I grabbed a shovel and trekked down the slope to the dipin the land where the puddle had formed a muddy trench and a refuse catch. Birds scattered and flew up into the trees, which were just starting to hint of buds. Simon’s footsteps came down the slope behind me.
“So what’s your plan?” he asked. He was leaving for Scarborough for seeds, supplies, and a donkey. He touched my back and moved around me, almost slipping.
“Don’t fall in,” I said. “There’s too much water to do a straightforward canal, but if I dredge this and feed it into a smaller system of switchbacks, that will divert any future runoff away from the house, like a funnel. Then I can feed it into the creek down the hill, and if I’m lucky enough, it will reach as far as the mill at Wykeham, which would be a whole other thing to deal with. But think of how nice it would be to have that mill running all the time next winter.”
Simon nodded in approval. He looked at the slope of the hill and how it washed out into open meadow. “If it’s able to maintain a steady current, we could use it as transport. Float things downstream. We could sail a barge down it.”
“Don’t get too ambitious. That would have to be pretty wide.”
Simon smiled and winked. “You’d better start digging.”
“You’d better hurry home and help,” I said with a laugh that tripped over my throat. I cleared it.
“Be careful with your cough. Don’t overdo it and have another fit.”
I assured him I’d be fine. The cough flared up every now and then but felt like nothing more than a common London smoker’s cough, except that I wasn’t in London anymore, and I wasn’t smoking. The air out here had to be cleaner than anything in themodern world, and maybe this was just my body’s way of shedding those last vestiges of London-stain, that poisoned world of microplastics and methane. Simon worried because coughing out here meant mortal peril. There were no thermometers, blood analyses, CAT scans, Google. A cough could mean anything.
“You smoked?” he asked.
I said no but my friends did, my boyfriend did, and I guess yes, sometimes I did too. Kind of. Only when I drank, which was usually every weekend. I explained how pubs, clubs, brunch, and wine gardens would all evolve over the coming centuries.
“That sounds like what we’ve got out here,” said Simon.
“Noooo,” I sang. I insisted like I always did that it wasn’t the same. (I didn’t admit that they were actually better here than back there.)
Simon shook his head and smiled, then sighed at the task I had given myself. “Just come with me,” he said. “We’ll go to a pub and you can compare.”
I laughed. “You could have offered that before I told you all my plans for today.”
“I didn’t think you were serious,” he said. “I’m impressed and I like it, but it’s a lot. Just come, the water will still be here when we get back.”
“That’s the problem.” I dug the shovel into the ground and stuck it farther with my foot. I told Simon I’d go with him to Scarborough next time and he made me promise. “You’re very conniving,” I said as he headed out on his way.
“Just with you.” He smiled over his shoulder and left.
This was how we had survived the winter together. We’d giggle and poke at each other like this, both of us clearly enjoying the life we had somehow managed to find out here together.
But what was this life?
I didn’t understand who Simon was. He was devoted to me, we enjoyed each other’s company, we shared a bed by sheer winter necessity, but there was a distance there, something unknowable. We seemed attracted to each other. I was attracted to him, definitely, and he was, I think in a way, to me. Sometimes I felt him watching me, waiting for something to happen, but our friendship stayed rote, as if we had been driven asexual by all the land tilling and hard labor. We were spent, physically, by the end of each day, and any serious conversation that didn’t revolve around survival simply melted away into the comforting depths of slumber. We would just sit and watch the fire every night and nothing more. During some of the harshest winter days, we would stay in bed all week, only leaving to eat, feed the animals, and go to the toilet, jumping back in and huddling together, laughing and shivering like kids. We loved to watch the fire together. Those were actually the best days.
I was attracted to him, but it was like I didn’t know what that meant anymore.
I began digging my trenches with barely a clue of what I was doing. I broke the earth with a hatchet first, chopping deep cuts down a long row, then shoveled everything out. Eventually I’d need gravel, or cement, ideally, to line the bottom but I didn’t know if any of that existed. I also didn’t know if this was how canals were dug in the first place or if this was even good land management, but looking at the row of topsoil I had removed and feeling the exertion... I felt like I knew exactly what I was doing. I felt like this movement, this disciplining of the land—thiswas purpose. More purpose than I had ever felt before. Hours wiled away like this. And then my cough started up.
It came not like a regular cough. There was nothing caught in my throat, but there was an irritation. I had had bad asthma as a child, relying on an inhaler daily. At night I would stand in the kitchen with my mum before bed and she would watch me as I inhaled two puffs of albuterol and she would count to ten slowly—I thought about her. I thought about my mother as I stood on the side of the hole I had dug, doubled over and wheezing. It was a barking, asthmatic kind of cough that brought no relief, just an exhaustion of the muscles of my chest and a pulsing in my larynx. I coughed and it only made me cough more. My ribs hurt.
I miss my mum.The thought passed through my mind for what I hate to admit was the first time. The general idea of a mum, of care at least. I kept coughing. My head flushed red as I tried to slow my breathing and bottle down the spasms. Tears pulsed naturally from my eyes and maybe this spurred the feeling, the memory. Counting to ten, inhaling, holding my breath, getting better. As a kid, I would instinctually hold my breath whenever a lorry or a bus drove by me on the road or if someone at school wore too heavy a perfume.
My asthma went away by the time I was a teenager, and my mother did too. My asthma was replaced with more nebulous, existential problems and perhaps more accurately they closed me off from my mother, she didn’t go away. It was me who turned and faded. In a way, the stability of her—of standing in the kitchen, her focused healing—had made her seem as if she would always be there, and maybe that was why it took me only until now to really grasp that she was gone from my life forever.
She was gone.
Or rather, I was gone from her. I had no way of seeing her again. It was shocking how plainly that fact surfaced and I accepted it. I kept coughing. Tears pulsed, excising emotions I didn’t know I had. She had been there, but so had all the weight of her expectation, her chatter and glazed surface. Constant prodding and questioning, tinged with guilt.
I didn’twantto go back—first of all.
I coughed.
