“In the Mediterranean,” said Simon.
I smiled. “Right. Sorry.” I decided to stop translating every little thing and continued. “This Italy trip was the only big trip we ever did together, everything after it was just beach holidays to Spain with his friends. But in those early days I think we were both trying to be something for the other, trying to show off.” I tried to describe the overwhelm of expectation, both of us trying to impress each other—him with some DJ friend he wanted me to meet in Naples, me with my inability to be intimidated by Italian. I remembered old train station walls plastered with laminated signs, broken ticket machines, asking Americans for directions to Pompeii. “We did a day trip there,” I said. “It was a billion degrees, I got sunburnt. We spent all day there and even stopped at Herculaneum on our way back to Naples, like we were trying to overculture each other, even though we had probably both watched the same travel videos to prepare the itinerary.”
We were annoyed with each other by the time we arrived at the Herculaneum complex, hungry and hot. We argued about getting audio guides or not, why we hadn’t thought about lunch, whose idea it was to go to Herculaneum the same day as Pompeii anyway. We blazed through the complex. I felt nervy about all the arguing we were having—we had been together less than a year, we were both about to turn thirty. I wandered alone to the very bottom of the archaeological site, to the boat docks, where hundreds of screaming skeletons frozen in volcanic ash had crammed the docks, trying to escape. I gazed into their empty eye sockets and felt the cheap horror, but what I rememberedmost was turning around and seeing the hundred-foot wall of solid rock they were up against—what their city had been buried under. Long grass grew at the bottom. The wall was pink and purple, stained in places with moisture. It was the purest form of hopelessness I had ever witnessed and it washed over me like a boiling wave.
My boyfriend came over and I pointed out the rock wall left over by the volcano, but he was more drawn to the skeletons. We took a tasteless photo together, we returned our audio guides, bought a chocolate bar, but I couldn’t shake the presence of that massive wall. I felt it in the back of my mind for a long time after, almost like a hidden shame, like a desire. It had been such an anomaly of destruction, how could you do anything but surrender? I wanted it to envelop me.
“I swear,” I said to Simon, “if Mount Vesuvius had been any closer, I would have thrown myself right into it. I wasn’t upset or anything, I just felt the overwhelming impracticality of being there, being up against something so enormous. I wanted it to bury me. I guess it was awe.” I went silent, surprised by how real the feeling was when I acknowledged it out loud. “Anyway, that’s what this place reminds me of. It just feels like it’s about to swallow us.”
“Well, I hope not,” said Simon. He put his hand against one of the gothic pillars and gave it a comical shove. “Seems pretty sturdy to me.”
I smiled but my awe was not eased. I almost proclaimed this was the biggest building I had ever seen, but of course that wasn’t true. I laughed at how acclimatized I had become, my wherewithal no greater than any peasant scurrying under the stained glass gaze of angels.
We stood up and stretched, yawned, nudged each other along. We went to the guesthouse to find our travel companions and some splatter of breakfast. We ate and rested in the churchyard while magpies thieved about and the city thrummed to life. We gathered our things for the final stretch of our journey, and all the while I still felt that destructive awe, the gravity pull of the cathedral. Like light pouring through stained glass, I felt the eyes of monsters on me as I stepped further into their world.
6
We went north of York. We went near the coast, a few hours’ hike to the sea, a day’s journey into Scarborough, a long, blind step into winter.
We went under our blankets, under silence, under snow, under the abandon of the land—quieter than those early days in Greenwich, quieter than antinoise, than fog, than snow, than deer breathing out but never in, just out, their curly steam one vast exhale we swam through, all alone for weeks at a time.
It’s a miracle we didn’t freeze to death.
It’s a miracle that actually I consider this time to be the warmest I’ve ever been in my whole life.
Being mapless was liberating and evened the playing field. I had no idea where we were. Simon had no idea either. I had been to York, once, years ago when I was a child. I had been to Leeds and Manchester and Scunthorpe to see my old aunt. I assumed I haddriven through the Moors at one point or another, or cut across it on a train, or maybe not. It took me months to stop doing this—refer to future-spam still in my brain—and admit that any memories that were there (or would be there?) were useless to what was needed now, which was fresh water, more blankets, food preserves, firewood, warmth and dryness, fixed roof, rot avoidance, animal management, that sound in the night, that crack in the forest, a critter? A mouse? That man we saw. A neighbor? A tradesman? There were no neighbors—the concept of them. There were only people and when one of them was in a place that was yours you tensed up, you looked around, listened, stared until their footsteps faded away or they hollered a friendly greeting and you remembered the concept of community. Sometimes it was just water and your imagination anyway—the snowmelt! Dripping through the pines! That stream overstepping the banks! It would all need fixing in spring.
OK, there were maps, technically. There were beautiful ones, drawn with more detail than my twenty-first-century fool-self could have expected. We had relied mostly on caravan crowds and traveling merchants for directions for most of our journey, but by the time we arrived at York, we were truly on our own.
We arrived exhausted in the town hall, in the cathedral, where a giant map was rolled out big and gilded with a blue-painted sea, and I realized I held no intellectual superiority over these people. The map had no perspective or considered ratio to speak of (no satellite assistance), but things were more detailed: the squiggles of the river seeming childlike and crude until you counted the bends and inlets and realized that that’s what was really there; and the astonishingly observed species of foliage, rocks, roads, cliffs, and hamlets that had all been drawn exactlyas what they were: stacks, sticks, little tome-like boxes. A warden reached a long brass pointer across the map to indicate where Simon’s uncle’s smallholding was located. It lay in between a crisscross netting of forests and meadows awash with invisible claims of borders, our land included, which OK wasn’t technicallyourland, yet somehow the manorial system felt more equitable than the rent system I was used to. Scrolls were stamped. Though illiterate, Simon signed his name. We paid three pieces of silver for a pocket-size copy of the map and I hoped this was all a good deal.
The endless journey north, the cold, the sudden snow—the snow that fell around us like powder, then sawdust, then like a thick lather of cream, the earth suddenly covered in it and trying to find our house underneath it all—we had a house, right? We had a roof over our heads? Simon assured me we did, his nodding head growing weary and delirious with each step, until finally, look! There.
Where?
White on white—what am I looking at?
Simon was already running ahead, opening a door in the middle of a blinding whiteness. A space revealed itself, a house. Darkness came alight, dust awash, critters all furry and leggy screaming and scattering from what we were going to call home. When I say house I mean hut.
I have to say I ceased to be human, or at least how I thought a human was meant to be. I worshipped fire, I melted snow, I ate once, maybe twice a day, placing rocks of roots into my frozen stomach, massaging my guts to ease their digestion. I vomited often. I drank milk from an ancient goat, I feared my neighbors, I developed a putrid, chronic cough.
But it felt exhilarating to be so baseline, to feel my body take advantage of every shift in temperature and calorie. If I had it in me, I had it in me, and it was queued up and spent. I finally figured out what year it was. It was December of 1300, then it was January of 1301. For the first time in my life, I knew what it meant to toil and to freeze.
“In the future, there’ll be electric heaters,” I told Simon. We were watching the fire in the hearth in our hut house. Despite my worsening cough, I inhaled its smoke like sniffing a warm summer breeze, grateful. Even as far out in the country as we were, smoke was inescapable, wafting in from neighboring homesteads, big swells of it from villages in the valley, and of course our own hearth, which we kept roaring day and night as long as winter lasted. I explained a radiator, underfloor heating, hot water taps.
“How can you know all of this without knowing how to make any of it?” said Simon. “What good is that?” We were huddled close together. We shared a bed, made from rope and wood, the mattress stuffed with hay and old wool. The fire was right next to us—coals and embers the most tempting blanket.
“There’ll be electric blankets someday,” I said.
“Then go make one, right now.” He tried nudging me out of the bed with his knee, laughing. “What do you need to make one? Wood? Mercury? Copper?”
“I need...” I paused. An Amazon account? A mum who had one stored up in the loft? All I could do was laugh and nudge Simon back, tempt him to put another log on the fire.
By February and into March, the sun slipped into the picture more frequently. I gave little weather reports as we went about our daily chores, tilling the land, skinning rodents, milkinggoats, sorting sheep, and I’d estimate the change in degrees—the numbers meaning nothing to Simon of course, and nothing, ultimately, to me either, but the sun was unburrowing itself and I had never been so aware of it.
Our smallholding was on a slope, and when the snow melted it caused flooding and puddles to form anywhere we had attempted to tame. Whole crops were washed out, there was mud and awkward spinoff streams that ran counter to the actual stream that had broken its banks. The puddles attracted the wrong kinds of wildlife and the land rotted, turning brown before an approaching spring could think of turning anything green. I set out one morning to do something about it—that was how easy it was to live out here, you just woke up and decided to do something.
Like all mornings I woke up and grabbed the kettle (or what I called the kettle) off the coals and fed the hearth a new stick of wood, then went outside. I mixed hot water from the kettle into a larger basin of cold water and used this to wash myself as best I could, grateful there was no more frost or ice at least. Then I went back inside and ate/drank a cup of perpetual stew/gruel of roots, grains, and old bones, which mixed nicely with eggs (when our chickens laid any) or fish or what have you, which we didn’t have any at the moment, despite Simon’s best efforts. Simon was good with the animals (three chickens, two goats, eight sheep) and an apt tradesman, but I was still mostly useless. Everything I could do (read, write, execute Excel formulas, manage streaming subscriptions, unsubscribe from newsletters, make pasta salads) I could only do well in the world I had come from, not this one, and I was always in search of ways to prove my worth.
