Chapter 35 #2
I was as peevish as the babies by lunchtime, and the travelling days got shorter because I often felt too sick and feverish to mount up again after looking after them and making sure they were fed and clean.
I’d taken to knotting their washed nappy rags to the outside of the panniers to dry, and I always managed to keep at least two pairs of dry rags each in reserve.
I’m strangely proud of that, knowing that as I slowly lost my grip on everything else I focused right down on what was important.
I remember sitting on the floor in front of many fireplaces in houses that were all different except for a common dampness, making sure the wet rags got dry enough for me to shore up the fire and sleep, sometimes sewing and mending the leather bottle teats Cat had made from old glove fingers which the babies often sucked to bits while I waited, secure in the knowledge that, come the next day, they’d be ready for action.
Lighting fires in long abandoned fireplaces always felt like we’d restarted the heart of the dead homes we were borrowing, just for one more night of life.
I don’t remember the exact sequence of events because, like when you spill water on a painting you’re working on and it blurs everything and runs colours that you didn’t mean to mix into each other, making a huge indecipherable mess, the fever washed all the different days together.
So it’s a smudged and blotchy picture, a ruined watercolour memory of the past which has smeared details and only a foggy shape to it.
But I do know that shape and some of the details.
I just lose track of how they join together, and which details are real and which came out of the fever instead.
One dark colour runs through it all, and I’m ashamed of it in a way that I can still taste, like a bitterness that spoils even the good bits of memory that do loom out of the mists of confusion I was pushing us through as we trudged the long passage through the borderland.
I can’t put a name on that dark colour: Jealousy is green, anger is red, but I don’t know what colour shame is.
I only know it muddies all the other ones it comes in contact with.
I’m ashamed because it was in this part of the journey that I began to feel something I had never felt before in my life.
I began to resent Cat. Almost hate her in tiny flashes.
Not for long, not for real, but just enough that the betrayal of it spoils everything.
It came in flares, nasty little bursts of bottled-up anger and frustration that I tried to keep inside me.
It came because I was tired and scared and not thinking straight because of the fever, I think.
I had kept to our routine so carefully, so rigorously that I didn’t notice at first, and then – when I did notice – it was too late to quench it and it would tear through me like a fire.
And it would be quickly in and quickly out, because it wasn’t real hate and Cat was, even when I nearly-hated her, also and for ever my only-one.
It’s just that I was doing everything. For everyone.
Almost everything anyway. I led the horse and the goats, led them to feed, led them to water, milked the goats, fed the babies, cleaned the babies, washed their rag nappies, dried them, played with the babies, told them stories and then – the moment they fell asleep, did so myself, knowing I would again be on duty the moment they woke in the night.
And they always woke in the night, often many times in the same night.
I snatched fragments of sleep like a starving person grabbing scraps of food.
Oh, and I made fires and collected firewood, mended more teats and found houses and buildings with safe roofs for us to spend all those nights in.
Different houses, changeable weather, same plod, plod northwards, same routine every day, same repetition of the same on the next day and the one after that.
And all this while running a fever with streaming nose and eyes that seemed hard to focus and a dryness in my throat that never went away no matter how much I drank.
And I had the shits. And all I had to help me was the conviction we had to keep moving because if I stopped I’d never start again, so I couldn’t stop because the only real help I had was Digger who hunted her own food and did patrol round us to keep us safe.
And Cat? My shameful nearly-hating of my only-one?
Still feels unforgivable. I knew better.
It wasn’t just that she was talking to me less and less.
I knew she was hurt. Badly. And I knew she was trying to heal.
I knew she was trying to help by what she said, how she encouraged me, how she reminded me, how she kept me focused.
Picking her words, probably. She even helped when I was asleep because I do remember waking in the gold light of one dawn and realising the babies hadn’t woken me and I sat up fast, convinced something had happened to them, like they’d stopped breathing or been snuck out of the window by hungry wolves that Digger hadn’t warned us about, only to find them both lying against the sleeping dog, the boy dozing and the girl staring over my shoulder, rapt and adoring and I realised they were listening to Cat who was telling them a story that they couldn’t have understood, but seemed entranced by.
I was too. Just her voice in my ear was enough to calm me, then and always.
That morning was a good one. No shameful anger in it that I can remember.
Maybe it was the familiar lilting rhythm of her voice as she told a fairy story three words at a time, the one about the boy and his shadow.
It was a story she must have told me so many times when I was little that it was a part of me, just like Cat was.
The girl had a special bond with Cat. Her eyes always seemed to find her when she woke, and the sight of her triggered a gurgling smile.
The boy seemed more inward looking, slower to smile, but warm when he in his turn found my face instead and gummed a smile in my direction.
But that happy morning was the exception to a procession of colder mornings that somehow just seemed to get grimmer and more desperate, and much, much more tiring, because although Cat might have encouraged me, and despite the fact that she kept me company in all the moments when I felt so alone that it would have been easy enough to just stop and give in, that was all talk not action. It wasn’t physically helping me.
And actual physical help is what I really needed, bone-tired as I was.
And yes, maybe talk and encourage was all she could do, maybe physical help was an unrealistic expectation given how things were, but I still hated it, in those ignoble moments when the anger swept in and out, I hated that she never DID anything.
It wasn’t just my mind that was exhausted.
It was my body. I was so tired that sometimes I sat on the horse, forcing us ever more northwards, and the reason I often found it hard to follow the outline of the old road ahead was that my eyes were full of tears that I fought not to shed.
And I was tired to this point most of the time.
And even though Cat couldn’t possibly see it in my face because she was behind me, she’d tell me it was OK, and that I was doing really well, and all I could do was bite down on the angry things I wanted to shout at her about that just being words, and how a thousand of them were not as useful to me as her actually doing one little something, taking the tiniest fraction of the weight of doing everything off my back.
I once almost told her she was as useless at helping as Freya had been, but that was so unfair I bit it back before it got out.
It would have been a vicious thing to say out loud, but even thinking it for an angry instant filled me with shame deeper than I’d ever felt.
I don’t know if she could see into my head and knew what I wasn’t saying, but it always felt like she could.
If we’d been travelling cross-country, it’d have taken for ever, or maybe we wouldn’t have made it.
But the fact that all we had to do to reach Glasgow was to stay on the M-way made the biggest difference.
I didn’t have to stop and check our position all the time or work out complicated detours around obstacles that had occurred since the maps we had were printed.
I just had to walk the line as it ribboned north, keeping our little caravan moving along a wide strip of overgrown roadway and avoid doing anything thoughtless or unplanned.
But it was a wet progress, as if the weather had decided that the night of the lion and the fire that burned us out marked the turning point in the seasons as well as our story.
The hot dry spell broke as soon as we set off, and the rain set in instead.
Not constantly, but it did so enough to clear the air for a while, enough to seem refreshing if you were walking through a fever, until it found its way down the back of your neck and became irritating and then depressing.
Especially if you were already wet with sweat from a fever as I was to start with.
So it wasn’t all rain all the time, but from then on it became cooler and rained more than it shone, certainly until we saw the elephant and the sea.