The End We Start From

by Megan Hunter

  * * *

  Z is trying to roll over, already. It looks like someone trying to turn over a car with their bare hands. Impossible.

  Sometimes mothers develop superhuman powers when their children are in danger. It is called hysterical strength.

  * * *

  Z refuses to sleep in his cot. There are only single beds here, so we share one, Z hooped in the arc of my arm or lying splayed on my stomach.

  When R leaves people begin to speak to me. Spooning porridge into our mouths, still crusty-eyed and climbing out of dreams. Another woman with a baby on her lap. Brown hair and sunken features. P.

  It is hard to get used to listening again. The first few times I hear nothing but a rush in my ears, like holding up a shell.

  P asks me about R. I tell her about his time away, and she nods. She lost hers south of the border.

  In the disturbances, she says. This is one of the words people use.

  Her baby looks grotesquely large to me, with a huge head and completely erect body. He is eight months old.

  * * *

  Z wakes up to feed approximately thirty-eight times in the night. I wonder what this can mean.

  Every time: a small, fumbling race to his mouth before the scream.

  The gasping latch, and his breathing slows in the dark. The world inflates and deflates with him, a giant bellows.

  Out: to the hills that surround our squared camp. To the border. To whatever is left.

  In: past the dampening tent. Past each bulked mound around us, each collection of breath.

  * * *

  I have noticed that P sits with a group of other women at lunchtime. They all have babies.

  In London mothers formed into clubs when pregnant, then marched around in their groups after the birth, swerving their pneumatic buggies around our feet.

  I would never be like them, I promised myself.

  * * *

  When I was four or five my neighbour and I filled water bombs and adopted them as our children.

  We stroked their transparent blue or green stomachs. Gave them names and wrapped them in hand towels. Drew faces on, two eyes and a semicircle.

  * * *

  I go and sit with them. They are the husbandless. They are the milk drippers, the exhausted ones, with hair streaked with grey and rips in the knees of their jeans.

  Z bares his gums and waves a teaspoon around. This is the extremity of his social aptitude.

  O, a woman with a large, kind-looking nose, is almost hit by the spoon. She doesn’t mind.

  How old is he? she asks, and this is how it begins.

  * * *

  At the toddler group there are more toys than Z has ever seen in his life. He seems delighted, gurning over the colours and shapes, hauling everything towards the abyss of his mouth.

  I am giving him a normal childhood, I think to myself.

  * * *

  They start to make the porridge with water. There is no milk to add. We know better than to complain, but it is oddly close to gruel, to the stuff I shoved at my classmates on Victorians Day.

  Lunch becomes a thin soup. One slice of bread each.

  The only real meal comes in the evening.

  At night, my stomach reaches up to ask for more.

  * * *

  Bye, Baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, I sing to Z.

  I imagine R alone on the beach in front of a newly raised-up, swirling sea. People say they can sense when a missing person is still alive, and I try this with all my might.

  * * *

  The first one’s bones were made of branches, his blood of rivers, his eyes of moons, his spirit of fire.

  * * *

  People have started to leave, packing their bags quietly, as though no one will notice. This should mean more for us, but others arrive daily, filling the shelters with their breath and pains.

  * * *

  When I was six the neighbour’s goat had kids. Two of them, delicately different, with tiny, chalky horns and wobbling legs. The neighbour girl and I gave them bottles.

  Or that’s what I remember, anyway. Tucking the rubber teat between the long, hairy lips. Trying to look into button-slit eyes.

  * * *

  One day Z finally does it. I have placed him on the bed for three minutes while I put our things away. Nothing can be left out here.

  He chooses these three minutes, from all the minutes of our life, to master his latest milestone.

  He flips off the bed and onto the floor, crushing his triumph under a wall of crying, a never-ending hurling of his disappointment at the universe.

  I am a terrible mother, I think, nestling his unbroken body into my own. P comes, and O, and they tell me no. It happens to everyone.

  * * *

  The lone lines on pregnancy tests looked like failure, a singular plainness.

  I thought I was pregnant every single time. I would test the soreness of my breasts with the tops of my arms at work, squeezing them as I typed.

  One month, the faintest of lines on a supermarket test. Then, days later, the blood, like a sickness, a burial.

  I mourned it, kept one hand over my fruitless middle.

  * * *

  After the eighth cycle of hope and weeping into R’s silent chest I went online. I needed my people, the other ones. I found them in forums with purple font on a pink background.

  I found the stories I needed. I found a new language. The day mrsjackal79 got her BFP (Big Fat Positive). She had cooked a casserole. She had gas. A stronger sense of smell. I stalked through these pretty narratives, looking for my own symptoms.

  I longed for these women’s kitchens. For their American hobbies, their deep-fried chicken and quilts. These women drove big cars. They had big husbands who were trying to impregnate them. They were succeeding.

  * * *

  People I know start to leave. P leaves. She says there is a better camp, with more food, forty miles north. She has been offered a lift.

  O does not leave. She moves into our shelter, five beds away.

  Her baby, C, is the same age as Z. We pretend they are interested in each other.

  * * *

  After the twenty-fourth cycle of faux-nausea, of imagining the taste of coins and kicks like butterfly wings, R agreed to see a doctor.

  The doctor told us we had little hope, without donors, operations, pumpings of drugs.

  The next month, I had no symptoms. When my period was two weeks late, I took a test: hopelessly, casually, with professional ease.

  The second line showed immediately, like a voice out loud.

  * * *

  I cannot leave, I tell O. I have to wait for R.

  The first properly cold night. I cover Z with breath all the way through. Hot potatoes.

  Then, some news. An actual announcement in the catering tent. I drop a small amount of porridge on Z’s head. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  * * *

  We are told not to panic, the most panic-inducing instruction known to man.

  The quiet packers turn into noisy packers. Into evangelical packers.

  I overhear clippings, confused whispers: incursion, interruption, increase. A quickness over the hill, the hills turned quick, coming towards us.

  We are too close to the border here, O says. She and C have the same expression, all pursed lips and eyes thick with something I can’t work out.

  * * *

  When I was pregnant I kept expecting it to drop out of me, to fall into the shaking waters of a public toilet, or just slide down my trousers one day at work.

  It wasn’t until I was lumbering with it, cowboy-legged, that I believed in a baby.

  * * *

  There are buses to take us further north, if we want. Village buses, with fuzzy multi-coloured seats.

  I search for the car the whole way there. I think, if I see R, I will jump from the bus and wave my arms.

  This is a bad plan, but I have nothing else. Z and C sleep. O stares out of the window until her ey
es shut themselves.

  She flickers through her dreams in a way I recognize. We have learnt to stay half awake, like horses sleeping standing up. Hysterical strength.

  I watch. Not a single car passes by.

  vi.

  In the mornings the sun comes in like any other day. O tells me to remember: the sun has no idea what happened.

  She finds this reassuring. I don’t.

  I find O reassuring, with her hook nose, her round hips. She has kept those, when everywhere people have started to look like models, all visible angles.

  They are envied, those hips, and somehow hopeful: a sign of the past among us.

  O has ideas too, not just hips, and she pours them into my ear when it gets dark.

  This is what I sensed in her: plan-making, strategy. It makes her blood like syrup, slow with all the thoughts.

  She is like R in this way. I lace my fingers in hers and tell her no. Good ideas, but no.

  * * *

  The fifth world is a place you cannot imagine, reached through the bubbles of the first lake. We will all be led there – not yet, but tomorrow.

  * * *

  Me, Z, O, C. We half-sleep in a row, the babies suckered onto our nipples. They are six months old.

  They have learnt to sit up here, in this place of not-enough. They have straightened their backs. They have started to grab at our bread.

  * * *

  We have possibly come too far for R to find us. Across valleys, up hills covered in trees. But maybe he can plot our route, like a child’s pirate map, from there to here. Small red dashes.

  Here is the poor relation of there, with facilities so basic we laugh at our previous ignorant luck. Maybe this will be the way it goes, from now. Every few months fresh knowledge of the past, of how good it was compared to the present.

  What shall I say? It is dull-cold. This has become one thing, the chill and the boredom seeping into everything, invisible and everywhere.

  It is enough for us to be intact, we realize. To have all of our limbs. To be conscious. To still have milk in our breasts.

  * * *

  We have made a discovery: the maths is in our favour.

  I can stay with both babies, and O can queue with her old donated toothbrush, her allocated disc of soap.

  I wipe bottoms times two, I keep tiny things from four hands, I play games with twenty puffed toes.

  * * *

  We put the babies on a blanket together and lower our faces into theirs. We sing to them until someone tells us to shut the fuck up.

  We take their nappies off and let them kick, their legs like cloth in old paintings, every fold as clear and stark as a line of ink.

  There is nothing but this, their small bodies, time sliding now, losing form, turning one day into the next.

  * * *

  We talk through it. We pass our stories like spare change.

  O used to be an English teacher in Surrey. She was separated from her partner quickly, in the first few weeks. She has nearly always been a single mother.

  I tell her about R, whose eyes have arrived in Z’s head. I tell her how we met, how quickly we fell into bed.

  I find myself wanting to give her the details: how delicious his mouth was to me, like sweets. The hollow in his chest that gave just enough space for a head to rest.

  O points out that I am using the past tense.

  * * *

  We leave on a grey morning when the children have caught irritation from each other like a disease. They gnaw on their fingers. They squirm against our arms. They drip clear, stretchy fluid from their mouths.

  * * *

  Two men – D and L – are setting off, and O tells me we are going too. Golden opportunity, she sells me. The chance of petrol.

  We are inches from them, these strange D and L men. I have another plan, involving grabbing the steering wheel.

  Their skin is outside-raw and sore-looking, with straggling beards growing into patches of red. Compared to Z’s silken orb cheeks they look fifty years old, but they are young.

  They joke with each other like five-year-olds, the tic of nerves familiar beneath each jibe.

  O thinks the babies make us non-women, as far as these men are concerned. She thinks they make us safe.

  * * *

  Somewhere towards the base D’s neck looks soft. He tells us about his life before.

  I was in advertising, he says. We are used to these terms, to the young using the language of the retired.

  He talks about the crazy commute and the guys, the nights out and the return to his flat, quiet and waiting for him.

  His words take form in the landscape we pass, wrap themselves like gauze around trees, settle on abandoned houses, new cobwebs.

  A checkpoint.

  How easily we have got used to it all, as though we knew what was coming all along.

  * * *

  A secret: I thought having a baby would stop the fear.

  When I was a child, my mother told me she would die for me, of course.

  I asked her all the time. Tested her.

  The fear of ending woke me up, it choked me. It rendered me incapable. I thought a baby would stop it. Give me something to die for.

  * * *

  I want to write about the checkpoint quickly. Get it over with.

  Theyforceusoutofthecarbabieswillmakeussafedoesn’tseemtruetheyareroughwithusandtheysearchustheymakeustakeourclothesoff.

  * * *

  The young men are boys, I see now. Their skin is bright white in the wind.

  * * *

  Then they saw an angel standing in the light of the sun with his arms outstretched. He called to all the birds that fly, and they came.

  * * *

  We stop for the night at an empty house. We all sleep in one room without even thinking about it.

  We do not want to explore, to look through the drawers of someone who has fled.

  We do not want to imagine the fleeing, or the reasons why.

  In twenty-four hours, I have started to love D and L. They sleep deeply.

  * * *

  We don’t tell them about the boat until the last possible moment. It is O’s information, her possession, a friend of hers from teacher training college.

  Contacts, networking, people who might do it. Share.

  * * *

  O and I have started knowing each other’s thoughts. She thinks it is coming through the milk.

  Sometimes I sleep with both babies, a twin-mum, turning from one side to the other. Their sucks are almost identical.

  C used to do it harder, before we all started to smell the same.

  * * *

  I am not sure if R would approve. I do not know where he would approve from, or if approving still exists.

  He is in another dimension, is all I can think. A pixelated world, perhaps. Or a galaxy of blue-black, floating slowly out to space.

  * * *

  When I was a child we had knives in a row, lightly stuck to a magnetic strip on the kitchen wall. A gash in the linoleum where one fell, once.

  I wondered if I would clamber for the knives, without knowing it. If I might do it in my sleep.

  I wondered if I might put one into myself, in the smother of night, in the huge dark space that followed bedtime.

  * * *

  We ask D and L to drive us to the coast, and for a day or two it is close to something like a holiday. A Scottish holiday, with a rushing sea and the sky filled with clouds dense as drapery.

  The beaches are empty, of course. We remember that this used to be a good thing.

  * * *

  I have read that, when someone knows they are going to die, the world becomes acutely itself.

  * * *

  Z likes it when L holds him under his arms, his round belly bulging out like a friar. He digs his toes into the sand and lights his smile into me. He bounces as though the earth were made of rubber.

  * * *

  This is the place for the ones who have died
in rain, or lightning, or from diseases of the skin. It is a place of flowers, and of dancing.

  * * *

  Telling them is O’s idea. She is better than me.

  They have given us a share of their food. We had a little to add, all the way back from R’s stash. But mainly we have taken.

  We are four now, truly, the babies eating from our plates, gumming cold beans down and letting them swell back up again as we try not to wince at the waste.

  It was unclear from the beginning what we added. Baby-flesh as repellent worked. Or L and D are good boys. Definitely this.

  So we tell them. But not until we see it coming towards us like an alien craft, the only thing out there, a spot on the endless blank.

  * * *

  When you have a child, the fear is transferred, my mother could have told me.

  In a way, it is multiplied, she could have said.

  * * *

  D and L do not want to come.

  For a rare moment O and I are speechless, each holding the other’s baby, splashes of colour on the black and white of sea and sand.

  The boat comes as close as it can.

  We roll our clothes up and walk in. The sea streams into every part of my head.

  C’s arms are around my neck. I lower my face to her skin-silk. I breathe it all in.

  vii.

  The water reminds Z of where he came from.

  He is the most comfortable person on the boat, his softness slouching against mine, the rocking motion undulating his cheeks.

  The others watch him hungrily, as though they can catch his contentment.

  C cannot stand it. She lets her cries stream straight from her mouth to the sea. O has learnt to hold her due south. We can still hear her, but the sound flows behind us this way. Like an engine.

  * * *

  D and L waved at us until we couldn’t see them any more, the only people against the straight lines of earth and tide.

  For a few miles, I keep expecting their limbs to surface from the waves, creamy white and searching.

  * * *

  The sun glares, droops and Z naps, his head tucked under my chin. Soon, we are night sailing.

  This is the closest you can get to it: the void, the nothing, the black lapping mouth of the sea and the black arching back of the sky.

  The stars seem to mean something now. They are maps.

  Z likes the darkness, as well as the water. He opens his eyes into it.