How I Live Now Read online

  Whether I could feel his presence or not, I talked to him constantly, telling him about Piper and Jet and the McEvoys and our life the way it was now, and then in the middle of some rambling monologue I might get the feeling that he was there listening, as if I'd conjured him from thin air, pulled him out of a hat by the ears like a magician's rabbit. I was happiest when he just came and lay down next to me, and I could almost feel the weight of his body against mine. His presence silenced, if only for a few seconds, the crackling anxiety that made my blood grate against my bones and for a little while I'd feel melted and soft.

  Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to write a scientific paper about this. I believe in the spirit world about as not at all as the next person. I'm just saying what happened.

  In retrospect I have to think it was the kind of connection that makes people decide to phone each other at the same instant after fifty years of not talking. You hear about siblings adopted at birth into families thousands of miles apart who both name their first child Vera, dogs that begin to howl the instant their owner is killed in a war, people who dream plane crashes. It's the sort of communication there's no particular reason to believe in under ordinary circumstances and I'm generally not big on ghosts. Ouija boards and black cats are way down the list of neuroses I suffer from.

  So you'll understand why I didn't make a big song and dance about my meetings with Edmond. I wasn't even sure I wanted to talk about it with Piper.

  I was trying to revamp my reputation. This time around I thought I'd be the sane one.

  19

  Before we started angling to get into the wide world again the first question I wanted answered was this whole smallpox epidemic thing.

  Major McEvoy looked kind of uncomfortable when I asked him and said It was Not a Likely Danger to the Population at Large at the Present Time, and when I put on my best shocked face he said Now Daisy, how would Things Be if there was nothing to stop people wandering around Spreading Rumors and Getting Hysterical and trying to organize raids on The Enemy and that sort of thing, hmmm?

  And then he gave me his Name, Rank and Serial Number look and changed the subject.

  Not being entirely witless I got the picture that if we were going to die it wasn't going to be from smallpox.

  What was interesting about this little insight was that I could see the army had a point, but it still seemed like a sneaky trick to perpetrate on all those simple country folk.

  With that worry sorted out I started trying to figure out a way for Piper and me not to spend the rest of our lives rotting in Reston Bridge when we could be out in the world possibly running into some of our long-lost relatives.

  So after a few days sitting around twiddling our thumbs and going pretty much stark raving stir-crazy trying to have a sensible conversation while Alby whacked us on the head with a plastic sword every six seconds, we asked Major McEvoy to find us something to do because we were Hard Workers and wanted to Help People which was not a total lie except the people we wanted to help were us. He looked kind of pensive for a minute and said he would think about it and get back to us.

  You can imagine that the good Major had a lot of thinking to do given that even in the best possible light we were still a fairly useless pair, but then I remembered JET, and that was a STROKE OF GENIUS because a well-trained sheepdog and someone who knew how to get him to do things were just about priceless at the moment what with most of the local farmers dependent on herding their animals with big off-road bikes and there no longer being any fuel.

  Piper knew dog training from Isaac and the two of them were the world's foremost natural Animal Whisperers and could make dogs and goats and sheep and probably bugs too do pretty much whatever they asked just by looking at them in a certain way and whistling a little low whistle which for Isaac especially was extremely useful, given the limits of his conversational aptitude.

  Major McEvoy kind of perked up at this brainstorm and asked for a sheepdog demonstration. So with a couple of whistles, Piper sent Jet out into the garden and what do you know he was off like a shot, crouching down low when he got to Alby and then very gently without being obvious moving him little by little toward us until poor old Alby was standing right in front of his dad looking confused and wondering why every time he turned around to run back out to play Jet was blocking his path.

  Piper gave him a pat and looked as smug as she was ever likely to look and I thought YES we are on our way, now if only I can figure out some possible use for me before they stick me in some out-box marked Cannon Fodder.

  But it turned out that Major McEvoy was pretty nice after all and also he probably knew that walking off with someone else's pretty nine-year-old girl even in the middle of a war wasn't totally kosher and so he asked me to come along too and I gave Piper a mental thumbs-up sign and she smiled.

  It turned out that our place wasn't the only one that had been sequestered and Major M started taking us every morning to Meadow Brook Farm which was the largest dairy farm for fifty miles in any direction and should have been renamed Fort Dix Acres since the Meadows and the Brooks were teeming with soldiers all trying to take the place of machines.

  The problem was, the cows had to go out every day to graze because there wasn't enough hay to feed them and they had to be brought in to be milked twice a day which sounds simple enough until you think about three hundred cows all coming and going, and a lot of army guys milling around the farm like bulls in china shops.

  Jet was a miracle to watch in action and he had most of the remains of the occupied British Army in love with him after the first day and Piper was right behind him in their affections. She could get him to separate out ten cows and bring them in to be milked by the army guys and in the meantime have the next ten ready while he took the first ten back.

  All the big hunky army types couldn't get over sweet serious little Piper whistling her magic whistle and this black and white blur of a dog running exactly where she told him to and she must have reminded every single one of them of their little sister back home or the one they wished they had back home or possibly just the Virgin Mary. Whenever they weren't doing something else they kind of lurked around with moony expressions watching Piper and Jet in action and you could tell most of them felt happy just being near her and that Old Family Magic.

  Piper acted like she didn't even notice all the attention but I could tell she liked the way everyone asked her serious questions about Jet and treated her like something special. In the average morning at least three or four big guys would hang around for ages and finally get up the courage to say He reminds me exactly of my dog Dipper back home, or How does he know which whistle means what?

  But I got the feeling that what they all wanted to say was just You have the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen in my life.

  I guess this was fairly obvious, given that she had the same effect on most people, but with all those quirky brothers getting in the way she probably didn't get as much chance to be noticed as you might expect.

  The fly in the ointment was that there was too much work for Jet and not enough for me. Having Gin around to help Jet would have solved the first problem and been an all-around godsend but that still left the second. I spent some of my endless hours of leisure learning to shoot a gun, which I thought might come in handy someday, if not in the war then back on the streets of New York. It was a lot harder than it looked but after a while I got pretty good thanks to all the expert marksmen hanging around disguised as milkmaids.

  I tried raising the subject with Major McEvoy of getting Gin drafted into our section of the British Army and you could tell for a minute he forgot that he was supposed to keep us out of trouble and away from thoughts of Regrouping because he just looked sort of absentminded and said No, it wouldn't be possible to get Gin right now because of the Situation on the Roads and also she's probably as useful to Gateshead Farm as Jet is to us.

  Thank god I have years of Emergency Deadpan Practice because you wouldn't have guessed
that Gateshead Farm meant anything more to me than Porridge Oats but like any good undercover agent I now had two names to put together to make an address and Major McEvoy thought we were still talking about dogs.

  I didn't tell Piper just yet because I was hoping for divine intervention about how we were going to get to Gateshead Farm, near Kingly, East of Here, and when.

  Back to the dogs, in the end they compromised and managed to find a silly border collie named Ben who wasn't much more than a teenage puppy to work alongside the Master only it didn't work out as well as you might have hoped since he wasn't the brainiest dog on earth and besides was afraid of cows.

  It got so that Jet knew his job so well that either one of the army guys or I could take over some of the time while Piper tried to train some sense into dim Ben, practicing over and over again until he was just this side of useless. He still ran away bleating if any of the cows took it into their heads to look at him sideways, but most of the time they couldn't be bothered and he managed to muddle through.

  Sometimes I caught Jet giving him a look that was totally unimpressed and I could almost see Jet thinking Excuse me, but who invited this blockhead to the party?

  And sometimes I wondered if he might be thinking the same thing about me.

  20

  Now you might have gleaned from some of the hints dropped so far that food was not my best subject. So it was kind of ironic that the part of the army I got enlisted into was the one trying to provide it for everyone.

  There was the whole milk operation, starring Piper and Jet the Wonder Dog, and the part that came after milking was complicated by having to heat and sterilize the milk since there were no fridges to keep it cold and that turned out to be so hard that eventually they gave up and just served it the old-fashioned way straight from the cow. Everyone worried about uncontaminated containers but the best solution turned out to be making people Bring a Bottle, then at least the army knew the milk was OK when it left them and if it poisoned anyone later it wasn't their fault.

  There were a couple of local guys who knew all about butchering so they were the lucky ones who got to kill and divvy up the cows which was a lot bloodier than you might want to find yourself thinking about on a dark and stormy night. They were popular though, and suddenly had whole bunches of friends they'd never noticed before queuing around the block clutching barbecue tongs.

  Chickens were having their necks wrung all over the place especially if they didn't keep churning out eggs, and it was pretty surprising to me how many of the older folks seemed to be right at home strangling a chicken. Piper said it was because of the Last War and rationing and everyone keeping chickens and I was pleased to hear that some of the skills I was picking up would stand me in good stead in Later Life, assuming I had one.

  And finally, anyone who was healthy enough and willing enough to pick crops was hauled in to help and that was where I came in.

  My first job was picking apples, which was somewhat more useful than hanging around on the outskirts of the Piper Appreciation Society. I got a lot of doubtful looks at first about whether I was strong enough to work so hard but these days determination was nine-tenths of the law and also as time went on there were a lot more thin people around and I didn't stand out so much.

  I worked with eight other army people including three soldiers and their wives and two other civilians. We started early in the morning and worked until it started to get dark and after only a few hours we drifted into cliques like we were all back in school.

  My partner was a local woman called Elena who was from Liverpool originally so I didn't understand most of what she said for the first few days and vice versa. Eventually we started chatting about this and that and soon the stories started coming out and I heard all about how she and her husband Daniel met and what were their favorite movies and how often they had sex and though she was a lot older than me and we barely spoke the same language she turned out to be the kind of person you could talk to about pretty much anything without worrying that she'd report you to the Pope.

  She wanted to know all about my American and English families even though she'd never met any of them except Piper, and how I'd ended up picking apples in the middle of a foreign country not to mention the middle of a foreign war. Sometimes I thought I might implode if I didn't talk to another human being about the events of my new life, especially the parts someone my age wouldn't be allowed to see in the movies. But every time I was just on the verge of pouring it all out to Elena I changed my mind at the last minute just in case.

  Luckily it seemed riveting enough to her that I was American and had been sent over by my Evil Stepmother which got her all clucking and tutting and all I had to do was look kind of tragic and say nothing at all for a few minutes and suddenly I had a new best friend enlisting the whole bunch of apple pickers into hating Davina on faith, which cheered me up for ages.

  When we started work they gave us big boxes to pack the fruit in and the basic trick was not to throw the apples in or they would bruise and rot and ruin the rest of them in the box which suddenly made sense of the One Bad Apple expression my teachers used to trot out all the time, or Two if you counted Leah.

  We had baskets, and ladders you had to move whenever you ran out of apples close enough to reach, and when the baskets were either full or unbearably heavy you passed them down to one of the others and they unpacked the fruit carefully and passed back empty baskets. It didn't seem to matter whether I was picking or packing because both jobs were equally tiring, and the first few days I had to lie on the ground for twenty minutes at a time to keep from passing out from exhaustion and the pain in my arms. Elena was nice about it and just kept working around me.

  It was such hard work that at first I thought I wouldn't be able to stand it, what with every muscle in my body aching and me hardly able to climb into the truck or get out of bed the next day. But I did it because pushing myself farther and farther past what was possible made me feel calm, which is hard to explain but something I was good at.

  One of the guys who worked with us was a few years older than me and I didn't like him much but unfortunately the feeling wasn't mutual. He was called Joe and he started hanging around trying to get my attention by telling stupid jokes while we worked and asking totally duh questions like What's it like being a Yank? Elena felt sorry for Joe due to him not being the sharpest knife in the rack, especially when it came to picking up rejection vibes, but it was easier to feel sorry for him if you weren't being eyed up like prey.

  Maybe he's lonely, she said, and I just looked at her wondering if she expected me to open a Home for the Socially Challenged or what. Then she started giggling and I had the feeling we were thinking the same thing, namely, some people are lonely for all the right reasons.

  After that we both pretty much ignored him.

  Most of the workers except Piper, Jet, a few others and me lived at Meadow Brook so we were picked up every morning at seven and taken home at seven every evening and every night we fell asleep in the truck and just about managed to wake up for some food and climb into bed and that was our day.

  It took a lot of getting used to but after the first week we compared muscles and I told Piper all about Elena and it almost made up for the fact that when we had a day off neither of us got out of bed at all. Even Jet didn't seem interested in moving out from under the bed except when we called him for food.

  The plums turned ripe at about the same time as the apples and sometimes we moved from one to the other just to vary the routine but it was simpler to strip a tree of apples because they were easier to handle and you didn't have to move the ladder so often and when the plums fell off the trees they rotted and attracted thousands of wasps so Elena and I stuck with apples when we could.

  Elena was what you might call a Big Girl and you could tell she wanted to ask me about being so thin but being English she would rather have sawed her own legs off at the knees. I caught her looking pretty puzzled a few times when she saw me
nibbling at bits of lunch when everyone else was wolfing down anything in sight and I could tell, war or no war, she was thinking If Only I Had Her Self-Control.

  I found out she'd been trying to have a baby for seven years and was smack in the middle of some special last-ditch treatment when the war broke out and she couldn't get any more treatment now and was forty-three and didn't know when she'd ever get another chance.

  I told her she should borrow Alby for a few days if she wanted to appreciate how great it was to be childless but when I looked at her she was just managing to smile and her eyes were kind of bleak and I wished I hadn't said anything at all.

  After about ten days of picking some of us moved over to broad beans and that was worse because you were always bent over with a whole new set of aching muscles but at least the beans tasted nice when you got them home and cooked them. It was getting to a point where there wasn't much around that tasted like anything you'd want to eat and even I had to say I could do with a nice piece of toast which made Elena laugh.

  One night we were driving home through the usual checkpoints and Piper and I were asleep and Joe, who sometimes came with us to stay with his parents in the village, suddenly took it into his head to stand up and get show-offy, and I guess thinking war was some kind of open discussion forum where everyone was really interested in your opinion, started shouting a whole bunch of obscenities at one of the checkpoint guards and when Major McEvoy told him to sit down in a really icy army tone of voice he ignored him and kept shouting stuff about Johnny Foreigner being an Effing Bastard and worse.

  And then in an almost lazy kind of way the checkpoint guy who'd been looking at him raised his gun and pulled the trigger and there was a loud crack and part of Joe's face exploded and there was blood everywhere and he fell over out of the truck into the road.