How I Live Now

23

For almost a week we stayed like that, bunked up with various members of the Territorial Army. Piper seemed to go inside herself more than usual but for me it was just one more chapter of my increasingly surreal Normal Life and I had a calm feeling most of the time, like nothing could happen anymore that would surprise me.

Except for Mrs. McEvoy we were the only females in the barn with over a hundred men and they acted like we were the Queen and Princess of Sheba, bringing us food and coming over to talk and play cards and generally treating us like prize mascots or holy relics when in fact we were two grubby kids surrounded by soldiers in a dusty place without windows waiting for the war to catch up with us.

Most of the soldiers were so much more normal and friendly than you ever would have expected back in the olden days before everyone in your entire circle of friends and acquaintances had something to do with the army. I guess they were just regular people who probably never expected to get drafted when they signed up as part-timers. Most of the time you got the feeling they were lonely and fed up and wanted to go back home to their other lives as much as we did.

Since there wasn’t much to talk about except the war, I kept asking them all questions about camping and surviving in The Wild and finding food and all those kinds of things and I doubt they gave a whole lot of thought as to why I was so curious about survival skills since most of them loved to talk about the subject at length anyway.

Piper and I weren’t encouraged to go outside much so we read a little and helped in the mess and slept. It wasn’t so different from being back at the McEvoy’s except there were lots more people to talk to, and with all that time on my hands I couldn’t help wondering why life in a windowless barn thousands of miles from America surrounded by soldiers felt more real than most of the real life I’d ever lived through.

We got used to sleeping with Baz guarding us, and being brought food, and having shy twenty-year-olds sidle up to us and start up awkward conversations just for something to do. Even the noises of all those men around us, not all of which were exactly suitable for polite company, got to be reassuring in a certain way.

Baz seemed to get a special status from being Piper’s minder and after that first day the two of them fell into a kind of brother and sister thing that I’m sure came from the fact that almost every relationship in Piper’s life up till now had been with all those brothers. Baz was more normal than any of the ones she had at home, but he had something of that watchful stillness I associated with her gang. Birds of a feather find each other, I guess.

Well obviously all this Girl Scout Happy Families stuff wasn’t going to last forever.

At about four in the morning a few nights later we woke up to the noise of a lot of scuffling and shouting and Baz saying Get all your stuff together and Stay Here and then him disappearing into the chaos and us not being able to see anything much because there were no lights but then there was gunfire and then he was back and leading us out through the stable door back where the latrines were and he took our stuff and told us to follow him and we ran and ran until I thought my sides were going to rip open from the pain and I kept tripping because there was no moon and it was blacker than black and finally we got to an open space and we just stood there panting and Baz said Look you can see the sky getting a little lighter over there, that’s east, just keep walking in that direction and use your compass to find NNE, not NE, he said, or you’ll overshoot.

I was glad to know this fact because being from New York City where everyone’s born knowing uptown is north but not a whole lot else, I didn’t know anything about NNE vs. NE and was glad someone had let us in on that secret.

By now Piper realized Baz was leaving us and was starting to cry and he picked her up in his arms like she weighed nothing more than a handful of hay and just held her as tight as he could and finally he kissed her cheek and said Daisy will take care of you and he winked at me behind her back like we were in cahoots which I guess we were.

Then he gave her one last squeeze and shoved a heavy package into my hands and before I had a chance to see what it was he was running back in the direction we came.

Come on Piper, I said, let’s keep going while it’s still dark and we can find someplace to hide and then we’ll rest when it gets light.

And as we walked along and the noises of guns got to sound like little pops I told her about knowing where Isaac and Edmond were staying and having a map and talking to Baz about my plan and pumping every soldier in the barn for clues on how to survive in the wild. Piper seemed pretty substantially cheered up by all this surprising information and I said Once the sun starts to come up we’ll look for a place to bivouac and we both burst out laughing at my use of technical Boy Scout terminology and I said Honestly! That’s what it’s called.

Now here’s a good time to explain that footpaths are god’s gift to people trying to travel long distances without using roads. I guess in America we’d have to crash a path through the woods but here it was all nice and civilized and half the time they were even marked with little arrows leading to gates to climb over and even when we left the farm and moved much more into open ground without fences you could still see indications of paths.

We felt like we were about a thousand miles from any other human being and even though it had been a cold night, by about 8:30 a.m. when I thought it was time to find someplace to hide we’d been walking for hours and the sun was up and we were starting to feel warmed through.

The path we followed was fenced in on one side by stone walls covered in blackberries and other thorny bushes and there were smallish trees just beyond and though most of the undergrowth wasn’t higher than a few feet, it got pretty dense pretty quickly which kept us from straying off into it.

We were completely clueless about how safe we’d be walking around out here. One of the soldiers I’d talked to said there were hundreds of people heading into the countryside away from the action in order to try to disappear and wait out the trouble which suggested it would be like walking around in a shopping mall. On the other hand I got the feeling that there were more than enough footpaths in England and the average refugee wouldn’t be interested in socializing. The soldier’s theory was that most of the people we were likely to meet would be English people but he also said That doesn’t mean they won’t shoot you on sight.

I couldn’t really believe that a whole bunch of enemy soldiers were going to spend their spare time crashing around in the undergrowth looking for stray people to shoot but it still seemed like a good idea to keep a low profile for as long as possible or at least while you were pretty sure the world had lost its mind.

As the sun got hotter we decided to stop and rest and we found a nice dry piece of ground about fifty feet off the path that was pretty much out of sight if you were sitting or lying down which is what we felt like doing anyway.

The package that Baz gave me started out heavy and was getting heavier by the minute and I was glad to put it down and figure out how to untie the covering and find out whether it was worth lugging around. Inside were all the things we probably should have thought of taking along with us and hadn’t, like a plastic bottle full of water and some flat bread and a pretty big piece of hard cheese, some salami, matches, a big folded-up lightweight plastic sheet, a nylon rope, a little metal bowl. And a gun. I wrapped the matches and the gun back up in the bag for emergencies and added the rest of the food and other things to our blankets and supplies, namely the olives and strawberry jam, which was about the extent of it. To cheer us up on our first day on the road I made jam sandwiches for breakfast and they tasted hopeful.

We drank some of the water and with the sun getting hot we lay down in the grass for a rest and if we hadn’t been on the run going god knows where we would have been pretty happy. After sleeping for a while, we collected blackberries and ate them and then because it was so incredibly silent all around us except for the birds and bugs we decided to set off again in the light of day because although it’s a great theory to travel by night, it’s a lot easier said than done if you have no idea where you’re going and there’s no moon. Trying to follow the path and watch the compass all at the same time was proving difficult enough in broad daylight since the path headed slightly southeast and we wanted to go NNE but I figured we’d just have to try to swing up to the north when we got a chance.

One thing there was no shortage of was blackberries, and for lack of anything else we ate handfuls of them, which made your stomach feel pretty bad but they tasted good so we didn’t care.

We walked for four or five hours and as the sun got lower we started looking for a place to spend the night and once we thought we saw a house but it was almost burned to the ground with only one wall standing so we gave it a wide berth. The temperature dropped fairly quickly now that it was September and although it wasn’t exactly cold, we weren’t exactly SAS troops either and I didn’t think we should be stuck out without shelter so we stopped while there was still a little light and managed to tie the rope from a tree to a stick we jammed as deep as possible into the ground like a peg, and hung the plastic over it and weighed the edges down with stones. It collapsed about a hundred and fifty times before we managed to get it strong enough to hold when we crawled in with our blankets, and it was uncomfortable, but we were used to lying on the ground and also pretty exhausted and managed to go to sleep.

It rained a little during the night but we stayed mostly dry and some of the rain ran down into a curled-up corner of our tent, and we slurped it straight out of the plastic in the morning to save the water in the bottle and because we were so thirsty. We’d both been bitten by something or other in the night and it didn’t improve my mood to have a face covered in itching welts and wild hair and no toothbrush and also to feel so grubby from not having a bath in ages. I was glad I was too thin to get my period because that would have pushed me over the edge.

We packed up all our stuff and this time I made it into two bundles. I carried the big one and Piper took the small one and with the bundles slung crossways on our backs it wasn’t as bad as you might think and anyway we weren’t exactly pressed for time.

We walked and walked and walked and the path swung up to head more north than south which was a big relief, and when it started to rain again we stopped to rest and tried to get all our stuff and us under the plastic sheet and collect a little rainwater in the bowl at the same time.

Piper and I had been together for so long now that we barely talked any more than we had to. We were tired and hungry and lost and our feet hurt and there didn’t seem a whole lot to say and I was very glad she wasn’t the type of kid to ask stuff like Are we there yet? because There Yet wasn’t a notion I felt up to addressing at the moment.

So we rested. Then we walked some more. Past another burned house. Past a child’s shoe abandoned on the path. We kept walking. Then we rested. And walked. We didn’t see anybody but there were signs they’d been there. Discarded clothing. Paper. A dead cat. We ate some of the food and drank some of the water and only occasionally wondered what the hell we thought we were going to find at the end of the road.

We could have kept going for another hour or two but around midafternoon we saw something that looked like a falling-down hut and it was a little way off the path and hadn’t been burned so we climbed over the wall and crashed our way through the tangled thorns and grass until we got to it and it was big enough to lie down in and fairly dry inside though it smelled like rotten wood. We felt as relieved as if we’d suddenly come across a five-star hotel and before the rain started up again we collected armfuls of long grass to make a nest that was nearly soft enough to rest on comfortably and then I opened up our two backpacks and laid the blankets out and it was amazingly cozy and actually pretty civilized if you didn’t count the spiders.

Piper was out picking flowers to put in our new home like we were going to stay there for years and suddenly she shouted Daisy! and my heart stopped and I shot over to where her voice was coming from and she said Look! And when I looked I didn’t see anything but a shrubby tree and papery acorns underneath it and she said Hazelnuts!

It was lucky Piper was my faithful companion just then because I wouldn’t have recognized a hazelnut if it tapped me on the shoulder and asked me how to get to Carnegie Hall but we collected a shirtful of them and then smashed them open on a rock and ate as many as we could without throwing up and I found myself wondering why hazelnuts weren’t everyone’s idea of five-star cuisine.

When we’d eaten about a thousand of them we collected as many more as we could and cracked them open and put them in with the rest of our provisions and had a few olives and some bread and then blackberries for dessert.

Then with nothing else to do except notice how hungry and thirsty we were and how much our blisters hurt we went to sleep and only woke up when the world started crashing with thunder that sounded about six inches above our heads but amazingly our little hut turned out to be watertight enough so that if you stayed away from the left side and stuffed the plastic in a certain way through a hole in the roof you didn’t get soaked and could go back to sleep. Also the rain seemed to discourage the bugs which was an unexpected plus.

In the middle of the rainstorm I remembered our bowl and reached out to get it, filtered off the stuff that was swimming on the top and drank the water down. Then I put it out again and in only about ten minutes it was full and I woke Piper and told her to drink it while we had it. After about four bowlfuls of water each we both felt a lot better except for stomach cramps I guess from the cold water or maybe the nuts and I filled the water bottle and went back to sleep.

When we woke up again it was still raining and there didn’t seem any point in moving from our happy home until we had to. It seemed like an incredibly bad idea to get our few clothes and blankets wet given that we didn’t have any others.

Piper was looking dreamy and seemed happy enough lying under the blankets singing to herself and I decided I was desperate to get clean so I used the bowlful of cold water and the rain to try to have some kind of bath which wasn’t very effective especially with no soap. Then I came back in and got dressed and huddled up to Piper to get warm again and for a while we played an incredibly convoluted word game called Mental Jotto that involved trying to remember how many letters of all different words were in the word the other person was thinking of and it was exactly complicated enough to pass the time.

She had just guessed Skate which was right and now it was my turn to guess but after a minute or two of trying Bacon, Cable, Deary there was no answer so I said Piper? but she was sound asleep. I lay there for a while listening to Edmond’s voice in my head and it was calm and familiar and a little bit wistful and I started to relax and forget about everything but him and that was another day gone.