How I Live Now Read online

  Do you ever think about dying? Edmond asked me, talking on a tangent.

  And I said Yes, all the time but mostly as a way of making other people feel guilty.

  And he didn't say anything but when, a lot later, I went over the conversation in my head I realized I never asked him the same question back.

  We were quiet for the longest time just listening to the rain on the window with his leg resting against mine and a feeling flying between us in a crazy jagged way like a bird caught in a room. The feeling which had been starting up for a while now was so strong it made me dizzy and so far we'd just been pretending it was what cousinly love felt like and all that garbage you tell yourself when you want to pretend something's not really happening.

  After some more time I tried an experiment by thinking something very very quietly to myself, and then nothing happened for ages, Edmond just lay there with his eyes closed and I felt a little disappointed and a little relieved all at the same time and then just as I was moving on to other things in my head, he propped himself up on one elbow and looked at me with a little half-smile and then kissed me on the mouth so gently and sweetly, and then we kissed again, only not quite so sweetly.

  And after a little while of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving, starving for Edmond.

  And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.

  10

  It would be much easier to tell this story if it were all about a chaste and perfect love between Two Children Against the World at an Extreme Time in History but let's face it that would be a load of crap.

  The real truth is that the war didn't have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop. There were no parents, no teachers, no schedules. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do that would remind us that this sort of thing didn't happen in the Real World. There no longer was any Real World.

  For a while Edmond and I pretended that what was happening between us was totally reversible. We drifted around through the day not looking at each other and acting like nothing at all had happened.

  But it didn't matter. It turns out to be true that an Object in Motion Remains in Motion. Well thank you, Miss Valerie Greene, science teacher back at dear old Nightingale-Bamford School for Girls. Whoever imagined anything you said would ever come in handy?

  Now let's try to understand that falling into sexual and emotional thrall with an underage blood relative hadn't exactly been on my list of Things to Do while visiting England, but I was coming around to the belief that whether you liked it or not, Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.

  In our case, Things Happened in spades.

  The next thing that happened was we started sleeping most of the daylight hours so we could be awake at night when everyone else was in bed. Of course if you had to choose an audience for illicit love based on the people you'd least like to have hanging around, Piper and Isaac would win hands down. Isaac because he always knew by a sort of navigational instinct where Edmond was and what he was thinking, in case it wasn't totally obvious anyway just by looking at us. And Piper because she was so good and pure that when she was confused about what was going on she just stood and stared at your face until you either told her the truth or ran away and hid. Neither of us was anxious to tell her the truth so most of the time we hid.

  Things were so intense I was sure that other people could hear the hum coming off us. Piper and Isaac didn't say anything but the dogs were upset and behaved strangely, as if the hum and the smell of our skin made them anxious. Gin refused to leave Edmond's side, wrapping herself around his legs when he tried to go anywhere, and crawling up into his armpit whenever he sat down as if she wanted to hide herself inside him. It got so bad that he had to be stroking her all the time or she'd start whining piteously until Osbert shouted from the other room Will someone make that dog shut up!

  Some nights Edmond had to lock her in the barn if we wanted to be alone but secretly I felt desperate for her because I knew exactly how she felt.

  Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.

  We didn't hear anything from Aunt Penn. It had been a few weeks since she left and every moment of every day felt like some bizarre new existence in which Not Hearing from Aunt Penn fit perfectly. You could tell Piper missed her mother and there were things I still wanted to ask her but aside from that her arrival right now in the middle of the world's most inappropriate case of sexual obsession would have been inconvenient to say the least.

  As for me? I was pretty far gone, but not so far gone that I thought anyone with half a toehold in reality would think what we were doing was a good idea.

  But I would like to make an important point before this goes any further and that is if anyone feels like arresting me for corrupting an innocent kid then all I can say is that Edmond was not corruptible. Some people are just like that and if you don't believe me it just means you've never met one of them yourself.

  Which is your loss.

  11

  It was now five weeks since the war started.

  Pretty much every day we heard about more bombs. The airports stayed closed and occasionally the electricity would sputter and go off. All the usual sources of information including e-mail and cell phones were much too slow and unreliable to be of any use and there was no television to speak of. According to Osbert you could try to send e-mails but they'd bounce back at you for no particular reason and the same with text messages. And sometimes they'd get where they were going, but not in the form you'd sent them. And sometimes you couldn't get anything like a dial tone for hours at a time and in the end it was easier just to give up and read a book.

  None of this bothered me too much since no one ever tried to call me but I guess it made Osbert nervous because it was getting harder and harder to stay in touch with his spy-crazy friends who spent their lives organizing illicit jaunts down to the pub for exchanges of information. Though they practiced looking grim, in fact they couldn't have been happier waiting for the real action to get going so they could smoke out collaborators and look danger in the eye while carrying messages across enemy lines. We've all seen the movies.

  Then just when we got used to our new life and our daily walk to town and waiting hours for a couple of loaves of bread and half a pound of butter and four pints of milk (because we're children) the whole countryside was quarantined due to an outbreak of smallpox or should I say an Alleged Outbreak of Smallpox because these days we didn't know what was true and what wasn't, and Osbert and the Food Queue were virtually our only sources of information since even the voices on the radio sounded strange and when you could manage to tune in to them you didn't know who they were or whether they were telling you the truth, and there were no newspapers and the phone lines were dead more often than not.

  Anyhow, the upshot of the so-called Smallpox Epidemic was that you weren't supposed to be out on the streets at all and now big black trucks went around and left bags of food twice a week at the end of the drive, and if you had any special requests you could write them on a piece of paper.

  We thought this was pretty funny for a while, and wrote things like chocolate and sausages and cake and Coca-Cola on our list and then Piper got mad at us because she was the one who did most of the cooking and there were things she really needed, and all our stupid requests were getting in the way of them noticing that what we really needed was flour. Not that they paid any attention to our list anyway. We got what we got.

  So OK, there was smallpox. But because everything was getting worse by little daily increments and you didn't know what was true or not true it seemed easier
just to treat this news as another fact of life and nothing particularly to worry about.

  Think about it. It's May in the middle of the English Countryside. And everyone's saying It's the most beautiful May we've had in years and Isn't it ironic? From my point of view this made any doomsday scenario even harder to get my head around, especially having grown up in the Concrete Jungle, which possibly overstates the case given that the Upper West Side is fairly leafy, as concrete jungles go. But we're still talking about a few nice trees here and there whereas in England I was drowning in fertility. And although there were tons of rumors coming from every direction, nothing THAT BAD seemed to be happening to any of US.

  Meanwhile about 100,000 white roses all over the front of the house are blooming like mad, the vegetables grow about six inches a day, and the flower gardens all around the house are so full of color that you couldn't help feeling ecstatic and dizzy just looking at them. According to one of Isaac's rare speeches, the birds were happier with the invasion than they'd been in years since no one was driving cars or farming or doing anything much to disturb them, so all they did was lay eggs and sing and try to avoid getting eaten by foxes.

  It was getting to be like Walt Disney on Ecstasy outside the house what with squirrels and hedgehogs and deer wandering around with the ducks and dogs and chickens and goats and sheep and if anyone looked totally disoriented by this whole war thing it was them.

  Piper and Edmond and Isaac and I used to watch this lunatic fringe milling around every day around sunset and then Edmond and I would slip away up to the tiny bedroom at the top of the house or the big storage closet under the eaves or the lambing barn or one of about a thousand places we'd found where we could try and try and try to get enough of each other but it was like some witch's curse where the more we tried to stop being hungry the more starving we got.

  It was the first time in as long as I could remember that hunger wasn't a punishment or a crime or a weapon or a mode of self-destruction.

  It was simply a way of being in love.

  Sometimes I thought hours had passed when really it was minutes. Sometimes we fell asleep and then woke up to finish where we'd left off. Sometimes I felt like I was being consumed from within like a person with one of those freak diseases where you digest your own stomach. And sometimes we had to stop, just because we were raw and exhausted and still humming humming humming with something we didn't even have the strength left to do anything about.

  Then we would sleep for a little while and eventually reappear and try to act normal which meant things like helping Piper search for honeycomb or dandelion leaves or spending a few hours weeding the vegetable garden. All the sunshine meant there were vegetables earlier than there should have been, and given the dire straits we were supposedly in, there seemed to be lots of food. And of course being me, now that there was a war on and rationing and all, I was in deprivation heaven and hardly needed my father screwing Davina in the next room to help me lose my appetite for a few years.

  The rest of them ate eggs and goat's milk and greens from the garden, and there were baked beans that we'd stockpiled and Piper was getting incredibly good at making things with the dried beans and rice and bacon they put in our package most weeks. There were starting to be tomatoes from the garden, and there were lots of green beans and everyone except me missed bread which was getting harder to come by and especially Anchor butter which Edmond said he dreamed about though we made something I thought worked pretty well by beating the goat's milk for ages with a whisk.

  One of the stranger things that we just came to accept was that no one seemed to know exactly where the food was coming from. At first they thought it must be the local council, but some people whispered that it was the Red Cross, or the Americans, and others suspected The Enemy, and lots of people wouldn't touch it at all Just In Case.

  I was pretty happy to starve rather than eat food Davina made in peacetime but I never thought anyone was trying to poison us during the war. I tried eating a little more so Edmond would stop looking at me that way and after a week or so he even said I looked better by which I'm sure he meant fatter so I cut back some after that.

  But I was talking about the quarantine.

  According to what Osbert picked up in one of his clandestine spy-boy meetings down at the pub, the Smallpox Epidemic was just a rumor spread around to keep us all quiet and scared and out of the way.

  Then we heard that people were dying.

  Edmond said that it was measles not smallpox and that most people weren't dying, but because it was almost impossible to get medicine, people were dying of pretty ordinary stuff like pneumonia and bad cases of chicken pox, and broken bones and some women died having babies.

  We got flyers in with our food saying to boil all our water and Be Extra Careful When Handling Knives, Tools or Firearms Because Minor Injuries Could Lead to Infection and Death. Which struck me as extremely amusing given that we're supposedly in the middle of a war, which usually has the same effect.

  I didn't know if the food was poisoned. I didn't know whether we'd get an infection and die. I didn't know if a bomb would fall on us. I didn't know whether Osbert would expose us to spores from some deadly disease picked up during his secret meetings. I didn't know if we would be taken prisoner, tortured, murdered, raped, forced to confess or inform on our friends.

  The only thing I knew for certain was that all around me was more life than I'd ever experienced in all the years I'd been on earth and as long as no one shut me in the barn away from Edmond at night I was safe.

  12

  So there we are carrying on our happy little life of underage sex, child labor and espionage when someone came to visit us, which, after weeks of Just Us Five kind of took us by surprise, to put it mildly.

  He was a not-too-bad-looking man around thirty-five who seemed too tired even to pretend to be all polite and friendly and he said I'm sorry to bother you but have you got any drugs?

  We all stood there and gaped at him and speaking personally I was wondering whether he was setting up some kind of small business venture to sell cocaine to people who were housebound, deprived of television and generally bored senseless by the war.

  We must have looked pretty moronic just staring at him with our mouths open because he said Perhaps I should speak to your mother or father and then Osbert puffed himself up like he was going to make a big speech and said There's only us. So I guess he decided against the speech after all.

  Then the man looked puzzled and Osbert explained about Aunt Penn and even though the guy didn't say anything more, by the look on his face I was going to be surprised if that was the end of it as far as he was concerned even with all the other things he had to think about.

  Then he picked up more or less where he left off and said I'm sorry, perhaps I should explain about the drugs, I'm Dr. Jameson and as you've probably noticed there's a war on and we're trying to take care of the people in this area.

  We didn't say anything and so he just kept talking.

  The surgeries have all been shut down. The hospitals are on skeleton staff and trying to deal with casualties coming in from the cities and have confiscated most of the drugs from the chemists so local people with basic problems like high blood pressure or diabetes are experiencing difficulties. We're trying to keep these problems from becoming life-threatening, but what we need is drugs. We're a little desperate, especially for antibiotics, and we're asking everyone to check around to see what they might have. Anything will help.

  I looked over at Edmond who was listening in a way that other people listen when they can't quite hear, and I knew he was trying to hear something that wasn't being said. But Osbert said OK, we'll have a look upstairs and Edmond got up with the rest of them to rifle through drawers to see what they could find in the way of prescriptions so I guess whatever he heard was OK.

  This leaves me and Dr. Jameson all alone and while he's looking me up and down I'm reminiscing about what a nice time I've had here in England
completely free of doctors and what a crying shame it's come to an end so soon, and after a little silence he says, How long has this been going on? And I know he's not talking about the war and I hope he's not talking about Edmond and me, so I say What? like I don't have a clue what he's talking about.

  But instead of starting up a big lecture and calling me Young Lady and all the usual crap he just looks at me in a sad sort of way with his tired eyes and says very softly Aren't there enough troubles in the world without this too?

  And for once I don't know what to say.

  Eventually Edmond and Isaac and Osbert and Piper come back with a whole bunch of half-empty boxes because Aunt Penn isn't much for throwing things away and the doctor looks at them and smiles his tired smile and says Thanks, and then he looks at us all standing there waiting for him to go and pauses for a minute and finally he says Is there anything you need that you don't have?

  And we all know what he's talking about and I want to shout NO we especially DO NOT NEED ANY GOVERNMENT SURPLUS PARENTS THANK YOU VERY MUCH but I don't say anything and neither does anyone else so he sighs his tired sigh and goes.

  13

  Something in the air shifted after the visit from the doctor.

  Not exactly because of anything you could put your finger on but if I had to guess I'd say that the magic we were trusting to keep us safe from the outside world suddenly seemed too fragile to protect us forever.

  Everyone was quieter than usual that night. Piper and I wedged ourselves into one of the big chairs and were reading Flashman together and it was late but still light enough outside to read with the help of a candle or two and all the windows and doors were open to let the warm air in along with the smell of honeysuckle, and the dogs were dozing near us and Piper suddenly stopped reading and looked at me in her solemn way and said Are you in love with Edmond?