Wildlife

by Fiona Wood

  I really should have been grinding the wild seeds I’d gathered and dried into a rustic flour and fashioning some unleavened bread from it on a handy flat rock. But of course I hadn’t been gathering any damn seeds. Thank god I don’t have to make my own flour. Which really is just thanks for the sheer fluke of being born into a first-world community.

  I thought of the World Vision kid we sponsor. She maybe has to grind her own flour. I know they have a well, too, so she probably has to carry water. Jesus. Okay, I know, more religious content. But seriously, some days she must feel like she got the short straw. I hope she gets to do nursing like she writes in the information sheet, and manages to get the hell out of there. Oh, you weak freak, Louisa, she might want to stay and help her community.

  Rocky goal as a game has its natural limitation, which is that your hands start to get sore.

  Soon it will be time to write to Fred, but not yet.

  The night.

  When the sun set, and the temperature dropped, it was time to think about food again. I had the special-occasion vac-sealed solo food, ravioli with bolognaise sauce. And a bag of salad and a self-saucing butterscotch pudding for dessert.

  Now, I am not afraid of the dark. I’m practical. But there is something a bit different about darkness in which you are totally alone. It is deeper, and both quieter and louder.

  All the noises have a rational source. There is no charcoal man. Or not anymore. There is no Maisy. But it is vaguely possible that you could be unlucky enough to encounter a group of hostile campers. Say, some people hunting. Drinking. What would they be hunting? Deer? Kangaroos? Rabbits?

  I’ve got my security-issue sat phone. But my outpost teacher is a five-hour walk away, not a huge amount of help should something go wrong.

  So I need to be able to trust that nothing will go wrong. It was a lot easier to live in that default mind-set before the very big thing did go wrong. Fred dying brought every possible worst-case scenario just a little closer. But to counter that, in a strange way, when the worst imaginable thing has already happened, you are somehow free to stop worrying.

  So leave me, worries, to the probably benign evening I’ve walked so far to meet.

  The stars.

  My self.

  Let me survive it. Hey, let me enjoy it.

  Too late for letter writing, no light left, and I’m stuffed.

  I climbed out of my top layer clothes, every muscle saying ouch, and got into the little tent, and into the soft sleeping bag. I let myself hear the night noises without trying to identify them or be frightened by them, and that was enough. I slept. A truly tired body does that well.

  wednesday 7 november

  The sunlight woke me early.

  Is this too basic for words? It feels good that bed happens when it’s dark, and I wake up when the sun says it’s daytime. But I didn’t have to do anything in particular, which was an amazing luxury, and I let myself drift back to sleep.

  Starving for breakfast when I woke again. I cooked bacon in a little pan on my Trangia and had it in a gigantic pita bread sandwich, with a sliced tomato and a travel sachet of barbecue sauce squeezed inside.

  I took my watch off. I was going to have a day without time, the sun my guide.

  I decided to document my area. It is encouraged.

  Wildlife: The air was full of little things I don’t see in the city. A flying bug with a bright yellow abdomen and black lace wings, black legs and head. Long-bodied black beetles with bright red legs, oh, dear, having sex on my gaiter, I was assuming they don’t usually walk around joined at their bottoms like that.

  A lacquer-backed beetle, brown with a purple tinge and perfectly glossy, like a tiny manicured fingernail. Bees. Introduced? I guess so. They were hovering around a clump of everlasting daisies. A drift of very small mauve butterflies. Black beetles with spiky backs splashed yellow and red. Pretty. I went back along the trail to where it was shady and nudged away some leaf litter with a stick.

  There I found a slater bug, but not gray or brown, or grown, or bray, the usual repertoire of slater colors. This one was vivid fire-engine red. If it stuck its head above the leaf litter, it would be a neon sign to a bird. I picked it up and marveled at its freaky beauty. Here we go, I thought. Fame at an unexpectedly early age. The Lou Bug. Louisa Slater. How would I get a significant scientific discovery documented? Mild excitement.

  In my driveling speculation, the first thing (well, second, after personal fame) I thought of was you, Fred. You would love this. You’d love it. Wish you were here. You’re such a pain in the heart.

  I made a leaf-littery fun park for my red friend in a plastic specimen box. We carry them with us in case we find anything of interest to bring back to the group for Physical World, etc. class.

  I got out my sketch pad. Drew and described my buggy finds. I’m sick of you not being here, Fred. So sick of wanting to show you stuff. Sick of restuffing it into my head that you’re not around anymore. It is like starving for a food, and remembering that it doesn’t exist.

  I guess I’ll show the slater to Michael. Sure. Why not? He’ll like it. But it is no substitute for being able to show you. Can that be quite clear?

  Part of this is that I don’t want to leave you out, and I love you by remembering you. If I don’t think of you every time there’s something important, then doesn’t that mean you are no longer important to me? And how can I let that happen when you were so very much the important one to me?

  Part of it is that you are irreplaceable. That is an immutable fact in my life. No matter how long I live.

  Touching base with you is like touching something for luck. Touching the sore spot, the tender bruise that misses you. How can I let go, let you go? Why would I want that to heal?

  The key is in my pocket. The key that locks us together somewhere on the other side of the world.

  Our, now my, photos lock us somewhere else.

  Our, now my, texts lock us again.

  But my best lock is memory. And if I don’t keep you always in my mind, won’t memory walk away? Or starve thin? Don’t memories need maintenance?

  The trouble is that keeping it alive, giving it all that energy, will, determination, stops me being alive in the present.

  I’m not stupid, I don’t need Esthers and Merills to tell me that is not a brilliant way for a sixteen-year-old to live.

  I know what you would say.

  You’d say, get on with it, Lou, m’Lou.

  There’s lots more to do than thinking about me.

  Don’t hang out somewhere that isn’t anymore.

  Don’t haunt the landlost past, you’d say.

  Read the Christina Rossetti poem again, for Chrissake, you’d say, in homage to Holden Caulfield. No one I know does that now.

  I’ve written you a hundred unsent letters.

  Maybe if I keep writing and sealing them, they can sit somewhere safely. Our story as a one-sided correspondence—I know that’s oxymoronic—and I can allow that to be it. I can put a lid… I can just go there sometimes… I can know it’s there, safely; we are there.

  I haven’t written in a single letter about the time you told me that you loved me.

  You didn’t mean to say it. But it brimmed out of you and wouldn’t stop.

  Remember we decided that we could probably make some fairly superb puddings in the microwave? It was a big thing at the time—everyone was having a microjunkbake after school. Plan B was at work, and the Gazelle was at some conference. We had the run of the pantry. We thought if we put cakey stuff with nice-bits in a cup and nuked it, we’d be in the fast lane to pudding heaven.

  So was it eggs, self-rising flour, M&Ms, and Milo? And Nutella? A chopped Snickers bar? Lightly stirred.

  We would name it after its inventors: us. It would be Fred & Lou’s, like Ben & Jerry’s, only warm. We zapped it one instant minute at a time.

  Smells like deliciousness, we thought, after four zaps.

  I put a spoonful in my mouth.


  It was super disgusting and still a bit raw-eggy and flour-gluey. And we’d somehow forgotten sugar, a vital ingredient if you want a cake-pudding thing. We didn’t use any butter, either, also probably a desirable ingredient.

  And was it just my face as I tasted it? You cracked up. You were looking at me and laughing.

  And I said, What? And you said, I love you.

  And we were both completely shocked. Because it was a little premature, surely.

  And you said it again, as though you were checking the flavor, and it tasted perfectly right. You said it again, softly, I love you; you were looking right into my heart. You said it again, almost shouting. And you were laughing and it was as though you were so happy you couldn’t believe that someone had given you this good thing.

  And it was partly that, and it was partly because you were thinking you’d had a premature declaration, whereas guys your age were more generally associated with premature ejaculation. As well as inability to speak girl and commitment problems to anything other than games with buttons.

  And the best part was when you said, You love me, too. And all I had to do was nod. Because it was true. Because I could hardly talk, because my mouth was still glued together by the foul and truly monstrous thing we had created in the microwave.

  God, when I remember that afternoon every part of me hurts like I’ve been in a car accident; like I’m bashed to pieces inside and out, and bits of me are missing and other bits are put back the wrong way.

  So.

  Guys your age, hey? Wouldn’t want to be making any generalizations.

  But most guys your age get to be older one day.

  I love you, too, and I never said it enough.

  Lou

  XXX

  The sky-watchers are already getting prepped for the eclipse. There is a whole truckload of mathematical stuff about where and when and how fast things move through the heavens above—endless star-mapping and moon phase calculations for the math brains.

  For the rest of us there’s the “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,” generalized literary appeal. I guess it will be a new and strange beauty looking at the shadows and textures of planets and stars, but I can’t get as properly excited as I should apparently be.

  We have a super-excellent high-powered Meade telescope that we can use only under supervision. Mr. Epstein has told us that bumping it—which could strip delicate gears—will earn the punishment of weeding the oval with tweezers.

  We’ve been warned there are hunters in the mountains again. It’s illegal, but that doesn’t stop some people. There is the odd, unsettling crack of distant gunfire.

  Ben and I are plotting and planning an escape, a whole day out together next week during which we will try not to get shot.

  Michael is overrunning, doing too much gym, and over-practicing piano, but I am not his freaking mother. Neither is Lou. She told me when she was packing for her solo that he has already run through one pair of sneakers and one set of toenails. They’re growing back (nails), and I keep in mind that he’s not the only one to have messed up his feet a bit, and hope I shouldn’t be getting in touch with his actual mother to say he seems a bit on edge.

  Miss having Lou around the house.

  thursday 8 november

  Tramping back down the mountain felt like flying, gravity on my side. I had eaten most of the weight of my pack; it probably went from thirty to fifteen pounds, and I really needed my poles on the slidey paths so I didn’t go careening down headfirst in a rock rumble.

  A huge stampeding noise was happening at the outer reaches of my hearing range, and coming closer. Only sounded like one thing, an animal or a person, but I stayed still till I could see what it was.

  Michael. And it was not an accident. He ran to meet me.

  What flavor would you say blue snakes are, he asked.

  Fair question, it’s puzzled me, too, but the closest I ever come up with is blue, or perhaps we are supposed to link the color to a food, in which case blueberry? Or maybe it is linked to the other hard-to-define non-flavor, blue heaven?

  But let us be frank, it tastes like chemicals and colors.

  He nodded, agreeing, his breathing slowing up, and I realized what a super-fit machine he is turning himself into, because he was pounding, sprinting up the mountain a second ago, pouring with sweat, and it was only a few breaths before he was breathing very easily.

  You are a super-fit machine, I told him.

  I believe I have run farther than Ben, he said.

  But you’re not going to put it like that to anyone but me, right? Because you know it makes you seem a bit vulnerable, or Sibylla-focused, I said.

  It could simply be a man-to-man competition, he said.

  But it’s not, and everyone who knows you knows that you don’t care about bullshit like that.

  There is a night of entertainment when we return, he warned me.

  Oh, dear. They spring this random fun on us. We wake up and find invitations slipped under the doors of our house. We are expected to participate from time to time. Sometimes it’s house-devised group fun stuff, other nights it is individual fun stuff.

  Individual fun, or house fun? I asked.

  Individual.

  Right. I had better do something, or I will start putting myself in the Merill spotlight, I said.

  You are very manipulative of that relationship, said Michael.

  Not manipulative, I’m just keeping it at arm’s length to as great an extent as possible under the circumstances. I want her to believe that I am making the sort of progress I should be making.

  Did you throw away the key?

  Not quite, I said. Not quite sure that I ever will be able to, I thought.

  What would you propose to do to entertain your new friends? Michael asked.

  I think my new friends would enjoy hearing me sing. They will at first hope to ridicule me, and get a laugh out of someone falling on her face, but I will sing something simple, and I sing in tune. I have known this is coming and so I’ll just do it, as the sneaker advertisement exhorts us.

  You are a pragmatic soul, Louisa.

  What else has been happening in the big smoke while I’ve been hunting the bear?

  Michael looks with some concentration into the middle distance. I can’t quite tell you. I’ve been practicing piano and running. Not quite sure what everyone else is up to. Holly appears to be going out with Ben’s friends, particularly Vincent, it seems, as much as Sibylla is going out with Ben, he eventually offered.

  So she is happy?

  Who?

  Holly? Happy?

  She seems to have what she wants, which is a slight shift in the sociograph with regard to whom she spends most of her time with.

  How are she and Sib getting along?

  Michael thinks again. Sorry, pass.

  How does Sib look? Easy question. His special topic.

  She looks as much herself as she can; she is tired from the sharing with other people.

  Hey, that is the best thing about the solo; it’s such a relief, I recommend.

  I imagine.

  When are you down to do yours?

  Two weeks.

  Sorry about how I smell.

  It could be a lot worse. It’s not too bad.

  But you can smell me?

  I can smell you.

  (later)

  New true pleasure.

  A shower when you really need it. When you have proper grime, dried sweat and mud, and a thousand little nicks and scratches, a longish hot shower with citrusy soap and shampoo is heaven.

  I can sing. But I haven’t felt like singing at all since Fred. It helps to be joyful when you sing. Though, conversely, singing can induce joy. I haven’t felt like I deserve joy, or want it.

  So my voice is as rusty as shit.

  After my shower, I took a walk far enough away to warm it up.

  Hello, voice! You haven’t forsaken me. You’re just sounding a little thin.

  I
went to the kitchen to scrounge a few strawberries from Priscilla. I explained that they help singer’s throat, and she handed over half a container. She didn’t ask for money, but she has a black-market vibe about her, no doubt.

  I’ve looked over my lyrics. The song is short.

  I’m ready. As ready as I will ever be. As ready as I need to be to look like I’m joining in. And, hey, I will be joining in. Fake it till you make it. No big deal, just a song to keep the counselor lulled into thinking I’m doing okay.

  I am doing okay, low-end okay. Low-end okay is great, considering.

  My song is Blackbird.

  Wow. Lou is bringing down the house. She has an amazing voice. Who knew? She doesn’t even sing in the shower.

  She started singing “Blackbird,” unaccompanied.

  People were still buzzy and unsettled for the first little bit, but she just kept singing, really relaxed. Her “relaxed” lives deep in the land of “don’t give a shit.” Her voice is pure and perfectly tuneful.

  By the end of the song, there was dead silence. And a chant started up: Again, again, again, again. So she sang it through from the beginning.

  And now we are all screaming it out with her a third time. Not so tunefully.

  It’s a pretty beautiful song. And it’s one of those songs that somehow everyone seems to know.

  You could say that for an audience of people who are mostly sixteen it’s the perfect money-shot lyric, punching us right in the heart, given that we all feel like we are waiting for the moment to be free. Or for some other moment to arise. Usually the end of a class. Or someone realizing we are the center of their universe, or something.

  When she finishes, everyone is up yelping and cheering and whoa-ing and whistling. And Holly (of all people—but then again, it is an opportunity to put herself in the middle of it) gets up and leads another chant: Bennett, Bennett, Bennett. And we Bennetts get up and do our dance. Usually it’s an in-house private affair—just for when we manage to get all our jobs done, or someone gets a letter they’ve been waiting for, or someone gets a contraband food parcel, or we don’t have prep, or someone just farted—yes, okay, that is gross, but it is the wilderness. The dance involves some pointing—at each other, at the stars, nodding, gyrating hips, smacking own arse, pulling bits of nothing down from the sky, and doing some arms-out fists-together stirring. Vary and repeat as required to imaginary funky beat.