The afternoon sunlight streams through the window, lingering on the once-glossy granite counters and warming the honeyed grain of the birch table. The kitchen is rustic yet chic and looks, at first glance, like a photo from a high-brow magazine, the kind where elegant women in pearls show off their hand-made jams in front of their gleaming Aga. It is top-of-the-line, ordered by someone with far more money and taste than I ever had. A closer look, though, shows signs of its slow decline. The once-immaculate paint starting to peel and flake, the clumps of greasy fluff clogging the corners, the smeared windows, the blank display screens of the high-tech kitchen gadgets. A thick layer of dust shrouds the breadmaker, the waffle iron, the coffee machine: all these electrical devices are useless to anyone now. The block of razor-sharp chef’s knives and the retro mechanical weighing scales, on the other hand, have been a godsend during our strange exile here.
I add the egg yolks to the bowl, and slowly pour in the warm water. I deliberately saved some from the last time I boiled a panful, a painfully slow process that always fills me with futile longings for an electric kettle. I plunge my hands into the bowl, rubbing the rough cornmeal into the water and eggs, rhythmically kneading the mix. It smells of popcorn, a thought I push to the back of my mind. Popcorn is one of the few treats we can still make. But the one time I tried it, it triggered a deluge of memories of our habitual half-term cinema trips. The cardboard tower filled with popcorn, the bag of insanely overpriced pic-n-mix, the faux velvet seats, the giant screen transporting us into another world, the dramatic rumbling of the surround sound sending thrills tingling through our bodies. The home we returned to afterwards. The children were in floods of tears for the rest of the day, so I haven’t done it since.
I’m making arepas. The first time I made them, back in the time before, they were an exotic lunch. I bought pan arepa from the local delicatessen, which stocked everything from ten different kinds of prawn crackers, to countless Indonesian spice mixes, to boxes piled high of sticky Asian sweets. Back home, I followed the YouTube video step by step to bake up a batch that we ate with guacamole and mince, after which the pack languished, forgotten, at the back of my over-stuffed kitchen cupboard. Arepas are the closest thing we can get to bread now, no longer an exotic novelty but a staple of our diet. The nearby fields, which we harvested in a bumbling amateur fashion once we had been here long enough that it no longer seemed a ridiculous idea but rather a prudent act of survival, grew not wheat but maize. No guacamole or mince; these days we eat our arepas with whatever we can pick, swap for or scavenge. We have no fresh fruit and few fresh vegetables at this time of year. Nor do we have fresh meat. There were no cattle farms here, probably their distinctive odour wouldn’t have been tolerated by the well-heeled residents. Thinking of the stories I heard about the invasion at the start of the Second World War, when unmilked cows bellowed in agony as they slowly died from swollen udders, I am glad that the only animals kept here were free-range chickens, able to fend for themselves. Those that weren’t picked off by the fox, that is.
Our food supply is a strange mix of contrasts. For tins and dry goods we are still living in the global era of plenty. The cupboards hold liqueur chocolates, jasmine rice, tinned pineapple and caviar. There’s nothing frozen, all that rotted in a few days when the power went, and for fresh food we are back to what we can glean from the gardens and fields. The days of walking into a supermarket to a paradise of produce from around the world are gone. The pyramids of oranges, the punnets of strawberries even in the middle of winter, avocados both unripe or ready-to-eat, star-fruit, mango, root ginger. Our meals are cobbled-together concoctions; cornflakes with water instead of milk, chicken chow mein without the chicken and with preserved leek taking the place of beansprouts, curries made with tinned sausage. I’ve been eking out the spices, using pinches where I used to toss in a spoonful, as we won’t be getting any more once they’re gone. Garlic we still have, thank God, growing wild in the woods, and potatoes, reinstated to their old position of dietary mainstay now that stocks of their foreign competitors will no longer be replenished.
I suppose in a way I should be grateful for our limited supplies. With no sources of milk or cheese, our diet is now de facto lactose free, sparing me the unpleasantness I suffered in the early days, when we were eating up whatever we could save from the dark, silent fridges and freezers. Like the children during the first few weeks ‘after’, my food intolerances refused to acknowledge that circumstances were out of my control. As if vegan spread and soya milk, just like home, friends and Daddy, were all things that I could supply if only I would try hard enough. The children accepted our situation in the end; my guts remained in denial.
Outside the window, my children pass by. I wave, but they don’t see me. There is no time for play for them anymore, no leisure to press their faces up against the window to make funny faces at Mum in the kitchen, the way they used to do when they came skipping home from school, rucksacks heavy with homework, laptop and gym kit slung over their shoulders. They are helping my partner to carry fencing material to fix the perimeter. The chickens, our egg lifeline, have been escaping. But in any case, all of us here maintain our fences. Against what, we don’t know.
The kids are squabbling, but my partner is being remarkably patient with them. He is doing a pretty good job as a surrogate father, though it’s not a role I ever intended him to take. He was supposed to be my mad fling, a celebration of my new-found freedom after twenty years of marriage came to an end. We met when I wandered in to the takeaway on the spur of the moment to pick up a Thai curry, still overwhelmed by my liberty to decide what I would eat and when, rather than sticking to a menu planned in advance to please the whole family and to fit in with music lessons and football training. He was behind me in the queue, and we got talking about our shared love of spicy food, then the trips abroad that he’d taken, and the ones I wished I had. Before I knew it, we were walking down the street together, aromatic, greasy cardboard boxes in our hands, then we ended up in his studio, and later in his bed. It was so easy, a bewildering contrast with the last time I had been single, decades before, when a new relationship was preceded with weeks of enervating speculation and nervous doubt. My new flat was in an up-and-coming neighbourhood, full of well-off students, hipster entrepreneurs and artistic types. He was the latter, a sculptor working with 3D printers, an intoxicating breath of fresh air after years of suburban life with two small children. Deep philosophical discussions, expeditions to museums, late nights in tiny theatres or concert halls, and lots of sex.
I was in his studio when the end began. I was dressing to go back to my own flat, where my ex was going to drop off the children, feeling the familiar mix of confusion and irritation from the impeding transition between my two lives, the free-spirited urbanite and the caring mother. He was making it worse by badgering me about how he would love to meet my kids, somehow assuming that I would be thrilled, when actually his key attraction was a total escape from my responsibilities. When my phone beeped, I assumed it was my ex, arrived early and impatient to hand over the kids. Instead, it was the first of an avalanche of breaking news alerts.
Growing up under the shadow of nuclear war, I had often had nightmares about an impending apocalypse. The terse official announcement, the numbing disbelief, then the panicked rush to reach loved ones, to obtain emergency supplies, to find some sort of shelter, as the countdown ticked inexorably down to zero. The reality was far less clear-cut. The reports told of strange incidents in the city, people piling into hospitals with injuries of unknown cause, fire, explosions. Spreading panic, mobs of terrified people milling around in the streets while the authorities called for calm. At first it was just another news item, an oddity to wonder at. Then, we heard the first loud bangs coming from nearby.
He insisted on accompanying me to my flat, and my resistance to this blurring of the boundaries between my two worlds rapidly vanished in the face of the appalling chaos outside. The narrow city streets were dangerous at the best of times, packed with couriers hurtling to their next delivery while cyclists hared along, ringing their bells furiously to wake up the dozy tourists who were standing in the middle of the bike lane snapping photos, totally unaware of the local traffic rules.
Now there were no rules. People on foot were behaving like frightened sheep, bunching up together or shoving each other out of the way, spilling out into the road, then suddenly stampeding in all directions at an unexpected noise or movement, or for no apparent cause at all. Cars mounted the pavement trying to get through, and bikes were crisscrossing in all directions. The results were inevitable. Glass shattered a few feet away, shards slicing through my sleeve and biting into my cheek. Bikes collided in a juddering crash, bells and mudguards breaking in a dissonant jangle. The worst was a car, careening around the corner and slipping out of the bend to pin a man against the rough red brickwork of the wall. The driver reversed, gears crunching, then swerved away through the crowds. The man remained transfixed for a moment, then slid to the ground, crimson flooding from his crushed midsection, silent first in shock, then letting loose an agonized howl that seemed to be torn from deep inside.
No one stopped to help.
We didn’t stop to help.
It was like a scene from hell.
When we finally slammed the front door of my flat behind us, the comparative quiet was deafening, the apparent safety unsettling. My son lay curled up on the sofa, sobbing, clutching his cuddly panda to a tear-drenched face. My daughter stood pressed up against the wall, face blank, body as tense as a wire, violent shudders going through her as if they came, not from her own muscles, but from some distant earthquake that only she could feel. For a split second, I felt overwhelming relief, forgiveness, redemption. Then, I realized that someone was missing. ‘Where’s your father?’, I blurted out. Then instantly wished I could take the words back. Because I’d asked them in the same tone that I usually asked ‘Where’s your coat?’ or ‘Where have you left your phone?’. The tone that implied that she was responsible for losing them. Bad enough to have to shepherd your younger brother through streets of people gone mad, after having seen your father shoved off the station steps by the mob and tumble to his death on the pavement below. But to then have your mother imply it was your fault…
The worst thing was that I could never take those words back. I couldn’t even talk it over with her later without making the same mistake my partner did. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself’, he said, at some point during the horrendous night that followed on from that hideous day, when we were all huddled in a makeshift shelter, and the children had succumbed to exhaustion. What a stupid thing to say. Just saying that means that it is apparently logical that I might blame myself, which in turn implies that there is a valid reason to do so. So of course, I blamed myself all the more.
I replay it sometimes in my mind. He would’ve been distracted by the children, overwhelmed by the chaos, trying desperately to cope with it all on his own. Always when we were out in busy places we worked as a team, one of us keeping an eye on the kids while the other dealt with finding the way, handling tickets and passports, watching out for traffic. If I’d been there, it might have all turned out differently. If I’d never left, he wouldn’t have been travelling through the city with them at all. I loved my husband, I loved my children. I hadn’t left out of lack of love. I simply wanted to be more than his wife, their mother. Even once we were living apart, I had still regarded him as a permanent part of my life, the father of my children, my dear and trusted friend. His loss felt like my punishment for leaving my family, for feeling stifled at home, for longing for something more. For every time I’d sat grinding my teeth through the tedium of a school play, or sighing through a seemingly endless monologue about Pokémon, or nodding sympathetically to a tale of workplace woe from my husband that I wasn’t even listening to. It feels like I’m in purgatory now. It smacks of some sort of divine justice, dealt by an ultra-conservative hand. That I am now tied to a home with the man I wanted a no-strings affair with. That after seeking time and space for myself I am cloistered 24/7 with my children. That the technical talents I carefully honed now rust unused while I bungle the household tasks that I always hated. If it weren’t that it would be the ultimate hubris to think that civilization was destroyed just to teach me a lesson.
I’m not the only one suffering, of course. I’ve come across my daughter sitting on her own, gazing intently at her lifeless phone clutched in her hand. As if it might suddenly spring back to life, pinging and flashing as the messages flood in. Photos from the school party, a reminder to pack her passport for her first ever international scouting camp, a friend suggesting they meet up after school. The elements of the independent life she was tentatively starting to create for herself, a chick taking the first few flaps out of the nest. My son won’t let his raggedy panda – his one remaining cuddly toy – out of his sight. It goes everywhere with him, usually in his hand and at most as far away as his pocket, and he is mortally afraid of losing it. I know he silently mourns each and every stuffed friend left behind in his bedroom. Plus the room itself. His big boy’s cabin bed, his building projects, his origami, the paintings he made while staying with the grandmother he won’t ever see again. My partner works stoically on the chores around the house and garden, uncomplaining. But I know that it’s now his turn to long for something more than the daily grind. He misses his studio, the joy of seeing his creations take shape in reality, the work that wasn’t his job but his life. I’ve found small sketches on scraps of paper, flowing, graceful forms that will never now escape the two-dimensional. We work all the hours of daylight, and in the rare event that we still have some energy in the evenings, it seems foolish to break into our precious ration of candles and lamp oil to indulge ourselves with anything as frivolous as art.
It’s quiet in the house, too quiet. In the past, I always had the radio on while baking. In the unlikely event that it was switched off, I would have heard my daughter’s radio in the distance, the hum of the extractor fan, the rumble of cars outside, the shrieks of children playing in the park. I catch myself humming a melody and stop. I don’t like the sound blocking my hearing. Despite the apparent serenity of this place, I am on edge, constantly alert. The house is too big to heat it all, we keep all the rooms we don’t need closed off. It’s almost like I can feel them, like the gaps in my mouth where teeth used to be. Sometimes, I think I hear someone moving around in them. The original inhabitants returning, dead or alive, to reclaim their property. Or something else that has crept in, penetrating our pathetic defences to take up residence in our refuge. On a few occasions, I’ve even felt driven to creep upstairs to the closed doors. After arming myself with a weapon, and having opened the windows so my cries for help will be heard – unlike the traditional female fodder in horror films I’ve seen too much actual horror to wander into danger unprepared. Bracing myself, I fling the door open, then search every corner. There is never anything there. So far.
Even now, every tiny creak of the floorboards sets my heart pounding, every flicker of movement outside makes me crane my neck to see what it is. My son zips past the window, one sleeve of his too-large ‘borrowed’ shirt flapping where my improvised stitching has come undone, and my whole body stiffens, ready to charge outside, until he dashes back again clutching a forgotten hammer. It’s the same for everyone who made it out of the city and pitched up here, in this collection of houses and farms that had the virtue of being the first place far enough outside the city to feel somewhat safe. You can see it in their worn faces, the bags under their eyes, the lines graven around their mouths.
The worst is that we don’t know what we need to be alert for. What is it that is coming? Is it something the fences can keep out – drunken looters, wandering loonies? Or something that will trample over our defences as if they are nothing – a violent armed mob, trained soldiers? Will it sneak in secretly, a virus carried by an apparently normal person? Or is it nothing to do with people at all, a natural catastrophe, some phenomenon that started in the cities but will spread here eventually, on a normal day like today with the sun shining and my hands deep in dough?
When my children whisper wild stories of monsters and aliens, when they run to me crying because they think they’ve seen something in the woods, all I can do is comfort them wordlessly, holding them tightly, rocking them back and forth. I can’t debunk their claims with reason and logic. I can’t tell them it will be alright. I can’t confidently assert that their nightmares are not real. Not anymore. Because, for all I know, they might be. None of us knows what actually happened. All anyone experienced firsthand was the panic, the confusion, the violence, the secondary symptoms of some unknown cataclysm. In the early days, we kept expecting someone to show up and explain it all to us. Also inform us that it was all over and done with. That we could now return home and move on to the clean-up phase, followed by the solemn memorials and the expository documentaries anaesthetising the shock of the events with a soothing voice-over, academic detachment and the comfortable distance of time. But anyone who was close enough to find out what actually happened never made it out to tell the tale. I understand now the need of ancient peoples to propitiate the gods. Faced like them with forces beyond my understanding, helpless to control my destiny, I would feel so much better if I could offer up a prayer or make a sacrifice to beg divine protection for me and my family.
The arepas are sticking to my hands in some places while crumbling in others. I’m not much good at improvisational cooking. Luckily the recipe for arepas is so simple that even I could reconstruct it. The kitchen contains no recipe books, the tablet that presumably once took their place hangs on the wall like the dried-out husk of a long-dead insect. Living here, our lives are a strange combination of luxury and hardship. Lugging buckets of water to heat up over a fire, then washing ourselves with scented herbal soap and drying off with Egyptian cotton towels. Eating our strange piecemeal dinners from porcelain plates with platinum cutlery. Carrying stinking chamber pots to our improvised cess-pit while wearing costly clothes from our absent hosts’ wardrobes. It’s a post-apocalypse as envisioned by a designer think-tank.
My deficiencies in the kitchen extend to chopping wood, foraging for food or contriving house repairs. My artistic partner is even more at a loss. Not that my husband would have done any better. It’s an interesting philosophical question, whether you would rather be trapped in a post-apocalypse with someone with survival skills, or the person you truly loved. In my case, the point is moot. I ended up with neither. Previously, I regarded myself as highly capable. As engineers my husband and I felt a sense of superiority. We were the ones with the practical skills, we were the ones other people called in to solve their problems. To program the apps for their phone, to install their 3D printer, to set up their network connection. To actually get things done. Now, with the collapse of technology, my competence also lies in ruins.
There is no one to teach us the skills we so desperately need. The people who lived here, both the wealthy residents playing at being farmers and the genuine farmers themselves, were all gone when we came. Houses left abandoned, driveways emptied of the expensive cars that once stood proudly on display. I try not to think why, but still it makes me uneasy. The handful of people that escaped the disaster and ended up here is almost solely comprised of city workers. While not quite the ‘useless third’ of the population dumped in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – no PR specialists, no lifestyle gurus, no influencers – none of us has the necessary knowhow for the situation we find ourselves in. We have no nurses, no commandos trained in wilderness survival, no engineering wunderkinds capable of rigging us up renewable energy. No one whose hobbies involved gathering wild herbs and mushrooms, no one who camped anywhere that didn’t have electrical sockets and toilet blocks. We do have a plumber, who helped us out with our well, but without running water even his usefulness is limited. Ironically my children, with their years of Scouting experience, rank highest for survival skills in our tiny community. They can at least light fires and build shelters, even if modern squeamishness means they have no idea how to trap rabbits, let alone skin and gut them.
At first, the stocks left in the shops here seemed like unending plenty. But they’re shrinking at a worrying rate. Nor is food the only limited resource. We cherish all our possessions; we can’t afford to be wasteful. When my kids’ tension occasionally simmers over into wrestling matches, I shriek at them to stop immediately, my mind’s eye filled with visions of my daughter’s precious glasses getting smashed, leaving her to all intents and purposes completely blind. As I use the leftovers of civilization – cooking oil, suntan lotion, toilet paper, gardening shears, matches, wheels – I catch myself puzzling over how we could ever recreate them once they are used up or worn out. One of the previous residents here had a small business supplying hand-crafted soap, her stockroom full of bars wrapped in handprinted paper tied with rustic twine threaded with beads. Something I would have previously sniggered at as a glorified hobby to keep a rich wife busy, but for which I am now eternally grateful. I know from historical novels that soap is made from ash and animal fat. I remember from my Chemistry lessons that it is created from alkali and fat in a process called saponification. I once prided myself on my general knowledge, now I have discovered the yawning gulf between trivia and practical know-how. It is disheartening to discover how incomplete the knowledge that resides in my head actually is. I never needed to know chapter and verse, all I needed was enough of a hook in my memory to work out the right search term to google. My professional forte was for navigating the vast ocean of the internet to find the solution to a problem. Cut off from it, I feel like someone has removed a large part of my brain. This neighbourhood had a few supermarkets, various trendy boutiques, hip restaurants and a microbrewery, but no library. Who would need anything so backwards, so worthy and dull? With no record of the knowledge accumulated over generations, we are reduced to recreating the wisdom of our ancestors by trial and error, tiny ants who stood on the shoulders of giants now unceremoniously flung back down to the ground.
There must be others who survived. There can’t possibly be so few of us. The nearest city alone housed millions. Probably there are already communities within ten miles of here. Army camps run with efficient brutality; idealistic communes full of hunters, farmers and bakers serenely living out their own utopia; well-staffed rescue centres with functioning electricity generators and toilet facilities. No one has the time to go and look, we are all too busy surviving. Each day we get up, scavenge fuel, forage for food, maintain the defences, keep the house clean, warm and weatherproof, then get up the next day and do it all again. Day follows day in endless monotony. All the markers that used to exist – weekends, birthdays, Christmas – have been wiped away. For now, our watches keep ticking, marking the hours. When they cease to function, time will once more be the domain of the sun, moon and stars.
Sometimes the thought crosses my mind that maybe what happened wasn’t apocalyptic after all. That everywhere else is back to normal, and that those of us stuck out here, with no phones or internet, have simply missed the newsflash. That we have been left behind, like those Japanese soldiers on isolated islands, unaware that the war was over. But realistically, I know that is not true. This is not the Pacific. It is a small country, and if civilization still survived, then we would certainly know. Jet trails in the air, truck sounds from the motorway, construction noise echoing out from the city.
Having finally worked all the dough off my hands and shaped it into what passes for patties, I slide the arepas onto a plate and walk to the door, passing by the oven, the microwave, the sandwich toaster, all just wasted space. Nothing can be cooked in this kitchen anymore. I cross through the living room. The sophisticated sound system and the gigantic TV screen are just so many dust-catchers. On the other hand, the large open fireplace, along with the well in the garden, bought as extravagant props for a romantic bucolic scenario, actually saved our lives during the winter. I had never realized before how cold even a modern, well-insulated house gets when it’s freezing outside and there is no central heating. But the hearth was designed for cosy fireside evenings, not cooking.
From framed photos ranked along the bookcases, the eyes of strangers stare accusingly. I regularly consider removing them, yet it feels somehow disrespectful, like demolishing a person’s gravestone just because you need to camp next to it. We have no photos ourselves, of course. The preserved memories of my husband, my children as babies, my parents and sisters abroad, all died along with my phone battery. There are plenty of memories still preserved in my head, of course. For most, there is no one left who remembers them but me. But they’re too painful to dwell on. I am tortured by regrets. The things that I didn’t do when I had the chance. All those evenings that I stayed at home doing nothing much when I could have gone out instead. The museums, art galleries, theatres and restaurants that I never visited. The far-off countries I never travelled to, plumping for a safe, familiar destination instead. The times when, feeling down, I retreated to eat my lunch at my desk rather than sharing a table in the canteen with my colleagues.
Then there are the things that I did do, but half-heartedly. Irritably, distractedly, wishing I were somewhere else. The conversations with friends and neighbours that I chafed through, impatient to get on with what I was doing. The visits from family that I grumbled about for weeks in advance, knowing I would have an extra mountain of washing and cooking, not to mention the strain of trying to keep everyone happy and entertained. The concerts I only half listened to, as I was worrying about the babysitter, or whether we would make the last train.
Then there are the things I did do and lived to the full. The succulent meals in restaurants. Curry, the aromas already making my mouth water as the tray of sizzling brass dishes was brought to the table. Savouring the creamy sweetness of ice cream, lingering over the smoky glow of a good whisky. Dancing, feeling the pulse of the music, the shared joy of the anonymous crowd around me making me forget my aching back, my pinching shoes, the spilled beer on the floor, lifting my consciousness to some transcendent plane. The incredible beauty of nature in so many different guises; the jagged grey Canadian peaks thrusting up from verdant green meadows into a deep cerulean sky; the purple and yellow swirls of gorse and heather on rounded Welsh hilltops; the herd of Scottish cattle crossing the bike path in startlingly quiet majesty, breath puffing from their pink snouts and dark eyes peering comically through their shaggy pelts. Opening the freezer on a hot day, the cold spilling out over my arms, the exquisite sensation of biting into a choc ice. A Christmas market, countless tiny lights illuminating the icy night like stars come down to earth. The awkward but arousing caresses of my first boyfriend. The comforting pat on my shoulder from a friend, the sheltering embrace of my mother. All those treasures that are gone forever. My paradise lost.
The plate biting into my fingers as they clench tightly around it brings me out of my reverie, and I set myself in motion again. Our house – that is, the house we now live in – is not a genuine farmhouse but it is has a capacious garden, big enough that the owners could maintain a small vegetable plot and orchard while still having plenty of space left for stylish garden parties. I step outside through the terrace doors, the space around me echoing with the ghosts of celebrations past, tables decked with plates of gourmet nibbles surrounded by cocktail-quaffing neighbours sporting the latest designer fashions, chatting and laughing. Squatting down by the fire pit outside, I carefully lay down the plate and coax the barbecue coals into life. Once it is hot enough, I gingerly place the arepas on the grill to cook. I burnt plenty of food in the beginning trying to get the knack of cooking over an open fire.
The days are getting warmer now, I no longer have to huddle close to the fire to keep myself from freezing. Spring has finally arrived. The time of renewal, lengthening days, new life. The time of year when crops are planted. But when exactly? And how? We have been plunged back into medieval times, but without medieval knowledge or even medieval tools. Scythes and axes would serve us better than the high-tech equipment now rusting in the farm sheds. No matter how thrifty we are, one day our stocks will run out, and I very much fear that will happen long before our clumsy farming efforts will yield any harvest worth speaking of. Perhaps we will have to scavenge further afield. Maybe we will find supermarket distribution centres, Aladdin’s caves stuffed with every conceivable foodstuff. Or will they be inaccessible, locked behind thick doors with dead keycode locks? Already plundered, rotted or burned? I have no idea what it is realistic to expect, how long such stocks stay good, for how long they would supply our needs.
Even if we find enough food, how will we survive long-term? We have only limited medicines, some basic first aid supplies. My quack treatments, usually involving hand cream, often soothed the kids’ complaints of minor or imagined ailments, but have no real effect. The inevitable accidents and illnesses will take their toll. Suppose, by some miracle, we make it through. What about my children’s future? There are too few young people around to be their friends, their neighbours, their future husbands or wives. What awaits them if they venture outside our limited circle? Empty wastelands, warm welcomes, exploitation and abuse? Like us, they were brought up with the expectation of happiness, of self-determination, discovering your identity and finding your own path. It breaks my heart that their future will be dominated by mere survival, their work no more than a means to stay alive, vocations and self-fulfillment being luxuries that none of us can afford any more. Between my sorrow for the lost past and my fear for the uncertain future, the present, despite its suffering and strain, pain and privations, exhaustion and enervation, is all that I can bear to focus on.
A sudden movement flashes in the corner of my vision, and my head jerks round. But it’s just a squirrel, bounding across the grass so effortlessly that it looks more like a spring, a coiling ribbon of deep reddish-brown satin, than a living thing. I straighten up to stretch out my aching back. My muscles are throbbing, my hands sting from countless small cuts. But the sunlight is warm on my face, the evening breeze deliciously cool. The arepas are starting to cook, and a tantalizing scent wafts past my nose, prompting my stomach to rumble in anticipation. It’s the golden hour of the evening, and soft light is filtering through the new leaves in a thousand different shades of green. Its shafts fall gently on the garden, illuminating the last of the daffodils in a bright golden glow. I bend to inhale their scent, sweet and overpowering, and slip my fingers inside the taut trumpets to pick up saffron crumbs of pollen. The vegetable garden, clumsily stripped of its harvest last year, is preparing to start the cycle again, not unduly concerned with the lack of competent human supervision. Dandelions are encroaching, their flowers another rhapsody in yellow, the first few seed heads crystalline globes. Further off, the woods are filled with birdsong, sweetly liquid. Swans fly over, the pitch of their honking shifting in a comical doppler effect. Echoing from the forest depths, I hear the voices of my children, and my heart swells with love. Carrying over them are the louder tones of my partner. I don’t love him, and he doesn’t love me. But we are there for each other and, in this world gone insane, that is no small thing. For now, we are all here. For now, we are all alive.
The voices grow louder, agitated. I look up, and see that the children are rushing towards me, their arms waving. I can’t quite tell at this distance if they are excited or panicked. Peering into the growing twilight between the trees behind them, I see movement. Lots of movement, approaching through the gaps between the trees, and I catch my breath.
Something is coming.
