My Name Is Monster Page 14
I think about the mountain. I think about how cold it is to sleep outside even when the days are long and warm, and how much colder it must be now when the inside of my window sparkles every morning and the top of my blanket is white and hard from where my breath has turned to frost in the night. I think Mother would be bad at surviving away from the farm, because she is a creator and not a survivor. Which is maybe why she decided to come back.
I don’t say anything. I just make two cups of tea and pretend not to watch as Mother hides her full rucksack behind the broken chair in the storage room, where she keeps the box of wires and bits of plastic she thinks I don’t know about. She looks at me to check if I’ve seen her, but I look at the fire instead. I tell her I want to go looking for more animals, but she says there aren’t any. She says it’s only us and the sheep and the chickens, and that’s it. But before she found the sheep it was only us and the chickens, and there are already birds and ground bugs and wolf-dogs and boy-cats and fish and foxes and the rats in the City, so probably there are more different kinds of animals somewhere, too, we just haven’t found them yet.
Mother thinks the world is empty. It has the City and the farm and sometimes things we collect to help us survive, but apart from that it’s like at the end of the day when the sun goes behind the hill and everything becomes dark greens and blues because all the other colours are gone. Mother thinks I am empty the same way.
Mother isn’t very good at looking at things. I don’t mean like when I screw my eyes up and all the things in front of me lose their shapes. What I mean is, Mother isn’t very good at understanding the things she’s looking at. Sometimes she doesn’t understand so hard, I think she wants the world to be empty.
But the world isn’t empty. This is something I know and Mother doesn’t, that the world is full. There are all the worms that wriggle about in the vegetable field. There’s the stream next to the farm, and wherever it brings its water from. There are buildings that go on for ever in the City, and all of them are full of something, even if it’s only old chairs and boxes and things we can’t use. There are all the different kinds of grass and flowers along the edges of the lane, which are sometimes there and sometimes not, but still the lane is never quite empty. There are the chickens carrying their eggs around inside them. And now there are the sheep.
I think about the top of the mountain. I think about how big the world was from up there, and how full. I hold its fullness close to me, the way I held the shiny woman when I didn’t want Mother to find her.
Later, I help Mother bring the sheep to one of the fields a little bit closer to the farm. She says this is so we can keep an eye on them, which I know means being able to make sure they only do things that Mother wants them to do. We build a sort of lane from the sheep fold to the road using old gates and branches, and a long bit of fence we have to dig up and then plant again. It isn’t very far from the sheep fold to the road, but it still takes us all morning as well as a little bit of the afternoon. Then Mother opens the gate and we chase them out of the sheep fold and into the lane. Mother walks behind them with her arms out, saying things like ‘Hey hey hey, go go’ to keep them moving. I have to run around the outside to the bottom of our new little lane to stop them going the wrong way down the road, and then my job is to get in the way of any that look like they might start running away in different directions, because they don’t always want to go where we tell them to. When we get closer, I have to jump over the wall and run through the field so I can get to the gate and open it in time to let the sheep through.
Once they’re in the new field, we close the gate and watch them looking around at their new home. Then they start to eat the grass as if they haven’t even been on a journey.
They look so strange, standing there munching grass as if we don’t even exist, as if we’re not standing right there watching them, that I start to laugh. One of the sheep looks up and laughs back at me, a long flat laugh which makes me laugh even harder. More of the sheep join in, until my laugh has opened up their laughter like opening a box, and we’re all laughing, me and the sheep, and Mother just looks at us.
Mother says I have a laugh like breaking glass. I know what she means.
She smashed a window once with a brick so we could get at the treasure inside: a shiny coat and trousers that don’t let the mud or water in, a rucksack like Mother’s so I can help collect things on our trips to the City, and – most precious of all – my torch, which can make light in the darkness and show there are no wolf-dogs hiding in the shadows.
When Mother broke the window it made a bright, high noise, like the feeling when my torch breaks through the night.
I think it’s a wonderful thing to have a laugh like breaking glass. It means that when I laugh, it’s like breaking into a room full of treasures, it’s like a whole possibility for better things, like light in the darkness.
Because of the sheep, we set off late for the City. The sun’s already moving downwards in the sky, and at first I think Mother might decide to wait until tomorrow, but she doesn’t. She says it’s because there are things we need today, because we are getting too thin and that’s a bad thing, but really I think the reason Mother wants to go now is because of all the things she takes out of her rucksack when she thinks I’m not looking, and because she decided to walk away from the farm and then she didn’t, so now she has to do something else instead. I think Mother is like me in that way. She doesn’t like to change her mind.
*
The City feels different at night. The streets and buildings all become as black as each other, and I keep thinking I can hear wolf-dogs growling from the doorways. I scurry to keep close to Mother.
She takes us to a part of the City I’ve never seen before, where the buildings are smaller and there’s less glass to give our torchlight back to us. We go inside some of them, but we have to move slowly and even then we don’t find anything. In one, I hear a noise like small animals running through a pile of dry leaves, and when I turn my torch to the ceiling, a dark cloud of birds flies at me and I have to duck. Mother says they’re called bats and that they’re dangerous. We leave before they can bite us.
Back out in the road, Mother is still for a long time. I know my breath is making little clouds, even if it’s too dark to see them, and my fingers go so cold that I can’t feel them holding my torch. I shine the light at Mother to see if I can tell what she’s thinking.
She puts an arm across her eyes. ‘Stop it.’
I turn the torch to the ground.
‘This is stupid,’ she says, then walks away down the road. I don’t know what’s stupid, but I don’t think she means me, so I follow her.
We walk without speaking. Even though our torches have new batteries in them, the darkness still feels big behind me. I keep turning around to check what’s there, but I never see anything. Mother doesn’t stop, so I keep having to do skips to catch up with her.
I move my torch to my other hand and stuff the cold one in my pocket. ‘Where are we going?’
Mother doesn’t look around. ‘Not far now.’
We walk past building after building, lots of them unbroken and maybe full of food, but we don’t go inside. It’s only when I think Mother must have forgotten about collecting that I notice it getting lighter. I frown up at the sky, but it can’t be morning yet, and anyway the light isn’t pink or white like the sun coming up. It’s yellow, like the kitchen fire without the flickering.
We turn the corner. I stop in the middle of the road.
Instead of darkness, the building in front of us is like a whole shop full of torches pointing outwards into the night. I stare at the light so hard it starts to hurt my eyes. It makes me think of something, but I don’t know what. ‘Mother . . .’
‘Come on.’
She walks right up to the building. It’s so bright it makes the rest of the City seem even darker. I can feel it prickling, not just in one place like grass, but all around me, like something I don’t k
now how to remember – like there are more wolf-dogs watching than I know how to count. I try to not look, but the building has eyes, too. I can feel them looking over me, the way Mother looks over vegetables to check if they’re all right to eat, till all my hidden places are full of this bright yellow light and I think that if Mother looks round she’ll see everything I’ve never told her, even the things I don’t remember myself.
Mother looks back and says, ‘Monster, come on,’ and the way she says it sounds like when water boils too quickly and some of it gets out between the pan and the lid, like she’s trying to get away from something.
I keep staring, and it’s like Mother isn’t even there, like it’s just me and the lights, and the rest of the City around me is the soft woman, as if something that used to be just a picture in my head is now outside it and real.
*
The floor looks like someone has poured water over it.
Mother touches a box on the wall and the ceiling gets brighter, till I have to look away. I kick my feet against the shiny floor. They leave little black marks that make me think of the fish in the stream behind the farm.
‘It’s called a Clinic.’
I don’t look at Mother. I make the sound of the word Clinic in my head, like making a picture but out of noise, with all its hard shapes cracking like an egg.
She says the Clinic was built by the dead people when they had the Sickness, and I think maybe that’s why it’s prickling, maybe this is what the Sickness feels like when it’s all around you, except I know really it isn’t. She says they built it for survivors, and I know that means me.
I switch off my torch, because we don’t need it any more. ‘Is the Sickness still here?’
‘No,’ Mother says. She takes a big breath, then says it again. ‘No.’
The middle of the Clinic is the same as I remember it. It’s so big and empty it’s almost like being outside, except there are those little lights like torches in the walls, so everything is either white or covered in shadows, and above me where the ceiling should be is a big glass window. Through it, I can see the night.
I throw out my arms and tip my head back. I make a loud shout that sounds like the word ‘way’, but isn’t, so that the walls and doors and ceiling-window throw the sound back to me.
‘Monster!’
Mother moves inside the Clinic the way she moves in the clothes shop or the vegetable-growing building, like the place belongs to her because she’s been here before. I don’t tell her how really it belongs to me. I don’t say anything. If Mother can keep things hidden, then so can I.
*
A room full of tall silver cupboards. Their insides are cold and shining like the walls.
Mother hands me plastic bottles smaller than my fist which she calls food supplements and which she says will make us fatter. I don’t understand how such little bottles could make us fatter, but Mother is watching me so I pack them away in my bag.
*
There are so many things stored at the Clinic. More than I can remember. They are all things the dead people must have thought we would need to survive. I pick up a small pot of white circles that look a bit like seeds. For Sickness, Mother says.
‘I thought it wasn’t here any more.’
‘That’s a different Sickness.’ Mother’s voice is hard, and it hurts like the metal edge of the potato peeler. ‘Made in a lab. They couldn’t cure it.’
Lab. It makes me think of slab, like the stone shelf in the larder which is always cold, and I make a picture in my head of the dead people creating the Sickness on a cold stone shelf, only I don’t know what the Sickness looks like so I make it a fog. And the light in the Clinic feels heavy, till I think I can’t move, because there were dead people who were creators. Dead people who were like Mother.
But the Clinic isn’t for the dead people. It’s for survivors.
I make a picture in my head of Mother in the Clinic, and dead people who aren’t dead people in the other rooms, and me hiding in the cold, cold room where the dead people won’t look for me. Except I don’t make the picture by trying. It just appears in my head and I can’t make it go away again. And in the picture Mother doesn’t look like Mother. She doesn’t look like the soft woman or the shiny woman either, the way when the snow was melting it wasn’t quite water and it wasn’t quite snow. She is Mother and at the same time she isn’t.
In the room in the picture, everything is grey and white and silver and blue, like even the colours are made of cold. There’s a table that goes all round the walls, which is where I’m hiding because the dead people are loud and hard and if they find me they’ll hurt me, and in the middle of the floor are big white pots with blue lids on, like fat animals wearing bright blue hats. In the picture that isn’t a picture, Mother doesn’t see me. She cuts through a plastic string on one of the pots, and when she lifts up the lid, there’s a white cloud like the pot’s freezing breath, which drifts away and disappears. Mother puts on a pair of thick, rough gloves. She pulls four glass tubes out of the pot and puts them in a tray, and I know what she wants because for a moment she looks at me like she could be my creator and is sad that she isn’t, and for a moment I want to let her be. But she can’t because she isn’t really Mother, only in my head.
And then I’m on my own in the picture and Mother is gone – and the dead people are louder now, and I’m shaking. Not on the outside, but on the inside. I think I’m the bird that got trapped in the string net covering the cabbages, when it struggled and shook and made everything else shake with it, till Mother let it out. So I curl up under the table in the cold room in the picture in my head, but the dead people are there and they grab me and I struggle and shake but their hands are hard and tight and covered with thick black hairs.
*
The light in the Clinic is so heavy, I think it’s twisted around me like the string net, only the net is just part of the picture in my head and the light is real which is worse. I think about the hands, like I can still feel them grabbing me. They squeeze my arms and my sides and their squeezing feels like bruises.
I can feel my words getting smaller, going further away.
*
We walk away from the Clinic, back towards the normal parts of the City. I think about the sea and the soft woman on the bridge. I think about the mountain and how Mother hid her rucksack in the storage room after she found the sheep. I think about the Clinic and the cold room and how Mother’s name means creator, and I think about what that room was for. There are so many things Mother doesn’t know I know.
I watch her torch waving over the road and bits of building, like it’s one of the night birds that sometimes fly around the farm, with their flat round faces like circles of torchlight and their huge wings that never make a sound, so that if I couldn’t see them, I wouldn’t even know they were there. I think Mother is sometimes like a night bird.
She steps over a tree root that’s growing through the road, and I look up to see the tower with the hole in the wall.
We make our way to the building with all the vegetable-growing things in it, Mother flashing her torch from side to side to check for wolf-dogs. Once, we hear a low growling, but when Mother turns the light towards it, all we see is a tail running away.
To get there, we have to climb over a pile of cars that blocks the road. We’ve done it before, but it’s more difficult at night. All the grips and footholds disappear in the dark, and even when Mother shines her torch for me, the light shines back off the metal, and I can’t tell what’s a shadow and what’s a hole.
There’s a dead person in one of these cars. I found it once, when I was looking too closely for a way to clamber over, just a pile of bones in one of the seats. In the dark, it takes me longer to place my hands and feet, in case I do it wrong and my foot slips through a hole and I kick the dead person.
I don’t say this to Mother. Mother doesn’t like to talk about the dead people, and I know what she would say. ‘Dead people are dead, Monster. The
y can’t hurt you.’
I know they can’t hurt me. I just don’t want to hear the clatter of all the bits of bone jumbling together. I wonder if this dead person had the Sickness, the one they created in the lab that sounds like slab, and that they couldn’t make go away.
Once we’re over the cars, we’re almost there. I nearly run the last few steps to the building, but I don’t because then Mother might laugh at me and say I was being silly. So we walk, still checking side to side for wolf-dogs, as if this is normal, to be here so late at night. As if we’re not just here because it’s the only way for Mother to stop herself leaving the farm.
When we get to the vegetable-growing building, Mother forces the doors apart with the flat bit of metal she keeps there. Then I help her push them closed again to stop anything following us inside.
I love the smell of the vegetable-growing building. It’s like everything the Clinic isn’t. It smells of earth and plants, and of the painted metal tools that have never been used. From here, we can collect more seeds to plant in the fields. We collect bean seeds and carrot seeds and radish seeds. I stand in front of the wall of packets, looking at the pictures of all the things they can grow into, and at the words underneath them. Mother thinks I don’t know about words when they’re pictures on things instead of said out loud. She doesn’t see when I use book pages to catch the kitchen fire back at the farmhouse, how I touch the shapes of the words with my pointing finger before I put the pages to the embers, so it feels like they’re mine even if I can’t tell what they say.