I sprinted over, pulled myself up onto my tiptoes, and peeked across.
They were scrawny and scarred and had lost half their feathers, but they were alive.
They were chickens.
Lucky came streaking in from the side like a bullet of pure fur, power, and hunger.
‘YOU BLOODY DARE!’ I roared.
He skidded to a sudden dusty halt that would have been funny under any other circumstances. But this was not funny. I could tell he wanted the chickens just as much as I did. He looked up and, I swear, pretended not to see me. He wriggled his belly close to the ground and started to snake forward.
‘LUCKY!’ I shrieked it this time, determined to assert my power, even if only the top of my head was visible to him.
The chickens were going batshit crazy at the sudden presence of a hungry dog and a screaming human. They were running all over the place, and I was afraid they’d drop dead from fear.
I lowered my voice and used my ‘do not mess with me’ tone.
‘Lucky, you come back here, right NOW!’ and, thank all the gods in heaven, he did.
I heaved a sigh of relief, dropped to my knees, and hugged him. He was too heavy for me to pick up now (Lucky had put on quite a bit of weight during our few weeks of rest) so I lured him into the Defender with a handful of biscuits and ignored his howls when I locked him in there.
Then I went back and looked at my scrawny chickens. Three were white and one was brown. There were fourteen massive sacks of seed stretched from one end of the fence to the other. The bags were empty, but must have kept them going until now.
I knew nothing about chickens except that they get eaten by foxes and, if you wanted them to lay eggs, you needed to have a cockerel nearby. There was no cockerel in with them, so these chickens were destined to be my dinner.
My mouth began to water. Chicken! Roasted, baked or fried. Chicken! No idea how to kill, pluck or prepare them, but who cared? Chicken!
I was so lost in my reverie of meat that I almost didn’t hear the sound that took away my chicken-based fantasy.
Then I stopped.
It was quiet, it was weak, it was far away, but it was unmistakeable. A cockerel’s crow.
He was sitting in the doorway of a shed at the end of the next field. When I appeared, he raced across the field towards me with such enthusiasm that I completely forgot our comparative sizes, shat myself, and ran away, slamming the gate to the field behind me to shut him in.
He just walked under the gate of course.
I went back to the library.
Chickens are very sociable creatures and like company and humans.
I read this in my chicken book, but had also learnt it first-hand by the time the chickens moved into the ugly but usable chicken pen I had built a week later.
While I got their new home ready for them I visited them every day at the garden centre to feed them and change their water. They would crowd around me clucking and chirping and within three days they would let me pick them up and stroke them. By the end of the week I was very glad I hadn’t eaten them.
They laid their first egg two weeks after moving into their new home. I don’t think I can ever adequately describe the pure joy I felt holding that warm, speckled egg in my hand. My brain said that I should keep it, that it was symbolic, that it meant I was becoming adapted to, and successful in, this new world.
My tummy said, ‘Fuck that!’
I ate it boiled and dipped in salt and pepper. It was truly delicious.
I named the chickens Hetty, Netty, Letty and Betty and the cockerel was Simon.
I nearly named the cockerel Xav, because of his friendliness, neediness, strutting about, and obvious beauty – even with half his feathers missing you could tell he was a looker. But I decided it would be too sad to be reminded of my former best friend every day.
I don’t want to be reminded of my best friend every day because he wasn’t my best friend at the end, or at least I wasn’t his best friend. I didn’t deserve to be.
I wasn’t a good friend to Xav or Ginny in the last six months before 6DM.
I saw very little of either of them during that time, but told myself I had every excuse not to.
Ginny was heavily pregnant. We still spoke regularly on the phone and messaged pretty much every day, but whenever I saw her in person, saw her now huge belly, it just reminded me how empty I was; an emptiness that even Harry couldn’t fill.
She was, of course, incredibly sweet about it and didn’t even mention my conspicuous absence at her baby shower.
I didn’t deserve her sweetness.
Xav was more difficult to avoid and ignore. He had yet to relapse after his last visit to rehab and was making heroic attempts to repair our friendship. I don’t know whether I was cruel to him because I thought he deserved it, or because it made it easier for me not to see him.
But I was cruel to him, very cruel.
It wasn’t that I ignored him or refused to see him, I saw him quite regularly. But I kept him at a distance. I kept him out of my life, out of my family, refused to allow my mum and dad to invite him for Christmas or birthdays. When we met I would only talk about work, the news, movies, bands; nothing serious, nothing deep, nothing about me. I refused to let him back in. I wouldn’t forgive him.
I think my refusal to love Xav again broke him. I was his family, and I rejected him. He was quieter now, smaller almost. He didn’t laugh with me any more, didn’t tell me about his latest conquest or a funny story from his gym. He asked me earnest questions, tried to needle information out of me, tried to hold my hand. All the while his eyes pleaded with me to forgive him, to let him back into my heart.
I didn’t.
I hate myself for that.
James never knew I was seeing Xav and Ginny less.
James thought I saw them at least a couple of times a week, and some weeks even more.
That was the time I spent with Harry.
I used my best friends as cover for my affair.
I pretended I was going to therapy sessions with Xav to try to make our friendship work again. I wasn’t.
I pretended I had gone to Ginny’s baby shower. I hadn’t.
Instead I spent the afternoon getting drunk with Harry.
James thought I was being brave and strong and a good friend.
It turned out James didn’t know me that well after all.
July 2024
By the middle of July, now that I had a burgeoning smallholding, my days of lazing around were over.
Every day started just after dawn when I heard Simon crowing.
I’d built Simon a special ‘man-shed’ and chicken run (a large rabbit hutch with some chicken wire attached), but he was incredibly adept at getting out of it so in the end I just let him run free. Some mornings he would crow from quite far away and I could ignore him for a while. Most mornings he sat right outside the door and whenever it was too hot to close the door overnight, he would walk right into the Hobbit House and yell from below the bed.
Once I was up, Simon would strut about the house and butt his head against my leg until I gave him something to eat to keep him quiet. Chickens will eat pretty much anything, so they got a lot of my leftovers. (I am hoping I might find a stray pig at some point so that I can feed my leftover crap to that too.)
I am reluctantly grateful for the agony I went through learning to light a fire in Scotland as it now means I can get a fire going in the wood burner and have the kettle suspended over it within ten minutes of getting out of bed. I would then get dressed (mostly just in knickers and a huge garden-centre Christmas T-shirt) and go out to check on the girls. Their feathers were growing back and they had managed to put on a surprising amount of weight in the month that I had had them. They too wanted a bit of love and attention, so I normally sat with them while they had their breakfast and they pecked and I patted. I liked that they needed me.
Most mornings Lucky would still be snoring when I got back inside after feedi
ng the girls, as he is lazy and surprisingly adept at ignoring the noise made by Simon. Like a mother trying to rouse her sleeping teenager, I would clatter about until he deigned to get out of bed and eat the breakfast I had made for him. If it wasn’t raining I ate my breakfast outside – either cereal or a tortilla with jam.
I had finally worked out how to make my own bread. At the beginning of June I discovered the naan aisle in the supermarket had packs that were still in date, so I ripped them open with my teeth, sat down on the floor, and chomped my way through two bags. Utter, utter joy. Then I realised I had been thinking purely traditionally with my limited choice of bread products and actually weren’t there ones that didn’t need to be baked in an oven? Back to the library I went. One week, and lots of experimentation later, I had learnt that I was able to make a very tasty tortilla, a pretty good batbout (a sort of Moroccan puffy bread), a passable pitta bread, and a slightly doughy naan. There are others that I could make – cornbread and oven-top scones for example – but these all need butter and milk, so are off my menu for now. But I am not complaining! I am very happy to have any bread choice at all.
In fact, I am pretty happy with my diet in general now. Don’t get me wrong, I still massively miss meat and dairy, but, along with the bread, I also made another discovery in June, which is always my next morning job after the chickens: fishing.
The stream at the back of the Hobbit House positively teems with small to medium sized fish. We’d had a load of rain at the end of June and the river was practically breaching the bank. The sun had returned a couple of days later and I was sitting dangling my hot and swollen feet in the river, when a fish jumped right out and landed on the grass by my side.
Somehow I resisted my natural reaction, which was to jump up screaming, and instead I grabbed it by the tail and smashed its head on the stones next to me. Blood flew everywhere and it lay limp.
Then, before I could be consumed by further guilt, I took it back to the house, cut its head off, cut it in half and fried it in a pan.
I ate the lot, bones and all. I had no idea what type of fish it was and it was only after I had eaten it that I stopped to worry it might not be a type of fish one should eat. But, when I woke up the next morning and was still alive, I jumped straight in the Defender, drove to the garden centre and got netting.
Thank you shipping crewmen for teaching me the rudiments of net fishing.
It took a few attempts to rig a good netting system. In the end I made a sort of bag out of the netting that gapes widely at one end. I tether this to a stake, stick some tortilla in the back, float it in the water overnight, and hope for the best. It’s not ideal and isn’t always successful. Some mornings there is nothing in it, some mornings anything in it is too small to eat and, if it rains overnight, I normally come out to find the bag has slipped the tether and floated off, sometimes never to be found.
I hardly flinch at all when I kill them now. I have two large stones at the side of the river. I lay them on one and bash their heads in with the other. When I am done, I wash the blood off the stones. They are pretty small, so it takes three or four to make a good meal. But if I have had a particularly good haul – five or more fish – I will try to preserve the extra. I am experimenting with salting them and putting them in the storage cupboard. I am not sure if it will work, but the storage cupboard is yet to start stinking of rotting fish, so I am hopeful.
Once I have checked the fishing net, I head for the fruit and veg patch and polytunnel. I am finding it more and more difficult to do any significant digging or weeding, so I tend to just collect the ripe stuff and pull out a few weeds here and there. I am eating mainly fresh things at the moment and saving the tins for winter. Rice, pasta, flour, oils, tins, and lots of gravy and mixes are all still in date and, I should imagine, will pretty much last for ever, but everything else is either out of date or running low on time. Milk, butter, cheese, yoghurts, meats, processed meats were all done months ago. Chocolate, biscuits, crisps, cakes, packaged breads, nuts, cereals, drinks and even coffee and tea are either past their sell-by date or getting close.
However, I am discovering that rules on food consumption are pretty fluid in the new world. For example, potato-based crisps are stale and disgusting, but something maize-based like Wotsits or tortillas are normally fine – maybe a bit chewy, but definitely still edible. The same goes for biscuits. Anything covered in chocolate is probably bad, but your average digestive or shortbread? Still totally yummy. As long as it doesn’t smell bad, I take a nibble and see. My parameters for what is, and isn’t, edible have widened considerably. A carrot that I would previously have deemed too ugly or blemished or even wonky to eat goes in the pot along with the rest of them. Skin and all. I am too hungry to waste anything.
By the time I am done with my fruit and veg the sun is normally high in the sky and I am sweating and knackered. So, if I can be bothered, I treat myself to a dip in the river, which is icy cold to begin with and then refreshing after five minutes. I will normally be dive-bombed by Lucky as soon as he realises where I am, and then Simon might wander over and strut at the edge chattering away.
One happy family.
Lunch is leftovers or whatever is easy, as by now I am seriously flagging. I stuff it down and then fall asleep.
I don’t know how long I sleep for or when I wake up because I don’t have a clock or phone any more. These days I wake with Simon and go to sleep when it is dark or I am tired.
I spend the rest of the afternoon doing whatever is most urgent. I inventory food or preserve surplus fruit and veg, I collect twigs and fallen branches for kindling, I attempt maintenance on the Defender using one of the many books on car mechanics that I now have, I wash my clothes in the stream using eco washing powder, I sow seeds in the polytunnel, I cumbersomely climb a ladder and try to patch small holes in the thatched roof of the Hobbit House where rain has started to drip through, I clean out the chicken hutches and repair their wire run, I check and reattach my fishing nets, I do any number of the many, many things that always seem to need to be done just to survive.
When the light starts to get dusky I re-bait the fishing nets, feed the girls again, and try to chase Simon into his chicken hutch – knowing full well that he’ll be out of it the moment my back is turned.
Some nights I go back into my house, make a lovely supper of fish, potatoes and vegetables, followed by pudding of stewed fruit. I watch a DVD or read by the fire, then brush my teeth, wash my face, apply moisturiser, change into a clean nightie, and go to bed. Some nights I eat a bag of crisps and go to bed in a dirty pair of knickers.
I have started to dream again.
I hadn’t dreamt for years before 6DM, at least, not dreams that I could remember the following morning.
But now I have started to dream again. Bright, vivid, physical dreams that seem so real that when I wake up I am disappointed to find them not true. I dream that I am sitting in my rocking chair breastfeeding my baby. That my baby is learning to crawl on the grass by the stream. That my baby is rolling a ball for Lucky. That my baby is sleeping gently in my arms as I sing to it all the songs that have ever been, or will ever be, written or remembered on this earth.
I never see the face of my baby, just the form, the weight, the smell of him or her.
I am trying not to see this as a bad omen.
August 2024
It is the middle of summer and I have a growing tummy and a growing family.
Life is now almost idyllic – especially in comparison to the things I have written about before.
No more struggles with sadness or addiction or suicide; I seem to be contented, busy, and productive.
Which I am.
Mostly.
I am busy because I have no choice. Keeping the chickens, managing the veg patch, fishing, looking after the Hobbit House, preserving food for the future – this all takes a lot of work and I am now getting very, very large, so I do everything very slowly.
But, often, I w
ill find myself wondering if I am ‘making busy’ to distract myself from the fact that, despite being pregnant, nothing has changed.
I am still alone.
I have my idyllic setting and my little pseudo-family and we bumble through each day in a happy muddle, but I still fall asleep each evening without speaking to another person.
Or do I?
Because, each night, as I drift to sleep I trace my hands over my ever-growing belly and whisper to the person growing inside. I tell them of my life before and of the people I loved, my friends, my family, the world that we lived in. It soothes and gratifies me that I can now do this without crying, that I can speak of the legacy left by those I loved with deep emotion but not necessarily deep sorrow.
I whisper secrets that I don’t even allow myself to fully hope, secrets and dreams for our future. That my baby will arrive safely and that we will, eventually, find other survivors. That we are not the only ones left.
I whisper how I owe my baby my life so, in return, I will give them theirs too and I will do everything to make sure it is a happy one.
When waves of sadness threaten to envelop me, which they still do, I lie on my back by the river and stare up at the cloudless, plane-less blue sky and feel my baby kick at my enquiring hands and I know, I know that this is about so much more than just me now.
And yet, despite my ever-growing love for the person inside me, I am not preparing for the arrival of my baby in any way.
I have done and collected nothing. No Moses basket, no clothes, no nappies, no wipes, no bottles, no pram, no toys, nothing to bathe it with, feed it with, burp it with. I haven’t read any books, I haven’t watched any DVDs, and I definitely haven’t listened to anything about birth or babies.
When I was trying to get pregnant in my life before, I didn’t watch or read anything about birth and babies out of superstition. So, I have never seen One Born Every Minute or watched Call the Midwife. The closest I have been to any kind of birthing manual is the scene where Katherine Heigl gives birth in Knocked Up, and I watched that about fifteen years ago and all I can remember is a lot of screaming. Not particularly educational.
Last One at the Party Page 27
