A.N.: This was meant to be a snippet! I imagine it'll be a few chapters long, but not my usual sixty-chapter standard.
How We Live Now
02
For that first afternoon, they returned to the house. Without really speaking, Daisy and Isaac set to work, helping put the furniture back to rights in the living-room, while they silently debated whether or not to take up residence or hide out in the barn where the illusion of safety was strongest, and probably the reality too, while Piper soaked the dirt-crusted dishes in water heated up in an antique kettle over the fireplace in the living-room, tidying up as best she could, searching through the cupboards and larder and the hidey-holes only a family in their own home knew to search, above cupboards and behind the piano, under the cutlery drawer in the sideboard in the posh dining-room and in vintage Tupperware in the garage, in the drawer under Piper's bed and the desk in Isaac's room, gathering supplies.
With at least a few of the ghosts having been made flesh and blood again, the house was the source of previously-forgotten comfort, thick walls and fresh clothes and each other. A place they had once considered safe, and now became that for them again, not relaxing but allowing things to catch up to them.
Isaac was hurt worse than they thought. Already a skinny kid before, the last few months had wrought a change in him that reminded her of age-spotted photographs of Nazi concentration-camps. Now he was deathly thin, more even than her, and covered in nicks and cuts; his raincoat was splattered with someone else's blood and whoever he had taken the gun from had left Isaac with a nasty cut from his neck down his shoulder-blade, and a swollen bruise on his hip the colour of a rotting eggplant.
The ancient living-room became the new centre of the house, the kitchen with its gas-fired Aga forgotten in lieu of the open fireplace where they boiled water to bottle for later just in case the water-butts ran dry, and warmed more to use and have their first hot wash in ages. With the couches pushed back to their proper places, something slipped into place, the house felt more familiar. Piper found the blankets and raided the bookcases stuffed three-deep in Aunt Penn's study and found a deck of playing-cards from Isaac's desk upstairs, jigsaw puzzles, Bananagrams and Monopoly. Piper was even sighted sweeping a bright-yellow duster over the piano and side-tables, gazing through the glass of a small curiosity-cabinet full of Aunt Penn's collectible figurines and homemade Mother's Day gifts from her children, fine crystal catching the light and porcelain gleaming, painted with wildflowers Daisy could now name because of Piper.
Piper never asked about her mother, not since confessing that her being a chocolate-monster had frightened her mom off to Oslo. But her longing and grief were plain as day in the reflection as she gazed at those figurines, her mother's treasures gathered amongst things she considered precious - gifts from her children.
Instinctively, without ever having known a mother's love herself, Daisy knew Aunt Penn, wherever she was, would trade every single one of those ornaments and her soul to hear the sound of her children's voices on the end of a phone-call. It was because Piper was a monster for chocolate and a solemn shepherdess, because Isaac was quirky and the animal-whisperer, because Edmond was Edmond and everything that name meant that Penn, wherever she was, took pride in her children. Loved her children as fiercely as they loved each other, and loved her, and now loved Daisy, as she loved them.
When the water was warmed through, Daisy helped Isaac strip off. He seemed too stiff to do much himself, but if he was embarrassed he was most likely too exhausted or numb to react: That was when they saw the bruises, and Piper's face went solemn. He was worse off than they were, and Daisy knew they were pretty bad.
He had stopped crying, and she washed away the tear-marks streaked down his face in the muck, using soft washcloths and a big, clean sponge after, the warm water doing as much for the spirit as for the body, cleaning away the dried blood, muck and debris of hiking through the countryside in all weathers, the warmth permeating through the skin and invigorating him, until his cheeks were no longer ashen. Leaning over the now-empty kitchen sink, she carefully rinsed shampoo out of Isaac's curls with a plastic jug. Forcing him to drink quarts of water helped with his chapped lips; and Piper found a dusty First Aid kit tucked in an obscure corner of the potting-shed and brought out Isaac's Boy Scouts' Handbook, flipping it open to Minor Injuries. Piper tugged both the Handbook and Jet out of the house with her in search of natural remedies in the woods, while Daisy stayed behind with Isaac.
Quietly, she washed him and tended to his wounds. The cut from his neck down his shoulder-blade was jagged and seeping, but not angry, and the antibiotic ointment in the First Aid kit had never been opened; Daisy was no nurse but she cleaned the wound, ignoring Isaac's soft hisses and flinching until she was satisfied it was clean, daubed ointment on it and left it to breathe before taping a bandage over it. Counting every one of his ribs, Daisy tucked a blanket around the nude but clean Isaac, his hair tousled but drying into the curls she remembered, his eyelashes spiked, his eyes no longer as red.
Daisy gave herself a wash, the warm water bliss, cleaning her many cuts and scrapes and bloody bug-bites, wiping away the muck to reveal the bruised skin beneath. She didn't look too closely; and she avoided the mirrors after shocking even herself in the landing. She coated her hair with shampoo, combing it out for the first time in weeks; and she found toothpaste. Divinity!
She sat quietly with Isaac while they waited for Piper to reappear, naked, cleaned, and cocooned in blankets that lulled her with thoughts of blissful, deadened sleep, ignoring the pile of neatly folded clean clothes that would take effort to put back on.
It was then she noticed the tears glittering on Isaac's clean, bruised face, felt his desperation and grief. She didn't have to ask why he was crying, or why he was grieving. Edmond wasn't with him. She pulled herself off the couch, shuffled three feet to the other, and sank down beside Isaac. He took even less space on the couch than she remembered, even with the blankets.
"He went back," Isaac gulped, gazing unseeing with tear-filled eyes at the embroidered cushion on the other couch. Bluebells. Edmond had tucked bluebells into the braid Piper insisted on giving her that afternoon they had gone out to see the carpets of blue spreading across the entire woods.
"Back where?" she asked hoarsely, but she knew.
"Gatesfield." The word was whispered, and tears spilled down Isaac's hollow cheeks. "We kn-knew what was g-going to h-h-happen…could feel it'n the - air…" He slurred and choked on his words, his huge eyes turning on her with a glazed kind of intensity; she was the first person he had to have spoken to in days. "We tried. They w-wouldn't listen. Had to leave, so - I made him… But we had a fight. He went back."
The brothers, so in tune with nature, had felt what was about to happen like the birds that had gone silent and the dogs that had run for shelter moments before the fallout of the nuclear bomb had turned their sunny Perfect Day to ash falling like snow. They had sensed the danger and had tried to convince the people at Gatesfield, with whom they had lived and toiled for weeks, months even. Until something strange happened, and Isaac imposed his considerable will-power over Edmond, forcing him to leave the farm. The brothers had fought, and Edmond had turned back, not satisfied he had done everything in his power to convince the people they had worked beside and befriended that they were in danger and had to evacuate.
Daisy stared, her mind racing. Gatesfield. The foxes. Ding. The pervasive stench of death, the lowing of half-dead cows and the massacre of innocent people learning how to farm, women and children younger than Piper zip-tied, heads covered, shot and left for dead to be picked over… The horror of Gatesfield would never be scrubbed from her mind, rats chewing their way out of the rotting innards of dead cows; Ding, covered in shit and half-dead and straining for Piper whom he knew even in that state; carrion picking strips of purplish flesh from the faces of human beings who had been massacred.
Painstakingly examining each and every one of what remained of their faces. The guilt and grief and relief that not a single one was anyone she vaguely or even distinctly recognised.
"He wasn't there."
Suddenly, Isaac seemed more like four than fourteen, big eyes wide and locked on Daisy's face with devastating hope, tears sliding down his face, wanting nothing more than to hear her tell him his big-brother was okay. "How do you know?" he choked.
"I checked their faces."
Isaac blinked at her. Then he realised, and what little colour was in his cheeks faded, and his tears dried up and he blinked rapidly, then started to nod. She didn't have to clarify that she meant she had searched dead bodies to make sure none of them were the boys. He seemed to know what had happened at Gatesfield.
"He wasn't with them, Isaac. I made myself look at every face. Neither of you were there." She was glad Piper was outside, gathering comfrey and chamomile and searching to find liquorice and healing unicorn tears for all she knew. She hadn't told Piper everything she had seen at Gatesfield, or in the woods, but Piper had found Dink and the feel of the place and the memory of the stench was enough.
She had shielded Piper from a lot.
Edmond had wanted to keep others alive: Isaac had wanted to keep Edmond alive. Neither of them had been shielded from anything. And she knew without asking that Isaac had seen and done things that could never be forgotten.
They all had. Piper less so, but she had seen Joe gunned down, felt the spatter of his blood warm on her cheeks like tears. Seen Daisy shoot that guy in the heart for touching Piper; they had left the younger one to bleed out when she shot him in the stomach.
The horrible thing was, it didn't keep her up at night because she'd done it; because Daisy would do it again.
And in the pit of her stomach Daisy knew, even if he hadn't been among the dead, Edmond had been at Gatesfield. Had seen all those people zip-tied, bagged and sloppily executed, left to rot and become a feast for foxes.
Because Edmond was a good man and he couldn't live with that on his conscience; Isaac could. But he had lost Edmond.
As someone who had stopped expecting anything, good or bad, she still recognised the dreadful hope filling Isaac's young, tear-stained face. Wrapped up as they were in blankets, all they could do for closeness was lean against each other, Isaac's head resting against hers as his brother's had so long ago in the moonlight. Her eyes burned and he wasn't here, and she cried. She cried with Isaac, Isaac who had wanted to keep his great-hearted introvert brother alive. She had threatened to leave Piper behind; she had never meant it. She couldn't imagine how either brother was feeling - feeling, because she knew, she felt it in her bones: Edmond would find his way home to them.
With every fibre of her being she knew it as fact.
Against ridiculous odds, a nine-year-old and a city-raised anorexic American had hiked across the English countryside, avoiding massacres and gang-rape and poisoning by dubious mushrooms; the skinniest, happiest fourteen-year-old had made it home with a firearm and a few minor injuries, shaken to his core but alive.
Edmond, the oldest and kindest and wisest of them, had to make it home.
He had to.
Anything else was unthinkable.
They heard Piper's gurgling laugh first, the soft gruff bark of Jet, and in the dim half-light of early-evening, bundled up in blankets, they watched the shadow of Piper's skinny form dance across the wall and the open living-room door until she seemed to realise nothing but a hoist was going to shift them from the couch, and she bounded in with Jet, bearing armfuls of muddy potatoes and sticks of rhubarb longer than her legs, wearing a crown of vibrant purple-blue asters and a smile.
It was Piper's turn to wash, and with her quiet, solemn smile she reached up, tenderly resting the wreath of stubbornly-beautiful purple flowers on Daisy's crown before stripping out of her abused clothes that, like Daisy's, like Isaac's, had reached the Do Not Resuscitate stage in their life and would be cremated out in the yard with the rest of the trash they had gathered from the house, evidence of the men who had sequestered this home and then abandoned it. Isaac dozed while Daisy helped Piper wash, rinsing shampoo through Piper's long hair and tenderly combing through the tangles with froths of Aunt Penn's rose-scented soap that evoked the brief but vivid memory of that night Daisy had talked with her mother's sister about this place she loved so much.
Wrapping Piper up in blankets after air-drying in front of the fire crackling in the enormous hearth, Daisy eyed the bloodstains and burs in Jet's coat and thought, That battle could wait another day.
Eventually they dressed, and lit a couple candle stubs to light their way around. They secured the external doors - good old sturdy thick English oak doors that had been designed in the times when highwaymen galloped around the countryside harassing the locals, kind of like now - and pulled the curtains, Isaac's face drawn in an unfamiliar sombre frown of concentration as he plugged any gaps, making sure no light escaped, murmuring about finding a hammer and nails to board up the windows in the rooms they weren't using. He said he was strangely glad for the days becoming shorter, to conceal the smoke coming from the chimney.
With a fire lit and a couple candles glowing, Isaac had on an old pair of glasses and Piper was humming contentedly as they arranged their provisions on the battered old kitchen-table, another piece of ancient oak that must have stood there in the centre of the huge room since the dawn of time. They had examined the maps on the walls full of push-pins, gathering what information they could before plucking everything down, leaving only Aunt Penn's pressed-flowers and Isaac's academic certificates and Piper's paintings and the commemorative plates and antique copper Jell-O moulds and the horseshoes over the door.
Isaac hadn't remembered the food they had hidden from Piper, back before everything began, the rations provided by the Government or whoever: Piper had enjoyed it so much, foraging and gardening and being creative and self-sufficient hunting rabbits and fishing for pink trout, that they hadn't the heart to tell her about the crate that Edmond had hidden away in the lambing-barn. Daisy had recovered it, hidden in the hay and completely untouched. Only the ham had to be thrown away, even Jet wouldn't touch it, but Daisy figured the rats would enjoy a good meal and threw it into the woods away from the barn.
They figured whoever had sequestered their home had left pretty soon after pulling the rug from under their feet, not too worried about the information they left behind tacked and taped to Aunt Penn's ancient kitchen-walls, and no-one had seemed intent on finding and looting the house because there was still food in some of the cupboards, though the refrigerator had long been emptied but for a half-full jar of lemon curd, another of sliced jalapenos, a bottle of HP brown sauce and what Piper called the heels of some cheeses that Mummy got at Waitrose because she liked cheese and biscuits with chutney and pears or figs and sometimes a little glass of port that she let Edmond sip but Piper didn't like because it was yucky.
It was surprising that what they recovered from the kitchen, the pantry and the garage nearly filled the ancient oak table, and Daisy accredited this to the fact the British Army had chosen to sequester a house cluttered up to the eaves; it also helped that Aunt Penn was frazzled by housework where she had laser-point precision with her career, and the house was a mess, truthfully. There were hidey-holes everywhere and things were stored in the unlikeliest places. Three ceramic bowls Isaac excitedly said were Christmas puddings, already cooked, covered in tinfoil; they were so full of alcohol and sugar they would keep for years. Large tins of something called confit, the duck they liked from holidaying in France; they just had to open the tins and reheat the meat, which would be succulent and moist, and they could save the fat to cook other things, Piper kept licking her lips at thought. Tins of mixed beans and oxtail soup; tomato passata and jars of Aunt Penn's honey, coconut-milk and curry-paste; hot-cocoa powder and boxes of herbal tea-bags that were Aunt Penn's; bottles of olive-oil, sunflower oil and vinegar and sriracha and chocolate balsamic; a big box of sea salt; tangy Branston pickle and something Piper called piccalilli; evaporated milk Piper said Mummy uses for her special chocolate-cakes; pesto and miso paste; an open bottle of good maple syrup; bags of Italian 00 pasta flour; the Tupperware tubs older than Edmond that contained Self-Raising and Plain flour; baking-powder and boxes of Atora suet Aunt Penn stockpiled before autumn because everyone and their grandmother wanted to get started on Christmas pudding prep; bags of raisins and dried cranberries and walnuts and freeze-dried raspberries from the fairy-cakes Edmond made for Piper's last birthday, bronze-coloured sprinkles and a tub of Betty Crocker chocolate frosting still sealed; black treacle and Lyle's Golden Syrup; black pudding; the last of Aunt Penn's homemade jams, plum-and-amaretto, fruits of the forest, rhubarb-and-ginger and only three jars of her special marmalade; tins of lychees; spitted cherries in kirsch; stock cubes; sliced peaches; a box of oat-cakes, another of bran-flakes; fancy Italian dried mushrooms that made Piper catch Daisy's eye solemnly, remembering but not speaking about Mushroom Night. Aunt Penn's friend had a membership to Costco and Aunt Penn bought all her pasta and rice there, storing it all in the loft above the garage, dozens of untouched bags hidden under a tarpaulin with all the fishing gear and the blow-up kiddie-pool and toilet-paper stacked on top, boxes of PG Tips teabags and jars of instant coffee. Amid the dried pasta, they had found a sack of rice and another of milled oats because Aunt Penn and Edmond had porridge every morning and their favourite was vegetarian chilli, and they found untouched bags of lentils and jars of spices in the cupboards and Piper had the idea to start drying the herbs in Edmond's garden and Isaac thought they might be able to pull together something like Mum's chilli if they went through the cookbooks and Piper got that gleam in her eye Daisy hadn't seen for months, reminding her of their Perfect Day.
To the jars and packets and bottles of hard-cider and beer Mummy got for Edmond and stored in the potting-shed, they added the offerings from the Government that they had hidden away all those weeks ago. What Isaac called a 'crock' of mature Cheddar sealed in wax; a bottle of apple-juice; a rich, chock-full-of-fruit, dark, enormous fruit-cake that stayed perfect and would stay perfect, Isaac said, for months just like Mum's Christmas puds; dried apricots and a box of dates; a bag of oats and a smaller one of flour, a box of salt and tins of corned-beef.
Isaac hadn't eaten in days, making their forced-march starvation rations seem like feasts in comparison. Daisy at least had had Piper with her, the mystical creature born to flit amid the turning foliage collecting edible plants and nuts and blackberries, bringing back confirmation of a relatively untouched potato field and the news that Edmond's vegetable-garden had been left to its own devices and thus was thriving.
After investigating the gardens and the greenhouse, Piper had returned carrying muddy potatoes and stalks of rhubarb as long as her legs that were woody but full of fibre and good and sweet once they had been poached. It was a special occasion, returning home, returning to Isaac; they opened the tin of Ambrosia rice-pudding and heated it up, dividing it between the three of them in bowls painted with blue patterns with sweet, sharp rhubarb on top and it felt like they were gorging on food, but it really wasn't much, but like babies they needed to feed little and often or they'd make themselves ill from the shock of real food.
In the warmth of the living-room, they dozed, until Piper's soft snores joined Jet's and Isaac's glasses sat crooked on his nose where he had fallen asleep, and Daisy blew out the candles rather than waste them, and Daisy instinctively knew it was four a.m. when she woke because it was always bitter, and she raked the embers and put another log on the fire when she got up to use the bathroom because it was an old house and the toilet still worked because of ancient plumbing and the water-tank in the attic and Aunt Penn's foresight in fitting solar-panels.
For a few bleary moments as the embers glowed and fire started to lick at the edges of the log and sparks glittered and amber started to chase away the shadows and warmth relaxed her body again after the chill in the rest of the house, she sat watching Piper and Isaac sleep, curled together under their blankets, Jet grumbling on the hearth where it was warmest.
They were home.
Edmond…we're home… We're waiting for you.
I'll wait forever… Eddie…
She drifted off, dreaming of Edmond, and the lambing-barn, and his smile as he watched the hawk that had guided her home.