My Name Is Monster Read online

  ‘Mother—’

  She grabs the shiny woman from my leg and her hand makes a loud crack against my face. ‘You fucking bitch!’

  You fucking bridge.

  Her eyes are like a fire, but not like the beautiful woman, not that kind of bright-flame burning. Mother’s eyes burn like a hot metal pan, like they could blacken and blister my skin.

  I’m falling and not falling. I’m sitting on the railing and watching myself hit the thin river below.

  You bridge.

  *

  The room feels cold, as if Mother took all the warmth out with her and with the picture of the shiny woman. I tuck myself back into the blanket and think about bridges, how they are what separate people and how there’s no way for them to get back to each other.

  I nearly run out into the dark to find her. I want to grab her hand and hold it tight, as tight as I can, and say please not to let go, and I won’t let go either, not this time. I’m not a bridge. I won’t let go of Mother.

  But my nightclothes are lost somewhere at the bottom of the blanket, and without the shiny woman looking at me, I don’t feel beautiful any more.

  I want to remember what it felt like to be beautiful. I want to be looked at like I’m beautiful again. But Mother has probably thrown the shiny woman on the fire and I didn’t even get to see her go, so maybe Mother is a bridge as well. Maybe we are both bridges, pulling each other away from everything else.

  I find my nightclothes and put them on. In the dark, I shuffle down the stairs into the kitchen.

  Mother is sitting by the fire, hugging her arms. Her face looks like empty rucksacks, like she’s sad and there’s nothing left inside her to make her happy again. I can’t see what’s happened to the shiny woman.

  ‘Mother?’ My voice sounds small and far away, and I think of the thin river at the bottom of the gully.

  She looks up. Her eyes are empty, too.

  ‘Mother? Are you going to leave me?’

  As soon as I say this, I see something in those deep rucksack eyes, like she’s about to reach over and grab my hand so we can always fall or not fall together. But she doesn’t. She just says, ‘No, Monster. I’m not going to leave you.’

  ‘Not ever?’

  ‘No. Not ever.’

  ‘Promise?’

  That makes her smile, like I’ve reminded her that she’s my Mother and I’m her Monster, and she says, ‘I promise.’

  And I know then that it’s going to be all right, because even though we’re both bridges, I won’t separate us because I know I don’t want to be alone, and Mother won’t separate us because she said ‘I promise’ and that means you have to do it. That promise sits inside me like the kitchen fire, like the fire that we feed coal and dry wood, and that we never let go out.

  *

  Mother says our days are all the same. ‘We wake up, we survive, we go to sleep. End of.’

  She doesn’t tell me what it’s the end of, and I don’t tell her that she’s wrong.

  Some days are City days and some days are farm days. Some days are bright and happy. Some days are warm on the inside. Some days are too full, like when the chickens try to squeeze through a little gap and there are too many wings and feathers and all of them scratch at each other. Sometimes the days are like the egg Mother showed me how to prick with a needle, so that the middle leaked out and there was only the empty shell.

  More and more, the days are short and cold and full of bad weather. We spend every moment we can bringing in whatever vegetables are ready from the field, or collecting food from the City. Sometimes, on City days, I stop at the top of the hill behind the farm. It’s the closest we ever come to the top of the mountain, but I don’t tell Mother this, either. I just tell her I like the way the farm looks different from up here, the way I can see moss on the roof and how the tiles get smaller the closer they get to the top.

  But I also like to look towards the edges of the world, and try to make pictures of the things on the other side of it. If I screw my eyes up really small, I sometimes think I can see through the gap between the ground and the sky. And sometimes I even think I can see the other city through it, with its high bridge and little river, but that’s just a picture in my head.

  I wonder if Mother knows what’s really there. Probably not.

  She says she knows there are no more people who are not dead people, but she can’t know for certain what there’s not, only what there is – and sometimes she doesn’t even know that. When we search for things in the City, she never knows what’s there until we find it.

  When I look hard at the edge of the world, I can make a picture of another farm somewhere, with another Mother making clicking noises with her teeth, while she waits at the top of the hill for another Monster.

  *

  One of the walls around the vegetable field is tumbling down. As we build it back up, Mother tells me that my name means ‘Survivor’. I like that my name means survivor. I like that I am someone who can keep going, who can plant and reap and scavenge and not become one of the dead people.

  I stop to rub my hands together because even with my gloves on they’re still cold. ‘What does Mother mean?’

  She bends over to pick up another stone. ‘Creator.’ She tells me she is called this because she created me.

  ‘What about the other people? The dead ones. Do they have names?’

  Mother concentrates on positioning the stone in our rebuilt wall. ‘They used to.’

  ‘What happened to them?’ How can a person have a name and then not have a name?

  ‘They died, Monster.’

  I think about the soft woman and the shiny woman, how they used to have names that meant something, but now they are dead and so there is no one to remember what their names were or what they meant, except that they were soft or shiny. We finish building the wall without talking.

  *

  After all the work is done and the food is eaten and the bowls are washed, we sit by the fire, Mother in the comfy chair and me on the cushion on the floor. Mother doesn’t talk. She works at something small with her hands. Sometimes I help her with these evening jobs, but tonight I just sit and listen to the quiet while she fixes her button back to her shirt.

  It’s a warm quiet, full of little noises. The fire rushing like a tree in the wind, Mother breathing in and out, the clock saying its one word over and over.

  When I’m not thinking about the soft woman or trying to remember more about the bridge, I like to look for shapes in the fire. They’re not real shapes, not made out of things you can touch, like wood or ash or the metal grate. I see them in the fire itself, after I’ve been looking for a long time. Tonight I see a person waving her long arms in the air, floating above a city full of pointed buildings. If I look hard enough, I can turn the buildings into more people, all with their arms and faces pointed up. When I look away, my eyes paint bright dots across the rest of the kitchen, like when the sun is too bright on the stream behind the house, and all the fish inside it flash. Mother doesn’t know about the fish – she thinks the stream is only for water. She doesn’t know about the people in the fire, either. She watches the needle going in and out of the button, and I keep what I know hidden inside me like a chicken’s egg.

  *

  I wake up one morning to find everything broken.

  As soon as I open my eyes I can tell something is wrong. There’s frost under my nose on the edge of my blanket and the sky is bright and yellow, the colour of a bruise after the purple has faded.

  I swing my legs out of the covers and stuff my feet in my shoes before they can touch the cold floorboards, then run to the window.

  The field is gone. Where the rows of vegetables should be is just nothing. Thick blank nothing, as if someone has snuck into the farm during the night and cleared everything away. It’s empty. It looks hard and cold, and it makes me think of the dead people, how there’s nothing left but bone.

  How will we survive now the farm is gone? What w
ill we eat?

  There’s food in the City, but we can’t survive on cans and crackers – or maybe we can. I don’t know. I can’t remember. But if we can’t grow anything we will have to only eat small things, and I don’t want to only eat small things.

  I try to make a picture of the chickens like this, their soft feathers all covered and made hard like bone, but I can’t do it. Maybe the chickens are dead like the farm. I remember them scratting in the yard, the way they would hold one yellow foot in the air like a limp hand, before spreading it flat on the cobbles. Maybe if I remember them hard enough they’ll come back – although I know it doesn’t really work like that. Once in the City I made a picture of shining chocolate bars stacked inside a shop we found. I pictured them until it was as if I could already smell them, but when we broke in the shop was empty and we left the City without finding any chocolate bars at all.

  The City.

  I put my hand against the cold wall to make myself steady. What if the City is gone as well?

  I run downstairs to Mother, thinking I will find her with her head in her hands, or counting out what’s left to see how much longer we will live for, or even worse, that she will have become one of the dead people during the night. A picture of Mother comes into my head, of her lying with her face against the kitchen floor and her arms and legs splayed out, the way I found a dead woman once in a house in the City, with one side of her face normal and the other side flat against the kitchen tiles, and I don’t want to open the door.

  I close my eyes and open them again, and the door is still in front of me, so I push it open and see Mother. Mother, sitting in the comfy chair with her hands over the fire to warm them as if this is just another morning, as if the farm isn’t dead and the world hasn’t ended and we aren’t about to turn into dead people.

  ‘Morning,’ she says.

  I listen and I can’t hear the ending in her voice – but maybe she’s trying to hide it from me so I won’t be afraid. Maybe she thinks I haven’t already seen what has happened.

  ‘Shut the door,’ she says, ‘you’ll let the cold in.’

  Because I don’t know what else to do, I shut the door and sit opposite Mother. I snuggle as close to the fire as I can without falling off my cushion.

  Mother says nothing. I watch her carefully, the way the chickens used to watch when they couldn’t decide whether to run away from something or not, and my breathing comes quicker when I think about the poor chickens being gone, but Mother doesn’t look any different to normal. Maybe the grey skin under her eyes is a bit darker, but that’s all. Her face doesn’t change as she sits and waits for the pot of water to boil.

  For a while I don’t say anything either, but I can feel it bubbling up inside me like the water pot, until suddenly it bursts out: ‘Mother!’

  She looks at me.

  ‘Mother, the farm . . .’

  ‘What about it?’

  Everything collapses inside me, then, like a stone wall tumbling, as I realise that Mother doesn’t know. She has no idea. I am the only one who knows the terrible thing that has happened, and now I have to break it to her. That’s what Mother calls it when she has to say something bad: breaking it. I never knew why before, but now I understand, how the words can make a crack down the middle of an ordinary morning, then push the two edges of it apart until the crack is a river and there is no getting back across it to how things used to be. And now I have to break today.

  I take a huge breath as though I’m going to shout it, but the words come out small and frightened. ‘The farm’s gone. Everything’s dead.’

  It’s quiet for a moment, just the fire-crackle and the pot beginning to boil. Then Mother starts to laugh.

  I’ve never seen Mother laugh before, not like this, not so hard that her eyes crease up and her breathing is short and difficult. It’s as if she’s trying to laugh away the bad news, like she could push all the emptiness out of her in those quick breaths, or like she could use them to breathe the farm back to life. I just sit there, watching, not knowing how to help, but the more worried I look, the more it makes Mother laugh. I start to feel warm. I shift away from the fire but it doesn’t help. I feel hot and empty. It feels like all the thoughts I hold inside of me because Mother says they’re silly, like they’re all on the outside for Mother to see and laugh at, and all that’s left inside of me is this uncomfortable heat that makes everything prickle.

  Eventually, the laughing stops, and Mother manages to breathe normally again. ‘Oh Monster,’ she says, once she can speak.

  I frown at the fire instead of looking her in the eye. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s snow.’

  So she tells me about snow. She tells me that this is what happens to water when it gets really cold, that all the raindrops turn white and cover everything like a big blanket, and how the field with the vegetables isn’t gone, just hidden, and how when it gets warmer the snow will turn back to water, which will either run into the stream or sink into the soil to help the grass and trees and vegetables grow. Then she starts to tell me about a place she used to live a long time ago, where it was so cold that the snow could be higher than me, and where it covered the ground for months at a time.

  I ask her what a month is.

  Mother thinks for a moment, then tells me it’s about thirty days, which I understand because that’s how often I bleed, although I didn’t know there was a word for it. Month. When I say it out loud, all at the front of my mouth, it sounds like blood, like the first day of bleeding when everything feels like it’s tumbling out of me in heavy drops. Month.

  I ask Mother to tell me more about where she lived, with all the snow. How did she keep warm? Was it frightening, not being able to see the ground for so long? Why did she leave?

  But Mother just shakes her head and pours the boiling water into a cup. She picks out the teabag with her fingernails then squeezes it and dumps it in her own cup.

  ‘Drink your tea,’ she says, then turns away to finish the porridge.

  I curl my hands around my cup to keep them warm, and think about snow. Mother might not want to talk about it, but it’s all around us now, so she can’t stop me finding out about it for myself. I curl my toes inside my trainers and try not to burn my tongue on my tea by being too impatient.

  *

  Snow is not like water. Snow keeps its edges when you tread through it. It makes a pattern of holes across the yard. Snow is solid like sheep’s wool. Snow lets me sink through it like a stream. Snow is bright and grey at the same time, and has dark spots hidden in its bumps and dips. When I turn my head or flick my eyes to the side, the grey patches shift like sly animals. The snow is alive.

  Mother stands in the doorway, watching me plunge my feet into the deep whiteness. I stamp faster and faster, spinning with my arms out like the bits of ribbon that blow from the posts around the field. I turn so fast it feels like I’m going to fall, but I don’t, I keep spinning and stamping, always just ahead of losing my balance and my whole body collapsing in the snow.

  A small sound from the doorway. A laugh. Not bright and sharp like my laugh, or too loud like when I didn’t know about snow. Mother’s laugh is like the belly clucks the chickens make, soft like feathers, kept inside herself.

  I stop. Mother has her arms crossed, but her face is uncrossed. What I mean is, her face is all opened out like when I uncross my arms and Mother can see the softer parts on the insides of my wrists, and the front of my body isn’t hidden and hunched over any more. What I mean is, Mother looks happy.

  I smile at her. ‘Come and try it.’

  For a moment I think she will. She leans forward, just a bit, as if there’s a breeze behind her and she can’t help it, and her arms start to uncross. But then she shivers and looks over her shoulder as if there’s a wolf-dog watching from inside the house. A frown appears on her face like one of those grey patches on the snow, and she shakes her head.

  ‘There’s too much to do.’ She turns inside, leaving me in the empty
yard, which is too quiet with the chickens shut away in their shed. I don’t feel like spinning any more.

  Snow is cold. It sits heavy inside me like I’ve swallowed a handful of it. It’s a heavy weight across the fields. Snow is wet, tugging on the bottoms of my trousers and on my coat cuffs. I can shout and shout at the snow, but I can’t make it talk back to me.

  I fold my arms around myself to keep in the warm, and go back inside after Mother.

  Later, we bring in the wood for the fire. We bring in lots because Mother says we don’t know how long the snow will last, and by the time we’re finished I can’t feel my fingers very well. After that, we still have to go out to feed the chickens and make sure they have water, but mostly we just stay inside.

  *

  The snow lasts for four days. We sit by the fire and don’t talk much. Mother’s face stays hidden again like crossed arms, and I don’t know how to uncross it.

  *

  On day number five, the snow starts to disappear, so slowly that if I look right at it, I can’t see it happening. The yard is full of the sound of dripping water.

  By day number six, enough of it has gone for us to walk to the City.

  When we get back, we check on the onions and broad beans growing in the field, but everything is the same as it was before the snow except maybe the stream, which is fuller and colder, and snaps at my hands when I go to fetch the water.

  *

  Mother has found nine sheep, though she says that they are really eight sheep and a ram.

  A sheep is a soft fat animal that makes a lot of noise. It looks like it’s wearing a thick, dirty white coat. Mother says that once upon a time, before the dead people were dead people, they used to cut off a sheep’s coat and make rugs and jumpers and blankets with it, but we don’t need to do that because we have the shops in the City, which are full of jumpers already.

  Mother says she got up in the night because she couldn’t sleep, and went for a walk to try to make herself tired. She says she was just following the stream upwards so she could find her way back, the way she taught me to always know where the farm is, and that she heard noises coming from inside something called a sheepfold, which she says is like a wall that folds around the sheep to keep them warm. She put the gate across so they couldn’t get back out. She says she can’t believe the sheep haven’t been eaten by wolf-dogs, but I know this is just something she says, because she can see them so she has to believe it. I know this the same way I know she wasn’t just walking to make herself tired, because normally Mother doesn’t like to go out when it’s night, and because her rucksack is full of all the things she needs to survive away from the farm.