Chapter 11 #3
Despite that, we focused on doing practical things to make them feel safe and welcome.
Thinking it would help them be comfortable with us, Cat gave them her bed and moved some of her stuff over to my sleeping area.
That only seemed to make them suspicious, which made no sense to me.
And the more Cat told them they were OK and that we would look after them, the more suspicious they got.
I didn’t feel a bit like eating myself, but I decided food would make everyone else feel better.
Or if not better, at least not hungry. Sometimes food’s just fuel, sometimes it’s a pleasure, but this time it was more like ballast, something to weigh us down and keep our feet on the ground, even though – or maybe because – it felt like the ground itself was shifting beneath us.
I heard their uneasy whispering intensify as I went into the kitchen, but because I was basically sleep-walking through the idea of cooking, it took me a while and some fruitless searching for where I’d left the kitchen knives before I realised what had happened and how very deeply they must have distrusted their situation.
I beckoned Cat over and pointed to the knife rack she’d screwed to the wall beside the sink.
What? she said.
See anything missing? I said, pointing.
Oh, she said. Ah. They’ve been busy.
The rack was empty.
What do we do? I said.
Fuck, she said. I don’t know.
Cat was not a big swearer, like I said. She turned and walked into her sleeping space where the girls sat on the bed staring at her, their hands awkwardly hidden under the blankets. She sighed and suddenly sounded as exhausted as I felt.
Look, said Cat. Just look.
Their eyes followed her across the room as she walked over to one of the big metal tool cabinets we used to store our useful finds. Metal shrieked against metal as she yanked open the first few layers of drawers.
You want more knives? Come and get them. We got axes here too, and a big machete thing that Mouse found in one of the other bunkers over there. If it makes you feel safer, here it is, she said, her face fizzing with anger.
Their faces were the opposite, blank as pebbles and just as smooth and unreadable. Cat snorted and jerked her head at the door.
Or you want something to go bang? You want a gun? They’re out there under the tank. Be our guest. All we’re trying to do is the right thing. Be welcoming. Kind. That sort of idea. Right?
They just carried on staring back at her, faces unmoving and empty of any emotion I could detect.
Cat looked away, took a breath, and when she looked back at them her own face was as vacant as theirs; it might even have looked emotionless to them, but I knew it was the calm before the storm.
Cat didn’t lose her temper easily, but when she blew, she really blew – detonating like a force of nature.
She took a deep breath, visibly steadying herself, speaking very deliberately.
Freya. Storm. One more time: I’m Cat. This is Mouse.
This is our home. You are welcome in it.
You are not prisoners. This is all odd, really, really odd for everyone, but Mouse is trying to keep us all from going even more nutty from the way the day has gone so far by making us something hot to eat.
Hot food is good, right? So give him his kitchen knives so he can hurry up and do some, OK?
That got no reaction except more unreadable blankness from the girls.
I need to go get carrots from the veg patch, I said.
I’ll give you a hand, said Cat.
I didn’t need a hand but we both needed to get outside and breathe ourselves calm.
What are we doing wrong? I said as we crouched over the veg patch pulling orange carrots out of the dark earth.
Everything, I expect, Cat said.
But she was wrong. We must have been doing something right because the knives were back on the rack when we walked back in out of the rain, even though the girls’ faces seemed unchanged. I remember smiling. It felt like a truce. And a truce felt like one place to start.
Doing something about the horses was another, because they, or at least Storm, had to show us how to handle them and so she felt powerful or in charge.
And we didn’t know about horses, only goats.
The ones that kept me alive as a baby had died, but not before having more goats that we kept hobbled so they wouldn’t stray too far, in the way Cat had been taught by her parents.
When I was small the goats also had bells on so we could hear them if we were looking for them but couldn’t see them in the undergrowth.
The sound of them clacking and tinkling around us was part of my childhood, until the day Cat decided they might draw attention should any more strangers from the sea come within hearing range, and now the collars with the bells hang silently on the hooks by the back door to the Bunker and we now keep track of the goats a different way.
There are three huge fields at the far end of the Tanglewood.
Once they must have had thin hedges between them, like the photographs of patchwork countryside in the picture book called Britain from Above that I loved to pore over when I was smaller.
Since the fields stopped being farmed and the hedges tended, the narrow boundaries had expanded and thickened so that most small fields have dwindled or disappeared as the expanding hedges have met in the middle and eaten up all the open ground they once protected, slowly turning the patchwork back into woodland and forest. In the last, biggest fields that had not had time to happen yet.
So the open land stayed clearish but protected by broad hedges that were now themselves basically as thick and impenetrable as the Tanglewood.
We used these as grazing for the goats. Thick though the hedges were, they were of course not completely goat-proof since a determined goat will find a way to go wherever it wants, but it slowed them down and the fields were more than large enough to provide food for a handful of goats over a year.
So any impulse to roam came from goatish curiosity and cussedness, not hunger.
And goats are inquisitive. So part of every morning’s routine was to check in on our little herd to make sure they were safe and more or less where they’d been put the night before.
The fields were called Big, Bigger and Biggest. Cat had many qualities but a sense of poetry when naming things was not one of them.
I had named the Tanglewood from the fairy story she’d read me.
I was quite proud of it. She just called the goats Brown, Not Brown and Devil.
Calling him Devil was not some uncharacteristic poetry on Cat’s part.
It was as baldly descriptive as Brown or Not Brown, as simple and truthful as names come.
Devil was so obviously evil and wilful and always tempting Brown and Not Brown astray.
It was getting Devil off the single-storey side-roof on a tumbledown church that gave me my worst scar when I fell through it and knocked myself out.
I woke on my back only to see Devil looking calmly down at me through the hole, still chomping on the delicious roof grass it had scaled the side-building for, and the calmly satisfied look in its evil eyes said: Got you.
Dealing with the horses was much simpler than I’d imagined.
For a start none of them was Devil. In fact, compared to goats, they were about four times the size and a tenth of the trouble.
We just put them in the field we called Biggest and pulled branches across the narrow path into it, making a gate.
Biggest was the best field for them as it had a pond at the low end.
It also had more open grass for them to eat.
In time it fitted them so well we stopped calling it Biggest and called it the Paddock instead.
Paddock was a word that meant field for horses, Cat said. I looked it up. She was right.