Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (4 page)

My father taught me how to trap and cook squirrels and rabbits, which mushrooms were poisonous and where to collect the edible ones like chicken-of-the-woods, chanterelles, and penny buns, and how to make ramson soup. We pulled up the stalks of nettles and dried them in the sun; then, sitting on the edge of a grave, I watched him strip away the plant’s exterior and twist what had been foliage a few minutes before into a fine braid. I copied him because he said the best way to learn was to do things myself, but even with my small fingers, the cord I produced was clumsy and malformed. Still, we made hangman’s nooses of them and tied them to a branch that we propped up against a tree.

“The squirrel is a lazy creature,” said my father. “What is the squirrel?”

“A lazy creature,” I said.

“He always takes the path of least resistance,” he said. “What does the squirrel do?”

“He takes the path of least resistance.”

“And what does that mean?” He waited for my answer, which didn’t come. “It means he’ll happily run up this branch and get his stupid head stuck in a noose,” my father said. “In fact he’ll happily run up this branch over his dead friends and still get his head stuck in a noose.”

When we returned to our traps the next day, two slight corpses dangled from the tree by their necks, swaying to and fro from the weight of their own bodies. I dared myself not to look away. My father untied them and put the nooses in his pocket “for next time.” That evening he tried to show me how to skin them, but when his knife came down on the first neck, I said that I didn’t think we had enough kindling and perhaps I should go and collect more. When he had finished, he skewered the skinned animals on a stick he had whittled to a point, and we cooked them over the fire and ate them with ramsons and boiled burdock roots. I picked at mine—the squirrel looked too similar to the animal it had once been, and tasted like chicken that had been out of the fridge for a day too long.

We didn’t give a thought to what we were doing to the garden. We only considered our next meal—how to find it, how to kill it, and how to cook it. And although I would have preferred Sugar Puffs with milk in front of the telly, I joined in the adventure without question.

My father dug stones out of the rockery with a trowel and built a fire pit in the middle of the scuffed earth, a little way from our tent. We tied ropes across our shoulders and dragged half a fallen tree trunk around the gravestones and back to the garden so we had something to sit on. Chairs from the house would have been cheating. We dug a pit in a dusty flower bed and made a shallow grave for the bones and skins of the animals we ate. My father showed me how to make char-cloth using a shirt that he had me fetch from his wardrobe in the house. According to my father’s rules, this wasn’t cheating. I brought it down still on its metal hanger and he sliced the cotton into pieces with his knife. He said if we’d been near a river the hanger would have made perfect fishing hooks and we could be having smoked trout for our dinner. Every evening I lit a fire with his flint and steel, which he always kept with him—flashing the sparks onto the char-cloth, then transferring it to the dry tinder we had gathered.

“Never waste a match when you can light a fire with flint and steel,” he said.

After we had eaten and I had brushed my teeth, we sat on the log and my father told me stories about catching animals and living wild.

“Long ago, in a land called Hampshire,” he said, “there was a family who lived together in die Hütte.
They survived off the land and no one ever told them what to do.”

“What’s a Hütte?” I asked.

“A magical, secret place in the forest,” my father said with a catch in his voice. “Our very own little cabin, with wooden walls, and wooden floors, and wooden shutters at the windows.” His voice was deep and smooth; it lulled me. “Outside, we can pick sweet berries all year round; chanterelles spread like yellow rugs under the trees; and in the bottom of a valley there’s a river, a beautiful swirling Fluss overflowing with silvery fish, so when we’re hungry and need supper, we can just dip our hands in and pull three out.

“One for each of us,” he said as I leaned against him. “You, me, and Mutti.”

“Does she like fish?”

“I think so. You can ask her soon.”

“When she gets home from Germany.” I was almost asleep.

“In two weeks and three days exactly.” He sounded happy.

“That’s not long, is it?”

“No, not long until we have Mutti back.”

“What else about the Hütte, Papa?” I didn’t want the conversation to end.

“Inside there’s a stove to keep us warm on long winter nights and a piano for Mutti to play.”

“Can we go there, Papa?” I yawned.

“Perhaps,” he said as I closed my eyes.

He carried me into the tent and tucked me inside, my body brown from sun and dirt, but my teeth clean. “How do we get there?”

“I’m not sure, Peggy. I’ll work it out,” he said.

4

The next morning, Oliver Hannington was sitting on the swing seat next to the house when we walked back from the cemetery carrying a brace of squirrels and a basket of ground elder. The sun was high behind him, his face in deep shadow. He was rocking back and forth, trying to blow his cigarette smoke out through a hole I had torn in the canopy weeks ago, when I had been fighting pirates from the swing seat’s deck. When Oliver succeeded, puffs of grey cloud signalled a warning like a red Indian campfire.

“Hi,” said Oliver, still looking upward. On his lap was a black-and-white newsletter, and although it was upside down I could make out a drawing of a man wearing a vest and holding a large hammer. At the top of the
page were the words THE SURVIVOR. Oliver gave up blowing and looked at us. “Jesus,” he said, making the word twice as long as it was at Christmas. I was suddenly conscious of my dirty clothes and unwashed hair and, looking at my father, noticed he had sprouted a beard while we had been living in the garden.

“We’ve just been messing about in the woods for a bit. Peggy wanted to see what it would be like to sleep outside,” said my father. “In fact I was just starting to think that it must be about time for a bath.” He handed me the squirrels, which were bound together by their tails, and sat down beside Oliver, who shuffled a little farther along the seat.

“Jesus,” said Oliver again. “You really do need a bath. And what have you there, little girl?” Oliver smiled with white straight teeth and beckoned me forward so he could peer into the basket hanging over my arm. “Nice, spinach grown by dead people.” He laughed.

I couldn’t have explained why, but even then I knew Oliver Hannington was dangerous.

“Take the squirrels down to the camp, Peggy, and go inside and wash,” said my father. It was the first time in two weeks that he had given me an order. I carried the animals back to the smoking fire, dumped them on the ground, then moped up the garden to the seat, where
my father and Oliver were swinging and laughing. My father took a cigarette from the open packet which Oliver held out to him and lit it using a match. An angry, choking feeling stuck inside my throat.

“Papa, you shouldn’t smoke,” I said, standing in front of them.

“Papa,” said Oliver in a squeaky English accent, “you shouldn’t smoke.” He laughed and exhaled through his nostrils like a dragon.

“Go and wash,” my father repeated with a frown.

In the bathroom, I pushed the plug into the bath and, to comfort myself, said lines from
The Railway Children
. Aloud, I said, “Let’s have some hot water, Mrs. Viney.”

Without a reply or a tired laugh from Ute, my voice sounded small and pathetic. I sat on the edge of the bath while it filled, then cried as I slid down into the water. When I was submerged the only noise was the hum of the blood in my head. I didn’t understand why my father had become more like a parent when we had walked up the garden, but I knew that he had, and understood it had something to do with Oliver. When I resurfaced, I thought about my father’s friend falling backward off the seat and banging his head on a rock, the blood soaking away into the earth, or cooking him squirrel stew and telling him it was chicken. He would gobble it up
and one of the tiny bones would stick in his gullet and make him choke. For the first time since she had left, I wanted Ute. I wanted her sitting on the edge of the bath and complaining that I was taking too long. I wanted to be able to beg her to imitate the mother from
The Railway Children
, until she relented and said, “You must never, never, never ask strangers to give you things. Now, always remember that—won’t you?” and I wanted to be able to laugh because the words sounded so funny in her German accent. On my own, I washed and pulled out the bath plug, leaving a soapy tidemark which I didn’t clean. I dressed in my bedroom and leaned out of the window, over the glasshouse.

I could see my father’s knees and calves, hairy and brown, his shoes flat on the dusty ground. Oliver’s legs in jeans, at the other end of the seat, were splayed wide, in the way that some men sit. As I watched, my father opened his legs too.

“I’ve finished,” I shouted down in a voice that was so full of resentment, I was sure my father must notice.

Oliver stood up and stretched. “I could do with a shower. It’s so damn hot in this country. Why do the English still only have baths?” He pulled at the front of his shirt, and I caught a glimpse of blond hair against brown chest.

“Well, I’m going first,” said my father. He pushed past Oliver and charged across the patio toward the house. Oliver gave a whoop of delight, lobbed his cigarette into the flower bed, and raced after my father. I saw them running through the glasshouse, and heard them bursting into the sitting room and chasing each other up the stairs, laughing and swearing. I stood in my bedroom doorway as they stumbled and careered past, Oliver tackling my father, leaping over him into the bathroom, and locking the door. My father came into my room, panting and smiling. He sat on the edge of my bed.

“It’ll be nice to sleep on a proper mattress with sheets, won’t it, Peggy?” he said.

I shrugged.

“Come on, it’ll be fun having Oliver around. You’ll see.” He nudged me, gave me a tickle, then picked up a pillow and biffed me around the head with it, so that I fell backward, laughing. I snatched another pillow and went to whack him with it, but he was already standing, already leaving the room. I heard him bang on the bathroom door.

“Don’t be long,” he called to Oliver, and went into his bedroom.

I lay back on my bed and put the pillow over my head so that the house was quiet, as if no one were there; as if
all human life had disappeared in an instant. I imagined the blackberry’s tendrils continuing their reconnoitre of the upper terraces of the garden and reaching the house, crawling on their bellies—army-style—under the doors. The ivy which grew up the exterior wall would ease itself inside and spread like a green rash across the ceilings. And the bay tree, standing in the front garden, would stretch long, tenacious root-fingers into the sitting room, lifting and buckling the parquet. I wished I could fall asleep, cradled in the middle of the vegetation, and not wake for a hundred years.

It was airless under the pillow, so after a while I flung it off and ran downstairs and outside. Oliver had left his newsletter on the swing seat. I picked it up and went down to the bottom of the garden where the fire still smouldered. I held a corner of the paper against an ember, blowing on it until the fire caught, then laid the pages flat so the flames licked across them until they had transformed into black flakes. I looked at the squirrels. They were where I had left them, beside the fire. They could have been two miniature men, sunning themselves side by side—lying on their backs with their white tummies showing. I gave them a shove with my toe and thought about how dinner wasn’t going to be ready for hours.

Our camp was abandoned when Oliver arrived. We moved back into the house without any discussion. We made toast with white sliced bread that my father bought, along with Oliver’s cigarettes from the corner shop, or heated tins of steak pie and peas we chose from the shelves in the fallout shelter. Each day, the sun leached more colour from the tent that we had left to sag in the garden, and the ground around it dried and cracked into tiny ravines.

On the third afternoon of Oliver’s visit, the doorbell rang. I was spooning mouthfuls of Sugar Puffs at the kitchen table and watching two flies circle in the thick heat. Every time their paths crossed, they buzzed at each other in irritation. I had to unstick my legs to raise myself off my chair and so Oliver, with only an orange towel around his waist, got to the front door before me. I hung back at the end of the hall, waiting to see who the visitor was.

“Hi,” said Oliver in a way that roused my curiosity and made me want to see beyond his body to the doorstep.

“Oh,” said the person. “Hello.” The voice, a girl’s, hesitated. “Is Peggy in?”

“Come in,” said Oliver, then turned back into the house and yelled, “Peggy!”

I saw Becky standing on the doorstep at the same time as Oliver saw me loitering near the kitchen.

“You’ve got a visitor,” he called to me. “Come in, come in,” he said to Becky.

He held the door open and she walked past him, wide-eyed and smiling but looking at anything except the unknown semi-naked man in my house. Oliver followed her into the kitchen and went to the sink.

“Either of you kids want some water?”