My Name Is Monster Page 3

  *

  Here is what I learn about walking:

  Walking, like running, is about finding a pace. Stride out too quickly and you soon tire and become disheartened. Stroll too slowly and the journey can sit heavy in the bowl of your stomach.

  It is not passing across a landscape. Instead, it is feeling the landscape pass under you, as if the pushing of your feet into the ground turns the Earth further away from you, like balancing on a giant ball.

  You do not walk with your feet. You walk with your boots. Bad boots make the walking harder.

  When you walk, you notice the details. You notice the colours and shapes and precise movements of everything around you, from blades of grass to birds to creatures scurrying through the undergrowth. It is a way of becoming intimate with the landscape.

  Walking on flat roads is too easy. It lets you think too much.

  Walking over uneven rocky ground is a way to escape from the mind.

  Wet shoes weigh you down.

  Walking on a full stomach is like a sickness.

  Walking on an empty stomach is worse.

  Footsteps do not only make a noise at the point where your boots hit the tarmac. They also sound in your head. They echo like an organ note in a cathedral.

  Even when your body sweats, the ends of your fingers are still cold.

  Feet can be hot and cold at the same time.

  Walking on broken skin is a reminder of everything that is wrong with the world. With every step, I can picture news footage from the War – the screen wobble as a shockwave rushed towards the camera, the aftermath of Sickness-filled explosives filmed on shaking mobile phones, people on the pavements with empty eyes and a blue tinge spreading from their lips, the slackened jaws and flat expressions that it could happen here, in this county, in suburbs and villages, on high streets filled with shops. With every thought of the Sickness, I remember another person dead. At the ends of the worst nights, I wake shivering.

  Every day that I walk, it becomes easier and harder to set off.

  *

  My mother and father lived in a middle-sized house next to the church in a middle-sized village surrounded by fields. It was farm country, or had been thirty years ago, but my parents were not farm people.

  My mother worked at the village shop part-time on weekday afternoons. She brought my father spare copies of the Racing Post, and he would sit long evenings in his easy chair, analysing the odds, working out which horse should win and whether it favoured this or that kind of ground, and what would be the most effective bet. He never actually bet any money as far as I know.

  By day he was an accountant. He worked in town in a small upstairs office with no heating, and on winter evenings he would earn us a little extra money doing tax returns for the few farmers that the village had left. ‘Treat pennies,’ he called it. As soon as the autumn nights drew in, farmers or their wives would start to appear at our door, bearing carrier bags of receipts and bank statements bundled together with twine. My father would scatter these across the kitchen table as he scanned them for some kind of order, until my mother flipped and banished him and the mess to the spare room.

  By the time the pale spring nights returned, the papers had gone from the house, and my father was back to his racing calculations. As for me, I was already counting the days until the long school holiday, when I could get up each morning to scour the fields, or tinker with my collection. I would do this all through the summer, filling my days with creation and invention, until one day autumn would arrive, and I would be forced to pack up my bag, put on my clean uniform and return to school.

  This was the rhythm of our lives, marked by afternoons in the shop and the closing down and opening up again of the seasons.

  As I got older, our rhythms changed – but only on the surface. Underneath, we still turned on the same rotation.

  As the War diminished imports and drove the currency down, my mother’s hours in the shop were cut, sliced away so thinly that at first it was barely noticeable, until one day she wasn’t working there at all. Instead, she would clean the house daily, scrubbing at the skirting boards, uprooting the plates and bowls and baking trays to detox the insides of cupboards, using homemade cleaning fluids that made the whole house smell of vinegar. When she had finished, she would draw up lists of home improvements for my father to do when he staggered in from work – tasks he ignored or passed on to me. I shrugged them off. As my peers threw themselves into rumours and parties and each other, I threw myself more and more into my collection. From simply tinkering with the breaking apart and reconstituting of objects, my explorations started to gain direction. I borrowed books from the school library and spent my lunchtimes scouring the internet. I became obsessed with the ways things worked, building and rebuilding machines that fit together as precisely as the days I built them in. In this way, I made certain my routine stayed rigid, so there would be no room in it for anyone else. It was easier, I told myself. I didn’t want friends anyway. I used my well-honed skills of maintenance and systematic research to look for a way to move out.

  Sometimes on long nights, it is so easy to imagine my father still in the blue and yellow kitchen, surrounded by receipts for animal feed and tractor parts, and my mother fretting at him, the whole village shut tight and warm in their own little dramas in their own little rooms.

  *

  The ground here is rock-strewn and tussocky. My shadow stretches across it like a fractured version of myself, and I have to tread slowly to avoid ankle-grabbing dips and burrows. I’ve been walking under trees for most of the day, the sun’s position obscured by branches and new leaves so that I only have a vague notion of where I am and in which direction I am walking. I am following a path which occasionally thins and peters out, only to emerge again a few metres later. It might not be a path at all. I follow it all the same.

  To my left is a low wall, barely more than a pile of stones and so thick with moss that in places it almost disappears. As I walk, I come across another wall, and another, this one taller, the next one more intact. The path solidifies, then widens into a dirt road.

  I stop in the middle of a small village, a half-standing collection of stones. In the last of the afternoon light, it looks golden and soft, the kind of sequestered beauty that has no right to exist any more.

  The ruins here are old, abandoned centuries before the War made ghost towns so commonplace. None of the buildings have roofs, their windows open cavities with shrubs and ivy creeping through them. In one building, a bird’s nest sits in a crook of stone. In another, a tree is rooted in the compact earth of a hearth. All of it is draped in moss or sprouting ferns.

  The most complete house is a low bungalow on the edge of the village – a rectangular structure with just one window and a prickly bush part-blocking the doorway. I squeeze inside and am in a green world. The floor in here is mossy, but dry. I am as closed off from wildlife as I am likely to be tonight.

  Later, with the drawstring of my sleeping bag pulled tight, I wonder what made the people of this village move away. I had forgotten there were people who uprooted themselves for reasons other than Sickness and War, people who did not move simply because a government told them they had to. People like me.

  I try to picture those people loading the last of their possessions onto carts or horses, taking one final look around their bare rooms – how unsettling a place looks when stripped of all its furniture. I try to work out at what point a building stops being a home. Is it at this moment, when all private things are taken away and it reverts to its blank impersonal state? Or is it when you walk down the road laden with all your possessions, and the house at your back? Or is it always a home, even through its many stages of decay?

  I think about my mother sitting in the kitchen, flicking through a magazine and licking her fingers to turn the pages. Of the places I have lived, that is the only one I have called home.

  Maybe there is no such thing, only walls and a roof, a place secure enough to a
llow sleep. But how can I keep going if there is nowhere I am going to? How can I grow again without any roots? I close my eyes on the soft earth, and try not to imagine that I’m in my bedroom in my parents’ house.

  When I leave the next morning, I follow the dirt road out of the village. It quickly disintegrates into an overgrown track. Then a narrow path, fringed with vegetation. Then nothing.

  *

  As I hunker against a hedge at the roadside, hinging the lid from a tin of cubed vegetables, I realise how little I used to think about food. Eating was a task to be accomplished while I focused my attention on other things. The vitality of it was always lost. Now, as the watery carrots slide down my throat, I try to remember the taste of other food. Nothing elaborate – just the soft white and salt of a ham sandwich, the tang of fresh pineapple, or the chunky joints of beef my mother sometimes roasted on Sundays, filling the whole house with their thick, fatty smell. I try, but the memories slip away, leaving my mouth dry and tasting overwhelmingly of my own stale breath.

  *

  My mother used to bake gingerbread men for Christmas – little golden-brown figures that broke softly. Once, when I was young, she let me help, and I laid out my own irregular shapes on the tray. I made her leave mine in the oven longest, so they baked hard and dark, and broke with a snap. I liked their unforgiving crunch, the way they attracted my mother’s frowns. I think of this and wonder if I was meant to be the last. Then I remember there is no such thing as fate, because there is nobody in control.

  *

  I was nine or ten – that awkward age of feeling too big for everything, but independence still a long way off. It must have been the summer holidays, because I was sitting in the high grass in the field behind the house, letting the sun burn the back of my neck. I remember wearing a sun cap. There was a shadow on my face and a band of sweat trapped between the fabric and my scalp. If I sat up, I could see into my back garden – the vegetable patch and the canes snaked with runner beans. I could see the washing, limp and sagging from the line, and my mother standing at the kitchen window. But if I hunched, I could let the grass rise above me until I felt as though I was invisible. The blades were sharp against my bare calves, and insects gathered faster than I could brush them away. But it was worth it for the quiet, for the sense of isolation, and for my discovery.

  My discovery was a mouse. At least, I thought it was a mouse, but it was difficult to be certain. It was all bones, stripped bare, but still in the position it had died in, curled and complete and perfect. The tiny skull. A ribcage more like fishbones. Tail bones stacked end to end like elongated vertebrae, but in miniature.

  I traced its shape, letting my fingertip hover just above it, fearful in case my touch might be too strong and I might break it. For a long time I looked at it, trying to absorb its complex structure, to understand the mechanics of its biology. I was so engrossed in this exquisite arrangement of bones, I didn’t hear the other children until it was too late.

  ‘Hey! Monster!’

  Something small and dry hit my arm and fell into the grass beside me. I looked up. Three boys were standing a few metres away, up to their knees in the grass and laughing. Callum Jenkins, Liam Harper, and a lanky boy I didn’t know.

  ‘Freak.’ Callum Jenkins bent to scoop up a handful of dry sheep muck and lobbed it in my direction. It showered dustily around me and I covered the mouse skeleton with my hand.

  The boy I didn’t know laughed. It was high and grating, and seemed too loud in the still summer day.

  ‘What you wearing that cap for?’ asked Callum Jenkins. ‘Hiding your stupid hair?’

  Because it’s sunny, you idiot.

  I thought about leaving. I remember being so sorely tempted to get up, to give them the finger and stride away down the field towards home. I wanted to shut the door on them. But then I would have had to leave the mouse, and with the grass this overgrown, I knew I would never find it again.

  ‘Is she bald?’ asked the boy I didn’t know.

  Callum Jenkins lobbed another round of sheep muck. ‘Basically.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Liam Harper, ‘she’s just a freak.’

  I tried to ignore them. I focused on my mouse, how its tail curled back in on itself so its body formed an almost perfect oval, except for the head, which stuck forward as if it had wanted to get one last glimpse of the world, or as if it had been looking for a rescuer. The boys’ laughter was loud and spiralling. I tried to tune out their jeers, but they bored into me, deeper and deeper into my brain, and I could not shut them out.

  The mouse, I thought, the mouse, the mouse, the mouse . . .

  My hands shook. I could see, where my right hand extended over the beautiful skeleton, a tremor that travelled through my wrists, back along my arm and into my chest, till my whole body was shaking and I couldn’t make it stop.

  And then, in the midst of it all, my mother.

  She strode up the field, tramping down the grass in her wellies, her long skirt catching in her wake. She looked out of place here, in what I thought of as my domain, as if someone had taken an ornament from the mantelpiece and placed it on top of a mountain. But her face was pulled tight with a fierceness I had never seen before, and for the first time there was something broad and unwieldy about her. As she flattened the grass, I thought of a lorry veering across a motorway, crashing through the central reservation and levelling the traffic on the other side.

  The boys saw her coming and made to scarper, but my mother was an unstoppable torrent, and she would not relinquish them so easily.

  ‘Oh no you don’t. Liam Harper and Callum Jenkins, you get back here right now.’

  From my hollow I watched them turn, all their gleeful bigness gone, till they were only three pitiful boys, squirming under my mother’s glare.

  ‘And you,’ she said to the third boy, ‘I don’t know you.’

  The boy turned red and stuffed his hands deeper in his pockets. He shuffled.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He’s my cousin,’ Liam Harper said, not looking my mother in the eye.

  She folded her arms across her chest, her shoulders heaving. ‘Well, let me make this very clear to the three of you. If I ever catch you being mean to my daughter again, I’m going to grab each of you by the ear, and I’m going to twist it till you can’t even hear yourselves crying – is that understood?’

  The boys looked at their feet. I sat with my head barely over the grass, watching my mother’s face – the power and anger I had never seen in it before, the way it flared up when she said ‘my daughter’. My daughter. Like my collection, or the way I had thought earlier about my mouse, as a thing to be cherished and protected.

  ‘I said, is that understood?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to hurt us . . .’

  My mother blazed like a rocket flare. ‘Talk back to me again, Callum, and I’ll make sure nobody in the shop sells you sweets for a year, you little shit.’

  My mother’s swearing thrilled through me. It was as though someone had opened a treasure chest, and for a second I got to glimpse the glittering jewel inside.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’m going to go inside and phone your mothers. I think they’d like to know what you’ve been getting up to, don’t you? And I think it’d be a good idea if you were home and ready to explain yourselves by the time they’ve hung up.’

  The boys teetered, fidgeting.

  ‘Go on!’

  And suddenly they were gone, back across the field towards the stile and the lane, fleeing to escape the boundaries of my mother’s rage.

  My mother was still there, larger than herself, and suddenly all mine. She turned towards me and something in her shifted. The rage diminished. She was not any smaller in that big field, but she was somehow softer, stiller, so that for the first time I could remember I wondered what it would feel like to hug her, the way other children hugged their parents when they were picked up from school. Instead
I sat and watched her walking towards me.

  An arm’s reach away, she crouched, bringing her eyes to my level. ‘Are you OK?’

  I shrugged.

  I was fine. I was better than fine.

  I said nothing.

  ‘What were you doing out here anyway?’

  I pulled away my hand to show her my mouse, but I must have knocked it in all the distraction, because its tail bones no longer aligned and it was no longer quite as beautiful.

  My mother made a choked sound and stood up, pushing herself back from it.

  ‘It’s my mouse,’ I said. I tried to nudge the bones back into place with my little finger, to recreate that undisturbed oval.

  ‘Don’t touch it!’

  I looked up. My mother looked as though she wanted to snatch the words back into her mouth. Instead, she glanced in the direction of the stile and the retreating boys, then frowned back at me. And there she was again. My mother, petite and disapproving, exactly as I expected her to be.

  ‘I’ve left the dishes in the sink.’ She turned to leave, then half turned back to me. ‘I’m just in the kitchen. If you need me.’

  She hovered a moment, as though there was more to be said, but neither of us could think of anything. So I watched her walk away, an ungainly shuffle as she tried to stop her skirt from catching in the grass. I watched her go through the back gate and in the door, till I could see her again through the kitchen window, standing at the sink.

  I sat there for the rest of the afternoon, till my legs itched from the grass and the bug life, and a rash had broken out along my calf. I coaxed the mouse skeleton painstakingly back into shape. And I watched my fierce and startling mother pottering around the kitchen.

  *

  My parents died in the Sickness. My mother first, my father twelve days later. He always was a little bit hopeless without her.

  I didn’t visit. At the time, the Sickness hadn’t yet reached where I was living, and I wouldn’t be the one to help it spread. Instead, I moved out of the city, rented a ramshackle house that was really more of a shed at the edge of an out-of-the-way village. Told myself it was right. My parents would want me to isolate myself.