Chapter 27
Subtraction
Although it hurt all the long way home, seeming to get worse by the hour and sometimes even just from step to step, for the next day and a half – as we retraced our steps home to the Bunker – I wasn’t as worried about my hand and the hole in it as I was about Cat.
More specifically, her reaction when she saw it, bandaged up and swollen like a pumpkin someone had stuffed haphazardly on the end of my wrist.
I knew she was going be so angry that I’d injured myself the moment I’d left the limit of her care.
She’d be worried about infection and worse, and she’d be doubly blaming herself for letting me go north without her.
And the bit of her brain that never slept, the itchy-twitchy worry-worm of imagination that always bored down into the darkest places the future might go would bunch her up in a fist of controlled fury.
And then she’d get even more and more furious and twitchy trying to figure out how to make everything better instead of worse than it already was.
That’s what I expected, her face ticking with irritation and worry as she built up a head of steam.
I knew she’d blame Storm for shooting me, and she’d blame me for putting my hand in the way of the arrow, and though I thought it’d be unfair to blame Storm, I know I’d been stupid, even if it had been unconscious stupidity, moving my body on reflex like I had.
How many times have I told you to think before doing something? she’d spit, itching mad with a frustration that would of course be the cover-up for her deep fear for me.
I could hear her words every step of the way home.
I knew that’s what she would say. And I knew her anger would be a kind of love, because of course a hole in the hand is not a trivial thing.
It can kill you. Infection was the most likely result, and if it got bad, she’d be the one having to cut it off.
Like someone had had to do for her mother.
Losing my hand was a horrible thought that made my guts watery every time I thought about it.
So I tried not to, because when I felt like that I began to wonder if it was just my fear getting to me or the first stages in an actual infection.
We’d done what we could to stop the bleeding by packing the wound with clean cotton out of my medical kit, and we’d smeared it with the honey and vinegar mix we carried as an antiseptic.
So that was what I was expecting. What we got was something entirely different. And worse, in lots of ways.
Digger must have smelled us coming because we were upwind but still hidden on the wrong side of the slope above the airfield when she must have started running.
She met us as we crested the rise, bounding through the long grass, tail wagging, making the strangled noise that was usually the closest she got to barking.
She jumped up at me and tried to lick my face and my ears, almost beside herself with excitement.
It was as if the simple act of returning was a miracle, and she couldn’t believe it had actually happened to her.
Dogs are like that. Simple. Joy-bringers when you least expect it, when you most need it, and often when you didn’t even know you did.
Maybe I never had a dog until I needed one.
And this was a day when we needed some joy, because the face that met us was not the one I’d spent the long walk home imagining.
Something had happened, and even before any words were exchanged it was clear it had not been good.
Cat had a black eye. It wasn’t a little one.
Her cheekbone and eye socket were alarmingly bruised and puffy, swollen around an eyeball that itself seemed bulging and eggy.
The normal white of her eye was red with standing blood.
There were also scratch marks across the other side of her face, three of them raked hard enough to have broken the skin.
My instinctive thought was that she’d finally met the wild animal that had prowled around the edges of our imagination ever since we found those claw marks shedding the tree trunks, and the mangled deer carcass.
So it was me thinking I shouldn’t have left her alone instead of the other way around as I ran towards her, pleased to see from the way she got to her feet and raised a hand in greeting as she limped towards us that whatever had happened had not injured her worse than what I could see.
What happened? I said.
It’s OK, she said. Where’s the goat?
What happened? I said again.
I’m OK, she said. The babies are OK.
She held her finger to her lips and nodded over her shoulder at the wheelbarrow we used as a movable baby bed, so we could shift them around with us when we went on walks or foraged in the woods.
Freya? said Storm.
She’s OK too, said Cat. She’s asleep.
Storm ran past us and disappeared into the gloom of the bunker door without saying anything else.
I looked down at the twins. They were both asleep, though the girl opened one eye, squinted at me like a pirate checking the horizon, and then – evidently satisfied with what she saw – closed it again and returned to whatever voyage she was embarked on across the deep ocean of sleep.
Where’s the goat? Cat said.
Fuck the goat, where’s Freya, said Storm emerging from the Bunker.
I told you, she’s OK said Cat, but she said it in a way that carried an unspoken “now” in it, meaning she definitely hadn’t been OK earlier.
She’s sleeping in the library bunker, she said.
Why? Why is she sleeping there? said Storm over her shoulder, already striding off towards it.
Things got too much for her, Cat said. Don’t wake her up. She needs to sleep.
Storm didn’t break pace and just jogged away into one of the pathways crossing the Tanglewood towards the library bunker.
Cat, I said. What happened?
She didn’t speak until Storm was out of our earshot, then she spoke fast and low.
We need the goat, Mouse, she said.
Well. We lost the goat, I said. But I’ll go back and find it. Just tell me what happened.
I touched her shoulder. She tensed. I didn’t let go. I used my other hand to turn her face to me. I think that was the first time she actually took in the bandage swaddling it.
Mouse! What…? she said.
No, I said. I’m fine. I’ll tell you, but you go first. You’re hurt…
She stared at me and I could see she was about to argue, to say no, that I should go first. But then something happened inside her and she just bent into me, dropping her forehead and resting on my chest, and for a moment she wasn’t itchy-twitchy Cat, she wasn’t bossy Cat, she was just Cat.
My only-one. And she was letting me know it by allowing herself to lean on me so I could take some of the weight of whatever had happened and help keep her upright.
She threw the baby, she said. The girl. It was my fault. I should have kept a closer eye, I should have seen she was going to break… I think I was just too angry with her to let myself notice.
Threw the baby? I said. Cat…
She was on the bed. The baby was standing.
Holding the sides. Crying. Trying to shuffle towards her.
Wanting her. Legs wobbling, tight little fists furiously locked on the railing.
I think it was the wanting, not the crying that made her do it.
The baby got close enough to reach out a hand and touch her and she recoiled from it, like it was a stinging nettle.
And the baby, the girl, she stopped crying and looked at her, you know, really looked at her like that one does, like she’s looking right inside your head but also at things around and behind you?
Things you can’t see, Mouse. And she wobbled even closer and didn’t fall, and this time her little scrabbly fingers brushed Freya’s knee where she’d backed herself into the wall at the end of the bed, Freya looks at her with an expression that’s so dry-eyed and empty I started to say something, too little, too late to stop it and she just reaches out and takes the baby by its shoulders and says NO!
and then she sort of tosses it away into the pillows at the end of the bed where it came from.
More of a shove than a throw. But also a throw. And I think…
And here she pushed herself off my chest took a breath and looked up at me.
I think the pillows were just there by accident. I think if she had been sitting on the concrete she would have done the same thing.
You’re saying she wanted to hurt the baby? I said.
What she wanted was to get that baby away from her, she said She wasn’t thinking about whether it would injure itself or if she’d injure it.
She just wanted to be free of it in that moment.
And it was such a big feeling there was no room in her for any other thoughts.
And that’s why we need the goat milk. Because she is at the end of herself with the babies.
You can’t be sure, I said.
I can, Mouse, she said. She won’t even mean to, but she’s dangerous to them and she’ll hurt them.
And it’s not even her fault. And it’s not ours.
But the Deal we made with her, I don’t think there was any way round it.
I mean, she’d have died if she tried to stop being pregnant because the babies were too big.
Maybe in the old days they could have done it.
And if she’d had the babies without our helping, without the book and all the stuff we had, I think they’d all have died, all three of them.
But just because what happened was the only choice doesn’t mean it wasn’t a cruel and inhuman one too.
And now she is a threat to the babies, even if she doesn’t mean it. It’s gone too far.
Just let me go back and find the goats in Stitch Country, I said. That’ll help.
I don’t think we have time, she said. We can’t make her feed against her will.
Well, I said, looking down at the two bodies curled into each other like a pair of commas. Maybe we should, just until I find enough goats.