Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (21 page)

“OK, play it again.” My father listened with his head cocked.

He tried to catch the first few notes, scribbling them down onto the wall, but he couldn’t keep up with my
playing and singing as the music ran away with me again. In the end he sat on the bed and watched. This time I just kept going, singing and singing, until I stopped playing, picked up the piece of charcoal, and leaned across the piano. I hesitated; I could play my scales and read
La Campanella
, but it was another thing entirely to translate the music in my head to black notes on a wooden wall.

My father came over and took the piece of charcoal from my hand. He drew notes until the stick broke. He filled up the bars with a music that he had in his head, and it was my turn to sit and stare. I fetched him another stick and he carried on filling up the wall with lines and dots, music that I couldn’t follow, sounds that jumped and scratched and weren’t music at all. I replaced him on the bed, watching the sweat trickle down his face while he drew manically, rubbing out, rewriting each note until the whole wall above the piano became grey. I bit my nails, worrying about the noise trapped inside his head.

I fell asleep to the scratch of charcoal on wood and my father’s snatches of melody. When I woke in the night with him sleeping beside me in the airless room, I climbed over him, my old nightie sticking to me, and stood on the rug. The door was still open, and the light from a full moon illuminated the walls of die Hütte—all
of them filled with notes, unintelligible words, lists, lines and arrows connecting passages, as if I stood inside the pages of
La Campanella
, rewritten by a manic hand.

Outside, our world was still, scented with warm vegetation and a trace of stove smoke. The moon showed the trees and the mountain and the grass in muted shades of their daylight colours. At the back of die Hütte I crouched over our toilet hole to pee. When I wiped myself there was a smear of dark blood across the moss. I held it up to the moon to get a better look, frightened that something had cut me between my legs without me knowing. At the same time I smelled the smoke again and understood in a rush which made my heart falter that the smell of smoke wasn’t coming from die Hütte but from the trees. I walked toward the rock forest at the back of the clearing, sniffing, trying to follow the smell with my nose, but it had drifted away. Without warning, two huge rushing shapes jumped out from the trees, bounding in great leaps. I cried out, but just as soon as I realized they were deer, they had crossed the clearing and were gone into the forest on the other side. Then the smell came again, faint, but distinctive. Burning.

Dropping the moss, I turned and ran back to the cabin, aware of wetness between my legs, under my patched nightie.

“Fire!” I shouted as I ran. My father had rolled over onto his back but hadn’t woken. I shook his shoulder. “Fire!” I shouted into his face. He had black smudges across his forehead and I saw that his hands and his chest, too, were sooty.

He cracked open his eyes. “It’s the stove, Punzel,” he said, his words slurred with sleep. “Come back to bed.”

“No, there’s a fire in the forest. I smelled it.” I pulled the cover off him and saw that he was still wearing his trousers and socks. He sat up, yawning. I pulled on his hand to try to give him some urgency. The black rubbed off on mine.

“OK, OK,” he said. He was still pulling on his boots while I already had my moccasins on and was hopping in front of him, trying to hurry him up. We went outside and stood in the clearing where the land rose, our noses lifted, breathing in. The smell came again. “How full are the buckets?” he said.

“I don’t know; one full perhaps, the other half full.”

“Get the spade.” I watched his face as he spoke, and in the moonlight I thought I saw the flicker of a smile cross it before he said, “I’ll bring the water.”

The dark line of trees was two-dimensional, a silhouette, but we knew our way in. I walked behind my father into the forest, carrying the spade. It might have been
like old times, but the man’s back I followed was thinner, less jaunty. I imagined the bird’s nest on the shelves in die Hütte crackle from a lick of flame which curled around the feathers, turning them brown, crumbling them to ash. The toothbrushes buckled and melted, dripping off the shelf, and Phyllis’s hair fizzled and lit up around her head like a halo. I thought about going back to die Hütte and scooping all I could carry into my arms and running with it down to the river—horse-head stones in my pockets and pine cones tucked into my hair. But in my imagination I saw myself stop at the water’s edge and look down into the dark, unable to go any farther.

I carried on walking behind my father. “What are we going to do, Papa?” I said.

The bitter smell in the air was stronger now—I could taste it, too, harsh in the back of my throat. The only noises from the forest were the sticks snapping under our feet. Whatever we were walking toward was silent. He didn’t answer.

Where the trees thinned, scrubby bushes and grasses had claimed the ground but were dry from the weeks without rain. My father stopped and I came up beside him. The moonlight filtered through the trees, which cast long shadows, but in front of us I could see puffs of smoke rising from the ground, the earth smouldering.
While we watched, a flame flared up, illuminating the forest litter, consuming a fern, and dying away. I looked farther into the trees—the ground as far as I could see was smoking.

“Where’s the fire?” I said.

“Under the leaves,” said my father in a whisper, and my feet inside my moccasins seemed hotter.

I stepped backward. My father put one bucket down and threw the water from the other in an arc toward where the flame had erupted from the ground. The soil hissed and steam billowed. He threw the water from the other bucket in the opposite direction, with the same effect.

“Will that work, Papa? Will we be all right?” I wanted him to say that it would be fine, that we could go back to bed and in the morning we would wake up to have another normal day weeding the vegetable patch and going down to the river to fish. If he told me we could return to die Hütte, I promised myself, I would never complain about not having enough water, but again he ignored me. “Should we go back now, Papa?” I tugged on his sleeve. “Please let’s go back. We could get more water.” As I said it, I realized how hopeless that would be, how far away the river was, and even if we could carry more, we had only two buckets—three if you counted the one tied up to the tree on the bank. For a long time my father
stood watching and thinking, with me hopping around him, trying to get his attention or an answer, a plan. The smoke puffed closer. When I glanced over my shoulder, the trees were fading, blurred with grey.

“Pass me the spade, Punzel,” he said. I handed it to him. He thrust it into the ground and lifted out a pile of smouldering leaves. Fire leaped from the small pit at his feet and he moved back, to stand beside me. I could feel the heat and, while I watched, a stick lying across our path lit up, a tongue of fire passing along its length and jumping sideways onto other plants, the flames licking outward. My father let the spade fall from his hand and in an automatic reaction I caught the handle before it fell into the fire. At the same time, my father grabbed my wrist and squeezed it tight, holding it toward the flames. I cried out and dropped the tool.

“Leave it,” he said. “We don’t need it any more.”

The spade lay on the earth, and the orange flames crept around it. For two seconds my father held my arm out over the fire—offering me up, while I struggled to get away from the heat. Then he let go of me and I backed away, rubbing my wrist.

“Yes,” he said, “more water.” His voice was monotone, his words drawn out. He picked up the buckets and turned back the way we had come.

I stared after him, trying to make sense of what had just happened. I looked back at the spade in the fire but its handle had already blackened while, ahead, my father swung the buckets as though he were on a stroll down to the river. I had no option but to follow him.

When we reached the clearing, my father went into die Hütte, but I hung back, staring into the dark trees, unsure about whether I could see a low flicker of fire. A lesson from school came back to me: a cartoon where a cat called Charlie had told us in a squeaky voice not to play with matches, and a talk afterward by a real fireman about fire needing three things to burn—fuel, air, and something else. I wished I had listened more rather than messing about with Becky.

I remembered a phrase—firebreak—a circle around die Hütte that the fire couldn’t cross. I fetched the trowel from the vegetable garden and tried to dig a shallow channel around the back of the cabin, but the ground was solid from where our feet had tramped across it and it was difficult to get anything more than the point of the trowel into the earth. I stopped and realized that the furrow I was cutting was too close to the wooden walls; if the fire reached it, the sparks would simply leap across. I went closer to the trees and started to work at the ground in a different place, digging the trowel in and tossing spoonfuls
of soil behind me. The earth was softer but, just below the surface, a tangle of roots snagged and impeded me. Still I kept hacking and sobbing, glancing into the forest and back at die Hütte, hoping to see my father reappear. I dug with desperation, scraping at the earth, chopping at the roots with the side of the trowel. My palms grew blisters, which popped. I sat back, defeated. “Papa!” I cried, but he didn’t come. Throwing down the trowel, I kneeled on the ground and scraped with my hands at the earth between the roots. When I glanced around again, my father was standing a foot or two behind me, silent, clasping a bucket to his chest. In a crab-like motion, I scrabbled backward across the ground, frightened by how he had appeared without me noticing. “Did you get more water?” I said.

“Punzel, I’ve been thinking,” he replied, crouching down, so our eyes were level.

I saw that the bucket was crammed with things from die Hütte—a ball of twine, our tin plates, the hammer and other tools, with acorns rattling around loose—and I thought he must have had the same idea as I’d had: to save everything he could.

“Perhaps it’s time to let it go.” He spoke calmly. Tucked under his arm was a roll of animal skins.

“Let what go?” I stumbled across the loose earth, my nightie getting dirtier, but he shuffled closer on his
haunches. His face was dark, the sky behind him the colour of tracing paper.

“All of it.”

“We just need to get some water.”

“We don’t need any of this stuff.” He pulled out the twine and tossed the ball away into the trees, where it unravelled, its tail still stuck in the bucket. “Our time in the woods is over, Punzel.” He put down the bucket and the skins and picked out the tin plates. He clashed them together and lifted his head back, shouting, “Say goodbye to the last human beings on the planet!” He stood up, beating a rhythm with the plates, and gave a kind of howl that ripened into a laugh. His eye sockets were hollowed out, and the tight skin across his skull shone where his hair was retreating.

I covered my ears, terrified by the animal my father had become in the few minutes I had been digging. He flicked the plates like Frisbees into the trees, picked up the bucket and the animal skins and set off toward the fire. I sat in stunned silence, then stood up and ran after him, following the trail of twine that he dragged behind him.

The fire was much closer to the clearing than before, but still it crept low across the ground, consuming all the leaves and twigs that lay before it, but only licking
around the bottom of the large tree trunks, then moving forward. My father was dancing close to the edge of it—advancing and every now and again taking a leap backward, away from the heat. As well as the smoke there was a fetid smell, and I saw he had thrown the animal skins into the flames at his feet. The fire sparked and fizzed through the fur. I made an attempt to pluck them out, but the heat was too intense.

“Please come back!” I shouted, my arm covering my mouth. My father turned to look at me, surprised to see me there.

“It’s OK, Punzel,” he said, the flames flickering across the smile on his face. “We’ll go together. I would never leave you.” He bent down to the bucket, removed something else, and flung it into the fire. I stood dumbly and watched the words
La Campanella
curl and fold over themselves, and notes and staves and Ute’s handwriting catch light and transform into ash. Leaving the bucket where it was, my father walked back toward die Hütte again. I picked up the bucket and once more followed him. Inside the cabin he was filling the second bucket with anything he could find, sweeping our belongings off the shelves with the side of his arm. I tugged on his sleeve, begging him to stop, but he shrugged me off. All the time he was talking to himself as if I weren’t there,
saying things like, “This is it now, this is the answer. How could I have been so blind? Of course, we’ll go together.”

He moved toward the piano table and started to pull at the wooden keys, prising them out of their positions. I walked toward him, formed my hand into a fist, and punched him in the stomach as hard as I could. My father was still a strong man, so I think it must have been the surprise that made him double over, winded. He crumpled onto the floor, hugged his knees, and cried. In between my father’s wails I thought I heard the fire eating through the undergrowth, crackling, and for a second I thought maybe my father was right: it would be easier if we let it all go. I stood there wondering what was next, and a trickle of liquid ran down my thigh, the blood I had forgotten about flowing down my leg and around my ankle. At the same time, I looked out through the door and saw a curtain of rain move across the valley and up toward us and the fire. I went outside to greet it.