Not Alone, page 27
Harry! There, a foot. Then the soaked heavy weave of the blanket and the slick snowsuit. He’s limp and exhausted. I haul him up.
And I freeze: pain flares. A hot angry squeezing pain as my heart beats. Like it never has before. Not even last winter when it first gave that wince of pain that so terrified me.
Lightning flashes – once, twice, then all around – the storm heading towards the sea, which is suddenly visible again over the next rise. That row of cottages is close. I fold an arm over my chest, pulling Harry across the wet boggy grass. He yelps as his boots splosh through puddles, the grey matter on the surface swirling artistically like a watercolour.
The pain is making me dizzy, like walking with an arrow through my chest. Making me remember those dead deer, stiff on the tracks, putrid flesh.
We reach the remains of crumbling tarmac as the rain eases on our hillside, the grey storm still all around us, and I imagine Jack and his mother – and later in Jack’s teenage years, his stepfather too – trundling up this last stretch with their caravan. Arisaig just beyond these first cottages – they would have seen rows of whitewashed houses and steep winding streets, deep-green gorse thickets with lemon-yellow flowers on the windy cliffs, views down to pale sandy beaches and blue waters. That harbour and the Old Library Lodge.
Jack knows this area well, perhaps that’s why he picked it. Less chance of other people too. Perhaps he took to hunting like Andy; I can imagine him with a rifle and stores of meat. I squeeze Harry’s hand.
‘I don’t like it too big,’ Harry whispers. We can smell it now, the salt on the stiff sea breeze.
I remember that jealous feeling that came over me at the house in Derbyshire, quickly replaced by the dread of finding a body. I wouldn’t have really wished Jack alone and lonely, not really. Finding him alive is everything, no matter what.
No matter if Harry has a new mummy in the future; he’d have Jack! I’d have one last hug.
My head spins. ‘Maybe it’s best if I go alone, first. Make sure it’s safe. Explain. Y-you stay here?’ I help Harry onto the brick wall next to the road, out of the wet. His new shoes are covered in mud, dulling the bright rainbow laces.
‘Don’t go where I can’t see you.’ He shivers, those amber-brown eyes bloodshot and weary – worrying me – as he looks out at the sea and grey around us. He shimmies further under the branches of an elder bush.
‘I won’t.’
Alone, I slog on, along the last bit of road, until I reach the row of cottages overlooking the sea. At first I don’t know what I’m looking at – a blood red fringe to the coast, not visible back where I left Harry . . . algae, thick and clotted. The road forks, right and upslope to the cottages, and straight ahead to the harbour road, which then bends right and down, straight down to a drop into nothing, just choppy seawater below.
Trees and bushes with slimy black leaves bob in the red water amongst green-black kelp and rubble. The red meets the deep blue of the sea a few hundred metres out, finger-like tendrils bleeding out.
My stomach lurches. The steep hairpin road should zigzag down through rows of homes to the seafront where the Old Library was. Jack and I parked the Subaru right next to the harbour, the yak of gulls all around us.
I stumble along the row of wrecked cottages, forcing my way into each. Only the furthest one, on higher ground, hasn’t been completely flooded in the past and caved in. All stink of damp and decay. All are empty.
I lean against the doorway of the last cottage, trying to swallow, but the sea air is blowing right through my T-shirt mask, leaving salt on my lips, and itching down the back of my dry throat, pulling those thorns tighter in my chest.
There’s still one stubborn ‘Talk to us’ Samaritans plaque screwed into the brick wall near that hairpin to nowhere. I imagine it mocking Jack too, if he stood here, perhaps as he waited for me to come – his last just-in-case hope. Heavy with guilt and loss. I wonder if that road was quite so eroded away – if he saw that drop to a bloody shore?
I hope not.
A sound rings in my head, like when I hit my head at the flat. I stare at the red water, my legs and arms starting to shake. Crawling up from the pit of my stomach, the Fear pulls at my ribcage and the hot pain of my heart. I look again at the wall. At this row of cottages. This can’t be all that’s left of Arisaig. It can’t be gone. There can’t be nothing here.
An awful inhuman wail bursts out of me, quickly becoming a spluttering cough.
The wind buffets me as if in response and I rock on my feet, shivering. I should have known. I should have realized that it was Jack who left the Cruiser in the garage downstairs, should have found the key, should have found him sooner . . .
I almost had hold of him!
The cold sea air is burning my lungs, that squeezing pain of my heart hunching me over. I cough up more yuck, coating the inside of my makeshift mask.
There’s nothing to do but turn back for Harry. So I turn on the spot. Put one foot forward, then the other.
Harry is still there where I left him, under the brown-splotched gold of the elder shrub, feet dangling from the wall. So small. Sometimes in the flat I forgot how small he was. He seemed to fill the rooms, always be at my side, tripping me up, his hands touching whatever I was touching. But now . . . the low mountains spread out behind him, the massive ash-grey sky pressing in on us above and all around us, and the great mass of black loch and dark sea . . . it all swamps him. That sky rumbles again, threatening more rain, startling him. He’s so fragile and small in the midst of it all.
How could I have brought him here?
‘Was Daddy there?’ Harry asks brightly as I get closer, swinging his legs from his perch. How could I have ever doubted that Jack would have helped him? This precious little person. No matter what.
‘No, the sea swallowed everything up.’ My voice is cracking, flat, and Harry stills his legs and stares fearfully out at it as I pull him down from the wall as best I can, grimacing, and cast around me desperately for what to do next.
34
When I wake up, it’s because my chest is burning – lungs like torn bellows rattling open and shut, my heart beating too fast, and flaring with that sharp wincing spark every other beat. My eyes won’t open. My mouth is claggy with dry phlegm and the taste of blood.
‘Hungry.’ Harry’s voice is muffled under blankets, but he repeats himself as I rub at my crusted swollen eyes until I can creak them open to slits. I half expect not to be able to see. But the room is brighter today as I squint around at it, enough to see clearly the black smattering of mould up every wall in the once-cosy sitting room. Cold leaches out from those damp walls. The fire I lit last night is out and I crawl to it to get it going again. We’re soon coughing from the smoke, flames licking through scavenged wood – floorboards from upstairs that I yanked and hacked up yesterday, my fingers still stinging from my clumsy use of the blunt tools I found in the shed outside, a splinter in my thumb throbbing.
The days feel long since that first awful night here, drying out by a fire made from the OS maps for England as kindling and dismantled bits of wood furniture that could be wedged into the fireplace. Sitting close enough that I could feel dust specks sizzle on my itchy red skin as I tried to clean us up. Smashing open the corroded jars of vitamins and charcoal tablets to pick out the least mouldy ones to swallow. Harry, forehead and eyes blotchy and pink, feasting on that last tin of mandarins – happy – and the little food in my pack, not yet knowing all I’d found in the cottage was a decade-old empty bottle of tomato ketchup.
The cottage is oddly quiet today. I go to the window and pull back the curtains and blankets we used to cover the seaward view and stop little eddies of grey damp air from seeping inside. The sky is a brighter hazy grey. After days of pounding rain, it has stopped, though the bucket in the corner still plinks.
‘Hungry,’ Harry repeats, pinching my arm hard, leaving a red mark on my wrist.
‘Hey!’ I groan, flinching away, the movement burning across those sore bellows of my lungs. Those amber-brown eyes of his are tired and desperate, and I hate how hungry and tired I am – that it seems to make bitterness rise in me, making me have to blink away that faceless man in the dark with Harry’s hair and eyes.
Yet it’s my fault Harry’s suffering. My fault we’re here.
I crumple on the floor, striking my forehead with my knuckles, the dull thump bringing a sort of relief. You useless shit, Katie.
But beside me, Harry copies – delicate knuckles hard across his own head – before his face creases and he hugs his empty tummy.
‘No, not you, never you. I’m sorry . . .’ I rub his head better and kiss his cheeks, guilt rippling through me. He copies me after all. No one else.
He looks very thin. His skin grey and tight to his cheekbones. His fingers, clutched round Luna, like spindly birch twigs. I’ve not looked at him properly for days. Not enough light in the barricaded room to have noticed his eyes sunken and bloodshot, trails of red still weeping from the inside corners. Even his hair is dull and lank. And the cut on his forehead that Sue duct-taped is now exposed, a jagged angry line.
I pull him closer to examine his little nose and mouth – relieved not to see redness and inflammation there too, though his nose is snotty and his lips cracked.
‘There’s nothing to eat,’ I croak, my mouth dry too. We’ve not drunk anything for days either.
I haul myself up and across the sitting room, and out into the hallway to the front door of the cottage. Everything hurts. Even the cut on my hand has opened up again, red and raw, though not bleeding. I imagine it’s the same inside my chest – everything red, raw and swollen, stiff and scraping and blistering each time my lungs inflate and deflate. Yet while it’s dry, I have to go out; find water, if nothing else. I take a saucepan from the kitchen to collect ‘dirty’ water in and pull on my damp smoky parka. And there, underneath where I’d hung it and my boots, I spot a tin.
‘What’s the shiny?’ Harry asks as I tug out the crinkly plastic-wrapped contents.
I smile grimly. ‘Plastic.’
Harry freezes, peering down at it.
‘It’s OK, it’s not bad like this – quite useful and precious actually. Keeps what’s inside preserved and dry.’
‘We needed that for the stinky chestnuts.’ Harry sniffs the tin. ‘Is it food?’
‘It’s for animals,’ I say, reading the label. ‘Winter bird energy balls.’
It says clearly Not for human consumption, but I scan the ingredients: cut wheat, wheat flour, beef suet, cut maize and black sunflowers.
I shrug. ‘I guess.’
We share a ball. It’s greasy and sticky – hard to swallow.
‘Is Daddy dead?’
My stomach roils. I can’t answer.
‘Are we going to die?’
I cough on the last bit of fat stuck in my throat.
‘Is winter come now and we can’t go out?’
‘Not yet,’ I mumble as I shoo him back from the door. I tighten my belt a notch, zip up my coat and open the door before there are any more questions.
It seems so bright and cold as I step out, compared to the dark smoky warmth inside. I close my eyes until I can bear it. Icy air scratches inside my lungs. I shut the door and sit on the step to take shallow careful breaths, heart racing and squeezing with its hot pain.
The track along the front of the cottages has disappeared under a run of brown and grey floodwater and undulating mud – almost indistinguishable from the choppy seascape below. At my feet, the mounds of saturated moss – gold and glistening in the sunlight with ribbons of water oozing through them – make it feel like I’m sat at the very edge of the endless dark sea itself and if I took a step forward into that mud I’d actually plunge straight into its depths.
But I get up. There’s nowhere to go but up the slope behind our cottage. So I set off. My boots sink into the grey-red mud, the ground seeming to bleed and rust-coloured specks and midges floating up into the air around me. I pull my mask over my nose and mouth.
When the pain makes me feel faint, I stop, gasping in breaths. Behind and below me now, there’s the roof of our cottage and, visible from here, the point where brown floodwater along the coast mixes into the dark blue of the sea, globs of broken-up red algae afloat through it. And ahead of me, I take in the hillside to north, east and south – all wet mustard grasses and purple-black rushes with occasional lumps of granite, fading into the brown of flooded lochs. Water. All around us.
Feeling sick, I hug my chest and start scrambling across the hillside, slipping and sliding, legs soon slick with mud, my sleeves and hands too.
Up and down, inspecting pools and runs looking for clearer water, and leaves for edible plants. I zigzag one way and then another, over unpromising grassy mounds and dips. The stunted pines have stiff thick needles – all vivid red and orange, curling in tufts like old Christmas tinsel that’s been dipped in wax. I stuff my pockets full. Hopefully still rich in vitamin C, despite the colour and texture.
But I stagger to a halt, stomach growling. We need more than pine-needle tea!
Harry’s probably sat by the fire, his pale skinny face and hungry bloodshot eyes watching the door, waiting for me.
Pressure tingles around my eyes, my face crumpling, tears stinging as they break through blood-crusted ducts.
I look back towards the cottage, head in my hands, taking slow careful breaths, but the pain is dizzying. Tears flow freely down my face, my nose getting snottier and my chest throbbing hotter. I feel myself sway.
There’s nothing I can do now, is there? The word rings round my head: NOTHING. Stupid useless bitch. But I don’t clunk my idiot head with the heel of my hand like I want to, thinking of Harry’s little forehead.
You have no idea what to do now? You do, you always have! Jack is loud in my head, like wearing headphones with the volume too high. It makes me flinch, makes my whole body buzz. You’re going to keep living until you’re dead. You’re going to keep fighting for yourself. And for Harry. You’re not going to watch him die like I did Gale. You’re not! You’re his mum. Fighting is what you do. You know this.
But there was food in Hitchin. There were people to help in Derbyshire. God, even Bill might have been useful . . . I blink, eyes skimming across the landscape.
Andy and Sue were right: I didn’t know when to stop.
I wanted Jack to hold me, to love me – as well as love Harry – because I was scared of dying, wasn’t I? I couldn’t bear not knowing what had happened to him. I couldn’t bear not trying to find him. And now Harry’s going to die and it’s my fault because I couldn’t let go.
That man in the dark was right.
Stupid useless bitch.
Every choice was the right one – your best effort. Just because HE said those things doesn’t make it true. YOU know how strong you’ve been to make it through that, to make it through this. To hell if nobody else knows it! You know it. I would know it, the second I laid eyes on you.
He was wrong. You’re not useless, you’re not nothing.
I can feel all the dark places I’ve been – all the grief, fear, hunger and pain – piling on top of the hopelessness now, weighing me down heavier, sinking me into this mud. And I can understand why Jack turned to pills to numb all his darkness, his depression, after that awful last tour, to make it feel possible to cope with. I can feel now how hard it must have felt to get out of that mess, to keep fighting back to health.
To survive, quitting on you and Harry has to be taken off the table. Because then it’s simple, there’s only one choice, you have to dig in no matter what. Get through today.
I stand up. ‘I am not useless, not nothing.’ It becomes a mantra, a rhythm to keep me walking. And I feel a sort of stubbornness right at the rock bottom of my guts giving me strength. ‘Not useless, not nothing, not fucking dead yet . . .’ I even find myself breathing into the hot pain in my chest without fear. Let it come. I’m going to live till I’m dead. I’m going to walk until I have food for Harry. ‘Not useless, not nothing, not fucking dead yet.’
35
I’m sleeping too much. It’s morning again, the days slipping by, and I feel groggy and weak, my tummy bloated with pine-needle tea and pushing on my diaphragm, heart pain soaring and ebbing as I breathe. The warmth makes it a little less sharp. The embers hot still in the fireplace.
I scramble up and squat outside in the chill air. Harry has kept pinching himself and me awake, still scared to sleep. He’s yawning and blinking out at me from beside the fire, a pile of scavenged books and magazines next to him. He’s tearing the pages out, crumpling them, adding them to the basket next to the fireplace, for kindling. Every so often he stops and looks at the page.
I go back inside just as a coughing fit gets going – dialling up the pulsing pain until I’m doubled over in the hallway, struggling with my boots and coat. I force myself up, gasping, to filter floodwater through the old gauze and crumbling carbon block of the tap-attachment in the kitchen – which is better than nothing – before hanging the kettle in position in the fireplace. I try to distract myself by layering small bits of wood on top of the embers, followed by a few choice still-damp branches.
‘Mummy, what happened to all the people?’
My arms shake as I lean to blow on the embers.
‘In these books the pictures show lots. If they didn’t get disappeared, where did they go?’ He holds out some glossy advert for housing.
I bat the page away, trying not to look. ‘They died. They all died.’ I regret saying it instantly – the sheer weight of death: parents, siblings, friends, co-workers, neighbours, strangers you’d see hurrying to work or serving your coffee or reading the news on TV. Everyone.
Harry twists his mouth to one side, considering this – or does he? He can’t understand the vastness of all that death. It’s like us looking at the ruins of Pompeii or something; we couldn’t have ever understood it.
