Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel

by Claire Fuller

  In that second of doubt, when I was shocked at how my previous life had disappeared so easily, my father grabbed the spyglass from my hand. Without thinking, just like after the fire, I made a fist and punched him. This time the blow was weak, pathetic; it glanced off his chest, but it was enough to make him strike back. The end of the metal tube clipped my eyebrow, splitting the skin. I cried out as blood flowed into my eye and down the side of my nose. My father stepped forward—I knew it was to say sorry—but I pressed my hand against my head and turned to run. I ran to the forest and kept going, even when he called after me. I scrambled blindly up through the trees, my tears mingling with the flow of blood, and climbed the mountain, smearing mucus over the tufts of grass I used to pull myself upward. When I reached the platform where we had flown the kite, I shaded my eyes with my hands and stared across the river to the mountain on the other side. As my father had said, there were only trees: trees and dark clouds rolling in over the top of the ridge, which drew a line along the edge of my world.

  I sat there for a long time, watching for a puff of smoke or the movement of a man, but there was nothing. The midday sun passed overhead, and as I stumbled back down the sky grew darker and the first drops of rain fell. By the time I was walking through the forest to the nest, the rain was falling in sheets, so that it was hard to see farther than a step or two ahead. As I crawled inside, I heard my father calling my name again—his voice muffled and distant because of the rain. I curled up on the moss with an empty stomach, avoiding the water where it came in through the ferns, and hoped that I would die before morning, thinking how that would serve my father right.

  I tried to sleep, but the rain grew even heavier and the moss spongy, and no matter where I lay, muddy water soaked into my clothes. There were few other noises apart from the constant pouring, just the occasional scuttlings and crawlings that kept my eyes and ears straining into the darkness. The rain continued to pound, and after a while I thought I could hear another noise, a rushing of water and trees creaking and complaining. There was a crash somewhere up the mountain behind me, one that shook the ground under my body, a second’s gap of rain, and another thump and another, then wood splitting and breaking and a huge lumbering, trampling noise coming toward me down the mountain. There was a kind of breathless panting and I realized it was me. The blood pumped in my throat. I was ready to run or to face the thing coming. It was a monster about to pounce, claws out, teeth sharp. I scrabbled against the boggy floor and had just stuck my head out of the entrance when a final terrifying crash, travelling through the ground into my bones, came from behind and a boulder bigger than the nest dropped into the forest in front of me. It was followed by a shower of smaller rocks, which fell through the leaves into the nest, and all I could do was curl into a ball and cover my head. When the storm of stones had died away, the monochrome forest swayed, settled, and shifted in its sleep.

  I walked for the rest of the night, shivering until the rain stopped. I was determined never to go back to my father. When daylight broke, I hid behind a tree and watched the smoke rise from our chimney into a blue sky and smelled breakfast on the stove. Eventually, the door opened and my father appeared. He looked lean and wiry from a distance, his beard ragged and his long black hair a receding tide which had left behind an exposed beach of tanned forehead. He walked behind the cabin and called for me, and again, farther off.

  When I judged it safe, I ran across the clearing and into die Hütte. I stood at the stove and ate acorn porridge straight from the pan, scalding my mouth. The place was different after a night away—smaller, darker—but it smelled like home. I gathered a few special things together into my rucksack, but the spyglass was gone and I didn’t see it again until the summer was over.

  I stood on tiptoe beside my favourite wintereye, and where the three branches soared upward from the main trunk I felt with my fingers the basin of tepid water that the tree kept in its secret heart. In this scant pool I placed a squirrel’s skull. Last autumn, just to see what was inside, I had boiled the animal’s head until the flesh fell away and every tooth shone white. After the skull went a magpie’s feather—dark with a smear of blue, like petrol on a puddle. And lastly a dark hair, which I had unwound from the long-broken comb. It made me think of Becky’s hair tied behind her unaged face. To me, Becky was eight.

  It was right to give my treasures to the forest to thank it for keeping me safe from the boulder and to ask for something, anything, different to happen. After I had given the gifts to the tree, I walked a diagonal line across the forest. The early summer sun was already warm, and the dappled shade the trees gave was a relief. Making up the rules as I went along, I ignored the deer paths and walked straight through the undergrowth, over rotten logs, scratching my legs and arms on brambles and thistles. I picked up a stick and beat them back. When the forest thinned, but before the leaf mulch had disappeared, I stopped under a tree we called a gribble. It was my second favourite tree in the forest, after the wintereye, because it stood alone, sad-looking, its trunk bowed under the weight of a bad haircut. In autumn it was covered in miniature apples. Every time they appeared I couldn’t resist tasting one, but the sourness always dried the roof of my mouth and snarled my lips, and I had to spit it out, disappointed.

  With a flint I had taken from the shelf, I dug a neat pit under the gribble, about the size of my clenched fist. From my pocket, I took Phyllis’s head. I stroked her hair, pushing it away from her face, and gave her a kiss on her forehead. I placed her head in the hole and dusted it with soil, wishing she had the kind of eyes that fell closed when her face was tipped up. Even though I no longer played with her, her head was the hardest object to sacrifice and prising it from her neck had made my eyes sting with tears. I hadn’t been able to look at her headless body and so had tucked it away under the floorboards where we kept the seeds we gathered at the end of each summer. Once Phyllis was sprinkled with earth, I filled in the hole and laid two twigs on top, one over the other, in the shape of a cross.

  Next, I walked a trail from the buried head, downhill to the river, to form a triangle of offerings. For most of the way I followed a deer track, until I came to the clearing. This I ran across, crouching low and scurrying more than running, in case my father was in die Hütte. The summer river disturbed me; even though it was shallower and gentler than its winter cousin, I couldn’t look at the constant movement or shake off the feeling that the water was pretending to be serene with nowhere in particular to go and nothing much to do. Just under the surface it lived and breathed—malevolent and cunning.

  In my pocket I had a leaf taken from the wintereye and another I had plucked from the gribble. Holding one in each hand, I stumbled across the muddy pebbles to the river’s edge where my father fished. Tensed and holding my breath I stretched out over the water and placed both leaves on the surface and let them go. The current took them, like it had once taken me.

  “Take my love to Ute,” I called out after them, even though I knew she was dead and they would never reach her. The water danced with the leaves and spun them until they must have been dizzy and disoriented. I ran alongside calling out again, “Take my love to Ute.” With a sudden eddy they were sucked down and out of sight, as though a hand had pulled them into a watery grave. I backed away onto the bank, frightened that the same fingers would reach out for my ankles.

  As I scrambled back through the grass, I saw something lodged in the bank under the bushes—the toe of a shoe or a boot, sticking out of the mud. With a cry, I thought that all the wishing and thinking and offerings had been wasted. The river had already taken Reuben, swallowed him whole and left his bones in the earth, before I had a chance even to meet him. I tugged at the dark toe with both hands and dug around it with the flint that was still in my pocket. I imagined Reuben’s sock tucked inside the boot, his leg and the rest of his body brown and leathery, preserved by the mud, like the Tollund Man, remembered from school. I pulled again at the slippery toe, and with a sucking belch the
mud let it go and I fell backward. It was empty and it was my shoe—the one I had lost when I first crossed the river. I sat cradling it with relief and sure that magical, incredible things would happen now. I wiped the mud from the heel and saw again the leaping cat.

  I held my re-found shoe close to my chest and followed the flow of the river, planning to walk as far as I could until the mountain stopped me. I was dawdling, daydreaming about new green laces, when I saw the man.

  20

  London, November 1985

  When I reached the hall I heard the key lid open as someone clunked it against the piano frame, and I knew it couldn’t be Ute. Oskar sat at the piano, his hands poised, ready to play.

  “Either come in and close the door or go away,” he said, putting on a cross face.

  I went in. “What are you doing?” I whispered. “She’ll kill you.”

  He gave up the artificial frown and moved along the stool so I could slide in beside him.

  “I learned this at school. If she can’t be bothered to teach me, I’ll have to teach myself. Do you want me to show you?” Without waiting for my answer, he continued, “Curl up all your fingers except these two.” He pointed his index fingers side by side, like Peter and Paul in the nursery rhyme. I copied him, hiding a smile to keep my secret.

  “Your job is to play these two notes.” He put my fingers on F and G. His hands felt cool and were already as big as mine. “You have to press the notes six times. OK?”

  I pressed the keys just hard enough to hear the noise of the hammer on the string. It might have been the first time I had made a piano produce a real sound.

  “No, not yet,” he said. “Not until I’ve counted to six. And do it quietly.”

  Oskar spread out his fingers and started to play. Looking at him, nodding his head, biting his bottom lip, pleased me. He gave an extra-deep nod, but I was too busy watching his face.

  “Where were you?” Oskar said. “You have to be ready. After six.”

  I nodded.

  We were clumsy and halting, but we were making music; under my fingers’ instructions, just two at a time, the piano answered. When we had played six notes he stopped.

  “Why are you making that noise?” he said.

  “What noise?”

  “You were doing a weird kind of singing.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I think it might sound better if you didn’t.” He took hold of my fingers again. “Now you have to move your left finger down one, and keep your right in the same place, and play these notes six times.”

  We were out of sync with each other, but it didn’t seem to bother Oskar. He showed me four more notes.

  “Do you think you can remember? Four lots of six.”

  We started again from the beginning, with much more head nodding. Oskar stared at both his hands with intense concentration, but still his left was always a little behind his right.

  “I think you might have got it,” he said.

  We played the duet a few times, each round faster, until we didn’t stop in between but performed the sequence again and again, until one of us went wrong and we stopped, out of breath and laughing.

  “Once more!” I yelled, and we began thumping the piano as hard and as fast as we could, without thinking about the noise. After a couple of minutes Ute flung the sitting-room door open, her hands tucked inside oven gloves.

  “‘Chopsticks’!” she shouted. “On the Bösendorfer!”

  “Oh, Mum,” Oskar yelled back, standing up and pushing the stool with his legs, making it scrape the floor again. “Nobody has fun in this house.” He stormed past her and out of the room, leaving me sitting alone.

  Ute came to the piano. “If you would like to learn I will arrange lessons for you.” She took the oven gloves off and started to lower the lid so I had no choice but to withdraw my fingers. “Lunch in five minutes,” she said over her shoulder, and went back to the kitchen.

  I laid my forehead on the polished wood, closed my eyes, and remembered the piano my father had made, how much effort had gone into its creation, the wood turning greasy from my fingers, the pebble weights coming loose and falling between the floorboards, the song of La Campanella etched into my every cell. I sat up and opened the key lid again and traced the gold lettering of the word Bösendorfer with the fingers of my right hand. My left hand settled into a familiar arrangement on the keys, and when the tip of my finger reached the curlicue of the final r, my right hand joined my left.

  It didn’t feel as if I was doing the pressing, but more like I was sitting at a pianola, the ivory moving by itself, following the pattern of holes punched in a paper roll located somewhere deep inside the mechanism, and I was following along. My left hand played the first three notes, and my right, the high echo; then one low, two high, repeated; then the slightest of pauses.

  “Lunch!” Ute called from the kitchen.

  The spell was broken and the music stopped. I heard Oskar clatter down the stairs two at a time like I used to, his empty stomach overriding his brief argument with Ute.

  “Peggy, lunch!” Ute called again.

  I closed the piano and went into the kitchen.

  21

  The man was hunkered down under the trees, his head in profile. At first I mistook him for a boulder, not one which had rolled off the mountain in the recent rainstorm, but a rock which had lain in place for years, while the undergrowth had grown up around it and its surface had become mottled with orange and green lichen. I froze midstep, my heart hammering. I watched him with wide eyes, waiting to see his next move before I made mine.

  He had separated the wet grass and ferns like a pair of curtains and was peering intently forward through the gap. I had longed for this, offered up gifts for it, but now I wanted nothing more than to run back to die Hütte, even though my father’s responses were likely to include grabbing the axe and hunting the man down, or setting the forest alight to smoke him out. I moved one leg up and backward. But before my foot had even touched the ground, the man took his hands out from the grass and slowly, deliberately, turned his head toward me, as if he had always known I would be there. Shaggy hair hung down to his shoulders and his beard flowed over the front of his green and orange plaid shirt like a swarm of honeybees. His look was plaintive, as though he might be about to cry at what he had seen through the grass, but later I came to know this as his natural expression—melancholic, as if a terrible tragedy had happened that he couldn’t bear to speak of. Everything about his face flowed downward: his eyes, his mouth, even his thick, untrimmed moustache.

  He lifted a finger to his lips and at the same time cocked his head, beckoning me with it. I stayed where I was, almost tempted to glance behind me to check that he wasn’t nodding to someone else. He repeated the twitch of his head, and without waiting to see if I would come, he parted the grass again with his hands and stared through it. Gingerly, I went forward. If he had turned his head toward me once more, I’m sure I would have bolted, but the intensity of his stare beyond the grass drew me on. I walked toward him and crouched down beside him. He smelled different from me and my father. His scent was of the woods—bonfires, autumn berries, and leather, and underneath, something sweet: soap, perhaps. Tucked under his bent legs were the boots, damp again and creased across the toes. He still didn’t acknowledge that I was there; he just spread the grass wider, so I could see what he was looking at. Amongst trampled ferns, a doe licked her newborn fawn, still slippery with blood and membranes. The mother’s thick tongue lapped over the baby, cleaning and checking. She raised her head and fixed her large brown eyes on us, but in the same way that the man I squatted beside had looked at me, the doe took us both in and carried on with her work. She nudged the fawn with her nose, encouraging it to stand. It staggered to its feet and the man withdrew his arms from the gap and let the grass fall back into place.

  “I think that, just now, we are not wanted there,” he said, standing up and stretching as though he might have been crouching for
hours. It shocked me to hear another human voice in the forest, one that wasn’t mine or my father’s. I wanted him to carry on talking so I would know we weren’t alone. He reached his arms high over his head and cracked his elbows. He seemed to go on forever, and I thought that when he had come into die Hütte to carve his name beside the stove, he would have had to dip his head under the door lintel to get in. I stood too and stared up at him as he yawned. His beard opened up a pink hole in the middle of his face, and I looked away, embarrassed.

  “You’re Punzel, aren’t you?” Then he held out his hand and said, “Reuben.”

  Awkwardly, I shook it, as I had shaken the survivalists’ hands when I had greeted them at our London door. He was younger than I had first thought, his face less weathered and creased than my father’s, whose skin had become leathery from his time spent in the sun and the wind. Reuben smiled, and the exposed cheeks above his beard shaped themselves into pouches.

  “You have the dirtiest face I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  He reached his hand out toward my temple, and I realized I still hadn’t washed off the blood from yesterday or the mud from the river. He looked down to where I clasped my shoe to my chest.

  “That’s an odd thing for a girl to be carrying around a forest. Do you want to clean it? And your face?”

  I hesitated, and as if he understood my reluctance, he said, “Not in the river. We can go to the gill.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer but walked off, away from the deer and her fawn, seeming to assume I would follow. I stood looking at his retreating back, then went after him. He seemed to know the forest as well as I did, striding along the same trails I used every day, and I wondered again how he could have been here without me seeing him. In the middle of the wintereyes he headed right and uphill, passing within a few feet of the nest.