for my birthday. I snuck into a clothes shop on the high street, thrilling with trepidation. The halogen lighting and bulging rails seemed to be everywhere, till they were a barrage, pushing in at me on all sides. As a shop assistant in heavy eye make-up sashayed over, I grabbed the first bikini I saw and ducked into the changing rooms, pulling the curtains tight up to the edges to make sure nobody could see in. With my back to the mirror, I changed.
I cannot remember what I wanted. I do not know what I expected to happen, or what part of me had thought this might be a good idea. I only remember looking nothing like the girls in my mother’s magazines.
The top sat flatly over my chest. In magazines, the women always had long hair that cascaded over their shoulders and made everything else look curved and in proportion. My short rough hair made my neck look too long, and there was too much bareness. My skin was pale and mottled. In the shop lighting, it was almost blue, except for my face and arms, which were red from sun and windburn, and made my body look disconnected. The bikini bottom cut into the line around my groin. It made my legs stick out, like those branches that grow too big in the wrong directions and need propping up with wooden stakes to stop the whole tree collapsing. In the gusset, the protective plastic strip was hard and uncomfortable, and crinkled when I moved.
I bought it out of spite. At home, I stuffed it down the gap at the back of my chest of drawers, where it haunted my teenage years like the ghosts of all the women in my mother’s magazines.
At school, some of the boys had started to spend their lunch money on newspapers with pictures of topless girls in them. These pictures would end up stuffed in people’s lockers, or tucked unexpectedly into exercise books, or shoved at you as you walked between classrooms to raucous yells of ‘Tits on your face!’
I hunched over, avoided their eyes. I stopped watching films and I avoided looking at the pictures of models in shop windows. I learned to walk without attracting attention.
*
Open ground has given way to forest. Not the kind of nurturing, ancient treescape found in children’s adventure stories, but a sprawling pine farm, all evenly spaced trunks and a dark floor drowning in needles. I follow a dirt path, just wide enough for a four-by-four, although I doubt a vehicle has driven along here in years. Not since the War hit British soil and the construction industry collapsed along with so many others. Now, this forest is turning wild. Ferns and saplings sprout from the earth, while weeds inch their way through the hardened dust of the path. A fallen tree sprawls across it at an angle, its branches and bare twigs brittle. I clamber over it, then stop a few steps later to pick brown pine needles out of my clothes and the cracks between my boots and socks.
About a mile further along, I come to a clearing. It is not big – only a widening of the path, perhaps once meant as a passing place or to park a single vehicle. But the break in the trees means the air feels fresher, and more light filters through to illuminate the scene below. Which is probably why they chose this spot in the first place.
Three tents are grouped across the path, sagging and torn, their poles bent out of shape. In the shelter of the trees beyond, five rusty camping chairs surround a circle of stones that must once have formed the edge of a fire pit. Out here, away from towns and cities and the ferocity of the War, after the Safe Centres were full and shut their doors, these people must have assumed they had escaped. The Sickness could never reach them here, so far from the dispersing bombs and packed communities that allowed it to spread.
I wonder how long they were here before they realised they were wrong. Was it wildlife that brought it to them? Or did one of the people carry it with them from their old life like a live wire, just waiting to be touched? Or perhaps they managed to outrun the Sickness after all, only to be crippled by starvation.
Five people, sacrificing home comforts in an attempt to survive, but still unwilling to sacrifice each other. Discovering too late that near-isolation and living minimally in the open air was not quite enough to save them.
I hurry through, holding my breath even though I tell myself the Sickness cannot still be here. I do not stop until I am certain there are at least a couple of miles between us. I wonder if this vagabond life will be enough to save me.
My hair has grown long. It brushes my shoulders and catches under the straps of my backpack. It has been months since I owned a hairbrush, and my scalp itches. I could try cutting it, but hair dulls blades and I need my knife to be sharp. Instead, I cut a length of string and tie my hair in a fat clump at the nape of my neck. That will have to do for now.
*
I was eight when I first cut my hair. I stole the kitchen scissors while my mother was on the phone, then locked myself in the bathroom. With the small mirror leant against the bath taps to keep it from falling, I stripped down to my knickers and sat in the empty tub. I cut close to my scalp and the hair tumbled down me and stuck in my creases. I nicked the top of my ear, and blood ran down my neck, flowing freely, the way blood does from the head – but I folded toilet paper across it and continued. I kept cutting steadily, determined not to leave the job half done. I brushed myself off and got dressed, then gathered up the dead hairs into the waste-paper basket.
Only then did I let myself explore my new head. I mapped its contours with my fingertips. It felt cold and shocking to the touch. When I examined myself in the mirror, I saw how my cranium was not round as I had always assumed, but had little bumps and dips like a landscape. For the first time, I thought a part of myself was beautiful.
My mother shrieked when she saw me. Her hand flew to her chest like a startled bird and her breaths came loud. ‘Oh, Monster!’ she wailed. ‘What have you done?’
I ran my hand across my beautiful head.
That night, I sat upstairs with my collection, listening to my parents’ voices oscillating through the floorboards as I tried to get to grips with the mechanics of a circuit board stolen from the school skip.
As I entered the kitchen next morning, my father greeted me with a watery smile as my mother banged down spoons and breakfast bowls on the table. She pursed her lips, but said nothing. She kept her silence as she tidied away the cereal and drove me to school, though her eyes and lips were still narrow.
Of course, the children in my class laughed, but that is because children are idiots. I ignored them and they soon grew bored. They went back to their games and glitter pens, and I sat with Harry Symmonds and folded models out of paper.
*
I think about all the people I ever knew. Every day I remember someone else, as if they’re all buried inside me like books in a library, just waiting for my brain to pick one out. It’s shocking how many people you encounter in a lifetime.
Yesterday, I thought about the woman who ran the roadside café I worked in one summer, whose name I can’t remember. She had a flat high voice like a fork scraping across a plate, and she used to raid the table where the surplus cakes were kept. I can still hear her suck and slurp at her fingers as she pushed broken biscuits into her mouth.
Sometimes, I catch myself thinking about Joe. Joe was the school caretaker. When my mother was going to be late picking me up, or when I didn’t want to spend breaktime outside with the other children, I would sit with Joe in his office and drink strong tea.
It was not what my father would have recognised as an office – there were no banks of computers or overflowing stacks of paper, no yellowing pot plants. Joe’s office was a workshop, a forest of shelves and half-fixed electricals. Tools hung like artworks from the walls, and the only computer was a salvaged Acorn Archimedes he had spent the past twenty years trying to restore. Joe’s jumpers were
