Mam and Maeve don’t tell me they’re leaving till they’re nearly out the door, as if they might be saving me from something by doing it that way. It feels like they’re not planning on coming back, like maybe I haven’t been good enough or worked hard enough. It feels like I’m being left alone, suddenly and forever.
It is the hardest part of what they do for me.
I wonder is it difficult for them as well, but Maeve looks happy going. She has that non-frown on her face; her steps away from the house are light and easy. I watch them, shocked into silence. I do not cry until they are well out of sight.
I go to the beach because going back to the house without them in it, without them just gone outside and off doing something, makes it feel like all the other houses. When I’ve finished shaking and sobbing on the sand, I pick myself up and go off to do the things they said I’d to get done.
The island takes on a new rhythm; my chores take an age, each one, but the day goes too fast. Before dawn’s bloody fingers slip through the cracks of my boarded-up window, I am awake. When the sun’s up, we’re up. Maeve.
The house is quiet only for the constant wind, the shinaun, tearing through the grass and the ghost estate, and the noise of the sea behind it. I slip out of my liner, kick away the heavy covers, and swing my legs over the side of the bed. I’ve a fine big yellow-and-green bruise on my thigh from sparring a few days ago.
I rub my hand over my hair; it’s getting longer. Maeve will want to scissor some off when she and Mam come back.
If they come back.
I stretch out; I get down. The floor is cold beneath my palms, and the skin on my arms blossoms into goose bumps. I shift onto my knuckles, breathe deep, and get through some push-ups, sit-ups, a handstand for the fun of it. I inhale through my nose and close my eyes, listening hard for the sounds of Mam and Maeve coming home all the while. Hearing nothing. It is good to have somewhere to put the energy, the fierceness in me.
More push-ups, the last ten on my knuckles, just the way Maeve does it. The day throbs its first warmth into the room, and my body makes a grubby outline on the wall. I drop to my feet, stretch my arms, and shadowbox. I think about the way the balls of my feet work, how well I can tip and balance on them. Three spinning roundhouses, executed quick, one after the other, energy bubbling along my arms and down through my toes like fire. The last I jump for.
Panting now, I drop for more push-ups, because they’re my least favorite and I need somewhere to focus everything. My breath sounds too loud, obtrusive in the quiet. I dress, weapons first, my serrated blade and my throwing knives sheathed and in a belt around my waist, and my spare, the little dagger with the slim gold handle Mam gave me. The armpits on my long-sleeved top are crusty, but the smell doesn’t knock me out so on it goes.
The shape of the furniture in the not-quite-dark of the downstairs is reassuring. There’s the dusty couch, there’s the globe and the maps, and there’s my dictionary, obsessed over, words read and repeated till Maeve told me to whisht. There are the approved books, read to death and falling apart: Binti and Orange Horses alongside our Culpepper’s Herbal and Complete Gardener. So many versions of the world, and most of them bad. The men making the decisions and women suffering for them. I’ve a desperate hunger for something new, for information I’m not meant to have, for something I don’t know already.
The hearth is still full of the ash from last night’s fire, the coddle in its metal pot hanging over it, but things are mostly clean. Maeve teaches me about germs and how we should be careful of them if we have broken skin. Mam says the root and mint and ginger she carries in her herb pouch don’t cure everything. Then Maeve mutters to herself they don’t cure anything. If I have even a small cut, Mam cleans it out, though, and puts a mixture on it that stings like mad, and she says the sting is the good of it, that’s how you know it’s working. But Maeve doesn’t murmur to herself for no reason, so she doesn’t. I’m meant to learn something about goodness or rightness or health coming from pain, I don’t know what exactly, which is what you get when nobody says anything straight out.
The kitchen is our store cabinet. We plan at the table sitting straight-backed in proper chairs. Mam told me, though, how the oven would work in the olden days, with a gas that was piped in all the way to the island, under the roiling sea. Seems like a lot of trouble when you can just go on and make a fire. Maeve says, No matter, sure aren’t we all paying for it now. She says it in the voice that means I needn’t bother to ask more questions.
I open the presses, our whole store. There’s the bottled potatoes, the carrots. There’s soap and bleach and toothbrushes still in their plastic. Each brush is a sentence, a symbol of another six months spent here, with nothing changing, only me getting stronger and more restless, the hunger in me growing.
Mam taught me to read and write, and gave me books about doing harm and keeping from harm. Hunting, trapping, fishing, finding water, keeping seeds and growing things, and livestock, and there are pictures of cows and sheep and horses and deer. I’d give blood to see one; I’d go a long way for very little, I’m learning. There’re only rabbits and rats to hunt unless you can get a songbird, which I can’t, and our only livestock is chickens. Still, I get the idea.
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail is what Maeve says about that. I’d say she means I’ll go with them one day to hunt off-island, and I’d better have some idea about it. Better safe than sorry is another one of Maeve’s rules. Another is, Remember your Just-in-Cases.
We’ve a clock at home and it doesn’t work, but Maeve used it to show me—facing forward you’d be looking at twelve and your six then would be behind you. Three, she might whisper, and I’d look right. Watch your six, she’d say, and I’d turn around. Beware tall buildings and Don’t trust people. Does that include herself I want to say but never do. There’s no one else around but Mam. You’re never safe, ever. There’s a load more she says as well, but it’s this last one sounds most right to me.
It’s hard for me to remember sometimes that Maeve is not my mother as well. I know Mam gave birth to me, I know that she strained through pain and blood and love to bring me into this world and then keep me here with her. But Maeve made me. I’m in there too, in the neat grooves that have been worked into her face by wind and time and sheer bloody hard work. There’s something more than reassurance in her thick, strong body in the house. Her missing ear and her scars are her own or maybe hers and Mam’s, but I love them too. All she ever did was work her fingers to their raw bones to make me strong. Mam taught me how to live, so she did, but Maeve taught me how to survive.
When Mam and Maeve come back from the mainland, they are tired. They look older and newer as well, though they were gone for only one long, lonely night. They have things we need, like wire for the coops, and oil, and things I have not seen for years: battered tins of food, candles. There’s a backpack for me and a book I have not read before. I cry when they come back. I can’t stop. I’m so full of relief and happiness and love, and they can only tell me they’ll be going off again. Mam hugs me tight, and she tells me how well I did, that I looked after the chickens and the garden and did not let everything go to rack and ruin.
“What did you see?” I ask them, and they look at each other and there’s a blankness to their faces. Mam smiles and ruffles my hair and says am I ready for more sparring.