Chapter 5
Two to three to two
Next time I wake, Cat has the door open and is sitting on the step in the weak morning sun, reading a book and eating one of the oatcakes we made the day before.
Is it safe now? I say, only half serious because the strangers we hide from never appear and only exist in Cat’s mind, planted there by memories made when she was a child.
Have your pee and we’ll go see, she says. I think so. I already climbed the Tower and watched for a good long time as the sun came up. I couldn’t see anything.
Right, I say.
I don’t say of course, but I do think it.
I have a pee every morning when I wake up.
The earth closet’s in a hut we built in a bramble clump down the slope a bit, but first thing I usually pee in the nettles which are closer.
I walk over and watch the sky as I do so.
There’s a hawk in the distance and I watch it drift over the landscape riding the wind in the effortless way they always do, the way which is one of the Five Things about birds.
Cat used to make me play the game called Five Things, and the habit has stayed with me.
It’s not even a game really, but it helped pass the time when I was young and we were stuck inside out of bad weather, or when we were lying in the dark unable to sleep.
I suppose it was also a way of making me think, because it encouraged me to not only remember what I’d seen, but to have an opinion about it.
You had to pick a subject and the other person had to say five things they liked, or didn’t like about it.
Subjects could be anything – five things you liked about being stuck inside out of the rain, five things you liked eating, or five you didn’t.
I’d ask for five things Cat remembered about my parents, she’d ask for the first five things I could remember about being a baby.
Or five things you should look out for in the woods because they might be dangerous.
Or the last five animals you saw and where.
Five Things was a way of training you to be observant, and it also made you think about what you saw or knew.
It wasn’t school, but it did teach things, maybe just an alert frame of mind, but that’s more than enough.
So, seeing the hawk reminded me it was in my Five Things I like about birds.
Which are:
I like the way the robin knows when I’m working outside and comes and perches near me, as if they know I need company.
I like the way the jackdaws fly about in a gang, like they’re rascals, all up to no good, but watching each other’s backs.
I like the way the kingfisher flashes quick colour across the slow dark water of the canal.
I like the way hawks hover, feathers on the outstretched tips of their wings riffling as they ride the updraught of air, gently sliding slowly across the sky as they scan the ground below for prey.
And I used to like, more than any of the other things, the special hold-your-breath-and hope moment when crows, my favourite of all the birds, take flight.
Smaller birds like tits and sparrows just whirr weightlessly away into the sky, but crows always seem on the point of not making it at all; they step off wherever they’ve been perching and appear to leave it just too late to try to get airborne, and there’s this moment where the wings are stretched but haven’t begun to flap, so the crow just hangs untidily in the air, balanced for a beat between falling or flight, before lofting skywards at what always seems just after the last possible instant.
I used to love seeing that. Not any more.
I finish peeing, shake off and button up, feeling the impatience in Cat’s eyes burning holes in my back.
Come on, she says. And bring your bow.
I turn to look at her.
You know, she says. Just in case.
We could just spend the day in the Bunker, I say. If you’re not sure.
When she says just in case, she means bring the bow in case we have to shoot an imaginary dangerous stranger who has not ever yet appeared but who, if he does, will definitely want to cough all over us, or worse, but we’ve never done that because we’ve never ever seen anyone.
And though it’s easy to say it, I don’t think it would be easy to do.
But her words somehow make me get that dream-stain feeling in my head.
I go back inside to get my bow, grabbing an oatcake as I do so. She’s standing with an arrow nocked in her bow when I step back out of the shade into the sunlight.
Come on then, she says. Hunting walk.
That’s how I know she’s really not as relaxed as she’s pretending to be.
The hunting walk is the thing we do when we go after deer.
It’s three simple things: first we move silently, which means – in this at least – for once Cat has to slow down to my speed.
She taught me to do it ever since I could walk.
She made it a game, where she would stand with her nose on a tree and her eyes shut so she couldn’t see me, and I’d have to try and slowly and carefully creep up on her and touch her without her hearing me coming.
And then sometimes I’d be the listener and she’d be the hunter.
We got really good at it. And the truth is Cat can do it and move fast while she does so too.
It’s something her dad told her, and she says it a lot, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. The second thing is we move separately, but always knowing where the other is.
Cat is always off my left shoulder, never the other way round, never more than a quarter bowshot away.
We’ve been hunting so long that we do this without thinking and know where the other one is without having to look over and check all the time.
And the last, third thing about the hunting walk is that it is always done with the wind in our faces, if we possibly can.
That way anything that we’re hunting, which is almost always deer, will not be able to smell us coming.
We’re good hunters. Cat never misses and so nothing limps away hurt and bleeding.
If she shoots, she kills cleanly. She can knock a squirrel off a branch even if it’s running at full speed, though she doesn’t like wasting arrows on squirrels.
I’m nearly as good at shooting things that are still and on the ground, but what I’m really good at is stalking and trapping, where moving fast isn’t so important.
Sometimes I just stalk things to get close and to watch them better, which is like our childhood game I suppose.
It’s one of the other things that settles me if I’ve woken badly or am upset.
Moving slowly and deliberately, crawling through the woods and making myself still as a rock to avoid being seen makes me feel like I’m part of the land, not just walking on top of it.
If you get really still you can feel things moving around you without really knowing how.
It’s like your hands stretched out on the ground are picking up messages from the whole wood; as if you’re overhearing the stories the roots of the trees beneath you are telling each other.
Maybe that’s just me. Cat says it is, but she does trust it, because when I feel something and stop and signal her to do the same, she always does.
We follow each other through the narrow track through the brambles, and as we do so it starts to rain again. I look at her and she just shrugs.
We’re not going to melt, she says quietly.
Once Cat has an idea in her head she doesn’t let go. I think changing plans makes the inside of her head itch. It certainly makes her grumpy when the world doesn’t unfold the way she wants it to, the way she said it should.
We spread out as we walk down the slope towards the M-way and the tank below.
From up here the old roadway curves away in both directions, snaking round the hill.
The brambles and moss have crept in over the years, covering the tarmac on both sides of the divider that runs down the middle.
The divider was a metal fence, about hip high; it’s mostly rotted out, but it was built on a long trench of gravel, and that’s where the trees took root, claiming the space before the brambles got there, so that now the low green of the brambles snaking through the countryside has a tall central spine of old hazels and alder running along it.
Sometimes when I was younger, if I squinted, I could make it look like the body of a giant storybook dragon, a huge unmoving Smaug curled round the hill, protecting us.
The rain gets heavier, and I wish we’d gone back for our wet-weather coats, but Cat keeps going.
The rain means we don’t have to be quite so careful about making a noise since any sound we might make is covered by the drumming on the leaves around us, although I know that we are being quiet so as not to be heard by phantom strangers who only exist inside Cat’s brain.
By now the rain has found its way down the back of my neck and I’m not just getting wet, I’m getting cross with Cat for imagining she saw something yesterday.
I know we have to avoid strangers, but we’ve actually never seen any, and that’s ever, as in my whole life.
So either there aren’t any more, or if there are they just travel by boat and that’s safe enough for us because I’ve never seen the sea either, not since I was a baby and I don’t remember seeing it then.
I think Cat is only scared of strangers because she was told to be, but perhaps the only dangerous strangers were the ones who killed our families by mistake with their coughing disease, so even those ones weren’t dangerous on purpose.