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 for burning the 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