of it is draped in moss or sprouting ferns.
The most complete house is a low bungalow on the edge of the village – a rectangular structure with just one window and a prickly bush part-blocking the doorway. I squeeze inside and am in a green world. The floor in here is mossy, but dry. I am as closed off from wildlife as I am likely to be tonight.
Later, with the drawstring of my sleeping bag pulled tight, I wonder what made the people of this village move away. I had forgotten there were people who uprooted themselves for reasons other than Sickness and War, people who did not move simply because a government told them they had to. People like me.
I try to picture those people loading the last of their possessions onto carts or horses, taking one final look around their bare rooms – how unsettling a place looks when stripped of all its furniture. I try to work out at what point a building stops being a home. Is it at this moment, when all private things are taken away and it reverts to its blank impersonal state? Or is it when you walk down the road laden with all your possessions, and the house at your back? Or is it always a home, even through its many stages of decay?
I think about my mother sitting in the kitchen, flicking through a magazine and licking her fingers to turn the pages. Of the places I have lived, that is the only one I have called home.
Maybe there is no such thing, only walls and a roof, a place secure enough to allow sleep. But how can I keep going if there is nowhere I am going to? How can I grow again without any roots? I close my eyes on the soft earth, and try not to imagine that I’m in my bedroom in my parents’ house.
When I leave the next morning, I follow the dirt road out of the village. It quickly disintegrates into an overgrown track. Then a narrow path, fringed with vegetation. Then nothing.
*
As I hunker against a hedge at the roadside, hinging the lid from a tin of cubed vegetables, I realise how little I used to think about food. Eating was a task to be accomplished while I focused my attention on other things. The vitality of it was always lost. Now, as the watery carrots slide down my throat, I try to remember the taste of other food. Nothing elaborate – just the soft white and salt of a ham sandwich, the tang of fresh pineapple, or the chunky joints of beef my mother sometimes roasted on Sundays, filling the whole house with their thick, fatty smell. I try, but the memories slip away, leaving my mouth dry and tasting overwhelmingly of my own stale breath.
*
My mother used to bake gingerbread men for Christmas – little golden-brown figures that broke softly. Once, when I was young, she let me help, and I laid out my own irregular shapes on the tray. I made her leave mine in the oven longest, so they baked hard and dark, and broke with a snap. I liked their unforgiving crunch, the way they attracted my mother’s frowns. I think of this and wonder if I was meant to be the last. Then I remember there is no such thing as fate, because there is nobody in control.
*
I was nine or ten – that awkward age of feeling too big for everything, but independence still a long way off. It must have been the summer holidays, because I was sitting in the high grass in the field behind the house, letting the sun burn the back of my neck. I remember wearing a sun cap. There was a shadow on my face and a band of sweat trapped between the fabric and my scalp. If I sat up, I could see into my back garden – the vegetable patch and the canes snaked with runner beans. I could see the washing, limp and sagging from the line, and my mother standing at the kitchen window. But if I hunched, I could let the grass rise above me until I felt as though I was invisible. The blades were sharp against my bare calves, and insects gathered faster than I could brush them away. But it was worth it for the quiet, for the sense of isolation, and for my discovery.
My discovery was a mouse. At least, I thought it was a mouse, but it was difficult to be certain. It was all bones, stripped bare, but still in the position it had died in, curled and complete and perfect. The tiny skull. A ribcage more like fishbones. Tail bones stacked end to end like elongated vertebrae, but in miniature.
I traced its shape, letting my fingertip hover just above it, fearful in case my touch might be too strong and I might break it. For a long time I looked at it, trying to absorb its complex structure, to understand the mechanics of its biology. I was so engrossed in this exquisite arrangement of bones, I didn’t hear the other children until it was too late.
‘Hey! Monster!’
Something small and dry hit my arm and fell into the grass beside me. I looked up. Three boys were standing a few metres away, up to their knees in the grass and laughing. Callum Jenkins, Liam Harper, and a lanky boy I didn’t know.
‘Freak.’ Callum Jenkins bent to scoop up a handful of dry sheep muck and lobbed it in my direction. It showered dustily around me and I covered the mouse skeleton with my hand.
The boy I didn’t know laughed. It was high and grating, and seemed too loud in the still summer day.
‘What you wearing that cap for?’ asked Callum Jenkins. ‘Hiding your stupid hair?’
Because it’s sunny, you idiot.
I thought about leaving. I remember being so sorely tempted to get up, to give them the finger and stride away down the field towards home. I wanted to shut the door on them. But then I would have had to leave the mouse, and with the grass this overgrown, I knew I would never find it again.
‘Is she bald?’ asked the boy I didn’t know.
Callum Jenkins lobbed another round of sheep muck. ‘Basically.’
‘Nah,’ said Liam Harper, ‘she’s just a freak.’
I tried to ignore them. I focused on my mouse, how its tail curled back in on itself so its body formed an almost perfect oval, except for the head, which stuck forward as if it had wanted to get one last glimpse of the world, or as if it had been looking for a rescuer. The boys’ laughter was loud and spiralling. I tried to tune out their jeers, but they bored into me, deeper and deeper into my brain, and I could not shut them out.
The mouse, I thought, the mouse, the mouse, the mouse . . .
My hands shook. I could see, where my right hand extended over the beautiful skeleton, a tremor that travelled through my wrists, back along my arm and into my chest, till my whole body was shaking and I couldn’t make it stop.
And then, in the midst of it all, my mother.
She strode up the field, tramping down the grass in her wellies, her long skirt catching in her wake. She looked out of place here, in what I thought of as my domain, as if someone had taken an ornament from the mantelpiece and placed it on top of a mountain. But her face was pulled tight with a fierceness I had never seen before, and for the first time there was something broad and unwieldy about her. As she flattened the grass, I thought of a lorry veering across a motorway, crashing through the central reservation and levelling the traffic on the other side.
The boys saw her coming and made to scarper, but my mother was an unstoppable torrent, and she would not relinquish them so easily.
‘Oh no you don’t. Liam Harper and Callum Jenkins, you get back here right now.’
From my hollow I watched them turn, all their gleeful bigness gone, till they were only three pitiful boys, squirming under my mother’s glare.
‘And you,’ she said to the third boy, ‘I don’t know you.’
