Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (29 page)

When I stopped rocking and opened my eyes, nothing had changed. Still holding the balaclava and spyglass, I stood up and stepped off the rock, into the void. I hit the water sideways, with a vicious slap and a stinging pain that shocked me as much as the cold. The fall took me to the bottom of the river, and the momentum spun me so I wasn’t sure which way was up. I would have been happy to stay down there, kept below by my father’s heavy boots, washing back and forth with the pebbles and the fish, but the current snagged me, popped my head out like a cork, coughing and choking, and deposited me on the opposite bank where Reuben had climbed out. It wasn’t until I had wrung out the balaclava that I realized I had jumped without the rucksack. And the river had taken the spyglass from my hand. I imagined it spinning downstream and dropping into the Great Divide. The wound on my ear had opened again, and from under the dungarees a trickle of watery blood flowed down my neck, but the river had washed the red flowers from my nightshirt. I turned and pushed my way into the trees.

All the rest of that day I traipsed through the forest on the other side of the river. Once or twice, I thought I saw a tree or a path I recognized from when I had been
there years before, until I saw the same tree again and understood I had gone in a circle. The land on Reuben’s side of the river was steeper, and more crowded with trees and tangled bushes than mine. I walked through it, calling out for him and searching for signs that he had gone before me, but there were no broken branches, no footprints, nothing. In the late afternoon, I was even brave enough to climb a tree to try to spy the smoke from his campfire, but the branches became too thin to bear my weight and I had to return to the ground. My head throbbed with every step, and my skin was scratched and sore from the thickets that tried to trap me. I lumbered uphill through a copse of wintereyes, all the time thinking that beyond the next tree Reuben would be sitting on a log, his kettle whistling and his boots steaming in front of the fire. He would kiss me, laugh, and say, “What took you so long?”

I walked until the light left the sky and it became too dark to see my feet. A hook of tree root sent me sprawling; I put my hands out just in time to prevent my head hitting the ground. As soon as I sat down, my body began to shiver and the thought of the bedcovers and anorak discarded on the floor of the cabin tormented me. I tried to pull the balaclava over my head, but the dungarees still tied there made it too difficult and stabs of pain
shot down the side of my face, so instead I rubbed my legs with the damp wool. I eased off my father’s boots, my toenails tender to touch, and tucked my feet inside the balaclava and tried to curl up on the lumpy earth. I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering, so I sat up again and rested my forehead on my knees. It was impossible to sleep. I hummed a few phrases from
La Campanella
, but they didn’t distract me. I was alert to every noise the trees and hidden animals made, jumping when an owl hooted, wondering what was roaming in the midnight forest, but ever hopeful it was Reuben coming to find me. After a few hours I must have dropped off, because I saw my father emerging from the river with the sodden bedcovers draped around his shoulders. He was talking to me but his language was unrecognizable, garbled, his mouth distorted as if it moved underwater. He turned and I saw that the corner of his head was still missing. I woke with a start, in the middle of the forest.

It was the longest night, but when dawn broke, it was with a slow lightening of the sky; there was no sun. When the plants around me grew more distinct, I put my father’s boots back on and climbed higher, calling again for Reuben. I climbed with the idea that, near the top, I would have a view over the trees to see the column of smoke from his fire. I didn’t think about what was on the other
side; I was scared of the swirling blackness of the Great Divide. Near the top, just as on my side of the river, the trees thinned and the ground became stonier, but here there was no towering cliff. I kept going, until I came to bare rock, carried on up it, and looked backward over the valley. An autumn mist hung along the river and its banks. There was a gap amongst the trees which must have been our clearing, but the roof of die Hütte was hidden from me and there was no smoke. I turned away, and on my hands and knees crawled forward with my eyes closed, terrified of being sucked over. The boots sent showers of stones skittering down the hillside as I scrabbled for purchase. My heart hammering, I opened my eyes, my head already spinning with anticipated vertigo. In front of me, I saw another valley falling away. Wintereyes and beech and more mist stretched down to a distant hill, and beyond that, another. What I saw was beautiful.

For a long time I didn’t understand. I pivoted around to check I hadn’t become disoriented and was looking back at the way I had come, but even after I had turned several times the land beyond the ridge was still there. I threw a stone into it, expecting ripples, as though it were a pool reflecting my world back to me, but the stone bounced down the rocks and into the undergrowth. My father had
been mistaken. The Great Divide wasn’t an infinite blackness but a mirror image of our world. I put down one foot, the way I used to test the ice on the boggy shore near the river in winter. The ground held under my weight. One final time, I looked over my shoulder for smoke, a sign of Reuben, but there was nothing, so clutching the balaclava to my chest, I went forward into the new land.

I trudged downhill, using a stick to fight my way through tangled bushes and past spiny trees. I could manage only a short distance at a time before I had to stop and rest. Inside my father’s boots my bare feet slid about, my ankles banging into the tops, and the leather rubbing my heels into gory blisters with each step. I discovered that if I found a mossy spot I could put the balaclava under my head and lie down with my eyes closed for a few moments, to stop the banging pulse in my temple, but something always made me get up again and continue walking. When the midday sun passed overhead, the land turned upward again, and I staggered to the crest of a small rise. More wooded hills and another valley sloped away before me. I slid over the top, navigating the way down on my bottom. At the base was a gill, similar to ours—a long green tunnel with a tumble of mossy rocks—and for just a second I thought somehow I must have walked in a circle and crossed the river without noticing. After climbing down,
I shifted a stone in the way Reuben had, and cupped my hands to drink from the icy flow. I followed the gill downhill, clambering from rock to rock until the hidden stream burst out from underneath the boulders and the gill became a proper force. Scrambling up the bank, I pushed my way through bramble and holly to walk beside the water. Every time, when I reached the top of each small rib of land or negotiated a thicket, with nervous anticipation I expected to see the edge of the world.

All afternoon I walked, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, until the gill widened and became a river and when I next looked up there was open land falling away into the distance and rising again. I stood at the edge of the forest, watching the wind race across the meadow and the shadows of clouds wander over the grass. It was the darkening forest at my back that forced me onward and out into the open. I cut a path downward, over a long sloping hill, until in the distance I could see dotted across it, at intervals, towers of straw. I had seen towers like this before, but the name of them wouldn’t come back to me. Before the daylight had gone, I reached the first one—twice my height and smelling of newly cut hay. I tucked myself inside it and slept.

In the morning, as the sun was rising, I hobbled across the meadow. In the night, my raw heels had dried and
stuck themselves to the back of my father’s boots, and walking reopened the wounds, so that with each step pain shot up my legs. The dungarees around my head had shifted and fresh blood dripped down my cheek, which I caught with the palm of my hand and smeared upward, out of my eyes. I walked past more towers of straw and the sun got higher and hotter, so that I regretted leaving the river and forgot the pain in my head and my feet, and thought only of how thirsty I was. At the end of the meadow, over the brow of another small hill, I looked up and saw the red pitched roofs of houses. They clustered around a church, its white spire reaching above a line of trees. A thin grey road uncurled from the houses, running alongside the meadow. How many people would be in that village, I wondered. Fifty? Twice that? And I knew my father must have under-estimated the number of survivors. There weren’t two people left in our world, or even three, counting Reuben; there were more than a hundred. Without any clear plan, I walked down the hill and the road became closer and wider and greyer. The meadow went right up to it, with a shallow ditch dividing them. I stepped over and stood on the tarmac, dusty, man-made. Its hardness resonated through my knees and hip bones while I walked, and the loose chippings with their regular sides caught under my father’s boots.

At the start of the village, I passed a large house with many windows and doors. The ground floor was painted white, and its top storey, shaded by a steep roof, was wooden. I thought about knocking on the front door to ask the owner for a glass of water, but the shutters were closed. A dog barked twice and whimpered from an inside room. Beyond the house were a field and another house, smaller than the first, but the same shape and style; after these there were no more gaps, only buildings. I carried on walking until a man with a moustache and a child came toward me.

I glanced right and left to see how I might escape, but they walked quickly, and when I looked back they were a few feet away. The man stopped and pushed the child behind him, as though afraid I might leap forward. The child, with blond curls and a face that could have been a boy’s or a girl’s, peeped out, wide-eyed, from behind the man’s jeans.

“Please, do you have any water?” I said to the man with curly hair, similar to the child’s but darker and thinner. The dungarees tied around my face, crusty with blood, pulled against my skin as I spoke. The man said something I couldn’t understand, touched the side of his face with his hand, and moved toward me, the child still clinging to his leg.

26

I awoke in a room where everything was white—bed, floor, walls. Uniformed people came in and pressed needles into my arms, shone lights into my eyes, and peered into my mouth. I lay still and let them examine me. They spoke in gentle questioning voices, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying and I didn’t know what to tell them anyway.

Sometimes I whispered, “Is this the Great Divide?” but they didn’t answer. I was amazed at the different faces human beings can have, at the noises they made—from the squeak of their shoes on the white floor, to the clink of a wedding ring against a metal dish. I remembered the toy doctor’s set that Becky owned, with its medical instruments strapped into a carry-case. She would make me lie on her bed so she could listen to the beat
of my heart through the plastic stethoscope. We never worked out what we were supposed to do with the hammer which was also included, so I used it to beat out a rhythm on her headboard and in a deep voice she would say, “A1, that’s an A1 heart you have there, Miss.”

In the white room I drifted in and out of sleep. Reuben came to check up on me, sitting on the end of the bed with a leaf stuck in his hair. I asked him whether it was autumn yet, but he wouldn’t say.

One day I woke properly. I was aware of the shape my body made in the bed, knees curled to my chest, hands clasped under my chin. I stretched out my feet toward the cool end, lifted up the white sheets and the white gown which covered me, and stared at my naked body; it had never been so clean. I got out of bed and put my feet on the cold, hard floor and stood at the window. Curving away to my left was a white building, three storeys high. The sky beyond its flat roof was still dark and all the windows were illuminated. Shapes and shadows of people walked past them, all busy going somewhere, doing something. The building formed a semicircle around a dull patch of green, not a quarter the size of the clearing. In the middle was a bench under a solitary tree—a spindly thing with leaves that were already turning brown. More than anything I wanted to breathe the same fresh and cool air the tree
was breathing. I couldn’t find a catch to open the window; I tried to slide it, pushing one way, then the other, but it wouldn’t move. I pressed my cheek up against the glass, leaving behind a smudge, and then walked around the bed to a white sink and turned a tap. Water gushed out. I turned it again and the water stopped. On, off, on, off, on. It amazed me. I thought I would tell Reuben about it, and the idea that I might never find him in this huge white building made me sick with worry. Still standing at the sink, I looked up and was shocked to see a girl right in front of me, nose to nose. Her eyes were deep-set and her cheeks hollow; her head was shaved and bandaged, her face a more adult version of mine.

There was a sharp knock, and behind her a door opened and a group of people came in: men and women in white coats and an older lady in a blue uniform. I spun around, clutching at the gaping gown behind my back, and the group all started talking at once. I recognized the sound of their words; how odd that they speak German in the Great Divide, I thought. The blue lady came forward and gently but firmly ushered me back into bed, while someone else turned off the tap.

“I can do it,” I said, as she pulled back the sheets.

The oldest man in the group came toward me and all the others fell into place behind him.

“You are English,” he said, with some hesitation over the words. He started to say more, but gave up and spoke to the white-coated people, until a man at the back raised his hand and stepped forward.

“Dr. Biermann would like to know your name,” said the young man. His thin hair was combed flat to one side, but a cowlick leaped out from his parting.