shuffled.
‘Well?’
‘He’s my cousin,’ Liam Harper said, not looking my mother in the eye.
She folded her arms across her chest, her shoulders heaving. ‘Well, let me make this very clear to the three of you. If I ever catch you being mean to my daughter again, I’m going to grab each of you by the ear, and I’m going to twist it till you can’t even hear yourselves crying – is that understood?’
The boys looked at their feet. I sat with my head barely over the grass, watching my mother’s face – the power and anger I had never seen in it before, the way it flared up when she said ‘my daughter’. My daughter. Like my collection, or the way I had thought earlier about my mouse, as a thing to be cherished and protected.
‘I said, is that understood?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not allowed to hurt us . . .’
My mother blazed like a rocket flare. ‘Talk back to me again, Callum, and I’ll make sure nobody in the shop sells you sweets for a year, you little shit.’
My mother’s swearing thrilled through me. It was as though someone had opened a treasure chest, and for a second I got to glimpse the glittering jewel inside.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’m going to go inside and phone your mothers. I think they’d like to know what you’ve been getting up to, don’t you? And I think it’d be a good idea if you were home and ready to explain yourselves by the time they’ve hung up.’
The boys teetered, fidgeting.
‘Go on!’
And suddenly they were gone, back across the field towards the stile and the lane, fleeing to escape the boundaries of my mother’s rage.
My mother was still there, larger than herself, and suddenly all mine. She turned towards me and something in her shifted. The rage diminished. She was not any smaller in that big field, but she was somehow softer, stiller, so that for the first time I could remember I wondered what it would feel like to hug her, the way other children hugged their parents when they were picked up from school. Instead I sat and watched her walking towards me.
An arm’s reach away, she crouched, bringing her eyes to my level. ‘Are you OK?’
I shrugged.
I was fine. I was better than fine.
I said nothing.
‘What were you doing out here anyway?’
I pulled away my hand to show her my mouse, but I must have knocked it in all the distraction, because its tail bones no longer aligned and it was no longer quite as beautiful.
My mother made a choked sound and stood up, pushing herself back from it.
‘It’s my mouse,’ I said. I tried to nudge the bones back into place with my little finger, to recreate that undisturbed oval.
‘Don’t touch it!’
I looked up. My mother looked as though she wanted to snatch the words back into her mouth. Instead, she glanced in the direction of the stile and the retreating boys, then frowned back at me. And there she was again. My mother, petite and disapproving, exactly as I expected her to be.
‘I’ve left the dishes in the sink.’ She turned to leave, then half turned back to me. ‘I’m just in the kitchen. If you need me.’
She hovered a moment, as though there was more to be said, but neither of us could think of anything. So I watched her walk away, an ungainly shuffle as she tried to stop her skirt from catching in the grass. I watched her go through the back gate and in the door, till I could see her again through the kitchen window, standing at the sink.
I sat there for the rest of the afternoon, till my legs itched from the grass and the bug life, and a rash had broken out along my calf. I coaxed the mouse skeleton painstakingly back into shape. And I watched my fierce and startling mother pottering around the kitchen.
*
My parents died in the Sickness. My mother first, my father twelve days later. He always was a little bit hopeless without her.
I didn’t visit. At the time, the Sickness hadn’t yet reached where I was living, and I wouldn’t be the one to help it spread. Instead, I moved out of the city, rented a ramshackle house that was really more of a shed at the edge of an out-of-the-way village. Told myself it was right. My parents would want me to isolate myself.
I read their emails – frequent at first, full of optimism and denial, then growing briefer and more sporadic. I didn’t reply.
Two weeks after the final one, I had an email from a neighbour telling me they were dead. Her own son had caught the Sickness too, she said. It had emptied the village, everyone already dead or dying, or doomed by proximity.
I closed the window on one of the last emails I ever received. Two weeks later, the servers crashed, sending what little infrastructure remained skittering like a deck of cards. In its place, information became a rare bird. The Safe Centres and military hubs shared news via what was left of the internet, leaving everybody else to root out dusty wind-up radios and spend fruitless nights searching for something to tune in to. By that time, I had got the job at the Seed Vault. Two years later, everyone was dead.
*
I am close now. Even with the fields overgrown or rotting and walls and buildings turned to rubble, I can still recognise bits of the place, like a familiar picture seen through wavy glass.
I pull myself to the top of the hill behind my parents’ house. My calves are tight from the climb and under my layers I can feel my T-shirt sticking to my back. The sky is the same ambiguous grey it has been for days, the air cold and thirsty. In the distance, the familiar mountain range blurs into the clouds.
The drystone walls that divide the fields are mostly intact, grey mossy ribbons segmenting the landscape the way they have for hundreds of years. Here and there a section has crumbled. I remember seeing them like this at the end of winter: lengths of wall reduced to a tumbled pile of stone, where the water had got in and frozen.
Sometimes at the local summer fair, there would be a waller demonstrating his trade. He would set up his markers in the middle of a field, two pairs of wooden posts, each with a string running between them. Then he would build the wall up, starting with the big solid rocks at the bottom, using the string as a guide to keep the wall from bulging. He would turn the rocks in his rough hands, checking their size and edges, selecting just the right one for the space it had to occupy. He would leave the flat round ones for the top, standing them up on their sides to crown the wall, like a parade of soldiers puffing out their chests.
I used to love the fair. It was an annual tradition – one of the few my family had, alongside afternoon tea for my mother’s birthday and church on Christmas Day. One morning in August, my mother would assemble a picnic, pack my father and me towards the car, and we would drive the busy road to the fair.
It was held in a big field on the edge of town. It was not a city fair, the kind with ferris wheels and dodgems
