The Shadow Year (10 page)

‘What do we do now?’

‘Stand back,’ says Mac, and he bends down, removes the hook from the fish’s rubbery mouth and then, before she can say another word, he grabs a heavy wooden stick lying on the bottom of the boat and clobbers the creature over the head. One sharp blow and the fish is still.

‘Oh,’ says Kat, horrified. ‘Couldn’t you have left it? It would have died soon enough.’

‘Kinder this way,’ says Mac with a shrug, and he looks up at her, his face transformed by the curve of his grin and the fish blood splattered across his left cheek and dripping like a crimson tear from the corner of one eye. ‘One more that size and we’ll have supper sorted. Well done.’

Kat can’t help it; despite her lingering revulsion at the violence of it all, she feels something else welling within her: a warm flush of pride.

The crickets are in full song as they gather around the campfire that evening. They fry the perch over the flames with wild sorrel Mac has uncovered in the woods and eat it straight from the pan, the fish melting like butter in their mouths.

Kat watches her friends hunched over their plates, cramming the fish she caught only hours earlier into their bellies and she can’t stop her mouth twisting into a smile. ‘What?’ asks Ben, catching her eye. ‘Is there something on my face?’ He rubs at his scruffy goatee.

‘No,’ she laughs. ‘It’s just this.’ She gestures around them. ‘This place.’

Simon turns to her. ‘What about it?’

‘It’s even better than I thought it would be.’ Simon eyes her for a moment and then nods. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt so at home somewhere,’ she adds quietly. ‘It really feels as though it was meant to be, doesn’t it?’ and he nods again and returns her smile.

After they have picked the last of the fish bones clean, Simon leans back against the grassy slope and eyes them all. ‘I think we should make some plans,’ he says. ‘Summer has been kind but the days are growing shorter already.’

‘Uh-oh,’ jokes Carla, ‘it’s time for a serious-Simon talk.’

He smiles, but he isn’t deterred. ‘Things are only going to get harder . . . and colder and if we’re still here by winter – which I hope we will be – food will become more scarce.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ asks Ben, reaching for his pouch of tobacco and cigarette papers.

‘We need to set up a food store. We could start with the garden. I know it hasn’t been tended in a while and there’s a lot that’s gone to seed, but there are still things we can eat. We should harvest what we can now, before it spoils or the birds and snails get to it.’

‘But what about everything we lugged up here when we moved in? I still can’t see how we’ll ever get through those huge sacks of flour, rice and sugar.’

‘If we rely solely on that I can assure you we’ll have nothing come October but really bad scurvy. We can’t go running to the village shop every time we need a loaf of bread or a box of cereal. The less we do to draw attention to ourselves the better. Besides, if the weather turns bad – if a tree comes down across that track, or if we get snowed in – we wouldn’t be able to go anywhere.’

‘That’s true,’ admits Kat.

‘And there are other things to think about. We’ll need firewood, lots of it. We need to start stockpiling for winter.’

‘We need chickens, too,’ says Mac.

Carla laughs. ‘Chickens?’

‘Yes,’ says Simon, ‘we need chickens. For eggs, meat too, if we get desperate.’

Mac nods. ‘I can make a chicken coop.’

‘Is there no end to this boy’s talents?’ jokes Ben, putting the flame of a lighter to his roll-up.

Simon ignores him. ‘And we need to start hunting and foraging. Every day. Some things we can store – apples, root vegetables, nuts – things that won’t spoil. We can dry herbs. The supplies that won’t keep we should consider trying to stew or preserve. I found a load of old glass jars stacked up inside the lean-to. We can use those.’

Kat looks at Carla and rolls her eyes. ‘I suppose that will be our job.’

‘Not necessarily,’ says Simon. ‘We don’t have to fall into gender stereotypes here.
We
set the rules, remember?’

‘So we really are going to live off the land?’ asks Ben. ‘I always just thought that was just a bit of a joke. I’m perfectly happy with my cornflakes and instant mash.’

‘No,’ says Simon firmly. ‘I’m not saying we won’t need to visit a shop once in a while, but our money isn’t going to last long if we fritter it away on unnecessary groceries. No more boxes of cereal. No more biscuits and coffee and hair conditioner.’ He looks pointedly at Carla. ‘We need to adapt, make-do. We’ve been lucky. It’s been three weeks and no one has found us yet but we shouldn’t get cavalier.’ He looks around at them all in turn. ‘Agreed?’

There is shuffling and grumbling but they all agree.

‘We could draw up a rota,’ says Kat, ‘allocate everyone a job or two. That might be most fair?’

Ben groans. ‘Sounds to me like the holiday’s over.’

‘Maybe,’ says Simon, ‘but the most important thing is to lie low. We’ve been lucky. Let’s keep it that way. I’m not ready to go home just yet, are you?’

They shake their heads and for all the mumbling and groaning, Kat can see that they’re excited and up for the challenge that lies ahead. ‘What about Mac’s car?’ she asks. ‘It’s just sitting out there on the track. Bit of a giveaway, don’t you think?’

‘Yes,’ agrees Simon, ‘I’ve been thinking about that. We could move it into a corner of the meadow, cover it with brush or branches. Only use it when it’s absolutely necessary, ration our petrol.’

They all nod.

‘What about the bedrooms?’ Kat asks.

‘What about them?’

She swallows. ‘Well, we’ve never really allocated them. I wasn’t sure . . .’ She clears her throat, suddenly embarrassed. ‘You know . . . Ben and Carla took one of the upstairs rooms and I’m in the other . . . but it seems a bit selfish, me there on my own and you and Mac squashed downstairs.’

Simon eyes her. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘Nothing . . . I just . . .’ She flushes pink, suddenly wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. ‘I just wonder if we shouldn’t draw straws . . .’

‘But we’re a couple,’ says Carla. ‘Ben and I need our own room.’

‘I wasn’t saying . . .’ Kat swallows again. ‘Perhaps Simon and Mac should share the second bedroom and I could sleep downstairs. It’s just me, after all . . .’

Simon shrugs. ‘I don’t mind being downstairs. Do you, Mac?’

Mac shakes his head.

‘Unless one of you wants to share with Kat?’ adds Carla with a sly look.

Kat colours and shakes her head. ‘And listen to their snoring?’

‘So we’re agreed?’ asks Simon.

They nod again.

‘Good,’ says Simon, ‘tomorrow we get to work.’

‘Yes,’ agrees Ben, ‘tomorrow we work; but tonight . . .’ he adds, with a grin, ‘we party.’

He hands his still-burning roll-up to Carla then saunters to the jetty where he struts his way along the creaking boards, removing his T-shirt and shorts in an exaggerated striptease while Kat and Carla cat-call him from the shore. When he reaches the end he turns his back on them all and shimmies his pants to the floor, mooning them with his pasty buttocks in the half light. Throwing them one last glance over his shoulder, he acknowledges Carla’s wolf whistle with a low bow then dives high out over the lake, bellyflopping onto the surface of the water with a loud slap and making the rest of them groan in unison. ‘Ouch,’ laughs Simon, ‘now that’s got to hurt.’

The atmosphere in the cottage changes overnight. Whereas before they lazed around, living hand to mouth, drifting between the house and the lake like spoiled children at a summer camp, now they begin to rise earlier, waking at first light and gathering around the long table in the kitchen before heading off to complete a long list of tasks Simon has drawn up. Kat knows that for all their grumbling they are excited to be making the place their own. At first they take it in turns, each trying out different jobs, but very quickly they fall into their preferred roles.

Ben, to his surprise – and everyone else’s – assumes the role of cook. They each have a go but no one else has his deft touch with the feisty old range in the kitchen. After a few nights of sloppy stews and blackened loaves of bread still doughy in the middle, they agree it should be left to Ben. He’s the only one who seems capable of stoking the fire and producing edible meals and they are happy to agree that the kitchen should be his domain. Kat grows accustomed to seeing him sitting on the back doorstep in just his boxers and one of his florid Hawaiian shirts, smoking his joints and stroking his goatee while he appraises his marijuana plants growing on the window sill or the vat of homebrew fermenting in the larder. Carla is never far away, more often than not out in the garden with a basket over one arm, hunting for berries, hunched over flower beds or pulling up oversized stems of rhubarb, hunting for anything edible she can find. ‘You two are like a debauched Tom and Barbara Good,’ Kat jokes one afternoon.

But Carla just smiles and turns back to the garden. ‘I like it out here, it’s so peaceful.’

While Ben and Carla busy themselves in the vicinity of the cottage, Mac ventures further afield. He proves himself to be the most resourceful of them all, roaming the countryside, hardly ever returning empty-handed. No one knows quite where he goes or how he does it – no one actually bothers to ask – but more often than not he returns with prizes foraged on his travels. One afternoon it’s handfuls of earthy brown mushrooms plucked from the forest floor; another it’s a basket of tender dandelion leaves which they eat in a salad; there are wild nettles and bilberries and plump rabbits caught in his carefully laid snares which they roast over the campfire. Another morning, he rises especially early and hammers away at a pile of timber, wrapping it in chicken wire until Kat can see the definite outline of a coop take shape. Before nightfall the next day he is back at the cottage with five laying hens scratching and pecking at each other in an old wooden crate.

‘Where on earth?’ asks Carla, peering at the disgruntled birds through the slatted wood.

‘Don’t ask,’ says Mac, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. ‘I know they seem scrawny but they’re heavier than they look.’

‘Ugly things, aren’t they?’ says Kat, staring at their beady eyes and scraggy feet.

‘Doesn’t matter what they look like,’ says Mac, ‘as long as they can lay.’

She looks at him in wonder. ‘You were a wasted talent at university, you know that?’

Mac blushes at the compliment and they coax and then shove the flapping, protesting birds into their new home. Kat watches them unruffle their feathers and strut about the coop. Chickens, she thinks, whatever next?

With the other three focused on matters relating to food and provisions, Simon’s responsibilities inevitably fall to the maintenance of the place. He spends hours up the old ladder they have found lying in the long grass behind the lean-to, patching up roof tiles or fixing the guttering. He moves Mac’s car to a far corner of the overgrown meadow and covers it with an array of branches and ferns, until it is completely camouflaged from view. And every day he spends several hours collecting and chopping firewood, stacking the logs and kindling up behind the house into an ever-growing pile. Kat likes to watch him out by the lean-to; the wide swing of the axe in his hands, his shirt tied around his waist, the sheen of sweat shining on his tanned shoulders, the intense concentration on his face.

As the days pass, they each seem to fit naturally into the new set-up; it is just Kat who struggles to find her role within the group. Mac is a loner and she feels like a gooseberry in the kitchen with Ben and Carla. She’d happily spend her days with Simon but she isn’t strong enough or practical enough to help him chop wood or fix the roof, so in the end she focuses on the more basic tasks, the ones she knows she can manage.

She starts with the cottage, sweeping and scrubbing the floors, washing the grime-streaked windows and wiping down walls until the place almost gleams. She brings firewood and kindling in for the range, hammers nails into a wall by the front door for them to hang their raincoats and drags the mattresses from the bedrooms, beating them outside until the last plumes of dust have wafted away over the lake. Each new job brings her in some way closer to the cottage, helps her to see the details of the place: a whorl in the old wooden floorboards, a loose brick in the chimney breast, the curve of an iron window latch upstairs. It is hard work but she doesn’t mind it. She doesn’t mind the calluses on her hands, the dirt beneath her fingernails, the splinters and the grime. All those hours spent in lecture theatres and pondering the abstract ideas and philosophies of the world, when really Simon had been right all along: none of that matters. It’s the simple tasks, she realises, that fill her with the greatest pleasure. Laying a fire, boiling water, picking strawberries, making tea, scrawling words in a notebook or sitting upon the front step with her hands clasped around a mug and a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from her lips as the sun warms her face and the lake shimmers seductively before her. It’s these moments above all others that tell her she has made the right decision coming here.

‘This place suits you,’ Simon tells her one afternoon, regarding her from the open doorway. She is down on her hands and knees with a bucket of water scrubbing at the muddy floorboards, her hair tied up in an old scarf, the hem of her T-shirt twisted into a knot above her navel. ‘You’re different here,’ he adds.

She nods and watches as Simon uncurls his fist to reveal a cluster of blackberries lying on the palm of his hand, their juice already beginning to stain his skin.

‘They’re from the bushes up behind the house. They’re just beginning to ripen. Ben says he’s going to make a pie for Carla’s birthday tomorrow . . . maybe even some jam.’ He holds one out to her and she rises from the floor. ‘They’re sweet,’ he adds as she accepts the berry he holds to her lips, opening her mouth and then biting down, enjoying the warm syrup on her tongue. Juice trickles from her lips, making her laugh, but Simon reaches out and catches it on his fingertip, then lifts it to his own lips, a gesture so intimate it makes her blush.