Not Alone, page 19
The first animal is pure wolf – I’m sure of it. The others emerging around us look mixed-breed, smaller and paler, but all with the same wolfish shape and face – pointed ears, serious eyes and long nose.
‘Looking for victims of last night’s rain. Easy meal. I guess they think we might be it,’ Andy whispers, as we both back up. He motions for quiet.
Hot with panic, I try to muffle my wheezing chest, all those gleaming eyes making me feel like I did last night: small and stuck and easy prey.
‘I’d hoped we might’ve come across something by now.’
As the wolf darts towards us, Andy leaps forward to swipe his torch across its path, raining down sparks and foul smoke, the wolfdogs whimpering. The wolf keeps coming, looking for a way under our defences.
Jaws snap at my leg, snagging my trousers and teeth just scraping my skin – making me slip to one knee. I thrust my torch towards the snout, a whine marking the retreat of those teeth, though the pack surges towards me. Andy is there, waving his torch in a circle around us and hauling me up with one strong tug.
They lunge at us as we swipe and whack with our smoking torches, the flames dwindling. We edge down the railway line, metre by metre.
‘Aha! Knew there’d be something, torrential as it was last night – keep coming, Katie, if we can get past this . . .’
Both of us stumble backwards – hanging on to each other to stay upright – through the weeping torsos and stiff legs of a dozen deer, which likely tried to shelter amongst the bushes. Bloody foam trails from their mouths and noses, the air flitting with flies. Crows pick at the bodies, making shrill calls as we approach.
Yet I’m focused on the pack, whose eyes are still fixed on Andy and me. Andy draws his knife and slashes and pierces hides as he passes – the rotting stink he releases making me gag and feel faint, the smell tied to that first awful year.
Crow wings flap past me. I yank my own knife free and copy Andy. The wolf bares its teeth, the wolfdogs dashing forward to sniff and bite the deer, whining. Then the wolf issues a low warning, and all the dogs back up, heads low and whimpering.
And we keep moving off too – the wolf chewing and tearing at deer hide, eyes on us as if making sure rivals now are leaving – until we have shrugged backwards through an underpass and jogged the next few hundred metres of track, adrenaline making me move despite my queasy stomach and wheezing lungs.
We come to an abrupt stop as we emerge out of the bushes into the northern end of Andy and Sue’s village. I blink into an intense bleeding orange-pink horizon, the wonderful warmth soaking into my cold face. The whining of the pack is distant now, both of us gasping as we catch our breaths. Our eyes connect, and smiling, relieved, neither of us can help starting to chuckle.
‘You knew that was out there?’
‘Sorry,’ Andy grins, ‘I didn’t want to scare you. Some folks must have freed one years ago; I’ve seen ’em before. If you start behaving like you’re scared, with something with so much wild blood in it, you might be interpreted as prey. Never been so relieved to be tripping over dead bodies!’
I laugh, harder than is warranted – Andy too. Until I’m bent double, coughing and dizzy.
‘Katie, are your lungs bad?’ Andy asks. ‘They heard and stalked you, I think . . .’
I grimace, gasping and forcing my breathing steady again, to its prickling inhale and wincing exhale. I start down the street.
‘Is that why you’re hunting for Jack?’ Andy says, following. ‘After all this time? I know it must be hard, as a parent, you worry about what happens to them . . .’ He trails off, voice cautious, as we fall into step again. ‘Just make sure you’re not grasping at straws,’ he says softly. ‘Sue would be glad to help you.’
I nod. Harry would be fed and warm at the bungalow, perhaps. I try to feel glad that he isn’t alone right now, and grateful that there is someone to keep him safe and care for him. But all these blanks keep coming to me – all the unknowns about Sue and Andy and all the big and little things you don’t know about people you’ve just met or the place they live . . . and these survivors in the city . . .
‘But I don’t doubt there’s no substitute for the people we loved and imagined we’d share our lives with.’
I realize he’s right. And that tub of axle grease bouncing in my backpack – though heavy over the morning’s trek – now feels a comforting weight. I’m glad Andy convinced me we might as well look, though I’d wanted to forget it when I’d finally nudged him awake in the silent dark of that grim bedroom, relieved to still find him there in his corner.
We didn’t find any more fuel yet, but with the grease, the sunlight on my face, the dangers behind us, Harry close again, and an easy downhill stretch easing up that unpleasant prickling of my chest, somehow the Fear and doubt of last night and the last days has faded to the back of my mind. Replaced by that little bead of warmth that’s inside me again. Everything feels possible and clearer again: I imagine the Cruiser moving once more, and Jack’s arms around Harry.
‘Listen,’ Andy says softly, smiling as we reach the centre of the village and veer up towards where his and Sue’s road is, ‘don’t tell Sue about all the excitement last night and this morning, or she’ll be even less easy to convince on leaving the house and garden.’
I wince a smile, nodding, but I can feel the stinging in my calf now, my trouser leg draughty, and I’m picturing that wolf circling the bungalow with Harry in it, a persistent fairy-tale nasty.
Anxiety surging, the distance left to reach him squeezes at my chest. I try to pick out the bungalow among the rooftops as I speed along the squelching streets, Andy keeping pace with me this time.
‘Hey, should we take something back?’ Andy slows, grinning, and I follow his gaze to a lone stag, sprawled, dead, a little way up the next side street – unusually sturdy and beautifully branched antlers drawing my eye. Andy rushes to inspect the carcass. ‘It’s not spoiled – still warm. Something for dinner!’
I nod, reluctant to stop – but we can’t not take advantage of it.
And Harry and I have been eating Andy and Sue’s stores.
Bringing home good calories does normally make me feel better for leaving Harry behind too . . .
The nostrils and mouth have bloody foam around them like the earlier deer, the jaw opened wide in a last rictus gasp. I twist the ring on my finger, shifting from foot to foot.
It didn’t occur to me that the rains might have spread so far. I worry if Sue kept Harry indoors and safe. If she helped him feel less afraid of the shadows, and knew to list everything in the room still there, even in the dark. Or to imagine our own bed in the flat. If she knew what to say so he didn’t worry I’d disappeared into a black hole. Did he sleep alone on the sofa, or . . .? I feel a growing bitterness: it should be me there to do that, always. Jack rises up again: I know what his love felt like. If not me, I want that for Harry. Only that.
Once Andy and I are pulling the stiff body behind us on a piece of tarp, I keep moving, even as my prickling, heaving lungs beg to drop the weight of meat and the heavy backpack, feeling with each step the loosening of that thread between my chest and Harry’s.
There’s no face at the window when we get there, and I push past Andy, shrugging off overalls, boots and backpack to get inside, hurrying down the empty hall to the back room. Empty sofa, bare rug floor, cold fireplace. The Fear reignites, pumping through me, and just as I’m about ready to scream, I hear their voices in the garden and crash through the back door to see Harry sat at Sue’s side as they weed her potato patch. Harry is chuckling – it’s soft and over so quick and I savour the sound, wondering what she did to make it happen. He has a shy smile on his face, his hand rising for a high five. Heat surges inside me as I rush towards them. Neither have their masks on.
‘Harry!’
Sue stands up, smiling at us, leaving Harry hanging, that shy smile fading, lost.
I take in the turned-over soil, and despite the plastic polytunnel, imagine Harry disturbing grey sand-like particles that then drift up towards his exposed face. ‘He’s safer inside,’ I say, a hard edge to my voice.
‘I was careful to watch him,’ Sue says kindly. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted me to leave him alone indoors, would you?’
‘Mummy?’ He pounds across the covered veg patch towards me, sobbing – his eyes puffy and face pale like he hasn’t slept. ‘Why didn’t you come? Where were you?’ He stops a good six feet short, glancing – worried – back towards Sue.
‘I’m sorry, we got stuck because of the rain—’
‘You should have tried harder,’ he sobs, like he thought he’d never see me again. And I stop myself from sweeping him up – even without my overalls on – thinking of all the rain and dust I’ve been exposed to. He flinches as Andy steps out behind me.
‘Is it Sim the man?’ Harry whispers, glancing between us all, confused and scared.
‘No, it’s Andy, of course,’ Sue says softly. ‘Harry’s not great with faces, kept mistaking me for you . . .’
‘I’m your mummy, Harry.’ I kneel, tugging at his arched little shoulders. ‘I’m going to be your mummy, always,’ I say, tears pricking. ‘Always, always . . .’
No longer able to resist, I draw him into a tight hug – Harry hot and stiff but slowly softening, sobbing into my chest. ‘Why didn’t you sleep with me?’ He clutches his little head, shuddering. ‘What if I couldn’t wake up and I needed you?’
‘I know, I’m sorry, I’m here now,’ I say, repeating it as I carry him indoors to the washbasin in the hallway, Sue and Andy following.
Sue makes a show of being overjoyed by the venison. ‘We usually cook up something to eat straight away, hang some, and smoke some,’ she says, smiling at Harry and me.
Andy butchers the stag on the driveway. The air is clear and sheltered by the house, but I still grimace at the raw flesh so close to dust and algae and invertebrates on the ground. He wraps different cuts and the lacy fat from around the entrails inside oiled cloths, calling in to me to show me how to collect the thicker fat – hard and waxy – from around the kidneys and inner cavity, which Sue uses for soap and candles.
Harry is tired and grumpy and getting harder to persuade to stand still while I wipe his face.
So I don’t notice Andy walking up to the house until he is at the door holding up the impressive branched antlers, which he has sawn free to keep. He’s beaming. ‘Look at this, Harry!’
Harry’s face flushes red, his eyes big, staring at those dripping antlers.
‘You hurt him!’
‘He’s dead,’ Andy says gently, ‘nothing can hurt him now.’
‘It’s just meat,’ I say, trying to turn Harry’s face away from it and back to mine, ‘we eat it at home – not deer, but rabbit, fox, a dog once too!’
‘I didn’t know you had to make him dead, Mummy!’ He’s crying hard now, shoulders shuddering, face scrunched up, gulping out his words. ‘That’s mean! What if he wakes up without his head!’
‘You don’t know what dead means. I’m sorry, Harry—’
Sue kneels, reaching for him while he pulls away from me. But I know there’s no consoling him now and she doesn’t notice his stiffening arms and he flails, arms windmilling into her face. I pull him away from her. But there’s a sharp sting – teeth in my bare shoulder – and he runs off down the hallway to the back room.
A hot sick feeling goes through me. ‘You don’t bite, it’s bad to bite . . .’ Even when he was very little I never let him.
A red mark rises on Sue’s cheek. But there’s a small oval of red lines and arches on my arm making me feel dizzier and dizzier, because just a few inches higher are a larger oval of older scars that feel like they’re stinging too. Throbbing. Bleeding as they did when fresh.
Harry’s loud sniffling from the back room tugs me to the present. Andy and Sue are silent, watching me. ‘I never explained. About death . . .’
‘Can’t blame his fuss,’ Andy says with a small smile. ‘We didn’t eat meat Before, did you?’
I shake my head, speaking in a daze. ‘We gave it up – waste of resources, mass production causing all that pollution, deforestation . . .’
‘And bad for health.’
‘We thought it seemed cruel – all that death,’ Sue says.
I nod. The word feels big and ominous again, hearing ‘dead’ come out of Harry’s innocent little mouth, as if it conjures the overwhelmingly awful days of the storm.
‘Now it’s a necessity,’ Andy says firmly. ‘Easy calories.’
Sue nods fiercely. ‘Needs as much as you can give him.’
‘You should clean that straight away,’ Andy says gently, surreptitiously looking down at the tear in my trousers and the graze on my leg underneath, before nodding at my shoulder. ‘Bites, even from people, can get badly infected.’
‘I know.’ I’m shaking as I reach for the washbasin once more, glancing down the hall at Harry. He’s sat on the hearthrug now, tear-stained and sulking, stomping Luna the reindeer around Julian the train’s track. His soft chestnut hair half obscures his face, but I can still see his dark lashes, the shape of his rounded little face, the small delicate mouth. His eyes flick up once to meet mine – those beautiful melting amber-brown eyes pink-edged and wet.
The basin wobbles, water and soap slopping over the floor, and I slip down to hands and knees to soak it up in rags and towels before it runs in all directions across the hardwood of the hallway, taking any dust and spores from outside with it.
Those worries dream-Jack’s rejection of Harry sparked last night come back fully formed now. And I cringe, imagining an adult face with Harry’s amber-brown eyes and chestnut hair. As if Harry’s biting is a glimpse of some dark trait . . . and all of it a reminder of something awful that has nothing to do with him.
My own bleary image looks up at me from the slick floorboards – grim-faced, narrow, with its small mouth and full sad lips, messy mouse-blonde hair, and almond-shaped eyes, always the stormy sea-grey to Jack’s Mediterranean blue, framed by his blonde mop.
And I remember Jack, cross and eyes blazing just like in that nightmare, as he squared up to some woman who’d sideswiped my car but thankfully only left me whiplashed. How Linda became a curse word for Yaris drivers after that – good or bad – simply reminding Jack of that unrepentant woman who had hurt me and could have killed me.
The pounding rises into my head, worrying who Jack will see if and when he looks at Harry’s little face. What he’ll think. Would he be able to just see this precious person I know? But all this stuff—
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Sue says, taking the rags from me and mopping up the floor herself, smiling gently.
I jolt at her words; I’ve pretended for so long and things have felt so desperate that I haven’t really thought if it does. All my hopes feel like they’re spinning in my head again. My voice is low and flat. ‘He’d take care of him for me, wouldn’t he? Love him? No matter what?’
Sue is staring, mouth opening again, anxiety drawing the outside creases of her eyes down and sad – when all I want is for someone to agree. ‘What do you mean?’ Her hand reaches for mine.
‘Don’t touch me.’ I can’t bear it – I shrink away from her, breathing gaspy breaths, the wheezy notes loud in the hushed hallway. Itching at those scars, at that fresh bite.
‘Oh, honey,’ Sue is saying in a quiet voice.
Andy catches my eyes and I can see everything I’ve said about Jack unravelling in his.
‘Was it someone else?’ Sue whispers. ‘Is your Jack not Harry’s—’
‘Sue, if Katie doesn’t want to talk about it . . .’ Andy cuts her off, his eyes too understanding, but I’ve already rushed out of the front door to avoid the question that might come after the one she’s started – tell me you weren’t . . .? – scratching at that shoulder like it’s burning, like I can get him off me, and gulping in clear cool air.
23
As I step back inside, Andy and Sue fall silent at the other end of the hall.
‘Who wouldn’t care for that darling boy?’ Sue whispers when I approach, her hands reaching to close around mine.
I look at Harry’s little face – tired and puffy from tears – blinking up at me from amongst the toys on the hearthrug in the back room. I can’t help thinking Sue must be right. And his eyes are almond-shaped like mine, he has my frown, my smile – usually shy, closed lipped, our cheeks dimpling – something of me too. And if it were the other way around, I’d grow to love any child Jack loved, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I?
‘If I were you, though, I might let it go. You can’t think a journey like that would be safe for Harry, you can’t. I’ve had to live with so many would’ves and could’ves for my boys – but you have him, a healthy beautiful boy, and you have to keep him safe—’
‘That’s what I’m trying to do!’ Tears spill down my face.
‘Sue,’ Andy cuts in, a warning note in his voice.
I step past them to join Harry on the rug, where he shimmies closer, still trembling and upset, but allowing me to put my arm around him. He eventually lets me finish stripping and washing him, but he’s quiet and rigid, won’t put his favourite red trousers on afterwards.
‘How can I make it better?’ I whisper as he sits on the sofa in the stuffy back room in just T-shirt and pants. I glance warily at Sue’s pile of sentimental toys. ‘What about a game, any one you like?’
‘How about a storybook?’ Sue says, getting up from the fire she’s building to make a late breakfast for Andy and me, and a second one for her and Harry. ‘I’m sure we’ll have one that you won’t have read. I kept everything . . . couldn’t bear to get rid of any.’
My smile is frozen. ‘It’s alright, we have our own—’
She scurries off, coming back with an armful.
‘I want a new book!’ Harry hurries to look, picking one with an old man and his dog in front of a lighthouse on the cover.
‘Shall I read it for you?’ Sue pats the rug beside her.
Harry rubs tired eyes and rushes back to me. ‘I want this one.’
