After
The man had wondered before how old he would be when he felt old. He was not old now, but he felt it as he pushed the door. It was unlocked, like all the doors, of which he might have chosen any, except that this one, belonging to a secluded house atop a rural hill, had held a certain appeal for him. Perhaps it was that even from a distance the house looked as if it had once been lived in. He stepped into the cool embrace of the damp air that lingered about the hallway. The light in here was dim, the few beams of sunlight that penetrated the dirty window above the door and squeezed their way between the man and the door-frame being absorbed by the musty carpet. This house had definitely been lived in, loved even, but now it was what might once have been called a ‘fixer-upper’.
The man walked through to the first room on the left, which had once been the living room. As he entered he saw a spider dash across the floral white settee that looked as if it had been worn-out for a long time. It must have been comfortable though, must have been sat in hundreds of times as the family gathered around the TV that now sat impotently against the wall to the side of the fireplace. The man put down his backpack on the sofa as he went to inspect the TV, his body distorted along with the room as he moved closer to the reflection on the lifeless grey glass of the screen. For a second he fancied he could see reflected behind him the family who had lived here, sat together on the settee and its two satellite floral armchairs, but he knew no one was there, so he did not turn round. Instead, he continued staring into the dull grey screen.
It reminded him suddenly of a time many years ago when he had been twenty or so and he had walked through a large graveyard on a summer’s evening. He had stopped now and then to read the names or the eulogies inscribed on the headstones, but had not lingered long at any one until he came to a stone in an older part of the graveyard. Tall grass had grown up around it and an old tree extended a single drooping branch above it as if to shelter the rock from the pitiless onslaught of sun and rain. The man stood inert as he deciphered the eroded letters.
It was the grave of a fifteen-year-old girl dead for a hundred years. The man looked down at the tall grass and thought about the small corpse that lay beneath, probably no more than bones and tattered fragments of cloth by then. The thought had made him sad, the thought that this girl, shorn of life on the cusp of expectation, was never able to grow up and marry, as she might have dreamed of doing, and even love had been nothing more than an intangible ghost to her; a feeling half-promised on the whisper of the wind and in the stirrings of her own body. And yet had she lived she might have had children, and they might have had children, and her grandchildren might have come to visit from time to time, and stood over her as the young man had. Instead, passing by on a summer evening’s walk, he was the only one who stopped to mourn for her, for she had no one else. But that did not matter now, just as it did not really matter who had lived in this house before; all that mattered was if the house could be lived in again.
The man left the living room and walked around the rest of the house. There were not many rooms: three bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom, a toilet-room and a kitchen with dining area besides the living room downstairs; and all were the same beginning stages of creeping decay, but certainly with some care and some time this house could be quite habitable again. The beds upstairs still held their springiness, and there were some books on the shelves in the master bedroom that had not yet succumbed to mildew, not that he would have been unable to get those from a bookshop or library in the city, but it was somehow reassuring to know that the people who had lived here before had kept them. The man stood now in the garden, which was overgrown but running wild in the best possible way, with snowdrops and daffodils poking their bright heads up through the tangle of grass. Since there were no other houses around for quite a way, the garden seemed to stretch out all around, apart from a fence that suggested its border, until it disappeared into some trees thirty or so metres from the house. Like the house, the garden would again be nice with some work. The man could see it now, if he cut himself a patch of lawn amidst the wilderness: himself sitting there in the summer, reading. Winters were less agreeable, but at least there was that fireplace in the living room.
He looked back at the house with its cracked once-white roughcast walls. He would paint those sometime, but the inside needed doing first, before he could worry about that. He decided to make a list of everything he needed, and then he would drive into the city. He went back in and walked around the house, going through each room again meticulously noting down everything he could need, like cleaning products and new sheets, some furniture for the garden, more books, food, candles, fuels, buckets, paint, brushes, and bottles of water. His list complete he left the house and walked back down the hill, looking for a car. Eventually he found a Volvo parked on the drive of a semi-detached house. He walked into the house and found the keys on a table by the front door. From the keyring there hung a minute photograph taken at a theme park of a young couple on a roller coaster, both screaming with exhilaration. The photograph was held in a transparent plastic case sealed from time’s encroachment like those insects that are preserved in amber for millions of years. The man removed the photograph-keyring and left the house, closing the door behind him.
When the man first turned the key in the ignition, the car choked with the wheezing strain of disuse, but rather than slipping into a smooth rhythm, the radio came on, blaring static at full volume. The sudden hissing sound made the man jump, since he was unaccustomed to loud noises now that the world was almost silent. He recovered himself and switched the radio off, then tried the ignition again. This time the engine came on and the man was able to pull out onto the road and head towards the city. As he drove he wondered how long it had been since he had been in a car. At first he had driven everywhere, just because he could, but when he had realised he was not going anywhere and driving had taken on a hollow feeling of futility, he had started to walk. Now that he was anchored to a place to live, he felt safe driving again.
He pulled into a petrol station and filled the car’s tank. Petrol pumps seemed to be one of the few things that still worked. The man pulled away again and continued his drive towards the city. He did not miss the traffic, but even now he did not like cities. Still, he stopped outside each shop and took what he needed until that car was full and he had everything he needed, then he headed back to the house, his house. He worked for days, and then weeks, until the house inside and out, seemed to have had life breathed back into it. Even still he continued working, digging out a vegetable garden through the wild grass so that he would have something other than canned food to eat when summer came, and when he was not working, he painted, or taught himself the violin, or read, these being things he had never had time for before.
And so his life fell into a pattern: he would wake early, when the first light of day streamed through the windows; he would wash in the cold water he collected from a stream in the forest; he would work most of the morning and sometimes the afternoon, and in the evenings he would read or walk or drive or some other entertainment until bed. Sometimes, at night especially, he would feel lonely, though he had often been alone when he was younger, and then he would masturbate to the remembrance of women he had known. Otherwise he rarely thought of the past, and in the timelessness of those days he often felt inconceivably ancient, as if he had always existed like this and always would.
There was a change to this pattern however, that was both significant and minor, which occurred on what his watch told him was the twenty-first day of what must be either July or August, but might have been as late as September of the first year he lived in that house: a girl appeared in the garden while the man sat reading. He stood when he saw her and they looked at each other for a long while before either spoke.
“I used to live here,” the girl said.
“Oh,” said the man.
He was unaccustomed to speaking out loud, or hearing any voice other than the almost wordless thoughts in his head. Again they looked at each other silently.
“Is -” the girl began.
“Yes?”
“Is my room still the same?”
The man looked up at the house, its windows silver and impenetrable as the sun reflected from them.
“I redecorated,” the man said.
The girl nodded slowly and looked at the house, then they both spoke at the same time.
“Do you want to -” the man said.
“How are you -”
They both stopped. Neither smiled.
“There’s not -”
The man interrupted her again.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The girl looked up at the house again, then slumped to her knees in the grass. Tears began to run from her eyes. The man walked over to her and looked down at her.
“I’m hungry,” she said quietly.
“Come inside,” the man said.
The girl stood and followed him into the kitchen. Where the oven had once been he had put a barbecue with a brightly coloured gas tank attached to it by an orange tube. Sometimes it reminded him of his grandmother who, before she died many years before, had lost a lung through smoking and had to have an oxygen tank attached to the back of her wheelchair. It had been difficult for her to speak, so she had never said much to him, but the tank had kept her alive. Now the man lit the grill and put an open can of soup on it. Both the man and the girl were silent as the soup slowly came to the boil.
When the soup was bubbling, the man removed it with an oven glove and poured it into a bowl. He put the bowl on the table in front of the girl along with a spoon, but she ignored the spoon and picked up the hot bowl. The first sips burnt her lips, so she put the bowl back down and used the spoon. After a few minutes of tentative sipping however, she again picked up the bowl and drank the whole lot down in a couple of big gulps. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then began to breathe heavily as if she were about to cry again. Instead she looked up at the man, who had watched her eat in the same way that he might have once watched a squirrel bound across a park and dart up a tree.
“Can I see my room?” she asked.
The man nodded. The girl stood, walked past him and began to ascend the stairs. The man followed her, all the way up to the room at the far end of the landing.
“I didn’t like pink,” she said when she stepped through the door and looked at the white-yellow walls.
“There was mould in the corners,” said the man.
“There used to be…” said the girl pointing vaguely at the wall by the bed.
“Sorry,” the man said, “a lot of it was no good any more.”
The girl nodded.
“What about my clothes?” she asked.
“I threw them away.”
The man could not see the girl’s face.
“This doesn’t smell like my room,” she said.
“There’s clean sheets in the wardrobe,” the man said, “and there’s some shops in the city that still have clothes. We can go tomorrow.”
The girl sat on the edge of the bed.
“Yes,” she said.
She looked out the window. The man looked at her.
“I think I’d like to alone for a little while now,” the girl said.
The man nodded and went back out into the garden.
* * *
Weeks passed and autumn established itself in the air and the earth as it always had and the man’s vegetables became full and ready to pick. Against his expectations when he planted them however, he now had someone with which to share them, for the girl had remained in the house, living in her old room, working and reading as he had learned to do to pass the time. She had also taken to running, and was no longer so scrawny as she had been when she first appeared in the garden a couple of months before.
Often they would sit together, in the garden when it was fine, inside otherwise, usually in silence for there seemed little new each day to talk about and there was an unvoiced but apparent rule between that they never speak about the past. Neither of them even thought about the past much any more as it was painful to remember and easier to forget. Yet one day, sat in the garden, the girl was suddenly reminded of a morning several years before. She was wearing a dress at the time, and it was the coolness of the autumn breeze on her bare legs that triggered the memory.
In the memory she was sitting in this very garden eating breakfast at an old wooden table and watching her sister get ready for school. Her sister had had an exam that day, her last one, the girl supposed, and she knew that her sister planned to meet the boyfriend her parents knew nothing about afterwards. She had seemed so grown-up then, the girl had thought, as she slipped the lipstick which her parents forbade her to wear into her school-bag, though she had only been the age the girl was now. Then her sister had had to wait around for a lift to school from her father, and the girl had drawn up her legs onto the wooden seat because they were bare beneath her shorts and a cool May breeze had blown through the fine blond hairs that covered them, bringing with it the scent of dewy grass. Her sister noticed and said,
“You’ll have to start shaving your legs soon.”
“Does it hurt?” The girl had asked, drawing her legs in tighter.
Her sister laughed.
“No, it feels nice, at least afterwards it does.”
Their father had come out then and her sister had left with him.
The girl sighed and looked over at the man, who looked nothing like her father. She looked at his hands, which were rough.
“Were you married?” she said suddenly, breaking the silence that stretched out all around.
The man looked up from his book.
“No,” he said.
He started reading again.
“I had a boyfriend once,” the girl said.
The man nodded slightly, but continued reading.
“But not any more,” the girl continued. She looked at him. “I don’t remember what it was like.”
“Don’t remember then,” the man said quietly so she almost did not hear.
“We never -”
The man put down his book.
“Of course not,” he said.
They looked at each other for a minute or so, then the man picked his book back up and began reading again. The girl was still staring at him, thinking intently. She came to a decision and stood up. She walked over to him and stood in front of him with her legs either side of his knee. He looked up and she bent down towards his face. He put his hands on her shoulders and stopped her.
“What are you, fifteen, sixteen?” he asked, “I’m old enough to be your grandfather.”
“I’m older than that,” she said.
“Not much.”
“Old enough.”
Her shoulders still pressed into his hands. With outstretched fingers she clasped his arms.
“What do you expect will happen?” the man said, almost flinching at her contact, “That we’ll repopulate the world, that we’ll bring anything back? It won’t make anything any better.”
“I don’t want that, I just want to try it.”
“Do you think there’s any contraception around that’s still any good? Do you think there’s any doctors to fix any mistakes? This is no world to bring a child into.”
“We’ll be careful.”
She was beginning to feel desperate now and the corners of her eyes became moist.
“We are being careful, we never were before, but we are now,” the man said.
Slowly the grip of her fingers on his arms loosened and she became a dead weight against his hands. The man supported her weight as best he could from the awkward angle as he sat her on the grass, then he leaned forward and pressed his elbows into his knees. With a small, choked voice the girl asked,
“How old are you?”
The man did not answer so she looked up at him. He shrugged.
“I suppose we’re all a lot older now. I feel old,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘all’?” she asked, “are there others?”
“Oh, no, I suppose I meant us, or perhaps I meant me. We are all now.”
The girl breathed in and held herself against his knee. The man looked down and began to stroke her hair. When he had put his hands on her shoulders a moment before, it had been the first time they had touched since she arrived. He thought about this as he watched his fingers move across the yellow strands of her hair. He thought too how she would ask again sometime, and, though he would refuse her again, she would never forget about it and one day, amidst those long seasons that stretched out before them, she would ask and he would not resist. For now though, in the failing light and cool air of this autumn evening, she would hold herself against his knee, and he would stroke her hair, which felt like straw beneath his rough fingers, and she would cry if she needed to, and neither of them would speak.
Tags: distancing, Fiction, original fiction, post-apocalyptic, Relationships
