Which is probably why they chose this spot in the first place.

Three tents are grouped across the path, sagging and torn, their poles bent out of shape. In the shelter of the trees beyond, five rusty camping chairs surround a circle of stones that must once have formed the edge of a fire pit. Out here, away from towns and cities and the ferocity of the War, after the Safe Centres were full and shut their doors, these people must have assumed they had escaped. The Sickness could never reach them here, so far from the dispersing bombs and packed communities that allowed it to spread.

I wonder how long they were here before they realised they were wrong. Was it wildlife that brought it to them? Or did one of the people carry it with them from their old life like a live wire, just waiting to be touched? Or perhaps they managed to outrun the Sickness after all, only to be crippled by starvation.

Five people, sacrificing home comforts in an attempt to survive, but still unwilling to sacrifice each other. Discovering too late that near-isolation and living minimally in the open air was not quite enough to save them.

I hurry through, holding my breath even though I tell myself the Sickness cannot still be here. I do not stop until I am certain there are at least a couple of miles between us. I wonder if this vagabond life will be enough to save me.

My hair has grown long. It brushes my shoulders and catches under the straps of my backpack. It has been months since I owned a hairbrush, and my scalp itches. I could try cutting it, but hair dulls blades and I need my knife to be sharp. Instead, I cut a length of string and tie my hair in a fat clump at the nape of my neck. That will have to do for now.

*

I was eight when I first cut my hair. I stole the kitchen scissors while my mother was on the phone, then locked myself in the bathroom. With the small mirror leant against the bath taps to keep it from falling, I stripped down to my knickers and sat in the empty tub. I cut close to my scalp and the hair tumbled down me and stuck in my creases. I nicked the top of my ear, and blood ran down my neck, flowing freely, the way blood does from the head – but I folded toilet paper across it and continued. I kept cutting steadily, determined not to leave the job half done. I brushed myself off and got dressed, then gathered up the dead hairs into the waste-paper basket.

Only then did I let myself explore my new head. I mapped its contours with my fingertips. It felt cold and shocking to the touch. When I examined myself in the mirror, I saw how my cranium was not round as I had always assumed, but had little bumps and dips like a landscape. For the first time, I thought a part of myself was beautiful.

My mother shrieked when she saw me. Her hand flew to her chest like a startled bird and her breaths came loud. ‘Oh, Monster!’ she wailed. ‘What have you done?’

I ran my hand across my beautiful head.

That night, I sat upstairs with my collection, listening to my parents’ voices oscillating through the floorboards as I tried to get to grips with the mechanics of a circuit board stolen from the school skip.

As I entered the kitchen next morning, my father greeted me with a watery smile as my mother banged down spoons and breakfast bowls on the table. She pursed her lips, but said nothing. She kept her silence as she tidied away the cereal and drove me to school, though her eyes and lips were still narrow.

Of course, the children in my class laughed, but that is because children are idiots. I ignored them and they soon grew bored. They went back to their games and glitter pens, and I sat with Harry Symmonds and folded models out of paper.

*

I think about all the people I ever knew. Every day I remember someone else, as if they’re all buried inside me like books in a library, just waiting for my brain to pick one out. It’s shocking how many people you encounter in a lifetime.

Yesterday, I thought about the woman who ran the roadside café I worked in one summer, whose name I can’t remember. She had a flat high voice like a fork scraping across a plate, and she used to raid the table where the surplus cakes were kept. I can still hear her suck and slurp at her fingers as she pushed broken biscuits into her mouth.

Sometimes, I catch myself thinking about Joe. Joe was the school caretaker. When my mother was going to be late picking me up, or when I didn’t want to spend breaktime outside with the other children, I would sit with Joe in his office and drink strong tea.

It was not what my father would have recognised as an office – there were no banks of computers or overflowing stacks of paper, no yellowing pot plants. Joe’s office was a workshop, a forest of shelves and half-fixed electricals. Tools hung like artworks from the walls, and the only computer was a salvaged Acorn Archimedes he had spent the past twenty years trying to restore. Joe’s jumpers were always stretched in odd places where he had pegged them on the washing line, and tufts of grey hair sprouted from his ears and nose. But he could reassemble a fuse box blindfolded in twenty-three seconds.

When I was a child, first learning to talk, I used to sit on my father’s lap and go through all the names I knew: Mummy, Daddy, Monster, Ganny, Alfie, Joan. I used to say them over and over, demarcating the limits of my little world.

As I got older, my world became so huge that I couldn’t remember everybody even if I tried. My life is full of people and places that I’ve let slip down the back of my brain.

When my head gets so cold my face goes numb, I try to run through all the things I can remember. I try to list them, like descending the rungs of a ladder. Sometimes, as I go deeper, I remember things I’d forgotten even existed.

There was a quotation – I forget who said it, one of those things that flitted about the internet with a black-and-white picture and quirky font – that history is just a set of lies agreed upon. Now nobody needs to agree on anything. Now all of it is mine.

This is what I remember:

I remember that the Normans won the Battle of Hastings in 1066 – though what that means I don’t know, now that there are no more kings, no more place-names, no more dates.

I remember my fifth birthday with a cake that looked like a lion.

I remember that my mother’s birthday was 9 October.

I remember her fingers hovering over the keys of the piano that always needed tuning.

I remember the sounds of a person in the next room – the small eases and beats like a murmuring of the heart.

I remember train stations at rush hour.

I remember how most people lived crowded together, how there was never enough space.

I remember satellites. Sometimes, I remember that they’re still above me, tumbling through orbit, all screws and wires and metal.

I remember planting a time capsule in the school garden, sealing it in a Tupperware box to stop the worms getting in.

I remember Luke Denham, who sat next to me at school and had a birthmark on the bridge of his nose, and whose dad won the village darts competition six years in a row.

I remember Luke Denham wiping his nose on the sleeve of his jumper.

I remember my dad’s caterpillar eyebrows.

I remember faces – how beauty was in the petite and symmetrical, and ugliness was in the unexpected.

I remember Erik’s face, its drawn-out anguish as we waited, the terrible hunger in his eyes. I remember the helpless desperation of him.

This is always where I try to stop remembering.

*

Sometimes I think I’m being watched. If I sleep badly, I wake to a feeling like a hand grabbing my shoulder and the urge to turn and look. I spend the whole day thinking of eyes – countless unblinking eyes, following my progress along footpaths or staring from the hedgerows. They press me under their gaze like the ghosts of all the people who died in the War and the Sickness, like the ghosts of my parents, or blue-eyed Erik. I have never believed in spirits or an afterlife, but still they swirl around me like a current, dragging at me as if my survival was somehow a betrayal. At night I dream about the vault.

*

The Seed Vault is a metal and concrete blade jutting from the permafrost. Look at it too long and your eyes start flickering from the snow-glare and the sun on mirrored steel. The first time I saw it, I thought it looked like the perfect piece of that icy world, like the final bit of a jigsaw puzzle that suddenly reveals what the picture is supposed to be.

Inside is different. Through the heavy doors, all the elegance of the landscape is gone, and the mechanical insides of the structure are on display. Here is a grey and white world of pipes and covered wires, concrete and corrugated metal, and a long cold tunnel that leads to the vault.

When I was a child, I always thought of vaults as exotic places, secret stashes, stacked with glimmering treasures like Tutankhamen’s tomb. Places just waiting to be broken into.

The Seed Vault is not a treasure trove. Instead, it looks more like a warehouse: metal racks stacked with hundreds of uniform black plastic boxes. It is a place of order and purpose. A place where time has no jurisdiction, where everything is suspended. It is a place for waiting out the end of the world.

I was posted to the Seed Vault two years before the Last Fall, when the dying population still believed the Sickness could have a cure, before the Safe Centres shut their gates and left anyone outside them to die. When the vault was still a scientific exercise and not a military target, when people still thought the future might be a thing worth striving for.

When I first got off the plane, the air was sharp and biting. Despite the summer Arctic sunshine, already I could feel it scouring my ungloved fingers. I hesitated at the top of the stairs, taking in this stone and concrete world.

Waiting just inside the terminal building was a blond man holding a homemade cardboard placard which just said: MEKANIKER.

That was me. The woman brought in to fix things.

I walked over to him and held out my hand: ‘Monster.’

‘What?’ His accent was sharp, like an ice shard. He had blue eyes and skin pale as the walls.

‘Monster,’ I repeated, ‘my name’s Monster.’

‘Monster? What, like a monster?’

‘Yes. You?’

‘Oh.’ He tucked the placard under his arm and shook my hand. ‘Oh, OK. I’m Erik.’

‘Erik.’

‘Biologist,’ he said, ‘up at the vault.’

The vault. I learned later that Erik did not believe in God or religion or spirituality, but the way he spoke about the Seed Vault was as if he had found a higher purpose through which to orientate his own life. He was devoted to it. Cataloguing its contents was his rosary. Putting out calls for unrepresented species of plant-life was his version of prayer, and the Seed Vault itself was his church.

*

It used to be said that walking was good for the soul, that tramping for miles and miles created a rhythm in the body that opened the mind to the unconscious and all sorts of crap.

I have seen too many dead people to believe in a soul. Walking is only good for one thing, and that is survival. One blistered foot in front of the other. Getting through the day one step at a time.

I wake, I eat, sometimes I wash, I pack up my sleeping bag, warm my hands by the dying fire, bandage my feet, lace up my boots, put on my pack and start walking. I walk until my feet are hurting too much for me to ignore. I sit, take off my boots, rest a while, rebandage my feet, lace my boots back up and keep on walking. I avoid the towns, most of them whole and eerily empty, where the Sickness spread through them like a purging fire, leaving only buildings and possessions in its wake. On the outskirts, there is always a patch of blackened earth, marking the bonfires for burning the dead.

A couple of times, I pass towns blown apart by bombs. They hunch against the landscape like unattempted jigsaw puzzles. Here and there, a single street or row of shops is still standing. I avoid these too. When the War constricted everything, the places that survived became prime targets for looting. The people that survived with them became the worst versions of themselves, struggling against their own inevitable collapse.

I stick to scavenging from the smallest villages. Even then, I leave as quickly as I can, and always before dark.

When the light starts to fade, I hunt for shelter, build a fire with whatever I can find, eat whatever I have or can easily get, take off my boots, bury myself in my sleeping bag, and sleep. My dreams are filled with walking. They have a rhythm to them, now, a one-two-one-two circular flow.

*

Here is what I learn about walking:

Walking, like running, is about finding a pace. Stride out too quickly and you soon tire and become disheartened. Stroll too slowly and the journey can sit heavy in the bowl of your stomach.

It is not passing across a landscape. Instead, it is feeling the landscape pass under you, as if the pushing of your feet into the ground turns the Earth further away from you, like balancing on a giant ball.

You do not walk with your feet. You walk with your boots. Bad boots make the walking harder.

When you walk, you notice the details. You notice the colours and shapes and precise movements of everything around you, from blades of grass to birds to creatures scurrying through the undergrowth. It is a way of becoming intimate with the landscape.

Walking on flat roads is too easy. It lets you think too much.

Walking over uneven rocky ground is a way to escape from the mind.

Wet shoes weigh you down.

Walking on a full stomach is like a sickness.

Walking on an empty stomach is worse.

Footsteps do not only make a noise at the point where your boots hit the tarmac. They also sound in your head. They echo like an organ note in a cathedral.

Even when your body sweats, the ends of your fingers are still cold.

Feet can be hot and cold at the same time.

Walking on broken skin is a reminder of everything that is wrong with the world. With every step, I can picture news footage from the War – the screen wobble as a shockwave rushed towards the camera, the aftermath of Sickness-filled explosives filmed on shaking mobile phones, people on the pavements with empty eyes and a blue tinge spreading from their lips, the slackened jaws and flat expressions that it could happen here, in this county, in suburbs and villages, on high streets filled with shops. With every thought of the Sickness, I remember another person dead. At the ends of the worst nights, I wake shivering.

Every day that I walk, it becomes easier and harder to set off.

*

My mother and father lived in a middle-sized house next to the church in a middle-sized village surrounded by fields. It was farm country, or had been thirty years ago, but my parents were not farm people.

My mother worked at the village shop part-time on weekday afternoons. She brought my father spare copies of the Racing Post, and he would sit long evenings in his easy chair, analysing the odds, working out which horse should win and whether it favoured this or that kind of ground, and what would be the most effective bet. He never actually bet any money as far as I know.

By day he was an accountant. He worked in town in a small upstairs office with no heating, and on winter evenings he would earn us a little extra money doing tax returns for the few farmers that the village had left. ‘Treat pennies,’ he called it. As soon as the autumn nights drew in, farmers or their wives would start to appear at our door, bearing carrier bags of receipts and bank statements bundled together with twine. My father would scatter these across the kitchen table as he scanned them for some kind of order, until my mother flipped and banished him and the mess to the spare room.

By the time the pale spring nights returned, the papers had gone from the house, and my father was back to his racing calculations. As for me, I was already counting the days until the long school holiday, when I could get up each morning to scour the fields, or tinker with my collection. I would do this all through the summer, filling my days with creation and invention, until one day autumn would arrive, and I would be forced to pack up my bag, put on my clean uniform and return to school.

This was the rhythm of our lives, marked by afternoons in the shop and the closing down and opening up again of the seasons.

As I got older, our rhythms changed – but only on the surface. Underneath, we still turned on the same rotation.

As the War diminished imports and drove the currency down, my mother’s hours in the shop were cut, sliced away so thinly that at first it was barely noticeable, until one day she wasn’t working there at all. Instead, she would clean the house daily, scrubbing at the skirting boards, uprooting the plates and bowls and baking trays to detox the insides of cupboards, using homemade cleaning fluids that made the whole house smell of vinegar. When she had finished, she would draw up lists of home improvements for my father to do when he staggered in from work – tasks he ignored or passed on to me. I shrugged them off. As my peers threw themselves into rumours and parties and each other, I threw myself more and more into my collection. From simply tinkering with the breaking apart and reconstituting of objects, my explorations started to gain direction. I borrowed books from the school library and spent my lunchtimes scouring the internet. I became obsessed with the ways things worked, building and rebuilding machines that fit together as precisely as the days I built them in. In this way, I made certain my routine stayed rigid, so there would be no room in it for anyone else. It was easier, I told myself. I didn’t want friends anyway. I used my well-honed skills of maintenance and systematic research to look for a way to move out.

Sometimes on long nights, it is so easy to imagine my father still in the blue and yellow kitchen, surrounded by receipts for animal feed and tractor parts, and my mother fretting at him, the whole village shut tight and warm in their own little dramas in their own little rooms.

*

The ground here is rock-strewn and tussocky. My shadow stretches across it like a fractured version of myself, and I have to tread slowly to avoid ankle-grabbing dips and burrows. I’ve been walking under trees for most of the day, the sun’s position obscured by branches and new leaves so that I only have a vague notion of where I am and in which direction I am walking. I am following a path which occasionally thins and peters out, only to emerge again a few metres later. It might not be a path at all. I follow it all the same.

To my left is a low wall, barely more than a pile of stones and so thick with moss that in places it almost disappears. As I walk, I come across another wall, and another, this one taller, the next one more intact. The path solidifies, then widens into a dirt road.

I stop in the middle of a small village, a half-standing collection of stones. In the last of the afternoon light, it looks golden and soft, the kind of sequestered beauty that has no right to exist any more.

The ruins here are old, abandoned centuries before the War made ghost towns so commonplace. None of the buildings have roofs, their windows open cavities with shrubs and ivy creeping through them. In one building, a bird’s nest sits in a crook of stone. In another, a tree is rooted in the compact earth of a hearth. All of it is draped in moss or sprouting ferns.

The most complete house is a low bungalow on the edge of the village – a rectangular structure with just one window and a prickly bush part-blocking the doorway. I squeeze inside and am in a green world. The floor in here is mossy, but dry. I am as closed off from wildlife as I am likely to be tonight.

Later, with the drawstring of my sleeping bag pulled tight, I wonder what made the people of this village move away. I had forgotten there were people who uprooted themselves for reasons other than Sickness and War, people who did not move simply because a government told them they had to. People like me.

I try to picture those people loading the last of their possessions onto carts or horses, taking one final look around their bare rooms – how unsettling a place looks when stripped of all its furniture. I try to work out at what point a building stops being a home. Is it at this moment, when all private things are taken away and it reverts to its blank impersonal state? Or is it when you walk down the road laden with all your possessions, and the house at your back? Or is it always a home, even through its many stages of decay?

I think about my mother sitting in the kitchen, flicking through a magazine and licking her fingers to turn the pages. Of the places I have lived, that is the only one I have called home.

Maybe there is no such thing, only walls and a roof, a place secure enough to allow sleep. But how can I keep going if there is nowhere I am going to? How can I grow again without any roots? I close my eyes on the soft earth, and try not to imagine that I’m in my bedroom in my parents’ house.

When I leave the next morning, I follow the dirt road out of the village. It quickly disintegrates into an overgrown track. Then a narrow path, fringed with vegetation. Then nothing.

*

As I hunker against a hedge at the roadside, hinging the lid from a tin of cubed vegetables, I realise how little I used to think about food. Eating was a task to be accomplished while I focused my attention on other things. The vitality of it was always lost. Now, as the watery carrots slide down my throat, I try to remember the taste of other food. Nothing elaborate – just the soft white and salt of a ham sandwich, the tang of fresh pineapple, or the chunky joints of beef my mother sometimes roasted on Sundays, filling the whole house with their thick, fatty smell. I try, but the memories slip away, leaving my mouth dry and tasting overwhelmingly of my own stale breath.

*

My mother used to bake gingerbread men for Christmas – little golden-brown figures that broke softly. Once, when I was young, she let me help, and I laid out my own irregular shapes on the tray. I made her leave mine in the oven longest, so they baked hard and dark, and broke with a snap. I liked their unforgiving crunch, the way they attracted my mother’s frowns. I think of this and wonder if I was meant to be the last. Then I remember there is no such thing as fate, because there is nobody in control.

*

I was nine or ten – that awkward age of feeling too big for everything, but independence still a long way off. It must have been the summer holidays, because I was sitting in the high grass in the field behind the house, letting the sun burn the back of my neck. I remember wearing a sun cap. There was a shadow on my face and a band of sweat trapped between the fabric and my scalp. If I sat up, I could see into my back garden – the vegetable patch and the canes snaked with runner beans. I could see the washing, limp and sagging from the line, and my mother standing at the kitchen window. But if I hunched, I could let the grass rise above me until I felt as though I was invisible. The blades were sharp against my bare calves, and insects gathered faster than I could brush them away. But it was worth it for the quiet, for the sense of isolation, and for my discovery.

My discovery was a mouse. At least, I thought it was a mouse, but it was difficult to be certain. It was all bones, stripped bare, but still in the position it had died in, curled and complete and perfect. The tiny skull. A ribcage more like fishbones. Tail bones stacked end to end like elongated vertebrae, but in miniature.

I traced its shape, letting my fingertip hover just above it, fearful in case my touch might be too strong and I might break it. For a long time I looked at it, trying to absorb its complex structure, to understand the mechanics of its biology. I was so engrossed in this exquisite arrangement of bones, I didn’t hear the other children until it was too late.

‘Hey! Monster!’

Something small and dry hit my arm and fell into the grass beside me. I looked up. Three boys were standing a few metres away, up to their knees in the grass and laughing. Callum Jenkins, Liam Harper, and a lanky boy I didn’t know.

‘Freak.’ Callum Jenkins bent to scoop up a handful of dry sheep muck and lobbed it in my direction. It showered dustily around me and I covered the mouse skeleton with my hand.

The boy I didn’t know laughed. It was high and grating, and seemed too loud in the still summer day.

‘What you wearing that cap for?’ asked Callum Jenkins. ‘Hiding your stupid hair?’

Because it’s sunny, you idiot.

I thought about leaving. I remember being so sorely tempted to get up, to give them the finger and stride away down the field towards home. I wanted to shut the door on them. But then I would have had to leave the mouse, and with the grass this overgrown, I knew I would never find it again.

‘Is she bald?’ asked the boy I didn’t know.

Callum Jenkins lobbed another round of sheep muck. ‘Basically.’

‘Nah,’ said Liam Harper, ‘she’s just a freak.’

I tried to ignore them. I focused on my mouse, how its tail curled back in on itself so its body formed an almost perfect oval, except for the head, which stuck forward as if it had wanted to get one last glimpse of the world, or as if it had been looking for a rescuer. The boys’ laughter was loud and spiralling. I tried to tune out their jeers, but they bored into me, deeper and deeper into my brain, and I could not shut them out.

The mouse, I thought, the mouse, the mouse, the mouse . . .

My hands shook. I could see, where my right hand extended over the beautiful skeleton, a tremor that travelled through my wrists, back along my arm and into my chest, till my whole body was shaking and I couldn’t make it stop.

And then, in the midst of it all, my mother.

She strode up the field, tramping down the grass in her wellies, her long skirt catching in her wake. She looked out of place here, in what I thought of as my domain, as if someone had taken an ornament from the mantelpiece and placed it on top of a mountain. But her face was pulled tight with a fierceness I had never seen before, and for the first time there was something broad and unwieldy about her. As she flattened the grass, I thought of a lorry veering across a motorway, crashing through the central reservation and levelling the traffic on the other side.

The boys saw her coming and made to scarper, but my mother was an unstoppable torrent, and she would not relinquish them so easily.

‘Oh no you don’t. Liam Harper and Callum Jenkins, you get back here right now.’

From my hollow I watched them turn, all their gleeful bigness gone, till they were only three pitiful boys, squirming under my mother’s glare.

‘And you,’ she said to the third boy, ‘I don’t know you.’

The boy turned red and stuffed his hands deeper in his pockets. He shuffled.

‘Well?’

‘He’s my cousin,’ Liam Harper said, not looking my mother in the eye.

She folded her arms across her chest, her shoulders heaving. ‘Well, let me make this very clear to the three of you. If I ever catch you being mean to my daughter again, I’m going to grab each of you by the ear, and I’m going to twist it till you can’t even hear yourselves crying – is that understood?’

The boys looked at their feet. I sat with my head barely over the grass, watching my mother’s face – the power and anger I had never seen in it before, the way it flared up when she said ‘my daughter’. My daughter. Like my collection, or the way I had thought earlier about my mouse, as a thing to be cherished and protected.

‘I said, is that understood?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not allowed to hurt us . . .’

My mother blazed like a rocket flare. ‘Talk back to me again, Callum, and I’ll make sure nobody in the shop sells you sweets for a year, you little shit.’

My mother’s swearing thrilled through me. It was as though someone had opened a treasure chest, and for a second I got to glimpse the glittering jewel inside.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’m going to go inside and phone your mothers. I think they’d like to know what you’ve been getting up to, don’t you? And I think it’d be a good idea if you were home and ready to explain yourselves by the time they’ve hung up.’

The boys teetered, fidgeting.

‘Go on!’

And suddenly they were gone, back across the field towards the stile and the lane, fleeing to escape the boundaries of my mother’s rage.

My mother was still there, larger than herself, and suddenly all mine. She turned towards me and something in her shifted. The rage diminished. She was not any smaller in that big field, but she was somehow softer, stiller, so that for the first time I could remember I wondered what it would feel like to hug her, the way other children hugged their parents when they were picked up from school. Instead I sat and watched her walking towards me.

An arm’s reach away, she crouched, bringing her eyes to my level. ‘Are you OK?’

I shrugged.

I was fine. I was better than fine.

I said nothing.

‘What were you doing out here anyway?’

I pulled away my hand to show her my mouse, but I must have knocked it in all the distraction, because its tail bones no longer aligned and it was no longer quite as beautiful.

My mother made a choked sound and stood up, pushing herself back from it.

‘It’s my mouse,’ I said. I tried to nudge the bones back into place with my little finger, to recreate that undisturbed oval.

‘Don’t touch it!’

I looked up. My mother looked as though she wanted to snatch the words back into her mouth. Instead, she glanced in the direction of the stile and the retreating boys, then frowned back at me. And there she was again. My mother, petite and disapproving, exactly as I expected her to be.

‘I’ve left the dishes in the sink.’ She turned to leave, then half turned back to me. ‘I’m just in the kitchen. If you need me.’

She hovered a moment, as though there was more to be said, but neither of us could think of anything. So I watched her walk away, an ungainly shuffle as she tried to stop her skirt from catching in the grass. I watched her go through the back gate and in the door, till I could see her again through the kitchen window, standing at the sink.

I sat there for the rest of the afternoon, till my legs itched from the grass and the bug life, and a rash had broken out along my calf. I coaxed the mouse skeleton painstakingly back into shape. And I watched my fierce and startling mother pottering around the kitchen.

*

My parents died in the Sickness. My mother first, my father twelve days later. He always was a little bit hopeless without her.

I didn’t visit. At the time, the Sickness hadn’t yet reached where I was living, and I wouldn’t be the one to help it spread. Instead, I moved out of the city, rented a ramshackle house that was really more of a shed at the edge of an out-of-the-way village. Told myself it was right. My parents would want me to isolate myself.

I read their emails – frequent at first, full of optimism and denial, then growing briefer and more sporadic. I didn’t reply.

Two weeks after the final one, I had an email from a neighbour telling me they were dead. Her own son had caught the Sickness too, she said. It had emptied the village, everyone already dead or dying, or doomed by proximity.

I closed the window on one of the last emails I ever received. Two weeks later, the servers crashed, sending what little infrastructure remained skittering like a deck of cards. In its place, information became a rare bird. The Safe Centres and military hubs shared news via what was left of the internet, leaving everybody else to root out dusty wind-up radios and spend fruitless nights searching for something to tune in to. By that time, I had got the job at the Seed Vault. Two years later, everyone was dead.

*

I am close now. Even with the fields overgrown or rotting and walls and buildings turned to rubble, I can still recognise bits of the place, like a familiar picture seen through wavy glass.

I pull myself to the top of the hill behind my parents’ house. My calves are tight from the climb and under my layers I can feel my T-shirt sticking to my back. The sky is the same ambiguous grey it has been for days, the air cold and thirsty. In the distance, the familiar mountain range blurs into the clouds.

The drystone walls that divide the fields are mostly intact, grey mossy ribbons segmenting the landscape the way they have for hundreds of years. Here and there a section has crumbled. I remember seeing them like this at the end of winter: lengths of wall reduced to a tumbled pile of stone, where the water had got in and frozen.

Sometimes at the local summer fair, there would be a waller demonstrating his trade. He would set up his markers in the middle of a field, two pairs of wooden posts, each with a string running between them. Then he would build the wall up, starting with the big solid rocks at the bottom, using the string as a guide to keep the wall from bulging. He would turn the rocks in his rough hands, checking their size and edges, selecting just the right one for the space it had to occupy. He would leave the flat round ones for the top, standing them up on their sides to crown the wall, like a parade of soldiers puffing out their chests.

I used to love the fair. It was an annual tradition – one of the few my family had, alongside afternoon tea for my mother’s birthday and church on Christmas Day. One morning in August, my mother would assemble a picnic, pack my father and me towards the car, and we would drive the busy road to the fair.

It was held in a big field on the edge of town. It was not a city fair, the kind with ferris wheels and dodgems and candy-floss. Ours was a country fair, an agricultural fair. It was the time of year when everyone – even the non-farm people in their spit-clean wellies – gathered to remember the area’s past and to celebrate what remained of its industry.

There were no fairground rides, just a bouncy castle that came every year with a man from the next town – but it was only something to occupy the children while the real business of the day took place. This was the exhibition and judging of animals. Mostly that meant dogs and sheep, but sometimes also a coveted prize bull.

After he had parked up in the neighbouring field, my father would head straight for the judging ring, where he would sit for most of the day, making notes on the quality of the animals and the judges’ decisions. He understood the slight distinctions of dogs and of livestock, the stance and colour and distribution of weight that made one animal more worthy of accolades than another. As for me, I would look at the ring of stubbly old men and quivering terriers, and think they all looked the same, animals and owners alike.

My mother, like me, had no interest in livestock. She would make her way to the marquee, where flower displays and vegetables and sponges had undergone their own eagle-eyed judging process. If my mother had won a prize, which only happened two or three times that I can remember, my father and I would be dragged to the tent to admire her achievement in loud, carrying voices. Otherwise, she would spend around an hour studying the exhibits, before bustling across to the tea tent, where she would inevitably find a group of women she knew.

With a parting gift of five pounds in my pocket, I was left free to wander. I rarely spent the money – even when I was small, I had no interest in the bouncy castle or the face-painting. Instead I would watch the drystone waller giving his demonstrations. His name was Ted. Over the years, as the world grew more complicated and the War circled ever nearer, Ted was an unerring constant. I suppose he became a friend of sorts.

‘Morning, Monster,’ he would say when I arrived by his plot, ‘you’re here early.’ He said this every year, and every year it was true.

I would watch him set up and lay the first few stones, then I would wander off to check the other exhibits: the chugging vintage tractors, the man who could carve animals out of tree trunks, and the stick-dressing competition, where old men exhibited their carved walking sticks and shepherds’ crooks. Every now and then, I would circle back around to check on Ted and his progress with the wall. Sometimes he would even let me put one of the crowning stones on the top.

I wonder what happened to Ted. I wonder whether he built any of these walls above the village. I take off my backpack and clamber across one, dislodging a couple of stones as I do. They tumble loudly as everything shifts under me. I consider putting them back, but what would be the point? There is no livestock left to segregate, no claims to be made on arbitrary squares of land. Just bigness, spreading out in all directions. If I had time, I could demolish every single one of these walls. It would make no difference to anything.

*

My parents’ house sits squat and grey at the bottom of the hill. The whole village looks as I remember it. For all I know, my parents could be in the house still, waiting for somebody to burn or bury them. A lot of Sickness victims were left like that, everyone around them too afraid or too ill to do what needed to be done. For a moment, I almost turn back – but then I see the charred circle of earth at the edge of the village, and all the hair follicles on my head prickle.

I pull my pack higher on my shoulders. I stride down the hill.

When I reach the little road that runs through the village, the signs of neglect push themselves forward like boisterous children. Unmown grass along the verges. A broken window at a neighbour’s house. Untended flower beds that were once kept so prim and proper.

The gate to my parents’ garden is stiff on its hinges. I consider oiling it, just to feel the rightness of it opening smoothly under my hand, but that would be stupid. I’m not planning on staying.

The front door opens more easily. I had expected it to be locked, but of course there was nobody to lock it.

Inside, the hallway is dark and grey, and there is a smell of damp. It rests at the back of my throat and festers.

I check the downstairs first. It’s strange, walking through these old rooms, exactly the way I remember them, down to my mother’s china ornaments on the mantelpiece and my father’s cluttered papers. Like I’m observing my childhood through someone else’s eyes.

I search the kitchen, but the cupboards are empty, raided by our neighbours once my parents were dead, the way it was everywhere once quarantine was enforced. I check the secret cupboard at the back of my father’s desk, the one that only opens when you pop a slat of wood from its notch. As a child, I thought this was a hiding place worthy of an adventure novel; as an adult it just looks obvious. I pop out the piece of wood and the cupboard creaks open.

Inside are two envelopes, one big, one small.

The big one contains documents: the deed to the house, birth certificates, and my parents’ wills. I cast them aside and open the smaller envelope.

Stuffed inside it is more money than I’ve ever held in my life. There must be six or seven thousand pounds in twenty- pound notes, crammed inside this little envelope.

I run my thumb across their edges. They make a soft burring sound as I flip through them. My parents’ rainy-day fund. I never knew they kept so much cash in the house.

I have an urge to take it with me. Even now, this amount of money inspires a kind of awe. I can’t seem to put it down. It sits in my hand as I hover between staying and leaving, crouched on the patterned carpet in front of my father’s old desk. It’s a kind of power, tying me to this spot. The things this money can buy . . .

Could buy.

I look at the fat wad of notes in my hand and force myself to see a stack of useless coloured paper. I stuff both envelopes back in the secret cupboard. Out of habit, I close it up again.

I start upstairs, the musty smell still latched onto the walls of my throat. Even though I’m climbing, there’s a feeling of going deeper into the house.

I check the bathroom and the spare bedroom. Nothing but a few dead moths on the windowsill. When I can put it off no longer, I open the door to my parents’ bedroom.

There’s a lump in the bed.

I cover my eyes with my hand and force myself to count to ten. I feel foolish, like a child playing hide-and-seek with nobody to search for. I open my eyes.

Nothing. Just the bundled duvet and a couple of pillows. I take deep breaths and scan the room. Nothing to show that this was the room my parents sickened and grew weak and died in. Nothing but a smell of damp and empty house.

I step back along the landing into my old bedroom.

The walls are still the same garish green I chose when I was twelve because I knew it would upset my mother’s muted tastes. On top of the chest of drawers is a wooden automaton of a man riding a bicycle, which Harry Symmonds gave me for my birthday and which I used to like to take apart and put back together again.

The unmade bed is piled with cardboard boxes: all the books and tools and instruction manuals I wouldn’t let my parents throw away after I moved out. The brown parcel tape is cracked and flaking. On one of them there’s a half-dead fly buzzing on its back.

I catch sight of myself in the mirror beside my bedroom door. I look thin. Where before my face was a globe lit by the sun, now it is all squares and triangles, where all the weeks of walking and not enough to eat have carved me into the narrowest version of myself. My limbs are too long for my reflection – tough and gangly like the branches of an old tree, so that my movements look forced and unreliable. The dusty film across the mirror makes my face dead and grey. It is the face of a woman in her forties, not one in her late twenties.

I reach under the bed, into the dust and carpet fluff, and pull out the shoe box.

I sit with it unopened in my lap, holding all its memories of childhood and weekends, of the pestering of raindrops on the window, of long hours building complex circuits like race-tracks, of Harry Symmonds hovering, desperate to touch. I hold these past days close to me, too afraid to open the box and let them out.

I do not know how long I sit like that, in the room where I grew into my adult self, not even daring to open a tatty fucking shoe box. I only remember about time and lateness when the wind picks up in the trees in the back garden.

I do not want to spend the night in my dead parents’ house. Through all the days of walking here, home sparked within me like something electric, drawing me on. Now it is an emptiness, a house without a purpose. My parents are gone. I do not need to be here any more. I pick up the shoe box and shoulder my pack, and leave before it gets dark. I oil the gate on my way out.

*

I am halfway down the road when I hear them behind me: a low growl and a padding of paws on the tarmac. It takes a moment to place the sound, but when I do it sinks into me as if I had always expected to hear it. As if it had been waiting for me to dare to come home. If I had been the sort of person who placed some kind of value on proximity to other people, who gravitated towards family in their hour of need, if I had been the sort of person who cared, then this village is where I would have died. I should have known it would not let me leave so easily.

There are three of them, old farm dogs slinking low across the ground.

Farm dogs are always tough, bred for work on the unforgiving fells, but these three are something more. Shaped out of need and a fierce holding-on, they are more wolf than dog now. Like me, these three are survivors.

They prowl towards me in formation, eyes fixed, growls rumbling deep in their throats. The leader pulls back his lip in a snarl and the others follow him. I resist the urge to run, to let them give chase. I imagine those wet yellow teeth in my leg. I clutch the shoe box to my chest and plant my feet on the tarmac, claiming my territory.

I bare my own teeth.

The dogs keep coming.

I start to growl, a deep feral humming at the back of my throat. For a second, they pause, and I growl louder.

The leader steps out with one hesitant paw, and I lurch forward, spare arm whirling, a sudden explosion of movement and noise: ‘Fuck off, you bastard little shits, fuck off!’

There’s barking – the noise is everywhere. The dogs split and scatter and I try to keep my eyes on the leader, on his jaw snapping at my calves. I try to kick out but he’s a quick dancer, and suddenly there’s no noise, just a kind of wind tunnel in my head and one thought – Be bold, be bold, be bold . . . So I yell, ‘I am bold!’ and as I yell there’s a pain in my left calf like a nail gun and a sudden weight, and a bitch with her teeth stuck through my trousers, and everything spins. My scream cuts the air and I smash the shoe box on her head with my whole body-weight behind it.

The bitch lets go. I can still feel the tooth-grip, but she cowers and slinks and she is on me and not on me, beaten and not beaten. The other mutts continue to growl and snap and I kick out. There’s a sick crack as my foot connects with the leader’s snout. He whimpers and backs away, making small noises like a broken child.

The others stop snapping. They look to their wounded leader. Everything hangs in the air. Then they follow him, low to the road, and away, away.

I’m breathing hard. My back and underarms are soaked with sweat, my T-shirt stuck to my skin. I become aware of my heart, the undimmable batter of it. I become aware of my veins and capillaries, the blood’s flood-rush through them. I become aware of every part of me that is alive – and then I become aware of what is broken.

I put my hand to the wound and it comes away wet with my own blood and the dog’s saliva. I take a step. The injured leg shakes, sends spasms rippling up through the rest of me, then gives. My body crumples and I hit the tarmac.

I do not know how long I lie there. Five seconds. Maybe ten. It feels longer.

I let the hurt run through me, testing this new pain, chalking it up alongside the blisters and the sores from my backpack straps and the deep cramps in my stomach and thighs. I stare at the million grits surfacing the road, and I build my injured leg into the rest of me.

Slowly, thinking through every movement, I stand. I test the weight of myself. The leg shakes a moment, then is still. I take two deep breaths and look around. The dogs are gone. I check the shoe box. The corners are scuffed and battered, and along one side where it hit the bitch’s skull there is a cave I have to push back into place. The brown tape I once shut it with is barely holding, but the elastic bands are still intact. It isn’t broken. Nothing is lost.

I step out. I force myself to continue as though nothing happened, as though the dog pack is still watching, as though my whole body isn’t pounding. Hugging the shoe box to my chest, I follow the road. It rises steeply out of the village, its broad curves cutting across the fell where once I used to search for bones, or for tufts of wool caught on the stiff brown reeds. The wind through them makes a sound like a river in flood, and the sky has turned a thunderous lead. When I turn to look back, there is only the grey village and a thin strip of light between clouds and horizon.

At the top of the hill, the road forks. To the west, it dips into the next valley, where the military once guarded a hydroelectric plant, before it was bombed with the dispersing Sickness that spread and killed my parents. I cannot go there, just as I cannot stay here, with the village so keen to grab me in its jaws and add me to its horde of dead.

But I have to go somewhere. I have to find shelter far enough away that I can rest.

I head east, away from the dogs and the village, away from the sliver of light at the edge of everything, and into the vast dark sky.

*

The evening comes cold and blue. In the musty interior of an empty barn, I root in my bag for bandages. I ease off my boots and trousers.

My leg is a bluish white. There’s a raised purple circle on the side of my calf, and around it, a collection of deep red puncture marks, crusty and already secreting that clear liquid that means they’re healing. The skin is unnaturally shiny, filmed with a dried reddish smear. I use the smallest amount of water possible to clean it. When I wrap the bandages around, it stings.

I eat two digestive biscuits then climb into my sleeping bag in the flatbed of an abandoned truck. In the drive to reach my parents’ house, I forgot to look for food. My rations are thin.

I try to think about my parents, try to remember the way they filled the house. I try to picture my father taking off his glasses to rub tired eyes, or my mother perched on the edge of the sofa rubbing cream into her hands. I try to picture their faces, smiling or cross or indifferent – but every time I try, my mind goes blank. I wonder if I should have brought a photo with me from the house, but it is too late now.

For a long time, I lie awake with my leg throbbing, listening to my stomach complaining.

*

In the flatbed of an abandoned truck, I wake to a crushing dark and a rich hot pain in my leg like a welding torch. My face in contact with the air is cold, but the heat from my leg pushes through me till it fills my head and I think my skull is going to break apart. I lean over the side of the truck and vomit up the meagre contents of my stomach. It comes up thin and stinking.

I roll away and try to sleep again.

Dawn comes shyly. I get up as soon as it is light enough to see.

My leg is infected. The flesh is purple and huge, and the bite-marks themselves have turned deep red, ringed with yellow. Something thick and white oozes from them. With my last dribble of water, I wash them gently with the tips of two fingers, and the pain shoots up to my head and I have to force myself not to be sick again. I think of all the cuts and grazes I have given myself over the years, how liberally I rubbed in antiseptic. I eat another digestive biscuit and pack my things back into my bag. Somewhere, waiting for me to discover it, there is food. I tell myself there must be food.

*

I walk for three days. I try not to count them, but they tally themselves up on the wall of my brain and I cannot help myself. I measure distances in days now, each one shakier and smaller than the last. I am three days away from the abandoned truck, four days from the room my parents died in. Four days away from the dog pack. Surely that is enough?

I walk along narrow country lanes, their unkempt verges nodding towards one another and almost meeting in the middle. I skirt the edge of a blasted town, a charred maze of half-toppled walls and unnecessary possessions. A few hours later, I start to climb. The rise is steady at first, then gradually steeper, till I’m hauling myself up the slope and my pack is a dead weight trying to tug me back down. I do not know where I am going any more, but as I climb, the air becomes purer, brisker. I suppose this is a sort of ascension.

I fill my bottles whenever I find water: tannin-dark streams chattering downhill, a rain barrel, the clear top half of a silted animal trough. Once, when my reserves are low, I manage to squeeze a few precious drops from the moss clinging to an old wall. The drops are cloudy and bitter-tasting, and I am not sure if the effort is worth it. I toe the scattered green clumps into a pile then continue walking.

I can feel my steps growing scanter as my body grows lighter. I find no food, except the flat tan discs of mushrooms growing from the black bark of a tree. I stare at them for a long time.

I break a segment off one. The inside is white and fresh and smells of earth, and I touch my cracked lips to it. But I know nothing about which fungi might be safe to eat, so I drop it. For good measure, I kick them. They offer no resistance to my boots, so I kick the mushrooms over and over, till big flakes of their flesh litter the grass. Then I turn my back on them.

*

I am not sure in which direction I have been walking. I am not sure if I have been walking in just one direction, or in many. My stomach has stopped making noises. Now it is only a pain like a clenched fist, and a ceaseless searching.

*

Night is approaching. I can feel it coming on the way animals can sense a storm.

I’ve walked too far again today. My stomach is light with lack of food. Somehow, my pack feels heavier.

My pace has slowed to a funeral march along the rocky path. The pain in my leg is sharper. The throbbing is up to my thigh now, and what I need is medicine. My water bottles are both empty. My throat is dry and my tongue feels too big for my mouth. Already I am finding it hard to swallow.

The grass and heather are thick on either side and the moorland stretches away into nothingness in all directions. The sky up here is endless – a great grey dome, too pale for rain, too impenetrable for sun. Somewhere beyond it all, night is falling. As the grey dome darkens, the sky feels as though it’s contracting, squeezing everything beneath it into a tighter, blacker space, till even the air feels thick and heavy. Still the only sounds are my laboured footsteps, my own irregular breathing.

The straps of my backpack feel as if they’re branding my shoulders. My feet grow and swell till they are too heavy to lift. I sit down in the middle of the path. There is nowhere to go. I take off my boots and dig extra socks out of my pack. In this treeless landscape, there is no chance of a fire. I climb into my sleeping bag and try to sleep.

My stomach grumbles. It is two days since I ran out of food, and the few houses I have found since then have been empty. I keep telling myself there must be something soon.

The hollow feeling deepens. It spreads up into my ribcage.

I curl myself as small as I can. I press my fists into my stomach to trick myself into feeling full. After what feels like a long time, I start to drift.

*

I wake in the dark. A faint glow where the moon is hidden behind a thick layer of cloud. Otherwise, only blackness, the moor stretching away unseen.

My body is heavy and cold. My toes ache with it. My bones are made of ice. I will never be warm again. Still my leg burns.

I feel for my pack beside me on the path. My fingers are so numb that I can barely unzip it, but I force myself to get up. As quickly as my clumsy hands will allow, I dress in all my layers and climb back into my sleeping bag. The cold is still inside me, not quite tamed. I wrap my arms around my chest and tuck my hands under my armpits. Somewhere close, a fox screams. I strain my eyes but there’s nothing – only the dark. The fox screams again. I lie awake and listen.

*

I drift between fog and oblivion. I open my eyes to uncertain white, then close them again. In this small circle of existence, I sleep. It is all there is.

*

My mother in my student flat, the War already on home soil – on all soil, everywhere. The three Warhammer geeks I live with have already scuttled home. I spread myself through their empty rooms. I am enormous. I am bigger than the city.

My mother saying: ‘Come home – it isn’t safe – come home—’

Her face is blotchy, no make-up, turned up towards me like a leaf desperate for sun – and running with tears. But here in this city I can be somebody, so I say no.

My mother saying: ‘Who do you have here?’ My mother saying: ‘You have nobody – come home—’

And I say, ‘Myself—’

‘Please—’

I say, ‘I have myself.’

*

I am chasing something. Someone. The lane leads to my parents’ village. It’s night and my bag is heavy – I call out to it wait – come back—

I round the bend but there’s no one, just a dog – a snarling dog with long teats, its hackles raised, mouth dripping. It lunges, its hot breath and rough tongue on my face—

And its mouth is a hand – my mother’s hand, her palm on my forehead. She is singing.

I’m too old to be sung to.

She brushes the hair from my face.

‘Wait—’

I reach out but she’s gone.

*

I never understood the idea of total absence. I thought there must always be something. The alternative was too big to comprehend.

Now there is nothing. It is vast.

I sleep. I wake. I sleep.

*

I wake and the fog is gone. In its place is weak sunlight, an empty sky, and sprawling moorland covered in sharp brown grass. My body aches and my stomach heaves. The cold is still there, lodged deep inside me, but I am still here, too.

The path stretches on further than I can see. In the distance, like a bright shell washed up and left behind by the retreating fog, is a white spot in the landscape. It is too far to tell if it is a building.

I try to sit up. Everything tilts and I grab out to steady myself. My hand comes away wet. The fog has left each spike of grass covered in minute droplets. They coat the ground so thinly that the world looks out of focus.

I run my hand across it and again, dampness. A single pearl of water running down the centre of my palm. I lick it off, and it tastes of salt and earth and my own skin. I do this again and again, drop by minuscule drop. It is almost nothing. Perhaps it is enough.

I wriggle out of my sleeping bag and stand.

The movement sends a wave of nausea crashing through me. I retch up bile and spit it into the grass. My tongue is bitter. My throat burns with acid and thirst. My lips are cracked and the inside of my mouth feels cavernous and rasping. My head throbs with dehydration and I have to clench my teeth and breathe through my nostrils to stop myself vomiting again. In the face of this new pain, my leg has given way to a sapping ache and a vicious itching. My trousers are hard where the scab has broken wetly and then dried and broken again. I cannot bring myself to look. I force myself not to scratch.

Over the space of what must be an hour, I pack away my sleeping bag. I look at my backpack for several minutes before heaving it onto my shoulders. As soon as it’s in place, the straps rub and my knees threaten to buckle. I drag myself away.

The world spins. Every few steps, I stop and concentrate on breathing. I count my breaths until I can walk the next uneven steps, and then the next.

*

I do not know how long it takes to reach it: a soot-smeared wall, which is all that remains of a cottage. I imagine its occupants contracting the Sickness, dying inside and everyone too afraid to remove the bodies to burn them on an outside pyre. Easier just to stand outside the door and light a match.

Bits of rubble stick up like blackened teeth. A mish-mash of objects in what must once have been a homely yard. An iron boot-scraper. A flowerpot filled with earth. A jumble of perished wellies. An old stone sink, a few inches of stagnant water in the bottom.

The water is brown and thick-looking. A few dead leaves are suspended in its murk. I scoop them out and my hand comes away smelling of plant rot. I clench my teeth again. I do not know what this water will do to me, if it will make me vomit until there is nothing of me left, if it will dry me out completely so all my organs stop functioning and I am lost. I also do not know when I will next find water.

I dip a bottle into the sludge. The sediment swirls against my hand as it glugs into the open neck.

I take a deep breath, then lift the bottle to my lips, trying not to smell the rancid rot I am drinking. I force my constricted throat open, drink in trickles, ignore the sour taste filling the raw cavern of my mouth.

There is a high ringing in my ears and I can no longer hear my heartbeat. The itch in my leg is a dull constant.

*

At the edge of the moorland, I drag myself, metre by metre, to the top of a hill. My leg still shakes at every other step, but the hill is a vantage point. There’s a stitch in my side and the climbing tugs and pulls at my muscles. It reminds me I am still here, that I am still human. I sit on top of the hill, regaining my breath, with the landscape unfolded below me. The world rises and falls around me, always keeping me at its centre. I need to understand my place in the world, even now, even if this is where my days run out.

In the distance is a city, a pre-War metropolis bristling with abandonment, a dark river winding through its centre. Beyond it, like a grey brushstroke, is the North Sea. Slumped here on this hilltop, I consider all the possibilities a city like that might hold: shops and warehouses, tool sheds, homes to scour for secret stores of food or medicines. Anything that might be useful. And on the edge of it all something I am too tired to understand nudges into the depths of my brain. A faint electric glow – machinery surviving even where life has failed.

The potential of it all swells and builds inside me, battling back at the aches and nauseating hunger. All that fortune, all those things, all mine, whenever I choose to claim them. It is as if I have stumbled on my own personal market where no money is demanded, where the only price is being alone.

From up here, I cannot tell how complete the city might be – how heavily it was bombed in the War, at what point its population was eviscerated by the Sickness, or whether anyone from here was evacuated to the Safe Centres to make it as far as the Last Fall. A city like this is an unknown element. Who knows what might be hiding in the shut-in buildings, what bombs were dropped here and are lying unexploded and full of dispersing Sickness, waiting for the touch of a boot to set their mechanisms working? And who knows how many dog packs fiercely guard the narrow streets? Animals, like people, are drawn to cities – to the stuff and mess of them, to the hiding places and the mounds of waste. I try not to think it, but I know they will also be drawn to the bodies that must be down there somewhere, too – laid out in beds or slumped on sofas, or perhaps trapped beneath exploded walls and waiting for the rubble to shift. I wonder how long ago this city’s people died. Despite myself, I wonder how much remains.

Left in the open air, a human body can break down to only a skeleton in as little as two years. In the ground, it can take as many as twelve. I remember researching these details as a child, filled with fearful curiosity as I looked for facts to write on little white cards for my museum. I never expected to be thinking about it like this, so many years later, overlooking a museum the size of a city. It feels like childhood, and a fear of falling asleep.

At night there is always a feeling of being watched – a feeling like an eye in the dark. As a child I would sit in bed with my back against the cold plaster, running the torchlight across the familiar objects of my room. Now, that eye is a bright blue. Now, when the darkness closes in around me, I like to curl in on myself and keep close to the fire or lie wrapped in my sleeping bag. The city, with its black streets and hidden alleyways, would be the worst place for feeling watched. In the city there would be no solid edge to put my back against, no protective wall that might not also be a hiding place for something else. The city has become a place for daylight, and daylight only.

I scour the landscape, the unfamiliar vastness of it. Away from the city, at the bottom of the next valley, there is a grey smudge of buildings. A farmhouse, perhaps also a barn. A safer place to sleep but can I make it there in my current condition? And if the buildings are empty, will I have the strength to make it to the city on an empty stomach tomorrow? In the city, there is bound to be food. There is also bound to be danger.

With the sweat cooling on my back, I look between the two. Safety or possibility? City or farm?

I cannot stay here. I haul myself up from the rock and thread my arms back through the shoulder straps of my pack. The sun is low in the sky and my shadow stretches away in front of me.

*

The sun has already gone behind the hills and there are shivers beginning to build inside me. The cobbled yard is quiet, an anticipatory hush like a library or a church, the only disturbance a murmuring that sounds like running water. I know it’s fanciful and stupid, but it feels as though the farm has been waiting for me – or maybe I have been waiting for it.

I mutter my silent prayer, though I do not believe in anyone who could hear it. Please no bodies. Please no death. Tonight I need to concentrate only on living, on being alive.

I open the door.

Here is an inventory of what the farmhouse contains:

A kitchen with faded yellow walls and a laminate floor.

A big wood-burning stove on a stone hearth.

A table missing a leg.

A red electric cooker.

A faulty clock, ticking at irregular intervals.

Scrubbed wooden cupboards, filled with crockery and iron-ware pans.

Some foodstuff, mostly inedible – black and mushy vegetables, their juices seeping onto the shelf below. A hard mouldy lump that might once have been a heel of bread. An open pack of crackers.

But there are treasures I can salvage: a bag of rice, two tins of kidney beans, half a box of Cup-a-Soup, stock cubes, vinegar and a bottle of red wine. For a while I sit and cradle them against me.

A living room that smells of decay. Two armchairs. A shelf of Reader’s Digests.

An old-style larder, with cold stone slabs for preserving food. The larder is empty.

Stairs. Up them, a bathroom with an avocado suite. A wilted spider plant. Six dead woodlice in the bath.

Across the hall, two bedrooms: a double and a twin. No clothes in the drawers or wardrobes. The beds are all unmade. In the airing cupboard, folded blankets and flowery bedding, the kind my mother used to keep as spares in her own airing cupboard, ‘Just in case.’

I heave one of the single mattresses downstairs to the kitchen. It takes more strength than I think I have left to tug it into place. I go back up to fetch a single set of bedding. It smells of the must inside the cupboard, but underneath that, locked into the cotton’s weave, is a smell of washing powder, and of breezy days drying on the line. For a moment I am at my parents’ house helping my mother fold the bed linen, and I press the sheets close around my face.

I light the fire with one of the books and the drawers from the kitchen table, and make up a bed beside it. Once I am confident the fire will not go out, I take one of the heavy iron pans from the cupboard and go outside. In the last light of the day I clamber over the fence and discover a small stream to the side of the house. I set the water to boil on top of the wood-burner and finally let myself look at my leg.