Chapter 2 #3
I’m sitting with my book which is about a boy called Oliver who’s all alone in old London before cars and planes and it makes me sad because he’s in a city full of people and he’s still lonely and everyone cheats him or lies to him or uses him.
That’s an even worse kind of alone than being in the empty world.
There are no others, no strangers any more now, but at least Cat and I each have our own only-one.
I’d hate to be alone, and Cat would like it even less.
I think it would kill her. Sometimes I catch her looking at me in such a strange way, caught between sad and cross and I know it’s that even though she’s happy I’m there, I’m not enough for her.
Her mind fizzes so fast perhaps she needs other ones to bounce off, minds hard, sharp and fast as hers.
I’m not fizzy like that. I can keep her safe, but I can’t give her the conversations she needs, maybe.
I think that’s why she talks to herself so much.
Did you, really? I say again, watching her sewing a new rain cape out of scraps. She’s been patching it together since spring came with the snowdrops on the bank below the Bunker.
Yes, she says.
She winces as she needles herself by mistake. She smudges the drop of blood into the oilskin and sucks her finger.
Yes. I’m sure I did.
Sometimes I think she sees people that aren’t there because, even though they might be the death of us, they’d at least stop her being so lonely with just me. I think she hates being lonely almost as much as she fears the idea of strangers and the sea.
This is why – and also how – we went from nearly fourteen to just two – or at least it’s what Cat told me she remembers about it, even though she was very young when it happened.
I expect stories just get old like people do and begin to fade a bit, so it might not be the whole story. Anyway, here it is:
There were some families, and we all lived together on a farm that was on the edge of the sea, except it wasn’t always a farm because once it had been an army base with lots of long low sheds and warehouses.
Some had fallen-in roofs but mostly they were still good and our parents and their parents, and the ones before them repaired the buildings all the time to keep the weather out.
They did farming and some fishing, but they didn’t have big boats so always kept close to the edge of the sea where they could row back to safety if they needed to.
Sometimes they went on expeditions up the coast to the big port city, and other times they went inland to other towns and cities and looked for things that they needed to keep the plant going.
Because what they were doing in those long low buildings was growing mould in shallow trays, racks and racks of them, filling the spaces and going on forever, Cat said.
They used the mould to make an old medicine called the antibiotic.
The antibiotic was one of the big things that kept people alive and healthy in the earlier time.
And before the old people died off, some of them used what they knew to set up the tanks and the trays and left the secret of how to do it in the hands of those younger ones who survived and could have children, so they could keep themselves healthy and the old, dying childless people alive for a bit longer.
One big, long shed was used for a different thing, which was soap making.
Soap stopped you getting infected or catching something from people who were ill.
It was as important as the antibiotic, Cat said.
Later it became even more important. Even though she was young when the strangers came from the sea, she was already working in the soap shed, helping and learning how to make lye from the wood ash and mix it with the cooking fat.
We still make soap now, here in the Bunker, and keep as clean as we can to stop infections because the antibiotic is just a memory now.
Anyway, back to the long-before-us: for a while the old world just drifted away as those who’d soon be dead got older and machines and factories and then electrics died too and the base became a place people would come from far away to get the antibiotic, and so they started trading and that’s how they survived for a bit longer, and then people stopped coming altogether, and maybe that was because they were now dead or there weren’t enough to remember where we were.
And then the skies went dark and the weather got very bad and there wasn’t a summer for two or three years and the trays of mould and the vats went bad and the antibiotic became the poison instead, as someone died when they took some, and so they stopped trying to make it any more.
Cat said the antibiotic turned to the poison when her dad was a kid, but that the miles of trays on racks still had a deep, sour smell and that those long low buildings – except for the soap shed – were the saddest places she’d ever been, though she couldn’t ever quite say why.
So instead of growing the antibiotic the families became full-time farmers, and things were fine, except little cuts and infections could be deadly again.
Cat’s mother only had one hand because the other one had blown up like a puffball mushroom when she had scratched herself on a bit of old rusty bob-wire when she was playing hide-and-go-seek as a child and they had to cut it off to stop the black infection spidering up her arm veins towards her heart where it would have killed her stone dead.
And then one day, two generations after they had stopped tending the vats and trays and just become farmers, strangers on two sailing boats sailed into the bay beneath the base and said they’d heard about the antibiotic, and could they trade for some?
They were nice, Cat said, and even when they were told the antibiotic had gone poisonous and the trays were now dry as dust, they still gave the things they’d brought hoping to trade with, and then stayed.
And for a week or so it looked very good, because they were proper sailors and our families weren’t really.
They just fished on old lines and hooks from the rowing boats or pulled up lobsters and crabs from pots in the bay.
They were coast-huggers, as I said, never going so far out they couldn’t outrun the nearest cloud if it turned towards them.
The strangers offered to teach them to sail properly if they could stay and join the group, and in turn they would like to learn farming so they could help in that way too.
Only thing was, presents weren’t all they’d brought for us.
They carried a small cough.
It didn’t start like anything big, just a tickle in the throat.
But then it got worse, fast. The sailors went first, drowning in their own lungs, which is how everyone knew it had come with them, and then slowly, one by one, our families started to get it.
The coughers were made to stay in the main house away from the others who moved into one of the sheds, except pretty soon everyone was coughing and dying and in the house anyway, except for me and Cat and my mum.
And then she got a tickle in her throat, and so then it was just Cat and me in the shed, which must have been really scary for Cat.
Mum said she’d come back, but she didn’t and after an afternoon on our own, Cat went across the yard to see what she should be doing.