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 a crook of stone. In another, a tree is rooted in the compact earth of a hearth. All 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