tufts of grey hair sprouted from his ears and nose. But he could reassemble a fuse box blindfolded in twenty-three seconds.
When I was a child, first learning to talk, I used to sit on my father’s lap and go through all the names I knew: Mummy, Daddy, Monster, Ganny, Alfie, Joan. I used to say them over and over, demarcating the limits of my little world.
As I got older, my world became so huge that I couldn’t remember everybody even if I tried. My life is full of people and places that I’ve let slip down the back of my brain.
When my head gets so cold my face goes numb, I try to run through all the things I can remember. I try to list them, like descending the rungs of a ladder. Sometimes, as I go deeper, I remember things I’d forgotten even existed.
There was a quotation – I forget who said it, one of those things that flitted about the internet with a black-and-white picture and quirky font – that history is just a set of lies agreed upon. Now nobody needs to agree on anything. Now all of it is mine.
This is what I remember:
I remember that the Normans won the Battle of Hastings in 1066 – though what that means I don’t know, now that there are no more kings, no more place-names, no more dates.
I remember my fifth birthday with a cake that looked like a lion.
I remember that my mother’s birthday was 9 October.
I remember her fingers hovering over the keys of the piano that always needed tuning.
I remember the sounds of a person in the next room – the small eases and beats like a murmuring of the heart.
I remember train stations at rush hour.
I remember how most people lived crowded together, how there was never enough space.
I remember satellites. Sometimes, I remember that they’re still above me, tumbling through orbit, all screws and wires and metal.
I remember planting a time capsule in the school garden, sealing it in a Tupperware box to stop the worms getting in.
I remember Luke Denham, who sat next to me at school and had a birthmark on the bridge of his nose, and whose dad won the village darts competition six years in a row.
I remember Luke Denham wiping his nose on the sleeve of his jumper.
I remember my dad’s caterpillar eyebrows.
I remember faces – how beauty was in the petite and symmetrical, and ugliness was in the unexpected.
I remember Erik’s face, its drawn-out anguish as we waited, the terrible hunger in his eyes. I remember the helpless desperation of him.
This is always where I try to stop remembering.
*
Sometimes I think I’m being watched. If I sleep badly, I wake to a feeling like a hand grabbing my shoulder and the urge to turn and look. I spend the whole day thinking of eyes – countless unblinking eyes, following my progress along footpaths or staring from the hedgerows. They press me under their gaze like the ghosts of all the people who died in the War and the Sickness, like the ghosts of my parents, or blue-eyed Erik. I have never believed in spirits or an afterlife, but still they swirl around me like a current, dragging at me as if my survival was somehow a betrayal. At night I dream about the vault.
*
The Seed Vault is a metal and concrete blade jutting from the permafrost. Look at it too long and your eyes start flickering from the snow-glare and the sun on mirrored steel. The first time I saw it, I thought it looked like the perfect piece of that icy world, like the final bit of a jigsaw puzzle that suddenly reveals what the picture is supposed to be.
Inside is different. Through the heavy doors, all the elegance of the landscape is gone, and the mechanical insides of the structure are on display. Here is a grey and white world of pipes and covered wires, concrete and corrugated metal, and a long cold tunnel that leads to the vault.
When I was a child, I always thought of vaults as exotic places, secret stashes, stacked with glimmering treasures like Tutankhamen’s tomb. Places just waiting to be broken into.
The Seed Vault is not a treasure trove. Instead, it looks more like a warehouse: metal racks stacked with hundreds of uniform black plastic boxes. It is a place of order and purpose. A place where time has no jurisdiction, where everything is suspended. It is a place for waiting out the end of the world.
I was posted to the Seed Vault two years before the Last Fall, when the dying population still believed the Sickness could have a cure, before the Safe Centres shut their gates and left anyone outside them to die. When the vault was still a scientific exercise and not a military target, when people still thought the future might be a thing worth striving for.
When I first got off the plane, the air was sharp and biting. Despite the summer Arctic sunshine, already I could feel it scouring my ungloved fingers. I hesitated at the top of the stairs, taking in this stone and concrete world.
Waiting just inside the terminal building was a blond man holding a homemade cardboard placard which just said: MEKANIKER.
That was me. The woman brought in to fix things.
I walked over to him and held out my hand: ‘Monster.’
‘What?’ His accent was sharp, like an ice shard. He had blue eyes and skin pale as the walls.
‘Monster,’ I repeated, ‘my name’s Monster.’
‘Monster? What, like a monster?’
‘Yes. You?’
‘Oh.’ He tucked the placard under his arm and shook my hand. ‘Oh, OK. I’m Erik.’
‘Erik.’
‘Biologist,’ he said, ‘up at the vault.’
The vault. I learned later that Erik did not believe in God or religion or spirituality, but the way he spoke about the Seed Vault was as if he had found a higher purpose through which to orientate his own life. He was devoted to it. Cataloguing its contents was his rosary. Putting out calls for unrepresented species of plant-life was his version of prayer, and the Seed Vault itself was his church.
*
It used to be said that walking was good for the soul, that tramping for miles and miles created a rhythm in the body that opened the mind to the unconscious and all sorts of crap.
I have seen too many dead people to believe in a soul. Walking is only good for one thing, and that is survival. One blistered foot in front of the other. Getting through the day one step at a time.
I wake, I eat, sometimes I wash, I pack up my sleeping bag, warm my hands by the dying fire, bandage my feet, lace up my boots, put on my pack and start walking. I walk until my feet are hurting too much for me to ignore. I sit, take off my boots, rest a while, rebandage my feet, lace my boots back up and keep on walking. I avoid the towns, most of them whole and eerily empty, where the Sickness spread through them like a purging fire, leaving only buildings and possessions in its wake. On the outskirts, there is always a patch of blackened earth, marking the bonfires
