Not Alone, page 3
Harry twists his mouth to one side, frowning.
‘Will it get inside, scratch all the way to our bedroom?’
‘No, no. And it won’t happen for a long time yet, Harry. The words just mean it’s good to keep trying to do something, to not give up.’
Harry scrunches his eyes shut, long eyelashes fluttering.
‘What are you wishing for tonight?’ I ask.
‘For a rainy inside day, so you can play more games with me.’
When he opens his eyes again I bend down to kiss his forehead. ‘Night night.’ I put the book back on the bookshelves above the bedside table, placing it so the cover faces outwards, so the ten books in our ‘safe’ collection fill the space.
‘You forgot the rest.’
‘Night night, sweet dreams.’
‘You won’t go, will you?’ he whispers, his skin hot and sticky as he snuggles close, taking up the middle of the bed.
‘No, I won’t. It’s just our room, Harry, nothing different about it now than in daytime.’
‘It is different. There’s dark shadows and I don’t want to fall in one by accident.’
‘You can’t fall anywhere, where do you think you’d go?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says fearfully. ‘’Cause you can’t see. Like the nasties in the rain. But you might get disappeared – gone!’
I swallow, feeling that familiar tremor of reaching the edge of things I don’t want to talk or think about. ‘It’s still the same as it is always,’ I say, the words calming me, ‘the same wood floor and cream-painted walls and ceiling, the same wardrobe and dresser. And they’re not scary, are they?’
‘And woolly rug on the floor – sky blue-grey.’
‘Yep.’
‘I don’t want to fall in the shadows anyway, just-in-case.’
I try not to focus on the darkness in the room, in case Harry’s fear rubs off on me. It has always felt the safest in here, especially as I watch Harry, asleep as he is now, his eyes twitching as he dreams. I feel as if I’m in that secret place between reality and sleep, where everything is kind of hazy and soft, and sort of OK. And it doesn’t matter what happened today or what might happen tomorrow. At the moment, in this soft warm bed in this darkened bedroom that’s always been ours, everything is alright.
My mind ticks over the minutes, until I feel safe to gently roll to the edge of the bed and carefully lever myself up. Padding softly back to the kitchen-lounge, I make sure to leave all the doors open so that I can hear if Harry stirs.
The fire must have shrunk down to black and red embers, only the faintest tinge of red is visible around the stove door. I set filtered water on to boil, ready for the washbowl and drinking water tomorrow, and slump onto the sofa with the balcony doors open – the dust boards down and curtains a few inches ajar – cool evening air seeping inside. It’s calm and still now, and often safest after rain has damped everything down. Just the brightest stars glinting through the night haze, the moon hidden behind the flats opposite but bathing everything in cold light.
I let myself imagine I could be drinking a glass of wine beside Jack, our legs tangled together as they rest on the coffee table. We’d be talking about whose family we’d go and spend the weekend with, what friends we might see the following night, all the little things that happened at work that day. Everything’s all rosy and perfect, looking back, and painful, but right now I want to hold on to that warm feeling, imagining the wine taking its effect, making me relaxed and slightly fuzzy-headed.
After a moment, something kicks me back into alertness.
I set my water flask down and inch the curtains open a little more. Under the night sky, the blocks of flats look darkest grey and indistinct, the trees blurry and fluttery black. When the wind isn’t blowing, it’s always quiet outside. I spot just one bird, an inky flutter against the navy sky, circling the poplars for a place to roost. My throat tickles, the cool air itching right down into my lungs. My eyes scan left to right, right to left. I look down. A silhouette shifts between the cars. I immediately drop to the floor, banging knees and elbows.
I can hear, in the back of my mind, a sort of desperate scream that echoes all round my head, making the blood pulse in my hands splayed on the hard floor.
I fight against that itchiness creeping in my throat.
I dare myself to take one more look – please, not now, not this too – just to double-check I’m not seeing shapes in the shadows that aren’t there.
Steeling myself, I inch forwards on my front, until I’m within inches of the Juliet balcony. I peep over. I can’t see the shape that I saw before. I search the edges of the car park, around the crumpled rectangular forms of rusting cars in the dark.
I pace the hallway, thinking. I check on Harry.
In what used to be the spare bedroom, I open up a locked chest. Jack would have laughed at my collection: a hammer, a sturdy piece of wood with five-inch rusty nails sticking out, the classic baseball bat, and an assortment of knives. Like I’m a player in one of his computer games, only in real life you don’t get to restart and try again.
3
‘Mummy?’
I flinch, but it’s only Harry coming to squat next to me by the window. Familiar soft round cheeks, clear amber-brown eyes, and thick chestnut hair.
‘Morning, baby,’ I whisper, smiling over the twinge of sadness and worry as I look at him, reaching, out of habit, to check his eyes and his throat.
He wriggles. ‘I’m not a baby, remember we said—’
‘We did. Morning, my big boy,’ I say, beaming.
I ease myself up, body aching from sitting here all night, and take tentative deep breaths – wary of finding stiffness in my lungs – and crack my neck as I scan the ground below again.
‘Breakfast time?’ Harry asks.
Breakfast is always cold, unless it is wintertime and still dark enough to get the wood stove going and make a pottage with whatever vegetables and meat we have, the soup getting increasingly watery the longer winter goes on.
So Harry eats cold leg meat and the succulent bulrush shoots I gathered yesterday, which give off a bitter cucumber scent as he tears into them. And I sip cold greater plantain tea and tear at the white starchy fibres of a cold cooked bulrush root. Always reminds me of sweet potato and winter comfort food, but this morning I can hardly stomach it.
It’s cooler today, the rain yesterday breaking the warm spell, making autumn feel suddenly closer. But it looks calm out there, the sky bluer than normal. I should take advantage of it. I fidget my hands over my chest and search the doorways and windows outside for movement . . .
Maybe it is safer to stay indoors today, though.
Still achy and tired, I sit on the sofa while Harry cuts up deep-red bulrush root husks.
‘What are you making?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘You could add them to that collage in the middle, they could be tree trunks.’
‘No, they can be slugs.’
I lean on the arm of the sofa, grabbing the box of chalks from the end of the kitchen counter. We don’t use them often; there are only stubs left. ‘You could use a white to make some of them snails?’
Harry grins and reaches for one. ‘Yes, and the blue and pink to show all the holes ’cause their houses are too thin, like when they were on everything Outside, all at once, remember? You got mad.’
‘Oh yeah, of course. Well, they ate everything. And then they all keeled over after bad rain making an awful goo!’
Harry giggles and I shuffle off the sofa to help cut and hack with the rusted scissors.
Mid-morning, we share a small cup of cold mint tea – the last drinking water in the flat unless we break into what we’ve put aside for the winter – and head to the spare bedroom.
We might as well put this time to good use by checking our winter stocks. Harry helps make sure everything is stored neatly, inspecting for mould and damp. Carrots preserved in airtight, heat-sealed glass jars, wooden crates of bulrush roots, turnips and onions. Malformed crab apples layered between old towels are sweating – I spread them out. I crush dried orange-brown pine needles, cheered by the faint green tinge at the sheath end, and seal them in jars to make ‘tea’, pound roasted dandelion roots for ‘coffee’, rotate the emergency containers of water to prevent bacteria or algae growing, and even start the laborious job of grinding dried bulrush roots into flour, bit by bit with the pestle and mortar.
The sweet chestnuts I picked last week already smell mouldy. They weren’t ripe, but I took them because some years they just rot on the tree with the sudden onslaught of the cold autumn rains. Yet they must have been damp – they’ll be bitter when we eat them, if they’re edible at all. Damn.
‘Can’t you get better ones?’ Harry frowns as he sniffs them too.
‘We have to be happy with what we can find, you know that.’
Harry lines them up on the desk by the window for me so today’s sunlight might dry them out.
‘Mummy!’
His yell makes my mind race and I glance beyond him through the glass. All morning I’ve felt drawn to the windows, looking for human shapes in the shadows under the trees and in doorways. Harry’s been absorbed in helping me, but I’ve caught him looking fearfully across at the windows too.
He points at the desk. ‘No, there, get it!’
I spit on a cloth and wipe the far corners, where fine dust has settled, and then continue round the room and the whole flat. ‘Not all dust is scary, Harry, some of it in the flat will be tiny pieces of your skin and mine or bits of our clothes.’
He touches his face, checking his fingers for evidence.
‘When the bad stuff’s in the air or rain outside, I can smell it, but settled and undisturbed on a surface like this, it’s hard to tell. So—’
‘Better clean it up, just-in-case,’ Harry says, with an exaggerated nod.
We pick at rabbit jerky and the wilting shoots for lunch, watching the blue-grey sky outside. I worry about my traps in Nathan’s Coppice. Unchecked, any trapped rabbits might attract dogs or foxes or rats to my best spot.
‘We could have a feast tonight?’ Harry says, eyes warming. ‘We could have baked potatoes and turnips, mashed up, with chestnuts all hot and yummy. Smoked-rabbit stew with pancakes . . .’
‘That does sound good, but no, we have to save lots of food for the winter.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why, summer and autumn are when the food grows outside.’
That dread I felt yesterday rises up again. We have to gather enough to last from the autumn berries until spring, with only scant fresh meat to be caught in between, provided the flooding isn’t so bad I can’t leave the flat, and the air meter isn’t hitting too deep into the orange danger part of its dial and I stop trusting my mask and gear, which it does more often than not in winter with the cold seeming to push bad air to the ground. And my lungs aren’t too sore, inflamed and breathless, the cold thick air triggering it, so that we have to stay in bed.
If they’re sore already . . .
All I’ve collected so far just isn’t enough.
‘Yeah, I don’t want to be hungry,’ Harry sighs, nodding.
I stare, as if he’s heard my thoughts.
He shrugs. ‘I remember my tummy hurt.’
Biting my lip, I can picture his hungry face and tears at the end of last winter.
I make myself get up, guilt and worry fuelling me to the front door – I should at least collect water today. We must not dig into our winter stores if we can help it, especially not now. My rainwater butt is only just the other side of the flats opposite.
I shove my favourite knife into my back pocket where the point of the sheath pokes out the hole in the corner. I run my fingers over the roughed-up leather and up the curved hardwood handle, tracing my father’s initials engraved there. It’s a good knife, fixed blade, five inches, full tang, proper pointed tip. It doesn’t feel like a weapon though, so I also pick up the rusty-nailed piece of wood, and head out, jittery, shoving boots and overalls on on the landing outside our front door, and leaving Harry stood in our hallway as the door closes on him, more peelings to stick to his collages in his hands.
I grab the empty water containers on the landing, and head down the stairs, kicking the sandbag dust and draught excluders out of the way at each internal door, and frowning at the bitter chemical-like smell of our building. I imagine it’s from leaks of bad rain and the smoke drifting in from our woodstove flue in the roof above, which I removed from another empty flat and fitted as best I could into ours. Finally, I step out into what was the communal garage. The cool shade makes me pause. The weapon in my hand is heavy, but I clutch it tighter. One whack if I need to, to give me time to run. That’s all.
Dark silhouetted cars still sit between the grey columns of concrete – glass glittering on the ground, wheels missing or tyres pancaked, fuel caps sticking out. I wait until I’m certain there’s nothing moving in here and then lock the stairwell door behind me, hurrying to the heavy metal shutter that once used to roll up and down electronically to let you drive in and out, and carefully slide through the half-metre gap at the bottom. I avoid nudging it, but the slight lip on the ground where the self-rising floodgate is still clips me.
Stepping outside, rubbing my shoulder, the dial on the handheld air meter springs up but settles in the green – less than ten micrograms per cubic metre – so I leave my hood down and my mask dangling from my neck – it can get hot and moist underneath it, and I’m scared of it triggering a coughing fit. Clicking the meter off again, I clip it to my overalls, so its solar chip can charge. A familiar heavy feeling rises alongside the worries as I walk. At least inside the flat, it can feel like Jack was only just there – that I’m less alone, or things might not be so bad. But out here, he always feels long gone.
My breathing seems loud and wheezy in the quiet open air, throat tickling. How far and how fast can I run if my chest flares up? I pause, squeezing my weapon, looking back the way I’ve come. Just the water. Just get that and then I can lock us inside the flat.
I tread carefully over the broken tarmac with its drifts of yellow and browning leaves and webs of bile-green algae, careful to avoid disturbing the glossy brown mounds of fungus.
Down the ivy-shaded alley between the two blocks of flats opposite ours, holding my breath until I reach the dappled daylight the other side, kicking through the deepening carpet of leaves. I look both ways. Nothing but the bright limey-yellow grass on the banks of the Hiz and drifts of golden leaves and the lurid acid yellow of the poplars above, rustling softly.
My water butt is on the left, tucked inside what used to be a corner of communal garden, a sweet nook with semi-circle benches and box hedging. Now it’s full of ivy – all washed-out green edged with deep red. The metallic front of the water butt sparkles in the sunshine, the deer of the Hertfordshire crest wet. The lid rests on the floor. The mesh filter too. Larger particles caught in the weave stand out, grey against the dark silver.
I snatch the lid up, checking the clasps in case it’s broken and been blown off. Yet condensation drips off and further wets the crest as I go to put it back. Worry gnaws at me.
The pebbles at my feet form two heavy indentations, as if a larger person has stood here. That trembling I felt last night kicks in. I could have kicked larger depressions myself, and I could have forgotten the lid last time I was here . . . Yet I’m not convinced I did.
I fumble the first container beneath the little tap at the bottom. Hitchin Town feels like a lurking presence at my back – beyond the poplars are supermarkets, rows of terraced houses, shops around the market square, where a survivor, if they came here, working along what were little commuter towns between London and Cambridge, might go scavenging. So I stand up, turn around to face it as water trickles into the container, but I feel very aware of the blocks of flats then, their tall looming masses and big dark windows at my back. A few broken doors and windows clatter in the breeze.
I try to focus on the familiar soothing sound of the poplars instead, leaves rustling like rushing waves on a beach, and how the air under the yellow canopy is golden as if shimmering with heat despite the cool day. I hear the Hiz trickling below the trees too, bankside grasses scratching.
Yet my eyes snag on a path trampled through the grass and fallen leaves to the river. So close to my water butt and the worry of tampering, that I leave the container still filling to follow it. The thick tufts of limey-yellow grass are unsettling as I brush past, orange-splotched, as if that imagined heat is real and the whole undergrowth about to ignite.
I find just deer prints and snuffle holes left in the moist earth at the water’s edge. Spots of the animal’s dry blood on the trampled leafy carpet too. It was too ill and disoriented perhaps to find a better source of water or food – the water thick with clotted clumps of that bile-green algae, and sparkling with suspended spores and plastic dust particles, like turquoise and grey glitter.
The moment I relax I lose my footing, one boot sinking into one of those soft holes, and I let myself topple backwards to my bottom to stop myself plunging forwards into that water. The snuffle hole sloshes with pearly mud and torn roots, now coating my boot too. From my place on the ground, the layer of grey in the soil profile is clear, an inch down, licking loose where I’ve disturbed it, below a thin line of the richest, blackest soil, and a thick pile of dark, decomposing leaves. It reminds me of cutting into cake and recoiling at decay and mould inside.
From this spot, too, the light catches the mist rising from the river. Droplets forming where the moisture clings to the hundreds of delicate threads from which hang moth cocoons. And I can imagine it all rising – water, plastic dust, and chemicals leached from the dust or run-off from elsewhere – only for it all to be rained down again, plastic and pollutants spreading through watercourses and groundwater into every crumb of soil, all caught in the cycle now and we’ll never be rid of it.
