in my pack as I scramble back up the bank.
A few miles further on, my rutted strip of tarmac arrives at a wider road, with grass verges and a dotted white line along the centre. The signpost points to a town in one direction, a nature reserve in the other. I stop to drink from my water bottle, balancing the possibility of food and shelter against the need for emptiness and open space. I think about what a town might mean – like the village but bigger, an unbearable cavity, cluttered with all the paraphernalia of what my mother might have called ‘normal people’: people who followed the rules, who had families and a community, who stuck so hard to their so-called loved ones they eventually let it kill them.
I think about my parents, like two satellites with incompatible programming, but orbiting on the same trajectory. I try not to think about Erik, his fatal need for human touch. When there is nobody else, it is easier to think about hating people than about wanting them.
In the War and in the Sickness that followed, so many people depended too much on those they cared about. But survival has a cost. It has always had a cost, and the cost is being alone, cutting out friends and family like a cancerous growth and sealing the wound behind them. And if you pay the greatest price, you get to survive the longest – which is why there is only me, and why I must keep walking.
I test the weight of the new supplies on my back, and head away from the town.
*
The ground is icy now. I leave the road and trek across fields. The frozen grass crunches under my boots. All around me, the world is wide and silver, like the painting of winter my parents had in the back bedroom. I walk with my face covered to protect myself from the cold. I can feel it in my toes and the tips of my fingers. Every day I hug my arms around my chest and am thankful for my thermal clothes. At night I light a fire and sleep as close to it as I dare.
When my toes go numb, I stamp the feeling back into them. When my mind starts to wander, when the immense unpeopled emptiness tugs at my thoughts and tries to scatter them, when the wind ruffling the reeds is the sound of Erik’s voice echoing in the Seed Vault – I count my steps. I focus on the rhythm and it almost pulls me back.
*
They used to say survival came in threes, that a person could survive three days without water, three weeks without food, three months without company.
At two months and twenty-one days I stopped counting. I didn’t want to know the moment that loneliness would mature into insanity. I didn’t want to know when I had finally become a madwoman.
Perhaps I am mad now. Perhaps none of this is real, and I’m still trapped in the Seed Vault and this world is all my own construction. I think that only a mind like mine could create such a world. When I look at broken houses baring their pipes and wires and inner workings to the outside world, I think only I could invent such mechanical detail.
When I was a child I did have one friend. Harry Symmonds.
Harry Symmonds built models out of cocktail sticks and cried when other children touched his things. Harry Symmonds, who I smacked on the side of the head one day at school – who decided that a blow to the face was an act of friendship and followed me home.
I made him wait outside on the step until my mother realised and I had to let him in.
‘Take him upstairs and show him your collection,’ she said.
So I did, because I had to. I unfolded all the wires and rawl plugs and pilfered things onto the bedroom carpet and warned him not to touch any of it, and his eyes shone round.
By that time I had started to create my museum in the back half of the garden shed: a motley gathering of old bones from the surrounding fields. Bird and small mammal bones, mostly, scrubbed clean or left sprouting with moss, each one accompanied by a neat little card documenting the date and location of its finding. Once, for two whole weeks, the museum exhibited a dead rat, damp fur and tail still clinging to its bones, until the maggots broke out and it had to be thrown in the bin.
The pride of this collection was the sheep skull: gorgeous and whole and noble, with elegant curling horns like German braids. I showed it to Harry Symmonds and he looked at it for a long time, scuffing up his shoes on the grubby floorboards. I refused to let him touch it.
Harry Symmonds, who took all the meanness I ever threw at him and never threw anything back, who wouldn’t separate himself from me for the next four years, because I smacked or bit any child who came too close, and that protection made it worth braving my battering jibes. By the time we reached secondary school, Harry Symmonds was ignored by everybody, and I had become his hard-shelled beetle with no soft underbelly. Once or twice, some of the boys would call Harry Symmonds my boyfriend and tell me I was pretty, then laugh as they catcalled and pretended to swoon. I spat back. In woodwork, when Robin Fell made a crude joke about nailing, I struck a precise tack through the skin between his thumb and forefinger – and later, Harry Symmonds joined me in insisting Robin had nailed his own hand to the desk by accident.
Harry Symmonds, who I didn’t like or dislike, but tolerated, because I found that thinking was easier when there was someone to talk at. Harry Symmonds, proving even then that survival is easier in pairs.
*
This morning I buried a sparrow. I don’t know what made me do it.
It was outside a once-whitewashed crofter’s cottage at the foot of a mountain. I thought there could be food in the kitchen – instead I found a table set with two tea cups, each one lined with a fuzzy green and white mould. Upstairs, damp curtains blew at an open window, and something lay sprawled in the middle of the bed. As I entered the room, I upset the flurry of crows that had gathered to steal its softer parts. They cawed and scuffled and scratched at me as I barrelled backwards.
Scarf tight over my nose and mouth, I checked the empty kitchen cupboards and left.
As I stepped back onto the road, I crunched something into the tarmac. A sparrow – a small speckled bump on the wet black road, trying vainly to lift its head and chirrup. I bent down to scoop it up. It was soft and firm, like a tennis ball. It quivered in my hands – a bundle of terrified warmth.
At the end of the last century, London lost three-quarters of its sparrows in just six years – one of those facts I read and inexplicably remembered – and nobody really cared. So what difference did another sparrow make?
But it was as if a cloud had stuffed itself into my throat – I struggled to breathe, felt my eyes go sharp. I fell to the road and clutched this ordinary bird to my chest.
Maybe it was because of the broken wing, or the matchstick feet dangling from its juddering stomach. Maybe because this was the first living body I had touched in weeks.
I put it out of its misery with a rock from the edge of the road, then buried it as best I could in a dip by the wall. I didn’t leave a marker – who was there to find it? I carried on walking south.
*
Growing up, I never understood the need for touch, for desire, for other people’s bodies – the way these things gushed into everyday life, unstoppable, till they permeated every layer of people’s existence. On television and on the sides of buses, people kissed or embraced or touched parts of their own skin. In my mother’s magazines, boys strolled along the beach sporting swimming trunks and superhero muscles. The girls posed in skimpy bikinis and pretended not to look at the camera.
When I was thirteen,
