I reach out but she’s gone.
*
I never understood the idea of total absence. I thought there must always be something. The alternative was too big to comprehend.
Now there is nothing. It is vast.
I sleep. I wake. I sleep.
*
I wake and the fog is gone. In its place is weak sunlight, an empty sky, and sprawling moorland covered in sharp brown grass. My body aches and my stomach heaves. The cold is still there, lodged deep inside me, but I am still here, too.
The path stretches on further than I can see. In the distance, like a bright shell washed up and left behind by the retreating fog, is a white spot in the landscape. It is too far to tell if it is a building.
I try to sit up. Everything tilts and I grab out to steady myself. My hand comes away wet. The fog has left each spike of grass covered in minute droplets. They coat the ground so thinly that the world looks out of focus.
I run my hand across it and again, dampness. A single pearl of water running down the centre of my palm. I lick it off, and it tastes of salt and earth and my own skin. I do this again and again, drop by minuscule drop. It is almost nothing. Perhaps it is enough.
I wriggle out of my sleeping bag and stand.
The movement sends a wave of nausea crashing through me. I retch up bile and spit it into the grass. My tongue is bitter. My throat burns with acid and thirst. My lips are cracked and the inside of my mouth feels cavernous and rasping. My head throbs with dehydration and I have to clench my teeth and breathe through my nostrils to stop myself vomiting again. In the face of this new pain, my leg has given way to a sapping ache and a vicious itching. My trousers are hard where the scab has broken wetly and then dried and broken again. I cannot bring myself to look. I force myself not to scratch.
Over the space of what must be an hour, I pack away my sleeping bag. I look at my backpack for several minutes before heaving it onto my shoulders. As soon as it’s in place, the straps rub and my knees threaten to buckle. I drag myself away.
The world spins. Every few steps, I stop and concentrate on breathing. I count my breaths until I can walk the next uneven steps, and then the next.
*
I do not know how long it takes to reach it: a soot-smeared wall, which is all that remains of a cottage. I imagine its occupants contracting the Sickness, dying inside and everyone too afraid to remove the bodies to burn them on an outside pyre. Easier just to stand outside the door and light a match.
Bits of rubble stick up like blackened teeth. A mish-mash of objects in what must once have been a homely yard. An iron boot-scraper. A flowerpot filled with earth. A jumble of perished wellies. An old stone sink, a few inches of stagnant water in the bottom.
The water is brown and thick-looking. A few dead leaves are suspended in its murk. I scoop them out and my hand comes away smelling of plant rot. I clench my teeth again. I do not know what this water will do to me, if it will make me vomit until there is nothing of me left, if it will dry me out completely so all my organs stop functioning and I am lost. I also do not know when I will next find water.
I dip a bottle into the sludge. The sediment swirls against my hand as it glugs into the open neck.
I take a deep breath, then lift the bottle to my lips, trying not to smell the rancid rot I am drinking. I force my constricted throat open, drink in trickles, ignore the sour taste filling the raw cavern of my mouth.
There is a high ringing in my ears and I can no longer hear my heartbeat. The itch in my leg is a dull constant.
*
At the edge of the moorland, I drag myself, metre by metre, to the top of a hill. My leg still shakes at every other step, but the hill is a vantage point. There’s a stitch in my side and the climbing tugs and pulls at my muscles. It reminds me I am still here, that I am still human. I sit on top of the hill, regaining my breath, with the landscape unfolded below me. The world rises and falls around me, always keeping me at its centre. I need to understand my place in the world, even now, even if this is where my days run out.
In the distance is a city, a pre-War metropolis bristling with abandonment, a dark river winding through its centre. Beyond it, like a grey brushstroke, is the North Sea. Slumped here on this hilltop, I consider all the possibilities a city like that might hold: shops and warehouses, tool sheds, homes to scour for secret stores of food or medicines. Anything that might be useful. And on the edge of it all something I am too tired to understand nudges into the depths of my brain. A faint electric glow – machinery surviving even where life has failed.
The potential of it all swells and builds inside me, battling back at the aches and nauseating hunger. All that fortune, all those things, all mine, whenever I choose to claim them. It is as if I have stumbled on my own personal market where no money is demanded, where the only price is being alone.
From up here, I cannot tell how complete the city might be – how heavily it was bombed in the War, at what point its population was eviscerated by the Sickness, or whether anyone from here was evacuated to the Safe Centres to make it as far as the Last Fall. A city like this is an unknown element. Who knows what might be hiding in the shut-in buildings, what bombs were dropped here and are lying unexploded and full of dispersing Sickness, waiting for the touch of a boot to set their mechanisms working? And who knows how many dog packs fiercely guard the narrow streets? Animals, like people, are drawn to cities – to the stuff and mess of them, to the hiding places and the mounds of waste. I try not to think it, but I know they will also be drawn to the bodies that must be down there somewhere, too – laid out in beds or slumped on sofas, or perhaps trapped beneath exploded walls and waiting for the rubble to shift. I wonder how long ago this city’s people died. Despite myself, I wonder how much remains.
Left in the open air, a human body can break down to only a skeleton in as little as two years. In the ground, it can take as many as twelve. I remember researching these details as a child, filled with fearful curiosity as I looked for facts to write on little white cards for my museum. I never expected to be thinking about it like this, so many years later, overlooking a museum the size of a city. It feels like childhood, and a fear of falling asleep.
At night there is always a feeling of being watched – a feeling like an eye in the dark. As a child I would sit in bed with my back against the cold plaster, running the torchlight across the familiar objects of my room. Now, that eye is a bright blue. Now, when the darkness closes in around me, I like to curl in on myself and keep close to the fire or lie wrapped in my sleeping bag. The city, with its black streets and hidden alleyways, would be the worst place for feeling watched. In the city there would be no solid edge to put my back against, no protective wall that might not also be a hiding place for something else. The city has become a place for daylight, and daylight only.
I scour the landscape, the unfamiliar vastness of it. Away from the city, at the bottom of the next valley, there is a grey smudge of buildings. A farmhouse, perhaps also a barn. A safer place to sleep but can I make it there in my current condition? And if the buildings are empty, will I have the strength to make it to the city on an empty stomach tomorrow? In the city, there is bound to be food. There is also bound to be danger.
With the sweat cooling on my back, I look between the two. Safety or possibility? City or farm?
I cannot stay here. I haul myself up from the rock and thread
