Not Alone, page 31
Harry shivers, whispering through his mask, ‘Do they eat people?’
‘No,’ I whisper back, wrapping my arms around my chest, but remembering that hot breath and those teeth.
‘What are they doing?’
‘Fighting over the females, I guess. See, over there.’ I nod at the hinds on the opposite ridge. Silvery-grey, their coats shimmer in the breeze, their eyes glinting in the daylight. They’re all small and slender. Malnourished and young, as if their life cycle is faster than it was Before. Several stamp their feet or paw at the ground, like they want to join in with the stags.
‘Why?’
‘What? Oh, to prove who is stronger and who should have the . . . be the leader of the females.’ I jump as one of the calves suddenly launches down the slope in a furious stampede, right into the path of the heavy thudding antlers of one of the stags.
Harry yelps.
Eyes and ears twitch to look right at us. The stags shake their heads, hooves stamping.
I pull Harry away.
‘But why does he want to—’
‘To make baby deer with them.’
‘How?’
My cheeks flush and I stumble over my words before rushing to get it out. ‘They’ll rub against each other, and . . . and he’ll put something-inside-her-that-helps-grow-a-baby.’ We shuffle down the way we came. The sound of hooves over the ridge makes me sweat and rush, ignoring the sharp pain in my ankle and horrible ache in my pulsing chest.
Harry nods. He has that wide-eyed look of make-believe on his face as I tug him along towards a sharp dip in the mountainside where a boulder must have dislodged and thundered downhill. Harry might well have believed flying storks or spontaneous whole-animal-mitosis – I needn’t have said what I did.
Down in the hollow, the wind whips round the sandy basin left by the boulder. Below us in the mottled yellow and purple valley there are now unnerving smears of mist or cloud or smog, it’s hard to tell which. The flooded A86 we’re trying to follow is still visible down there by the glint of the reflective snow-time marker-posts amongst the broader expanse of the Loch Laggan waters now. Having crossed the Spean at a high footbridge in its lower, steeply valleyed reach, the days have blurred together again, as we traipse painfully up-slope and down, always trying to refind and keep sight of those road markers as they weave through the Spey Valley. When we come across streams, we wander until we can find passable stepping stones. We sleep in hollows or thickets under the groundsheet, hungry, tired, cold, and eyes irritated and bloodshot, though thankfully my mask is keeping Harry’s lungs safe. Aviemore is still forty miles or so up the Spey Valley.
I peep over the rim. The stags have locked antlers. A few hinds still look in our direction. The calf hasn’t got back up.
‘Was my daddy the strongest?’ Harry asks, his voice almost lost in the wind and the clashing of antlers.
That old sickly feeling squeezes inside my stomach.
‘He was strong . . .’ I remember the muscled shoulders my hands would always cling to when Jack and I had those proper warm bear hugs. But also the way he cried when he broke down, the struggle to not resort to pills anymore, but to get better and forge his career and thrive. ‘Yes, he was strong.’ And then I think of the weight of that man I didn’t know, pinning me down, the way I couldn’t make him stop.
‘Am I as strong?’ Harry stands straight.
The sickly feeling swirls. But in the end I smile. ‘It doesn’t matter about him, you’re your own sort of strong.’
He grins, but it fades quickly. Mist is drifting in around us.
‘Come on.’ We cut south to loop around the deer and weave through the mountainscape, sticking to the clear parts, but we’re soon surrounded by mist.
Harry whimpers, eyes wide, next to me.
The air meter won’t turn on.
‘What does it smell of?’ My own nose is too blocked and sore.
I help Harry lift his mask, just a little. ‘I don’t know,’ he frets. ‘Just Outside.’
‘Not bitter and bad?’
He shrugs. ‘I don’t think so.’
We scramble up and down peatbogs and heath, the haze-muted orange and honey-yellow of miniature bushes and grasses and bare black mud at our feet the only things we can see. I try to keep an eye on the pale glow of the sun too, but soon I lose sight of it, all white everywhere. The cold wet air stains the map and soaks my blanket-mask, my hot pulsing lungs gasping for air. I find it’s better to keep going slowly than stopping and starting, more bearable. So we inch our way up and down, trying to find a way out of the whiteout; it no longer matters if it’s the right direction; I’ve no idea which that is anymore. Just get out.
We splosh through an icy stream and follow it downhill. Exhausted and with the afternoon drawing in, we finally emerge out of the hazy dreamlike night world of the whiteout and back into the clear waking world. Harry flops to the ground instantly. A flatter heathland spreads out ahead, a strip of green in the distance under a grey sky: the deep greens of tall healthy pines, with a scattering of glossy bright-yellow young birch.
‘One more bit,’ I wheeze, biting my lip as I help him back up.
‘You said that already,’ he says, but he stumbles to his feet and follows my slow limping pace across the wet, rocky heath until we reach the trees and pause at the first cluster of old dead trunks.
Burrow holes emerge around their bases. Muddy trails exiting them peter out into the mountainside around us. Harry cranes his neck to look up. Scuffed paths run up the wet and sloping blackened trunks to widened cracks and holes higher up, where small tunnels must be dug right into the rotting wood. I gape at a rabbit sat high up like a sentinel, his nose twitching. He soon dives down a knothole and disappears.
I snort. ‘I never looked up! I always thought the rabbits in Nathan’s Coppice, in the winter, either dug in somewhere else drier if they could find it . . .’ Or drowned. ‘What if they learned to do the same?’
‘Didn’t they always go up Before? Looks safe. I like high up.’
‘No, people controlled the rivers and sea then – or tried to – so it didn’t flood as much. Big walls and hard channels and gates and things. Floods used to be a surprise. And the floodwater now is probably full of bad dust.’
Harry frowns. ‘That’s silly, isn’t it too big for trapping? I bet that made it sad or angry. That’s why it swallows things.’
‘Wild places aren’t sad or angry, Harry. They don’t feel.’
‘They do!’ He whines, nodding his head, as he slips a hand free of its mitten to rub his tired eyes. ‘The wind and rain are sometimes angry. Like you when you sometimes slam and bang . . . things . . .’
Harry kicks his heel into the ground.
I watch, my thoughts already returning to rabbits. ‘A pitfall trap! It might work if we check it regularly. Otherwise, they’d soon dig themselves out.’
Harry sighs, sinking to his knees. ‘Why are we making a trap?’
I swallow, avoiding answering, and instead stab the ground on one of the rabbit trails with a stick, scraping away soil, careful to sit upwind as the grey layer beneath the rich topsoil gets carried off by the breeze. I dig until my arms have nothing left. Harry helps me find twigs and leaves to cover the pit, before we brush each other down as best we can.
‘Bait would help,’ I tell Harry.
‘What’s bait?’
‘Like food – something the rabbits would like.’
We explore the green and yellow copse, me hobbling in Harry’s wake.
Deeper amongst the trees, my ankle throbbing with each snag and every part of my body begging to rest, I spot hazelnut shells amongst the thick layer of fallen leaves. And soon, the double-toothed papery leaves – yellow with red-black smudges – of a hazel tree. I show Harry the unripe, pale green nuts in their crinkly coverings. Anything ripe must be taken straight away by squirrels. So we pick the unripe ones until our pockets are full.
With the trap baited with hazelnuts, we set up our camp at the other end of the copse with a view east of endless rolling mountains, which scares me as I frown at the blurred sodden map, not sure at all which mountains are which now. No snow-time marker-posts or roads visible either.
Huddled under our ponchos and the groundsheet, the fire taking, we listen to the hard pummelling rain coming down, and cram hazelnuts in our mouths. Most are too hard, like crunching into dried peas, but soaked a bit in hot water, they’re edible enough and have a sweet vegetable taste.
We doze, exhausted, the nuts only making me more aware of the terrible emptiness in my stomach. I wake to the fire snapping as Harry adds another branch to it, face bare and intent on the task. The rain has slowed and the light is fading, the distant black ridges backlit with lurid pink and orange.
The pain has crept back up, the adrenaline of the whiteout long gone, but we need to check that trap. I grimace as I force myself to sit up. Heart squeezing in sharp searing pulses. Lungs feeling raw and papery thin as I gasp in breaths – the ball of bramble I imagined in my chest in Arisaig, expanding and shrinking, now gorse instead, with its long stabbing thorns for leaves. I try to contain the wet coughing, bloody phlegm splattering the dirty cloth I use as a handkerchief. This feels unbearable. Tears prick my eyes.
Harry is weary, hypnotized by the hungry flames, and snuggled into his poncho and blanket. The firelight exaggerates the hollows in his cheeks, his sunken eye sockets.
Maybe if this is as far as we manage to get, it was my best. Maybe I’ve fought as far as I can fight. The pain fills my whole chest, and I rock, exhausted and holding myself together with my arms folded.
But as I watch Harry, eyes dancing with orange flames, something screams inside me. Can’t give up yet. Not dead yet. I focus my hope on the pitfall trap – not counting those first few days of rationed seaweed, or our taste of inner pine bark, and leaves and tiny lingering and sour haw- and buckthorn-berries picked as we’ve trekked, this is the closest we’ve come to finding a proper meal that filled our bellies in nearly a week. And that last hot meal with Andy and Sue feels an age ago. I try schooling my voice to a calm, hopefully playful, tone. ‘Can we play a finding game? One more before dinner?’
‘Too tired,’ Harry says, his eyes flicking up at the word dinner.
‘Please, Harry. A brand new different game, I promise.’
Finally he wobbles to his feet like a sleepwalker, shoulders hunched and yawning as he nods.
‘Good boy. Can you find me as many different plants as you can? One of them is magic – see if you can find it.’
We call out to each other as Harry scrambles through the undergrowth. He totters back frequently, looking brighter now he’s up – though I know his energy will sap quickly – asking if the wilting yellow in his fist is different. A nettle and a willowherb, a horsetail and a dead stem of something indeterminate. I check everything off as he brings it to me, still clutching my chest, just trying to focus on each gasp in as it comes, each rattling breath out, each painful pulse.
‘Wow, that’s fifteen now, Harry!’ Sensing him tiring, I risk a hand up from my chest to high five. ‘Getting warmer!’ The pain spasms as he slaps my hand and goes off for more.
Please let there be something.
40
A lemon-yellow flower. Harry presents it in a straggly bouquet, before slumping down by the fire. I know I’ve seen it before.
I flick through the book. There. Common evening-primrose. Flowers only open in the evening in summer and autumn. Four bright petals.
Pain-relieving properties.
‘This is it,’ I tell Harry and he squats to examine it. ‘Can you find more?’
‘Too tired.’ He slips lower under his poncho.
‘Harry, please?’ I croak, fear creeping into my voice. ‘It’s got magic that might make me hurt less.’
He wobbles to his feet and eventually I have several handfuls. Double-checking my identification in The Wild Flower Key, I test some in my mouth, nibbling it. No swelling or immediate reaction.
I oversteep some in an inch of hot water and sip the bitter tea.
My heart still squeezes painfully, but slowly, my lungs do seem to ease. Enough that I can sit up properly and feel less dizzy. I don’t care if it’s a placebo; I try not to think too much.
The light is fading now. I meant for us to check the trap hours ago; it could be too late. I limp slowly round the copse to the warren, pausing every time my chest spasms. When we get there, we find the trap fallen in on itself, the leaves gone. A rabbit darts out of a freshly dug hole not far from it, dashing up one of the warren trees. But a second rabbit is huddled in the leaf litter inside the pitfall trap, munching on exposed roots. Its ears flatten. I squeeze my hand twice and Harry freezes.
The newly dug escape tunnel is just to the rabbit’s left. This animal is almost white and has extra-long guard hairs, making it fluffy. It could have passed as a pet, Before.
This is going to hurt.
I glance at Harry’s windswept shabby little figure.
I dive. Eyes focused on those hind legs. The rabbit launches up the escape tunnel, but I get one hand around a kicking foot as I slam into the cold hard earth. Claws gouge through my sleeves. Pain explodes across my chest. The rabbit pulls and thrashes, digging claws into the damp tunnel soil; I groan and gasp, stubbornly holding on. But my fingers are weak, slipping.
Black spots blur my vision, I feel sickeningly dizzy and faint. I force a desperate grip with my stiff left hand, and suddenly I have two hands now around the back legs. I drag him back into the trap pit, inch by inch, against his panicked thrashing. Get my left hand around his neck.
One sharp yank and there’s a pop.
The rabbit sags in my hands and I crumple. Even to myself I sound like a wounded animal – gulping at breaths and moaning. Harry tugs desperately at my legs spread on the grass above, but I can’t speak yet, my face smashed into the soothing damp cold of the soil, soft warm fur pressed into my neck. White noise swirls round the fringes of my head and I feel on the edge of falling into it.
Harry is a shadow crouching over the hole. ‘Is it sleeping?’ His voice is small and unsure.
‘No, it’s dead,’ I whisper on an outbreath when I finally can. Harry’s face is drawn together in horror and confusion, his eyes teary. I take a careful breath in, and whisper. ‘Important to do it cleanly. Don’t want the rabbit to feel pain and be terrified.’
I haul myself up bit by bit, until I’m kneeling on the ground, the precious limp rabbit held tight in my lap. ‘We’re so hungry, Harry, I had to.’ I stop to catch my breath again, wait out the pain. ‘You understand?’ I gasp. ‘We kill only so we can eat.’ Another breath. ‘You feel bad for the rabbit, don’t you?’
Harry nods, bloodshot eyes full of tears.
‘That’s good,’ I mumble. ‘We should feel bad . . . shows we have proper respect for it.’
I try my best to clean myself up, wiping my face and hands with a spit-wetted corner of my T-shirt, but I don’t feel clean.
Harry winces as I show him how to skin the rabbit – ‘It’s dead, Harry, it can’t feel it anymore’ – and to cut and whittle hazel stools to make skewers to cook the meat over the fire. Harry has to help – I keep having to rest, crumpled forwards, biting my lips, and my knife keeps slipping, my left hand not gripping. Harry picks up the whittling quickly, chewing on the first cut skewer as he concentrates. Jack would love teaching him to carve and create things.
Soon, my mouth is watering at the smell of roasting food. Even Harry is grinning now.
This is how hungry we are: we eat every scrap of meat, until we are so full, neither of us can move. Maybe you’re supposed to build up to such a big meal after so long. And what if we don’t find anything more in the days to come?
I don’t care. It felt right.
‘I love you, Mummy,’ Harry says, his little hands resting on his tummy.
I smile, feeling better too. ‘Wholeheart,’ I whisper. ‘Sorry I didn’t let you . . . help more before, Harry . . . I wasn’t alone, was I . . . Always had you as my little partner, didn’t I?’
Harry nods vigorously.
I smile more. We settle into our blankets, watching the fire. I sip more oversteeped evening-primrose tea, conserving a mouthful of water for the morning, as I shift, trying to get comfortable. The rain is delicate, swirling in the breeze and getting us beneath the groundsheet anyway. But it looks clear for now. Harry helps me find more wood before everything gets too wet and then we get the fire going really well again by disturbing the glowing embers.
Harry points. ‘Look!’
Above the fire, yellow-white sparks snap like a fairy fireworks display.
‘This is a good place,’ he sighs.
I finally find a position that’s bearable, the warm mug pressed against my chest and soothing, my stiff left hand and sore ankle held towards the wonderful warmth of the fire. Harry is sat cross-legged, all bundled up in his steaming poncho, his face full of joy as he watches the sparks. I don’t remember the last time I felt this content, like I do just now – I don’t think I’ve been able to imagine that feeling being possible in the world After, not really. Everything’s still painful and scary; death hanging over us. But that makes the good feeling of being warm, fed and finally resting under cover together all the more intense. I feel hopeful that tomorrow might bring another meal and a fire, and we’ll get to rest and be warm together again. I feel almost drunk.
And alive – in a way I only ever felt Before with Jack on our adventures, when things felt brilliant and intense and eye-opening. That’s why those moments are what I remember most when I think of him. I don’t mean to, but I can feel a tear sting its way out from a blocked duct and roll slowly down my cheek. This is the feeling that makes the rest of it all worth living, all the stuff that we’ve been through and all that may happen next. I wish I could have had more of it with Harry.
I blink, aware again of the crackling snaps of light, and, frowning, tug my mask up, the air meter still unresponsive, and signal Harry to do the same. Yet I miss his smile and feel sad for losing sight of it, though I can tell it’s still there by the glint in his eyes. And why shouldn’t he enjoy this? He is of this new world just like the strange deer and the fiery trees. I’m the only one stuck in the past, thinking of the way the world once was, looking at it all as if it were alien and bad. Why shouldn’t he enjoy its strangeness? Why shouldn’t his favourite colour be yellow? We watch the sparks until the breeze changes direction, the orange flames shooting up higher.
