How I Live Now: Chapters 21–29

When he came to stay at the house that night I tried to talk to him about getting Mrs. M some sedatives but I never saw a person look tireder or more dispirited than him and I got the feeling he was already doing so much more than his best on so many fronts that digging up a prescription for Valium would be one job too many, and anyway he was the one who could’ve used a few hundred milligrams.

When I finally got to sleep I found Edmond and told him everything that happened, and he stayed with me for hours and whether I was dreaming or just borderline schizophrenic.

At around 6 a.m. when everyone was still sleeping four soldiers came bursting into the house looking for Frankie and said we had to leave immediately, that a vigilante group had started up and they went in the night to ambush the checkpoint soldiers and now The Enemy was going house to house and killing anyone they didn’t like the look of.

Piper looked stricken and whistled and called with her voice getting higher and more hysterical and much as everyone wanted to see a little girl reunited with her dog there was no way they were going to risk everyone’s lives waiting for it to happen so I pulled her in beside me and we drove off without him.

Piper and I were hanging on to each other feeling stupefied with fear and loss and Mrs. McEvoy was holding on to Alby like a drowning person and Alby just sat there thrilled that he was going in a car and could see all the trees rushing past him and as the tears streamed down Mrs. McEvoy’s face faster and faster I thought Her husband’s dead and maybe her older son too and now she has to leave her house and all she’s got left is one drooling kid without any idea what’s going on...

I wasn’t about to have him blow himself to smithereens on account of it would clearly be the end for his poor old deranged mom.

Piper seemed to go inside herself more than usual but for me it was just one more chapter of my increasingly surreal Normal Life and I had a calm feeling most of the time, like nothing could happen anymore that would surprise me.

Piper seemed pretty substantially cheered up by all this surprising information and I said Once the sun starts to come up we’ll look for a place to bivouac and we both burst out laughing at my use of technical Boy Scout terminology and I said Honestly!

We’d both been bitten by something or other in the night and it didn’t improve my mood to have a face covered in itching welts and wild hair and no toothbrush and also to feel so grubby from not having a bath in ages.

We felt as relieved as if we’d suddenly come across a five-star hotel and before the rain started up again we collected armfuls of long grass to make a nest that was nearly soft enough to rest on comfortably and then I opened up our two backpacks and laid the blankets out and it was amazingly cozy and actually pretty civilized if you didn’t count the spiders.

I lay there for a while listening to Edmond’s voice in my head and it was calm and familiar and a little bit wistful and I started to relax and forget about everything but him and that was another day gone.

For some stupid reason I started to cry then and I felt completely choked with despair and worthlessness and I couldn’t believe I was trying to lead Piper miles across England to find something the size of a microbe on a map when in my real life I couldn’t even find a clean pair of underpants in a chest of drawers.

We got out of the water shivering like crazy but more or less clean and tried not to look at each other because it was too depressing to acknowledge what we looked like and we stood for a little while in the cold evening wind to dry off because it had become kind of a fanatic compulsion to keep our blankets dry.

It must be some well-known phenomenon that if you stare into a fire when you’re already half out of your mind due to a variety of deprivations you will immediately find yourself hypnotized.

It took a supreme effort of will to pull my eyes away from it and if I hadn’t done that Piper and I might still be sitting there today, gazing into the flames and feeling the heat on our faces and hands, triumphant about making something as wild and effective as a fire, even though we did start out with matches which was obviously a lot easier than rubbing sticks together.

But along with being nervous there was a secret feeling of exhilaration to think we might almost be Somewhere.

Put yourselves in our shoes for a minute, walking into this deserted place on a glowering gray September day when it should be filled with animals and people and life but what you find is nothing, no sign of people, just the eeriest lack of noise possible and nothing moving except the big black birds in the air and legions of crows standing absolutely still, watching you.

My first thought was that they were beautiful, sleek and well fed and vivid orangey red with sharp little intelligent faces and it didn’t occur to me till second thought to wonder why there were so many of them and why they didn’t run away.

Dead things everywhere and when the stink hit you it was like nothing you ever smelled before and when you hear people say something smells like death trust them because that’s the only way to describe what it smells like, putrid and rotting and so foul your stomach tries to vault out through your throat and if your brain has any sense it wants to jump out of your skull and run away as fast as possible with or without the rest of you...

One by one I approached the bodies, nice and methodical, saw how dead each one was and sometimes how young, and one by one each turned out not to be the person I most feared it would be.

The optimism of it should have cheered me up a little but it didn’t.

In my new incarnation, I expected nothing, good or bad.

I couldn’t face the filthy sweater I’d been wearing every day to keep warm and although the new clothes were a little musty, when I crawled in between the wool blankets and put my head down next to Piper’s I felt almost clean and safe and best of all, home.

The fact that we were clean and more or less safe just made the absences more glaring and for all my longing after Edmond at least I’d come to terms with losing my mother a long time ago but all Piper had left out of a mother and three brothers was me, a dog, and a whole lot of unanswered questions.

Anyway there were lots of potatoes because in order to get to the barn you had to walk along an entire field planted with potatoes and though the army guys living at our house had obviously noticed this too, there are still only so many potatoes a small platoon of hungry sequesterers can eat in a month especially without any of the essential ingredients for mashed, French fried or potato salad.

I spent most mornings digging potatoes and carrying them back to the barn to store in the feed bins while Piper went off searching for natural morsels like watercress and sweet chestnuts and honey.

What about a meandering river I wondered to myself.

I spent practically a whole afternoon collecting chestnuts and when I got back Piper looked at me with as close as she ever got to contempt and said Those are Horse Chestnuts and Inedible.

It was cloudy and drizzling which Piper said was good for fishing and as usual I watched while she lured food onto the bank, but once she caught anything I had to follow her directions about killing and cleaning it while she turned her head away.

As the days passed and there was no sign of Edmond or Isaac I had to fight the unbearable fear that always lurked at the back of my mind.

Sometimes I thought I heard Edmond’s voice in my head but it always turned out to be my subconscious replaying old tapes out of some perverse kind of nostalgia.

I had looked carefully at every hideous, nightmare face just to be sure.

She always took Jet with her for company so I had no early-warning system and every time I approached the house I searched for portents, strange cloud patterns, thirteen magpies, frogs the size of antelopes, that sort of thing.

Some days I was convinced I could sense something or I experienced an uncanny mystical feeling but it won’t make the six o’clock news if I tell you I was always wrong.

There was no use pretending I had a premonition when Piper was around because if any manifestation was going to make itself manifest, it wasn’t going to be to me.