Could buy.
I look at the fat wad of notes in my hand and force myself to see a stack of useless coloured paper. I stuff both envelopes back in the secret cupboard. Out of habit, I close it up again.
I start upstairs, the musty smell still latched onto the walls of my throat. Even though I’m climbing, there’s a feeling of going deeper into the house.
I check the bathroom and the spare bedroom. Nothing but a few dead moths on the windowsill. When I can put it off no longer, I open the door to my parents’ bedroom.
There’s a lump in the bed.
I cover my eyes with my hand and force myself to count to ten. I feel foolish, like a child playing hide-and-seek with nobody to search for. I open my eyes.
Nothing. Just the bundled duvet and a couple of pillows. I take deep breaths and scan the room. Nothing to show that this was the room my parents sickened and grew weak and died in. Nothing but a smell of damp and empty house.
I step back along the landing into my old bedroom.
The walls are still the same garish green I chose when I was twelve because I knew it would upset my mother’s muted tastes. On top of the chest of drawers is a wooden automaton of a man riding a bicycle, which Harry Symmonds gave me for my birthday and which I used to like to take apart and put back together again.
The unmade bed is piled with cardboard boxes: all the books and tools and instruction manuals I wouldn’t let my parents throw away after I moved out. The brown parcel tape is cracked and flaking. On one of them there’s a half-dead fly buzzing on its back.
I catch sight of myself in the mirror beside my bedroom door. I look thin. Where before my face was a globe lit by the sun, now it is all squares and triangles, where all the weeks of walking and not enough to eat have carved me into the narrowest version of myself. My limbs are too long for my reflection – tough and gangly like the branches of an old tree, so that my movements look forced and unreliable. The dusty film across the mirror makes my face dead and grey. It is the face of a woman in her forties, not one in her late twenties.
I reach under the bed, into the dust and carpet fluff, and pull out the shoe box.
I sit with it unopened in my lap, holding all its memories of childhood and weekends, of the pestering of raindrops on the window, of long hours building complex circuits like race-tracks, of Harry Symmonds hovering, desperate to touch. I hold these past days close to me, too afraid to open the box and let them out.
I do not know how long I sit like that, in the room where I grew into my adult self, not even daring to open a tatty fucking shoe box. I only remember about time and lateness when the wind picks up in the trees in the back garden.
I do not want to spend the night in my dead parents’ house. Through all the days of walking here, home sparked within me like something electric, drawing me on. Now it is an emptiness, a house without a purpose. My parents are gone. I do not need to be here any more. I pick up the shoe box and shoulder my pack, and leave before it gets dark. I oil the gate on my way out.
*
I am halfway down the road when I hear them behind me: a low growl and a padding of paws on the tarmac. It takes a moment to place the sound, but when I do it sinks into me as if I had always expected to hear it. As if it had been waiting for me to dare to come home. If I had been the sort of person who placed some kind of value on proximity to other people, who gravitated towards family in their hour of need, if I had been the sort of person who cared, then this village is where I would have died. I should have known it would not let me leave so easily.
There are three of them, old farm dogs slinking low across the ground.
Farm dogs are always tough, bred for work on the unforgiving fells, but these three are something more. Shaped out of need and a fierce holding-on, they are more wolf than dog now. Like me, these three are survivors.
They prowl towards me in formation, eyes fixed, growls rumbling deep in their throats. The leader pulls back his lip in a snarl and the others follow him. I resist the urge to run, to let them give chase. I imagine those wet yellow teeth in my leg. I clutch the shoe box to my chest and plant my feet on the tarmac, claiming my territory.
I bare my own teeth.
The dogs keep coming.
I start to growl, a deep feral humming at the back of my throat. For a second, they pause, and I growl louder.
The leader steps out with one hesitant paw, and I lurch forward, spare arm whirling, a sudden explosion of movement and noise: ‘Fuck off, you bastard little shits, fuck off!’
There’s barking – the noise is everywhere. The dogs split and scatter and I try to keep my eyes on the leader, on his jaw snapping at my calves. I try to kick out but he’s a quick dancer, and suddenly there’s no noise, just a kind of wind tunnel in my head and one thought – Be bold, be bold, be bold . . . So I yell, ‘I am bold!’ and as I yell there’s a pain in my left calf like a nail gun and a sudden weight, and a bitch with her teeth stuck through my trousers, and everything spins. My scream cuts the air and I smash the shoe box on her head with my whole body-weight behind it.
The bitch lets go. I can still feel the tooth-grip, but she cowers and slinks and she is on me and not on me, beaten and not beaten. The other mutts continue to growl and snap and I kick out. There’s a sick crack as my foot connects with the leader’s snout. He whimpers and backs away, making small noises like a broken child.
The others stop snapping. They look to their wounded leader. Everything hangs in the air. Then they follow him, low to the road, and away, away.
I’m breathing hard. My back and underarms are soaked with sweat, my T-shirt stuck to my skin. I become aware of my heart, the undimmable batter of it. I become aware of my veins and capillaries, the blood’s flood-rush through them. I become aware of every part of me that is alive – and then I become aware of what is broken.
I put my hand to the wound and it comes away wet with my own blood and the dog’s saliva. I take a step. The injured leg shakes, sends spasms rippling up through the rest of me, then gives. My body crumples and I hit the tarmac.
I do not know how long I lie there. Five seconds. Maybe ten. It feels longer.
I let the hurt run through me, testing this new pain, chalking it up alongside the blisters and the sores from my backpack straps and the deep cramps in my stomach and thighs. I stare at the million grits surfacing the road, and I build my injured leg into the rest of me.
Slowly, thinking through every movement, I stand. I test the weight of myself. The leg shakes a moment, then is still. I take two deep breaths and look around. The dogs are gone. I check the shoe box. The corners are scuffed and battered, and along one side where it hit the bitch’s skull there is a cave I have to push back into place. The brown tape I once shut it with is barely holding, but the elastic bands are still intact. It isn’t broken. Nothing is lost.
I step out. I force myself to continue as though nothing happened, as though the dog pack is still watching, as though my whole body isn’t pounding. Hugging the shoe box to my chest, I follow the road. It rises steeply out of the village, its broad curves cutting across the fell where once I used to search for bones, or for tufts of wool caught on the stiff brown reeds. The wind through them makes a sound like a river in flood, and the sky has turned a thunderous lead. When I turn to look back, there is only the grey village and a thin strip of light between clouds and horizon.
At the top of the hill, the road forks. To the west, it dips into the next valley, where the military once guarded a hydroelectric plant, before it was bombed with the dispersing Sickness that spread and killed my parents. I cannot go there, just as I cannot stay here, with the village so keen to grab me in its jaws and add me to its horde of dead.
But I have to go somewhere. I have to find shelter far enough away that I can rest.
I head east, away from the dogs and the village, away from the sliver of light at the edge of everything,