Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (16 page)

My father made me stop playing the piano and together we carried the bow saw, which lived on a hook in the rafters next to the scythe, into the forest. My father
had tensioned its wooden frame and sharpened its teeth with the file until they shone with vicious intent. When he balanced it on end, the saw stood as high as my shoulders. We worked on cutting the forest’s fallen branches into manageable sizes—running the full length of the blade through them, moving the saw backward and forward between us. We talked about all sorts of things while we worked. But often my father used our time together in the forest as a lesson.

“Always use the full length of the saw.”

“Always use the full length of the saw,” I repeated mechanically, without waiting for his question.

“This blade has ten teeth per inch, but there are others in the chest for finer work if you ever need them,” he said.

I was concentrating on our rhythm, comforting in its regularity. I breathed in the autumn smells of humus, fern, and fresh wood sap. I watched the sun freckle the forest floor, and when a patch of warmth found me I lifted my face up toward it.

“Punzel! Pay attention. This is important for you to know.”

“Why?”

“In case I’m not here and you need to cut wood.”

I laughed. “But you’ll always be here.”

He carried on sawing while I sat on the thin end of a branch to steady it and to keep the cut open, so the blade would move without snagging.

“What if I have an accident? Retreaters need to know these things.”

“I’d rather be a survivalist,” I said. “In a bug-out location.” I rolled the words around my mouth to see how they sounded. I hoped they would make my father smile, but there was just the slightest of pauses in his sawing and he didn’t look up. “That’s what Oliver said,” I continued.

“What else do you know about Oliver?”

“Nothing,” I answered, remembering the conversation in my bedroom just before he had slammed the front door.

“Oliver said a lot of ridiculous things.” My father pushed and pulled the blade faster, head down. “He said he was a Retreater, a survivalist, but it turned out Oliver Hannington was interested in other things and too pathetic to even try it.”

“Not like us, Papa,” I said, but he couldn’t have heard me, because he continued speaking.

“He liked to talk the talk, Oliver, but he didn’t walk the walk.” On every “talk” and “walk” my father pushed forward, hard, so the saw ate deep into the wood and I had to grip tighter to keep my balance on the bouncing
end. “The cabin is in the perfect location,” my father said in an accent which copied Oliver’s disturbingly. “Fully equipped, James, stores of food for the winter.” He stopped imitating Oliver’s voice and continued speaking. “He showed me die Hütte on the map, told me about the fresh running water and herds of deer; it was even supposed to have a root cellar and an air rifle tucked out of sight on one of the roof joists. He told me that all I would need would be the gun pellets. So I bought boxes of pellets, boxes and boxes of pellets, but no bloody gun.” My father was panting and his words came out breathless and jerky. He wasn’t talking to me any more. “Oliver had never bloody set eyes on the place.”

“But if we hadn’t been here when the rest of the world disappeared, we would have died too. So really, we should be grateful,” I said.

My father stopped sawing, his expression vacant as if my words were taking time to go in. He turned his face away from me just as the branch complained and split apart, and I landed on the ground with a bump.

For the rest of the day, my father pulled and rolled branches to the cabin so we could chop them up with the axe. I collected bundles of kindling, which we tied together with home-made cord and my father attached to my shoulders. I staggered back, remembering an
illustration from a book of Christmas carols: a ragged man bent double under his load of winter fuel.

The day after, outside die Hütte, my father balanced one log on top of another and gave me a lesson in how to use the axe.

“Watch, Punzel: right hand near the head, left hand at the bottom of the handle. Swing up”—he hoisted the axe above his head—“let the weight take it forward, and your right hand will slide down to join your left.” The blade flew, its own momentum cleaving the top log in two. He crouched behind me, and with four hands on the axe we tried it together.

Remembering the rabbit, I shut my eyes as the tool swung crookedly and wedged itself in the bottom log.

“Keep your eyes open,” he said, and I wondered how he knew when he had been standing behind me. “Try again.”

Over and over we swung the axe together until I thought my arms would dislocate from my shoulders.

“I think I can do it by myself now,” I said, although I didn’t mean it and just wanted the job to be over so I could go indoors to play the piano.

“Show me,” he said.

I gripped the axe tight with both hands and, tightening my stomach, swung it up over my head, shut my eyes, and let it fall forward. When I opened them, the top log
was still in place, and the axe head was again deep in the bottom log. This time I couldn’t even wiggle it loose.

My father laughed. “Maybe next year,” he said.

We stacked hundreds of logs around the exterior walls. By the time we had finished sawing and chopping, they covered all four walls, right up to the eaves; only the door and the window with its tent curtain were left uncovered. My father put me on his shoulders for the last two rows, passing up one log at a time. He was delighted with our second layer of insulation.

When we had as much wood as my father’s calculations said we needed, we worked on gathering food to store for the winter. We smoked fish, squirrel, and rabbit meat over an outdoor fire which we kept alight day and night. And then we hung the pieces, as brown and flat as old kippers, from the rafters, between strings of dried mushrooms and berries and upside-down bouquets of herbs until the roof space was swathed with macabre decorations. Near the river we found a boggy area where a bed of bulrushes grew. We pulled them up, eating the stalks and storing the roots in the tool chest, hoping they might keep like potatoes. We spent days raking through the leaves in the forest, searching for mushrooms, until at bedtime, when I shut my eyes, patterns of brown and orange leaves danced behind the lids. My father had an
eye for mushrooms, and while I was bored after twenty minutes, he returned with oyster, hedgehog, ceps, chanterelles, and beefsteak. There was too much food for us to keep up with the preserving, so we ate the rest fresh. Every meal was a feast, as though we were fattening ourselves up for hibernation, and all of it was delicious. We were healthy, plump, and well fed. I lay in bed, looking up at the dark shapes dangling from the ceiling, thinking about the hard work it had taken to gather and preserve them, and I was sure my father must now be satisfied.

When the chest was full of food instead of tools, and the rafters appeared to have a colony of roosting bats, the early winter wind came to slap us in the face and tell us it wasn’t enough. We weren’t supposed to be eating the food we had preserved until well into the winter, but the temperature dropped so fast that the fish and the animals ignored our hooks and traps, and we often had to eat from our stores. My father’s calculations were off by at least a month.

Drips hung from our noses, turning to ice in my father’s moustache when he went outside. Indoors, we huddled beside the stove, one side of our bodies always freezing, the other burning. In the mornings I woke curled inside my sleeping bag, my hands tucked into my armpits. A thick skin of ice grew over the water bucket
in the night and the toothpaste froze in its tube. We wore as many layers as we could, and were so round and padded that on the occasional days when it was warm enough to reveal a leg, a bottom, or a bit of chest to wash, it was a shock to see how thin and white our bodies had become. I dragged the piano closer to the stove so my finger joints would still flex and I could practise my scales with the heat on my back. We stacked logs in the window space and packed all the gaps in the walls with damp mud and moss. We lived in the dark.

“It’s too cold to snow,” my father said, but it seemed he didn’t know everything. One morning, we woke to a different sound. Our normal noises—the kettle on the stove, the brushing of teeth with a dot of toothpaste, and our singing—were deadened. I heard them like I heard the rumbling of my stomach, distant and muted. But it wasn’t until I pushed against the door that we realized it had snowed. My father wrapped me in all the clothes I owned, including the blue mittens and the balaclava, which had already lost most of its whiskers. On my feet I still had my oddly matched leaping-cat shoe and the shingle bag. He worked at the snow with the spade until he was able to push the door wider and we could step outside.

Our world had been transformed. Instead of a tumbledown cottage where the witch lived, die Hütte had changed into the woodsman’s cabin, snug and inviting, with smoke puffing from the chimney. The snow had been pushed up the clearing by the wind and lay in thick drifts against the trees and the cabin’s walls. My father and I ran about, whooping and laughing, falling backward into soft piles, lying down and making snow angels, rolling two balls into a snowman. My father’s face even lost its worried frown in the hour or so that he played like a child, with no concerns about the next meal or that one day we would run out of toothpaste forever. The snow melted and refroze into clods of ice around my shingle-bag shoe, so that my foot grew heavy and I lost all feeling in my toes. Only then did I agree to go back indoors.

The best thing about the snow was having as much water as we needed right outside the door. We scooped it into the kettle and pans, and kept a constant supply of warm water on the stove. We had never been so profligate with the water my father had to lug up from the river.

In the afternoon we treated ourselves to a standing-up bath. Outside the cabin, we took turns to balance, naked and shivering, with one foot in each bucket,
and to have warm water poured over us. The last time I had washed all over had been in a communal campsite shower, its floor slopping in dirty water from a drain blocked with short dark hairs. I looked at our view, with the bare branches of the trees standing out spidery and black against the snow like the lungs of the world. And I thought about the view that Becky had from her bathroom window: a brick-and-concrete London.

“Do you think it’s snowing at home?” I asked. I stood drying myself in front of the stove, rotating by a quarter of my body at a time, so that one narrow strip of me roasted to pink, while the opposite side chilled.

“We are home. London has gone. You know that, Punzel,” said my father, arranging our piece of soap on the shelf. It was already thin enough to see light through it when I held it up to the sky.

“I forgot.”

“I know it’s hard. But you have to remember, none of it is there any more; the garden, the house, the cemetery, school—they’re all gone.”

“What about Germany,” I said, bending over to dunk my head into a bucket of warm water, “and Omi, has she gone too?” I scratched my scalp and tugged at my hair. We had finished the shampoo at the end of the summer.

“All of it,” he said.

I jumped up, flinging my head backward and throwing out water droplets which hissed on the stove. My father twisted my hair, squeezing out a trickle.

“But there are still hills over the Fluss.”

“Come on, I’ll show you.” My father helped me into a jumper and my dungarees, which had been warming above the stove. He put on his coat and, picking me up with one arm, wrapped me inside it with him.

I clung on to him with my arms and legs and we went outside. It made me feel strange to think there was no one left to see us emerge from die Hütte into the snow; no one to wonder at this new double creature—a PapaPunzel. Our two-legged, two-headed body lumbered into the clearing.

“This whole wonderful world is yours and mine, Punzel. Everything you can see is ours. Beyond the Fluss, over the hill”—he pointed in that direction—“there’s nothing. If you carried on over the top, you’d fall off the edge into a never-ending blackness. Ptarrr!” He loosened his grip on me.

I shrieked as I felt a lurch with the drop of my body, before he caught me again.

He laughed at my fright and then became serious. “And the same with the mountain.” He turned, running his outstretched arm in a semicircle, taking in all the
places I knew: the forest, the clearing, the cabin, and the rocky slope up to the summit. We both looked up to the sharp line slicing through the white sky. “On the other side there is only emptiness, an awful place that has eaten everything except our own little kingdom.”

“What’s it called?” I asked in an awed whisper.

He paused, and I thought it was because even the name must be too terrible to speak. At last he said, “The Great Divide. And you must promise never to go there. I couldn’t survive without you. We’re a team, you and I, aren’t we?”

I nodded. “We’re the PapaPunzel,” I said.

“Do you promise not to go there?”

“I promise.” I clung to him.

“What do you promise?”

“I promise never to go there,” I said.

He carried me back into the warmth, rinsed out our grey underwear and hung it near the hotplate, where it steamed and singed. I sat next to the fire and imagined our microscopic white and green island adrift in the blackness—an overlooked crumb, left behind when the earth was gobbled whole by the Great Divide. My father told me many times that winter that the world ended beyond the hills, and he often made me repeat my promise.