the gulls shriek and divebomb, but I ignore them.
I reach the top and start to walk.
*
I walk because somewhere there must be food and water. I walk to seek out shelter. I choose a destination because otherwise the possibility of anywhere is too big.
My parents lived around forty miles from Scotland. The Scottish mainland is roughly three hundred miles long. I do not know where I have washed up, but if I manage an average of ten miles a day, I should be home inside a month.
Of course it will take me much longer than that. I will get lost. As much as possible, I will avoid towns and cities. I will avoid their bombed and broken buildings, and their Sickness-ridden bodies lurking like a virus already in the bloodstream.
I will leave the roads, clogged with the cars of all those who tried to flee from explosions or infestations, those who had not already been claimed by the War or the Sickness that rose out of it, those who tried to reach the so-called Safe Centres before they shut their gates. Who knows how many shells are lying unexploded on the tarmac? Who knows what kinds of explosives or gases or diseases they might contain?
I will stick to fields and moorland and heaths. Nature always was a more predictable place – though even then there will be obstacles to overcome. There will be places to stop and search for food, and the unavoidable ritual of living. Survival is time-consuming.
Still it sits somewhere at the base of my belly, this drive to return. I am like a homing pigeon, pulled back to the place it was fed and watered and kept safe from prowling foxes, even though its keeper is no longer there to care for it. I suppose it is a pilgrimage of sorts. A sacrifice meted out in aches and blisters – an absolution. I need to see for myself that my parents are gone.
I dream about it sometimes. Not home itself, but the journey, the perpetual striving. In my dreams, I climb the hill behind my parents’ house, or I drag my feet along the lane that leads to their village, but I always wake just before I arrive. There is always further to go.
*
My father called me Monster. It was supposed to be ironic, I think – an affectionate joke.
As I got older, my mother tried to change it, but by then the name had solidified around me. It was a shame, she said, for such a pretty child to have an ugly name.
My mother often lamented that I didn’t fit my cherub cheeks and curls. Her name was Beatrice and she wore it like an elegant fur coat. As for me, I grew into my name and out of my curls. I think it takes a monster to survive when nobody else can.
*
I sit on a crumbling rock at the edge of a copse, where the air still smells of sea.
The fields here are wide and flat, and there is a feeling of height. The ground seems to go only as far as the nearest wall, and then into a cold sky beyond. I watch bright clouds scud across the horizon until it feels as though the whole world is moving.
For a moment, I can almost believe there was no War, no Sickness, no inevitable Last Fall. Then my eye lingers on the tangle of weeds growing over the bottom of the five-bar gate, part of the faint air of neglect that has settled over everything, human control succumbing to plant-life as the War forced people into towns and the Sickness swept through what remained of the villages.
A blister as big as a five pence coin has bubbled up on my right heel. I pop it between my nails and a clear liquid leaks across my thumb. I sit with cold air stinging the raw skin, until I’m numb from sitting. Then I stick a plaster on my heel and put my boot back on.
*
When I was five, I started to squirrel things under my bed in my mother’s old shoe boxes. Little things, the flotsam and jetsam of daily life: spare plugs, old phones, the toaster that was supposed to be thrown out. I sat straining my eyes by the desk lamp, fiddling and tinkering until they worked again, or until I could piece the parts together into something new. I fell in love with the honesty of objects, how they thrived or failed based on their own mechanical truth. On rainy days, I would lay out all the pieces on my bedroom floor just to gaze at them. I knew their ridges and grooves intimately.
My screws and wires were my company. In the playground, I fought the girls who whispered behind my back and cold-shouldered the boys who prodded me in the side and sometimes claimed to want to be my friend. When Callum Jenkins slouched over one lunchtime to tell me I was ‘cool for a girl’, I bit his arm until I tasted blood.
As a teenager I became volatile and fierce, snapping at neighbours who asked about my favourite subjects, turning a sullen eye on critical aunts and uncles. I swore loudly at the gaggle of cousins who came to visit. My mother bought me a book: How to Start Conversations and Make Friends. I told her to fuck off.
By the time I was sixteen, I had taught myself how to be Monster.
*
For two days it rains. I take shelter in a bothy, by a gushing stream that threatens to burst its banks. The only wood I can find is rotted through and slimy to the touch, impossible to make a fire from. I spend all day cocooned in my sleeping bag, reliant on the scant protection of four walls and a dripping roof. The flaking plaster is black with mildew and there is a smell of dead rats. In the shut-in dark, it’s too easy to remember the Seed Vault. It’s too easy to think of Erik, wide-eyed and afraid in the pressing underground chamber of the vault. Then the silence, and the world crumbling outside. I close my eyes and focus on the noise of rain.
*
The grass is patchy, the earth wet and cloying. It clings to my boots as I squelch through it, making them heavy with mud. I drop down behind a hill and am confronted by a village. A mean thing – a dozen old stone houses hunkered in a glen. The place still has an air of isolation and hellish winters, and for a while I stand at a distance and just look.
There are no noises except the half-hearted gusting of wind through trees. The village itself is still and huddled as a dead thing. At the furthest edge, a patch of burnt ground like a footprint. If I hold my hand at arm’s length, I can block out the whole sorry lot of it.
I have two days left before I run out of food.
Just once, as a teenager, I caught my mother in my bedroom, her flower-printed back to the door, fingers flicking through the pilfered things in my shoe box, turning them up to the light and putting them unceremoniously back.
That is what entering this village is like. I open doors to the houses and inside them I open cupboards and inside the cupboards I open boxes and tins. At every act of opening, I turn the hidden places up to the light and feel part of myself recoil. Everywhere I look, there are books or photographs or withered house-plants – all the flotsam that once made pieces of a life. If places could move, these would scurry from my entering them like woodlice on an upturned rock.
I try not to look too much, to break down these houses in my mind the way I might break down a machine into its functioning parts, so that I see each building only as a series of potential food stores, so I limit my attention to where supplies might be. I do not know how much I succeed, but I emerge from the last house with half a packet of oats, a tub of lentils, some tins and a box of not-quite luxury chocolates I decant into a bag. My pack is heavy, but my calendar of survival grows a little longer.
I follow a road so rough and potholed it is really no more than a track, skirting the bottom of a hill. A small bridge crosses a brook, and I dip down
