Chapter 6 #2
I assured him I’d be fine. The cough flared up every now and then but felt like nothing more than a common London smoker’s cough, except that I wasn’t in London anymore, and I wasn’t smoking.
The air out here had to be cleaner than anything in the modern world, and maybe this was just my body’s way of shedding those last vestiges of London-stain, that poisoned world of microplastics and methane.
Simon worried because coughing out here meant mortal peril.
There were no thermometers, blood analyses, CAT scans, Google. A cough could mean anything.
“You smoked?” he asked.
I said no but my friends did, my boyfriend did, and I guess yes, sometimes I did too. Kind of. Only when I drank, which was
usually every weekend. I explained how pubs, clubs, brunch, and wine gardens would all evolve over the coming centuries.
“That sounds like what we’ve got out here,” said Simon.
“Noooo,” I sang. I insisted like I always did that it wasn’t the same. (I didn’t admit that they were actually better here
than back there.)
Simon shook his head and smiled, then sighed at the task I had given myself. “Just come with me,” he said. “We’ll go to a
pub and you can compare.”
I laughed. “You could have offered that before I told you all my plans for today.”
“I didn’t think you were serious,” he said. “I’m impressed and I like it, but it’s a lot. Just come, the water will still
be here when we get back.”
“That’s the problem.” I dug the shovel into the ground and stuck it farther with my foot. I told Simon I’d go with him to
Scarborough next time and he made me promise. “You’re very conniving,” I said as he headed out on his way.
“Just with you.” He smiled over his shoulder and left.
This was how we had survived the winter together. We’d giggle and poke at each other like this, both of us clearly enjoying
the life we had somehow managed to find out here together.
But what was this life?
I didn’t understand who Simon was. He was devoted to me, we enjoyed each other’s company, we shared a bed by sheer winter
necessity, but there was a distance there, something unknowable. We seemed attracted to each other. I was attracted to him,
definitely, and he was, I think in a way, to me. Sometimes I felt him watching me, waiting for something to happen, but our
friendship stayed rote, as if we had been driven asexual by all the land tilling and hard labor. We were spent, physically,
by the end of each day, and any serious conversation that didn’t revolve around survival simply melted away into the comforting
depths of slumber. We would just sit and watch the fire every night and nothing more. During some of the harshest winter days,
we would stay in bed all week, only leaving to eat, feed the animals, and go to the toilet, jumping back in and huddling together,
laughing and shivering like kids. We loved to watch the fire together. Those were actually the best days.
I was attracted to him, but it was like I didn’t know what that meant anymore.
I began digging my trenches with barely a clue of what I was doing.
I broke the earth with a hatchet first, chopping deep cuts down a long row, then shoveled everything out.
Eventually I’d need gravel, or cement, ideally, to line the bottom but I didn’t know if any of that existed.
I also didn’t know if this was how canals were dug in the first place or if this was even good land management, but looking at the row of topsoil I had removed and feeling the exertion .
. . I felt like I knew exactly what I was doing.
I felt like this movement, this disciplining of the land—this was purpose.
More purpose than I had ever felt before.
Hours wiled away like this. And then my cough started up.
It came not like a regular cough. There was nothing caught in my throat, but there was an irritation. I had had bad asthma
as a child, relying on an inhaler daily. At night I would stand in the kitchen with my mum before bed and she would watch
me as I inhaled two puffs of albuterol and she would count to ten slowly—I thought about her. I thought about my mother as
I stood on the side of the hole I had dug, doubled over and wheezing. It was a barking, asthmatic kind of cough that brought
no relief, just an exhaustion of the muscles of my chest and a pulsing in my larynx. I coughed and it only made me cough more.
My ribs hurt.
I miss my mum. The thought passed through my mind for what I hate to admit was the first time. The general idea of a mum, of care at least.
I kept coughing. My head flushed red as I tried to slow my breathing and bottle down the spasms. Tears pulsed naturally from
my eyes and maybe this spurred the feeling, the memory. Counting to ten, inhaling, holding my breath, getting better. As a
kid, I would instinctually hold my breath whenever a lorry or a bus drove by me on the road or if someone at school wore too
heavy a perfume.
My asthma went away by the time I was a teenager, and my mother did too. My asthma was replaced with more nebulous, existential
problems and perhaps more accurately they closed me off from my mother, she didn’t go away. It was me who turned and faded.
In a way, the stability of her—of standing in the kitchen, her focused healing—had made her seem as if she would always be
there, and maybe that was why it took me only until now to really grasp that she was gone from my life forever.
She was gone.
Or rather, I was gone from her. I had no way of seeing her again. It was shocking how plainly that fact surfaced and I accepted
it. I kept coughing. Tears pulsed, excising emotions I didn’t know I had. She had been there, but so had all the weight of
her expectation, her chatter and glazed surface. Constant prodding and questioning, tinged with guilt.
I didn’t want to go back—first of all.
I coughed.
That was the hardest emotion to admit: not wanting to not say goodbye—purposefully clouding that up with double negatives.
I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want any of the things that were back there, which presented themselves now
like phantoms of what I had never had.
I coughed.
I let myself not miss my mother only because a part of me believed there was a version of me who was still back there. The
me who hadn’t slipped through time. If a part of her was still back there standing in the kitchen, counting to ten, then a
part of me had to be back there too. No need to do anything about that.
I kept coughing and when I breathed, I tasted acid, pure smoke.
Something was really wrong. I rubbed my eyes and they stung.
The tears I was crying weren’t from memories, they were from smoke.
I opened my eyes and suddenly the land was awash with it.
Long tentacles of smoke wrapped through the trees of the surrounding woodland and for a moment I was completely blinded by it.
A thick fog enveloped me—clearly from a fire somewhere—but there was a chemical flavor to it, it didn’t smell like regular smoke, like firewood or burning rubbish.
It made me stop thinking about Mum at least. I got a grip.
I ran to the house—it wasn’t on fire, thankfully.
I ran to the animals and considered letting them out of their pens in case there was a forest fire or something.
I scanned the treeline, looking for flames, but saw none.
Then somehow, as huge as it was, the wave of smoke passed and the air began to clear out.
The toxic cloud continued moving across the landscape.
I tried to think of a scientific explanation, something about weather inversions, trapped emissions, maybe the environment here was actually worse off than it would be in the future.
The smoke moved like a sentient being, crossing through neighboring fields, pressing through hedgerows until it was completely out of sight.
I walked back to my digging site and counted my breaths with each step. The air cleared up. I thought about those dragons
no one seemed to be able to form a consensus on. They existed, they didn’t, they were huge, they were tiny, they spoke English,
they spoke Welsh, they were in Yorkshire, they were in Scotland. No one seemed to have actually seen one because of course
no one ever lived to tell the tale—convenient. It was always someone’s cousin, or in Simon’s case, his uncle.
A dragon had landed on him, squashed him to death. And these rumors came from people in town—in Scarborough, in York, or down
the coast in Filey—silly, inconsequential people. I shouldn’t think like that. What a modern form of judgment to have. I wished
I could commit to something. Did I want to live out here or not? I thought about my mum one more time and waited for any lingering
emotions to come blaring back. They never did and I scolded myself for thinking dumb, modern thoughts of grief and family.
My cough never came back and I continued my work without interruption.
I saw Simon’s torch ten minutes before he was anywhere near me.
I watched it squiggle its way through the woods.
He pulled a gray donkey behind him, and strapped to the donkey were bags of food—grains, roots, some leafy greens, seeds, and bundles of herbs.
Most of this would have come from neighboring tenants within our manor on his return trip (selling goods on his way, buying goods on the return, netting an even, feudal zero), with the more rare and bulk commodities like salt, herbs, and the donkey coming from Scarborough.
“I got you a nettle and yarrow salve for your cough.” He showed me a little ceramic jar. “It’s supposed to work better than
the mullein but you have to apply it directly to the back of your throat.”
I looked at him questionably but said nothing.
“You’ll be compliant,” he said with a mock seriousness. “I heard you coughing all the way down the hill.”