dead.
A couple of times, I pass towns blown apart by bombs. They hunch against the landscape like unattempted jigsaw puzzles. Here and there, a single street or row of shops is still standing. I avoid these too. When the War constricted everything, the places that survived became prime targets for looting. The people that survived with them became the worst versions of themselves, struggling against their own inevitable collapse.
I stick to scavenging from the smallest villages. Even then, I leave as quickly as I can, and always before dark.
When the light starts to fade, I hunt for shelter, build a fire with whatever I can find, eat whatever I have or can easily get, take off my boots, bury myself in my sleeping bag, and sleep. My dreams are filled with walking. They have a rhythm to them, now, a one-two-one-two circular flow.
*
Here is what I learn about walking:
Walking, like running, is about finding a pace. Stride out too quickly and you soon tire and become disheartened. Stroll too slowly and the journey can sit heavy in the bowl of your stomach.
It is not passing across a landscape. Instead, it is feeling the landscape pass under you, as if the pushing of your feet into the ground turns the Earth further away from you, like balancing on a giant ball.
You do not walk with your feet. You walk with your boots. Bad boots make the walking harder.
When you walk, you notice the details. You notice the colours and shapes and precise movements of everything around you, from blades of grass to birds to creatures scurrying through the undergrowth. It is a way of becoming intimate with the landscape.
Walking on flat roads is too easy. It lets you think too much.
Walking over uneven rocky ground is a way to escape from the mind.
Wet shoes weigh you down.
Walking on a full stomach is like a sickness.
Walking on an empty stomach is worse.
Footsteps do not only make a noise at the point where your boots hit the tarmac. They also sound in your head. They echo like an organ note in a cathedral.
Even when your body sweats, the ends of your fingers are still cold.
Feet can be hot and cold at the same time.
Walking on broken skin is a reminder of everything that is wrong with the world. With every step, I can picture news footage from the War – the screen wobble as a shockwave rushed towards the camera, the aftermath of Sickness-filled explosives filmed on shaking mobile phones, people on the pavements with empty eyes and a blue tinge spreading from their lips, the slackened jaws and flat expressions that it could happen here, in this county, in suburbs and villages, on high streets filled with shops. With every thought of the Sickness, I remember another person dead. At the ends of the worst nights, I wake shivering.
Every day that I walk, it becomes easier and harder to set off.
*
My mother and father lived in a middle-sized house next to the church in a middle-sized village surrounded by fields. It was farm country, or had been thirty years ago, but my parents were not farm people.
My mother worked at the village shop part-time on weekday afternoons. She brought my father spare copies of the Racing Post, and he would sit long evenings in his easy chair, analysing the odds, working out which horse should win and whether it favoured this or that kind of ground, and what would be the most effective bet. He never actually bet any money as far as I know.
By day he was an accountant. He worked in town in a small upstairs office with no heating, and on winter evenings he would earn us a little extra money doing tax returns for the few farmers that the village had left. ‘Treat pennies,’ he called it. As soon as the autumn nights drew in, farmers or their wives would start to appear at our door, bearing carrier bags of receipts and bank statements bundled together with twine. My father would scatter these across the kitchen table as he scanned them for some kind of order, until my mother flipped and banished him and the mess to the spare room.
By the time the pale spring nights returned, the papers had gone from the house, and my father was back to his racing calculations. As for me, I was already counting the days until the long school holiday, when I could get up each morning to scour the fields, or tinker with my collection. I would do this all through the summer, filling my days with creation and invention, until one day autumn would arrive, and I would be forced to pack up my bag, put on my clean uniform and return to school.
This was the rhythm of our lives, marked by afternoons in the shop and the closing down and opening up again of the seasons.
As I got older, our rhythms changed – but only on the surface. Underneath, we still turned on the same rotation.
As the War diminished imports and drove the currency down, my mother’s hours in the shop were cut, sliced away so thinly that at first it was barely noticeable, until one day she wasn’t working there at all. Instead, she would clean the house daily, scrubbing at the skirting boards, uprooting the plates and bowls and baking trays to detox the insides of cupboards, using homemade cleaning fluids that made the whole house smell of vinegar. When she had finished, she would draw up lists of home improvements for my father to do when he staggered in from work – tasks he ignored or passed on to me. I shrugged them off. As my peers threw themselves into rumours and parties and each other, I threw myself more and more into my collection. From simply tinkering with the breaking apart and reconstituting of objects, my explorations started to gain direction. I borrowed books from the school library and spent my lunchtimes scouring the internet. I became obsessed with the ways things worked, building and rebuilding machines that fit together as precisely as the days I built them in. In this way, I made certain my routine stayed rigid, so there would be no room in it for anyone else. It was easier, I told myself. I didn’t want friends anyway. I used my well-honed skills of maintenance and systematic research to look for a way to move out.
Sometimes on long nights, it is so easy to imagine my father still in the blue and yellow kitchen, surrounded by receipts for animal feed and tractor parts, and my mother fretting at him, the whole village shut tight and warm in their own little dramas in their own little rooms.
*
The ground here is rock-strewn and tussocky. My shadow stretches across it like a fractured version of myself, and I have to tread slowly to avoid ankle-grabbing dips and burrows. I’ve been walking under trees for most of the day, the sun’s position obscured by branches and new leaves so that I only have a vague notion of where I am and in which direction I am walking. I am following a path which occasionally thins and peters out, only to emerge again a few metres later. It might not be a path at all. I follow it all the same.
To my left is a low wall, barely more than a pile of stones and so thick with moss that in places it almost disappears. As I walk, I come across another wall, and another, this one taller, the next one more intact. The path solidifies, then widens into a dirt road.
I stop in the middle of a small village, a half-standing collection of stones. In the last of the afternoon light, it looks golden and soft, the kind of sequestered beauty that has no right to exist any more.
The ruins here are old, abandoned centuries before the War made ghost towns so commonplace. None of the buildings have roofs, their windows open cavities with shrubs and ivy creeping through them. In one building, a bird’s nest sits in
