How I Live Now (11 page)

28

W
e couldn't go on. We went on.

Staying alive was what we did to pass the time.

Ages ago I learned in social studies about how the Cavemen and the Bushmen and other Primitive Tribes spent every waking hour searching for food and it was nice to be able to draw a good straight line through history between Hairy Old Neanderthal Man and us. I was thinking of approaching my old school next time I was in New York and telling them to replace the unit on Media Communications with one on How to Survive Half Dead in the Wild Without Much in the Way of Hope.

Luckily there was a fair amount of stuff around to eat just now, it being autumn the season of Fruitfulness and Thanksgiving etc., but I won't pretend it was an interesting diet and I could have killed for a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich on rye and a Diet Coke, which come to think of it was pretty radical for me and if only some of my thousand shrinks were here to pat themselves on the back and take the credit.

Anyway there were lots of potatoes because in order to get to the barn you had to walk along an entire field planted with potatoes and though the army guys living at our house had obviously noticed this too, there are still only so many potatoes a small platoon of hungry sequesterers can eat in a month especially without any of the essential ingredients for mashed, French fried or potato salad. In other words, we still had about nine-tenths of a field left to eat.

I spent most mornings digging potatoes and carrying them back to the barn to store in the feed bins while Piper went off searching for natural morsels like watercress and sweet chestnuts and honey. As usual, she cornered the Wood Nymph market while I settled for Old Faithful.

Some days when I couldn't bear to dig up another spud, I went with her, and seeing Piper in full flight you realized that whoever the father of these kids was, he had to be some kind of bona fide Pixie. She knew how to follow honeybees back to their hives and then how to get honeycomb out of them by making a torch out of a green branch so it smoked and the bees either flew away or got dopey enough to let her break off a chunk of the comb without stinging her, but to be safe I watched this operation from as far away as possible.

One day she showed me about getting watercress out of a river and explained that you had to get it out of a RUNNING river otherwise it would destroy your liver. What about a meandering river I wondered to myself. This is one of the things I most dislike about nature, namely that the rules are not at all precise. Like when Piper says I'm pretty sure that mushroom isn't poisonous.

Anyway I didn't really know what to do with a big fat sticky dripping honeycomb or a couple of fistfuls of watercress other than sending them to some factory where they'd be wrapped up in Styrofoam and plastic, but amazingly they tasted just like honey and watercress without having to do anything at all to them and what with digging up potatoes as well, I was starting to think that except for the deli counters and five or ten thousand other total essentials, supermarkets were pretty much a waste of time.

In the meantime I learned the hard way to store things like honey in a tightly covered container if you didn't want to get every bug on earth flying in for a taste.

Piper could smell wild garlic and onions in a meadow and she came home with armfuls of the stuff, which we shredded up to make potatoes with wild onions and garlic for a change from potatoes without wild onions and garlic. There were days I would happily have traded the entire future of England for a single jar of mayonnaise but unfortunately the opportunity never arose.

We roasted sweet chestnuts in the fire and they were pretty good except incredibly hard to peel and the skins got under your fingernails and hurt for days. I spent practically a whole afternoon collecting chestnuts and when I got back Piper looked at me with as close as she ever got to contempt and said Those are Horse Chestnuts and Inedible.

There were a few rows of sweet corn in Aunt Penn's vegetable garden, along with whatever cabbages hadn't been eaten by the British Army and the slug army, and also a fair number of squashes, some leeks and beans and mint running wild.

I brought a heavy frying pan up from the house and because we had no cooking oil we steamed vegetables in water over the fire. Piper said we should catch a rabbit and kill it for the fat to cook with but when I looked to see if she was out of her mind she got kind of defensive and said That's what the Boy Scout Handbook says.

A few days later Piper said we should try a fishing expedition and the thought of it made my heart sink because of our Perfect Day and not wanting ever to go there again and ruin it, but nostalgia wasn't a big part of the decision-making process these days so we got Piper's fishing rod and set off.

It was cloudy and drizzling which Piper said was good for fishing and as usual I watched while she lured food onto the bank, but once she caught anything I had to follow her directions about killing and cleaning it while she turned her head away. I had no complaints about Piper but I could have lived without ripping the guts out of dead trout to save her from doing it. Not to mention whacking them over the head with a club in the first place. I hated doing it but I COULD do it and I guess that was the difference between us.

Later there was poached pink trout that made most of the things you eat in life taste gross by comparison, followed by hazelnuts mashed up with honey and afterwards we had mint tea and it was nice but you couldn't help lying awake at night thinking about toast and butter.

In the days that followed we figured out how to make soup from whatever we could add to a pot and that was much better than just boiling things one by one. Leek and potato was the best and when we ran out of leeks we used wild onions.

We set as much as we could store aside. There were only two feed bins in the barn built to keep out mice and I'd already stacked one with potatoes and the other halfway with nuts and corn and cabbages. What we really needed was a huge Amana refrigerator-freezer with ice maker and root beer dispenser.

One funny thing was that I didn't look much different now from the day I arrived in England but the difference was that now I ate what I could.

Somewhere along the line I'd lost the will not to eat.

Partly I wouldn't be good old Daisy if I didn't get my appetite back just when everyone else in the world was learning how to starve, and partly the idea of wanting to be thin in a world full of people dying from lack of food struck even me as stupid.

Well what do you know?

Every war has its silver lining.

29

I
knew Edmond would come back to us if he could.

I tried doing the thing they do with dogs in the movies, saying JET FETCH EDMOND! and pointing in the general direction of the Wide World but he didn't bound off like Lassie following a hot scent, just sat down and stared at me politely for a few seconds and then lost interest when it turned out I wasn't going to clarify my request.

Can't you at least send Jet to look for Gin? I asked Piper in a What Kind of Dog Whisperer Are You tone of voice. But she shook her head and said He'd find her if he knew where to look.

We both looked over at him sitting with his nose slightly raised into the breeze.

See, Piper said, he's keeping tabs on the neighborhood. All the smells from miles around are filtering past his nose.

I came across Piper deep in conversation with Jet one afternoon and when I asked her what they were talking about she shrugged and said Dog Things. Sometimes the loneliness of being the odd man out in these conversations got to me but most of the time I just ignored it. I like old movies. She talks to dogs.

As the days passed and there was no sign of Edmond or Isaac I had to fight the unbearable fear that always lurked at the back of my mind. It took a long time to admit that I could no longer feel his presence and sometimes I lay awake until dawn listening desperately to the silence and trying to remember his face.

Sometimes I thought I heard Edmond's voice in my head but it always turned out to be my subconscious replaying old tapes out of some perverse kind of nostalgia.

I denied what appeared to be fact.

And yet, I had seen the dead people. I had looked carefully at every hideous, nightmare face just to be sure.

I found myself drawn more and more to the big house just to make sure Edmond wasn't waiting for us there, or had managed to drag himself that far but no farther.

I made excuses to Piper about being gone for a few hours, or just told her I'd found something in the vegetable garden that would be ripe any day now like tomatoes or maybe we needed something like more clean socks. She didn't mind my going alone because she didn't much like going there herself on account of the ghosts and also she probably more or less knew why I was going and was glad to have someone checking on the off chance.

She always took Jet with her for company so I had no early-warning system and every time I approached the house I searched for portents, strange cloud patterns, thirteen magpies, frogs the size of antelopes, that sort of thing. Some days I was convinced I could sense something or I experienced an uncanny mystical feeling but it won't make the six o'clock news if I tell you I was always wrong.

It didn't matter. Each time my heart would race at the smallest suggestion that we had company. Usually it was a moth thudding against a window. Or mice. Or nothing at all.

Once there I tried to put things back where they belonged.

I moved furniture. Swept rugs. Washed plates with cold water and bars of soap. Scrubbed dirt off walls.

Sometimes I just sat in the room that Edmond shared with Isaac, hoping something would happen.

Sometimes I put on his clothes and drifted around the house looking for something but I didn't know what.

I frightened myself. I became the ghost Piper was so scared of.

One day we went down to the house together because Piper wanted a bath. There was no use pretending I had a premonition when Piper was around because if any manifestation was going to make itself manifest, it wasn't going to be to me.

We had to haul buckets in as usual and the bath was cold but at least it took place in a bathtub, and then we sat around for a little while in the garden and swapped books we'd read for unread ones and I guess it was a little like going to a movie in the olden days before the war, something different to do.

For a while there was total peace and quiet, with nothing but the sound of Piper humming quietly and a chiffchaff chiff-chaffing in the apple tree and me turning the pages of a book.

Then the telephone rang.

It was such an unfamiliar sound we forgot how to react.

For an eternity neither of us moved.

Piper sat terrified. Eyes wide.

But I've never left a ringing phone in my life and I wasn't going to start now.

I brought the receiver up to my ear but said nothing.

Hello? said the voice and for a moment I couldn't place it.

Hello? it said again, and then in a pleading tone: Whoever you are, please say something.

And then I recognized the voice.

Hello, I said. It's Daisy.

Part One

1

I
ended up in a hospital, where they kept me for months after I arrived back in New York, staring at a wall, stunned silent, frozen rigid with anger and grief. My willingness to eat confused and annoyed the staff, confounding their efforts to understand what I was doing there. For months, an explanation for my presence escaped them completely. But I wasn't about to help them with that problem.

Eventually they were forced to release me, still unable to diagnose the obvious.

So here it is, finally, and I hope they're paying attention.

I was in the hospital because it was convenient. It was the only way to get me out of England. I was not interested in starving, killing, slashing, depriving, maiming or punishing myself.

I was dying, of course, but then we all are. Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.

The only help for my condition, then as now, is that I refused to let go of what I loved. I wrote everything down, at first in choppy fragments; a sentence here, a few words there, it was the most I could stand at the time. Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.

When I go back over my writing now I can barely read it. The happiness is the worst. Some days I can't bring myself to remember. But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past. What remains of my life depends on what happened six years ago.

In my brain, in my limbs, in my dreams, it is still happening.

2

I
t took all this time for the war to end.

I was going to say For Good, but even now I don't want to press my luck.

The Occupation itself lasted only nine months; by Christmas that first year it was over. By then I was back in New York City, not because I wanted to be, but because I was half dragged and half deported and the final half was blackmail, and after all the rest of the things I managed to resist, I didn't have the strength left for that particular fight.

The worst part about those years wasn't the hospital, or the solitude, or the war, or even being away from Edmond.

It was the not knowing.

It's fashionable nowadays to talk about cramming a whole life into a few years, especially when people turn up dead at the end of it, which increasingly they do. But for me it's been the opposite. When I left England I entered limbo. For all that time I was waiting to come home.

You think I'm exaggerating, that I should qualify my statement: I waited yes, but I also took a job, read books, spent days in air-raid shelters, filled out rationing papers, wrote letters, stayed alive.

But the truth is that nothing distracted me from waiting.

The. Time. Simply. Passed.

First, of course, I was reunited with my family. I met my half sister. Less than half, really. An eighth. A fiftieth.

They named her Leonora. Snub-nosed, Precious, and Refreshingly Normal, which is the line Davina's been using two or three hundred times a day for half a decade now.

I know exactly how the conversations with my father go.

“Thank heavens there are no problems with Leonora, why,
the money alone
that's been wasted on” (meaningful nod). And my father, looking uncomfortable, answers, “Of course, darling,” and silently taps his knuckles against their custom-made white Canadian birch headboard, for luck.

I was precious at her age too.

For my father's sake, I've pretended to be nice to Leonora. Not that she cares. She assumes admiration.

Well good for her. It's a lot easier that way.

I left the bosom of my family within a few days of being discharged from the hospital. Most of the schools had closed and it was hard to see the point of education in the midst of all that death and destruction anyway, so I moved into a derelict office building near what used to be Grand Central. No one wanted to live in that neighborhood anymore, but I liked it. The sky was bigger now and except for the occasional shooting, it was quiet.

Around the corner was The New York Public Library, Main Branch, Forty-second and Fifth. I assumed they were desperate for staff. Everyone in that neighborhood was. At the interview they asked me how I felt about the bomb threats and snipers and were impressed by what they took to be my courage. I was the only one who applied for the job, which may explain why they didn't seem to mind about my previous job experience. Hall monitor in a loony bin.

Day after day I attended my duties, which were virtually nonexistent. It was silent in there, cavernous and empty. Some days the only people who came in were our regulars: a small band of old-fashioned primary-source freaks and Intellectual Seekers. Everyone else stayed home and used the Internet, less worried about the quality of the information than about suicide bombers. Nearly everyone got used to living without little luxuries like library books.

It was only a few months ago that there was finally a pause in the thousands of wars being waged all over the planet. Or was it one big war? I forget.

I think everyone has.

A few days after the borders between the U.S. and England finally reopened for Casual Passage, the letter from Piper arrived. For the longest time I couldn't bring myself to read it.

For once my father's influence came in handy. He was trying to make amends, which I appreciated.

I was one of the first people they allowed to come back.

You'd laugh at the complications of my journey. From start to finish, the trip took almost a week. Of course it wasn't all traveling, there was a lot of waiting around too, but I was used to that.

When the plane finally did touch down, I half expected, half prayed that somehow a miracle would happen and Edmond would appear at the airport, just like last time, with his cigarette and the sweet doggy tilt to his head. But how could he?

I was disappointed nonetheless.

The procedure of checking us through was complicated so I waited with the small anxious crowd, a few Americans but mostly Brits who got stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic when borders all over the world started to close.

Our right to be in England had to be double and triple confirmed, with sheaves of paperwork and fingerprinted identification cards in addition to the new kind of passports we'd been issued.

All the officials at the airport carried guns. But underneath their grim expressions you could detect a hint of excitement. We were almost tourists, the first anyone had seen in years. For them, we represented the end of a long, hard winter. Like daffodils. They greeted us with barely disguised relief.

When I stepped outside, the familiar smell of that rainy April day hit me so hard I felt dizzy and had to put my bag down and wait for the spell to pass.

The airport was unrecognizable from my last visit, completely overgrown with gorse and ivy and huge prehistoric-looking thistles. Just as Isaac had predicted, the landscape was happily romping away from civilization. I half expected to see stags and wild boars on the runway.

Except for a couple of army jeeps the parking lot was empty. Their owners had hacked a space in the dense scrub that now covered everything, but the clearings looked temporary. It was like landing in a wild place; I'm glad I hadn't seen the condition of the runways beforehand.

The soldier had stamped my passport FAMILY in heavy black capital letters and I checked it now for reassurance and because I liked how fierce the word looked.

I'm coming, I said silently to everything I'd left behind, and headed for the single, ragged bus that would take me home.