Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (22 page)

In my mind, the blood, the rain, and the fire became associated with the change in my father. He was subdued for days afterward, as though he knew he had been bad, and I often wondered if he had started the fire himself. But I became aware that his plans for what would become of us hadn’t gone away; they had been clarified.
He still often got up in the middle of the night to draw diagrams and unintelligible scribbles over the walls of the cabin. In the mornings he would try to engage me with them, jabbering and jumping on the table to point out a particular argument about survivalism.

“Oliver Hannington wouldn’t be able to answer that one,” he would say.

“Oliver Hannington is dead; everyone is dead except us,” I would answer wearily.

The day after the fire, I walked through the burned rock forest. I found the metal part of the spade, but the handle was sooty and disintegrated in my hands. One of our plates was in a tree, the other below it, in a skeletal bush—the enamel scorched. With a stick, I poked through the ash caking the ground, but not even a corner of the sheet music remained. The forest smelled heavy and dirty and sorry for itself. The leaves in the canopy dripped and most of the vegetation had gone; the ground was grey sludge. The fire had reached the beginning of the clearing and had gone all the way down to the river, but the rain had started before it had spread across the mountain to the forest on the other side.

I found only one tree that had caught fire. It stood alone, blackened and twisted. I sat on a rock and watched a crow return to it again and again. The bird couldn’t
settle; it was all wings and flap and rusty cawing. It must have had a nest high up where the limbs became distorted. But I had no sympathy for the crow; the feeling I had was jealousy. I would have given up everything—the music, my memories of London, the forest—to become that bird and to be able to fly away to make a new nest in a new tree. But I also acknowledged that if it
were
possible for me to wish hard enough to become that crow, it would be equally possible that long ago, something else—a fly, a rabbit, a bee—may have looked at me, Peggy Hillcoat, and been jealous of everything I had then and might have in the future. And if that creature had wished hard enough, it might have given up everything to become me.

19

After the fire, when I had finished growing and was as tall as I was ever going to be, I insisted on a bed of my own. I pleaded for it, stamped my feet, turned my back on my father, refused everything he asked for until he relented. My bed had squat log legs and a warped frame cut from a pine. We placed it against the back wall toward the stove, so each morning when I woke with my head warmed by the fire and my feet chilly, the first thing I saw was my piano. I had spent every spare five minutes rolling plant stalks along my thighs to make rope thick and strong enough to criss-cross the bed frame. On top, I laid a straw mattress—bundles of dried grass stitched together with more rope—and a layer of furs, and over that I put the scraps of my sleeping bag. I tried to hide
my joy from my father, who sulked and predicted that the rope would sag and that by the end of the first night my bottom would be inches from the floor. I didn’t care.

“Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” he called out bitterly when we were both in bed.

He complained about being cold, about there being too much space in his bed, but I lay in the dark, smiling up at the joists. And when I was sure, from the sound of his breathing, that he was asleep, I put my fingers between my legs.

The first morning, it took a few seconds to orient myself—I woke to sunlight inching under the door instead of an out-of-focus view of wood grain and splinters, my head having been squeezed in the gap between the wall and my father’s back. I jumped out of bed, opened the chimney damper, shoved a log onto the fire embers, and climbed back under my furs, luxuriating in my own space. From my low position in the bed I saw the name again—gouged into the wood under the shelf next to the stove. I hadn’t thought about Reuben for so long, I couldn’t remember when I had last touched the letters or even seen them. And how many autumns had passed since I had watched the boots walk in front of the nest? Eight? Nine? The memory of them was connected to a different girl, naïve and new to the forest. I lay on my stomach on my
bed and stretched my arm above my head to touch with the very tips of my fingers where Reuben had once carved his name, and I mine. Had he been in die Hütte before us and abandoned it? And where was he now? I was sure that if he lived on our side of the river I would have bumped into him, or seen more evidence of his existence, other than a pair of damp boots.

That day, while I played the piano, hoed between the rows of new carrot leaves, and walked my usual route to check and set the traps, I wondered how the head and face at the other end of the boots might look. I gave him a clean-shaven chin, a flop of sandy hair, and blue eyes. I gave him an American accent, but he reminded me too much of Oliver Hannington, so I started again with dark curly hair and a drooping moustache. I thought about him crossing the river without being frightened, striding through the rapids in his sturdy boots and thick socks and climbing up to the ridge on the other side. He teetered on the lip of the Great Divide; he gazed into the empty blackness and he wasn’t afraid.

The spring afternoons were my own to do as I wanted. I sheltered from the rain in the nest while newborn ferns unfurled around me, and thought about whether Reuben might play the piano or the guitar. I dreamed of duets and recitals. Perhaps he lived in a brick house
across the river, with a mirror and a bath. Or he was a famous Russian writer who didn’t speak any English and was searching for his wife and children. Maybe he had been mistakenly arrested for spying, escaped to the forest, and got stuck here after the Great Divide happened. When I found a patch of sunshine to lie in, I put my hands behind my head and remembered how his ankles had seemed particularly well fed. He must catch and eat deer, I thought, something my father and I had still never managed to do, or maybe there were boar across the river.

I watched for him when I walked amongst the celandines, their yellow heads paling into summer. I whirled around when I caught a movement from the corner of my eye, but the man was always faster. I studied the ground for footprints which weren’t ours, but saw only the tracks of deer, birds, and wolves. One day, I had the idea of climbing again up to the ledge where we had flown the kite, to see the very edge of our land through the spyglass. My father came into the cabin just as I was taking it down from the shelf.

“What are you going to do with that?” He seemed immediately suspicious.

“I’m going to see if it works. I’m going to climb the mountain.”

“There’s nothing to see, just trees and the ridge.” He dropped the logs he was carrying in a heap next to the stove.

“I’ll just look at the trees and the ridge then,” I said, gripping the spyglass behind my back, as if I could hide it from him.

“It’s not a toy. You’ll only drop it.” He held out his hand. I was a puppy, receiving obedience training.

“I won’t. I’ll be careful. I promise.” I moved to go.

“Punzel. No!” He reached behind me and pulled my wrist, squeezing. “You are not allowed.”

“Why not? You can’t stop me. The spyglass is mine.” I yanked my arm back, but he gripped harder, burning the skin.

“I don’t want you playing with it.”

“I’m not going to play with it, I’m going to use it to look across the Fluss.”

“I don’t want you to do that.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t. That’s enough!”

“It’s not up to you what I do!” I was shouting now.

“Give it to me,” he yelled back. I was the bad dog with a bone I had snatched from my master’s table. “The spyglass, Punzel.” The palm of his left hand was straight out, the fingers straining backward and the tendons in
his wrist quivering. That’s when I knew Reuben really did live over the river and that my father knew it too.

“It’s mine. It was a present, from . . .” and I realized I couldn’t remember who had given it to me. There was a flash of a memory—tearing wrapping paper, seeing the frown lines on Ute’s face magnified and encircled by brass, but no memory or name of the giver.

In that second of doubt, when I was shocked at how my previous life had disappeared so easily, my father grabbed the spyglass from my hand. Without thinking, just like after the fire, I made a fist and punched him. This time the blow was weak, pathetic; it glanced off his chest, but it was enough to make him strike back. The end of the metal tube clipped my eyebrow, splitting the skin. I cried out as blood flowed into my eye and down the side of my nose. My father stepped forward—I knew it was to say sorry—but I pressed my hand against my head and turned to run. I ran to the forest and kept going, even when he called after me. I scrambled blindly up through the trees, my tears mingling with the flow of blood, and climbed the mountain, smearing mucus over the tufts of grass I used to pull myself upward. When I reached the platform where we had flown the kite, I shaded my eyes with my hands and stared across the river to the mountain on the other side. As my father had said, there were only
trees: trees and dark clouds rolling in over the top of the ridge, which drew a line along the edge of my world.

I sat there for a long time, watching for a puff of smoke or the movement of a man, but there was nothing. The midday sun passed overhead, and as I stumbled back down the sky grew darker and the first drops of rain fell. By the time I was walking through the forest to the nest, the rain was falling in sheets, so that it was hard to see farther than a step or two ahead. As I crawled inside, I heard my father calling my name again—his voice muffled and distant because of the rain. I curled up on the moss with an empty stomach, avoiding the water where it came in through the ferns, and hoped that I would die before morning, thinking how that would serve my father right.

I tried to sleep, but the rain grew even heavier and the moss spongy, and no matter where I lay, muddy water soaked into my clothes. There were few other noises apart from the constant pouring, just the occasional scuttlings and crawlings that kept my eyes and ears straining into the darkness. The rain continued to pound, and after a while I thought I could hear another noise, a rushing of water and trees creaking and complaining. There was a crash somewhere up the mountain behind me, one that shook the ground under my body, a second’s gap of rain, and another thump and another,
then wood splitting and breaking and a huge lumbering, trampling noise coming toward me down the mountain. There was a kind of breathless panting and I realized it was me. The blood pumped in my throat. I was ready to run or to face the thing coming. It was a monster about to pounce, claws out, teeth sharp. I scrabbled against the boggy floor and had just stuck my head out of the entrance when a final terrifying crash, travelling through the ground into my bones, came from behind and a boulder bigger than the nest dropped into the forest in front of me. It was followed by a shower of smaller rocks, which fell through the leaves into the nest, and all I could do was curl into a ball and cover my head. When the storm of stones had died away, the monochrome forest swayed, settled, and shifted in its sleep.

I walked for the rest of the night, shivering until the rain stopped. I was determined never to go back to my father. When daylight broke, I hid behind a tree and watched the smoke rise from our chimney into a blue sky and smelled breakfast on the stove. Eventually, the door opened and my father appeared. He looked lean and wiry from a distance, his beard ragged and his long black hair a receding tide which had left behind an exposed beach of tanned forehead. He walked behind the cabin and called for me, and again, farther off.

When I judged it safe, I ran across the clearing and into die Hütte. I stood at the stove and ate acorn porridge straight from the pan, scalding my mouth. The place was different after a night away—smaller, darker—but it smelled like home. I gathered a few special things together into my rucksack, but the spyglass was gone and I didn’t see it again until the summer was over.

I stood on tiptoe beside my favourite wintereye, and where the three branches soared upward from the main trunk I felt with my fingers the basin of tepid water that the tree kept in its secret heart. In this scant pool I placed a squirrel’s skull. Last autumn, just to see what was inside, I had boiled the animal’s head until the flesh fell away and every tooth shone white. After the skull went a magpie’s feather—dark with a smear of blue, like petrol on a puddle. And lastly a dark hair, which I had unwound from the long-broken comb. It made me think of Becky’s hair tied behind her unaged face. To me, Becky was eight.

It was right to give my treasures to the forest to thank it for keeping me safe from the boulder and to ask for something, anything, different to happen. After I had given the gifts to the tree, I walked a diagonal line across the forest. The early summer sun was already warm, and the dappled shade the trees gave was a relief. Making up the rules as I went along, I ignored the deer paths
and walked straight through the undergrowth, over rotten logs, scratching my legs and arms on brambles and thistles. I picked up a stick and beat them back. When the forest thinned, but before the leaf mulch had disappeared, I stopped under a tree we called a gribble. It was my second favourite tree in the forest, after the wintereye, because it stood alone, sad-looking, its trunk bowed under the weight of a bad haircut. In autumn it was covered in miniature apples. Every time they appeared I couldn’t resist tasting one, but the sourness always dried the roof of my mouth and snarled my lips, and I had to spit it out, disappointed.