Chapter 14
The deals
Looking back, once the girls arrived in our lives, especially once we knew what Freya was carrying, it seemed like time itself changed along with pretty much everything else.
There was the waiting time, which went too slow for all of us but especially for Freya.
Then there was the time the midwife book called Expulsion, and that went too fast. Much too fast, so fast we didn’t see the thing we should have noticed until it ripped its way into our world, unannounced and unexpected and quietly devastating.
And then there was the period after the arrival when time – and so much else – just went so strangely; grinding days and sleepless nights that never seemed to end, while time was also passing so swiftly that it was gone before you noticed it.
The waiting at the beginning was almost a happy time, though that didn’t make itself obvious as we went through it, maybe because some kinds of happy are so simple they hardly register in the moment, being no more than the absence of unhappy.
You only see them once the bad times arrive and throw their shadows backwards into the past, revealing the contours of what had previously been undetectable.
It was still a getting-to-know-you time for all of us and the novelty was strong enough to take the bite out of the worrying parts, smoothing them down enough to be bearable, and occasionally even ignorable.
And the most worrying parts were all to do with Freya really, and split into what Cat said were two big questions: How was she doing? And what might she do?
The answer to the first one was just about caring.
Second part was something much darker. Storm was convinced Freya had thrown herself off the edge of the quarry to try and end everything for herself, and had done so unconcerned that she was cuffed to her sister who hadn’t been consulted and didn’t want to die at all.
That was a big thing to swallow. Storm could be as sharp and flinty as her sister, but as time went on, I came to look forward to her lopsided smile when it came, as her spikiness mellowed into a more raspy kind of joking that she sometimes even aimed at herself instead of others.
In those moments she became likeable, and I give her a lot of credit for understanding that Freya wasn’t thinking straight when she did it, and forgiving her pretty quickly.
She meant it, Storm told me. But she also didn’t mean it. It wasn’t her being in charge of her real self that was steering. It was the thing the Russian did to her.
Putting the memory of Storm’s words down makes it seem jumbled and a sort of nonsense.
It made more sense when she said it. Writing it down makes it look stupid.
I think if Storm had got older and had had another go of explaining it she would have said it differently.
She might have said, I hate what she did but I still love her.
And that’s not strange. I now know that’s normal, because love – real love – proves itself in the hard places where it gets tested.
After all, if love only happens in the easy places and at the easy times, how do you know if it’s real?
Or actually worth anything? Anyone can do the easy stuff.
How do you know if love’s strong if it never has to walk the hard miles uphill into the wind carrying a weight that might break it?
The one thing they did have in common with Cat and I is that they were each other’s only-ones.
So it’s hard not to give them credit for that and I now do think Freya showed a love for her sister when she made The Deal.
I wasn’t there when the conversation happened that ended up in it being made, but whenever it was talked about after that, it was said in an especially important way that made it clear it should be in Capital Letters.
Maybe if I had been there, it wouldn’t have happened.
In those days, with Freya, I was just salt that made the wound hurt worse, and the fact Storm and I began to get on with each other on was more salt in the same wound.
Cat told me it was a brutal conversation because Freya appeared to have stopped believing that she’d tried to kill herself, and so wouldn’t engage with Storm or Cat on the most important thing, which was to get her to agree that she wouldn’t try to do it again.
Cat said to me that she didn’t really think that Freya just saying it on its own it would mean she wouldn’t try to harm herself or the baby inside her, but she thought it’d at least be a good start.
She told Freya that we would help her before, during and after the baby was born.
She told her there was nothing to fear because we would protect her.
Freya said that didn’t change anything. She still didn’t want the baby.
Cat said it was too late for “wanting” to have anything to do with it, because it looked like she was going to have to have it, given how big she was, but that giving birth didn’t mean she would have to “have” it afterwards.
She said we could all look after it once it was out, and then Cat said Storm cut in and said there was a but and the but was that we couldn’t do the bit before that.
Only Freya could do the looking after the baby before it was born, but we could all look after her while she did what we couldn’t do.
I don’t know why Freya said yes in the end, other than love for Storm, to stop her worrying about her every minute of the day.
Maybe she just wanted to stop the conversation.
Or maybe she did mean it. Cat told me she was sure once the baby was born that Freya would want it, so all we had to do was get her to that point safely.
And because Cat was always right about things, I believed her.
So they made The Deal: Freya would have the baby, and we’d all look after it and she would feed it until it didn’t need mother’s milk and could eat something else, maybe milk from the goats or berry porridge or something else mushy.
Whatever babies eat before their teeth arrive.
We knew very little about babies then. That changed as things went on.
Freya not wanting the baby? That didn’t.
Not before, not after.
Which I think makes her sticking to The Deal a heroic thing to have done, because she wasn’t just scared, she was sad. But she did stick to The Deal through the lowest points, and I can’t take that away from her. Freya may have been a pain to be around, but she wasn’t a liar. Her word was good.
Then there was the other deal, the one about reading and riding.
Storm knew about horses: Cat and I wanted to know how to work them.
Storm found the books we had in our bunker, and was even more interested in the other bunker which someone else had begun filling with ten times as many books, shelf after tilted shelf, like they were assembling their own library, a business we had continued whenever we found interesting titles of our own when out scavenging.
I think whoever the original book-collector was, they must have had a sad life and used books as a way of making themselves feel better.
They’d written things on the wall, lines copied from books, Cat said, most likely.
And though by now most of quotations were obscured by piles of books, the biggest one read, “When troubles come, they come not as single spies but in battalions.” Not a cheerful thought, even if it did turn out to be true.
I told Storm she could and should take anything she liked and read it.
It took her three days to tell me she couldn’t read, because her mother had never been taught properly.
Cat and I said we’d teach her if she liked.
So we made a deal: we would help her reading if she would teach us riding and looking after the horses, which was one thing she had been doing on her own until that point – mainly I think because it gave her time away from Freya.
Because of course we knew nothing about horses, and she sort of knew the alphabet but not how to use it properly as a key to unlock the words on the pages under the pictures she liked looking at.
And since she was strangely proud, I don’t think she would have let me teach her reading if she hadn’t had something to even the deal with, but because she was giving something in return, she allowed herself the luxury of being helped.
Deal, she said, holding out her hand.
D-E-A-L, I said. Deal.
D-E-A-L, she said, and we shook on it. That was another moment her lopsided smile crept out and betrayed her cool exterior.
To start with she clearly liked the picture books, and could read some words, but once she found the cleverly drawn picture books about a boy called Tintin and his dog called Snowy something happened in her face and she sat there thumbing slowly through the pages with concentration, and even a kind of smile (which disappeared as soon as she saw Cat or I were looking at her, of course).
And after a bit she’d start the book again and try and figure out what the words in the white speech bubbles said.
She was still spiky and defensive and, of course, often impossibly frustrating to deal with.
But teaching someone something is a good way to get to know them, and learning from someone does involve a kind of trust, even if it’s one you spend a lot of time seeming to resent.
Things became easier with Storm as we did more things together.
Freya was different. I always felt that when I was around her that there were rules I knew nothing about, except that I was inevitably going to break them. Usually in a way she would find especially stupid and irritating.