Today is December the twenty-second, two thousand and twelve. It’s Christopher’s second birthday, and the second anniversary of Clare’s death. As much as I’ve struggled to come to terms with the turmoil of conflicting emotions that this day represents, Christopher is a constant reminder of what I’ve lost, and I cannot find happiness in celebrating his birthday. Clare would be disgusted with me, would berate me without mercy and no doubt resort to violence if she knew how I feel about Chris. Even that thought is enough to set me off on an odyssey of self-pity. Every aspect of my life involves Chris in some way, and everything about Chris is a reflection of Clare.
Camille and Michael understand this, and for what feels like the thousandth time go beyond the call of their duties as adoptive aunt and uncle by taking Chris out for a tour of New York city. Their plan involves letting him exhaust himself on a miniature safari taking in the sprawling decay of Manhattan, a thin disguise for their own interest in cataloguing the return of wildlife to the city, which will be followed up by a boat ride out to Liberty Island, and if they feel up to it, a trip to the top of lady Liberty. It’s an ambitious itinerary, but Cam and Mike are something akin to a force of nature. When the village needs somebody to embark on an expedition into the wilderness on a hunt, or calls for volunteers for a technology scavenger hunt in the towering hulks of down town New York, Mike and Cam are always first in line. More often than not I am with them. Our trips are the sort of thing that Clare would have loved.
While Chris is being doted upon by his extended family I plan to spend the day alone with my memories and several bottles of Glenlivet which I’ve taken great pains to recover from a specialist liquor store specifically for this occasion. It’s a plan that goes wrong from almost the first moment.
I am taking advantage of a cabin in the deep woods north of the village that only a few people know about, a place that I enjoy spending infrequent quiet evenings at when the burden of trying to integrate with a bustling community of americans becomes too much of a strain. The cabin used to be a hunting lodge, the walls lined with dusty trophies of stuffed animals, or in several cases just parts of animals, no doubt a tribute to the prowess of some long-dead yank with a machine gun conquering the fearsome wildlife of New York. Clare and I cleared out every trace of the former inhabitants on our first visit here nearly three years ago, taking time and effort to keep the meagre accommodations in good repair. It was in this cabin, as best I can tell, that Christopher was conceived on a rainy April morning barely six months after our arrival, our contribution to the continuation of the human race.
I am making a respectable start in the first bottle of the day, and enjoying an impassioned argument with the ghost of Evgeny about my role in my son’s life, when I hear a scream from some distance away. There’s a short pause, and I consider that my prodigious tolerance for alcohol might be fading, then the scream is repeated, a long drawn-out expression of agony that has an unmistakable female timbre. We’re a good couple of hours’ walk from the village, so anybody making that sort of noise is going to be in serious trouble. I lift myself from the comfortable velvet cushions of my chair, and put the scotch down to pull my jacket on. On second thought, I bring the scotch with me.
I am reasonably sure that the scream came from off to the west somewhere, and start out in the direction at a decent pace, the thin winter undergrowth doing little to slow my progress. I travel a few hundred metres, and then stop to give a shout.
“Hey! Do you need help? Yell if you can hear me!”
The answer comes immediately, and from very close by. “Over here, I am at the bottom of the wall. I think my ankle’s broken.”
The voice is familiar, and a memory stirs from years ago. Flashes of a boat, a message, and a distant beacon of hope.
“Alice?” I call out to her, half expecting to be wrong, but as I round a small copse of trees and find myself at the top of a sheer rock wall, I know I am not.
“Yeah, down here. Who’s that?” She’s sat on the ground at the base of the wall, her right leg bent in at the knee and her ankle held gingerly in one hand. Her face is a mess of scratches and a large cut is dripping blood down her right cheek. The wall is a good thirty feet high, and extends north and south for quite a distance. Getting down is going to be difficult. Getting back up is going to be impossible.
“It’s Brian.” She look up at me, the name not meaning anything. “The limey.” Instant recognition. “How do I get down to you?”
“Well, I chose the quick way down but there’s not a lot to recommend it. If you want to keep your limbs intact, there’s a path down about half a mile to the south. Take your time, I am not going anywhere.”
“I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”
I tighten my grip on the bottle and set off at a jog, taking care to keep a good few yards away from the edge of the wall. There’s not a great hope of rescue if I go over the edge as well. The path is a bit further than half a mile, but at least it’s easy to find. A long ledge of granite has been carved out in a shallow gradient that tracks down the wall, the moss and lichen showing signs of being scraped off by a boot very recently. I descend slowly, the smooth surface of the rock path is wet and slick, and I have to resort to sliding down in a controlled skid several times. I cover the distance back to the stricken Alice as fast as I am able.
The nominal leader of our community is sprawled across a large flat rock, her jacket forming an impromptu field dressing for her ankle. The cut on her cheek isn’t serious, but she has managed to smear blood across her face in a manner that makes her look like she’s wearing some sort of tribal war paint. She doesn’t turn to look at me as I approach, and I recall that her hearing is pretty terrible. I try to make more noise, but she doesn’t notice me until I am right on top of her.
“Took your time.” There’s nothing malicious in her tone, but I get the distinct impression she resents needing help. That’s an attitude I can empathise with, and I don’t bother with a reply. Instead I uncork the whisky and offer her the bottle. She takes it without hesitation, knocking back a decent amount.
“Shit, that tastes like antiseptic. You didn’t have a bourbon?” She grimaces, her brow furrowing deep under her curly brown hair. Her face is lined with years of suffering, stress, and the burden of trying to unite over a hundred strangers around a common purpose. I am not quite sure how to react to her dead-pan sarcasm, so I give her as good as I get.
“Sorry, used the last of it filling the toilet cistern. Still, if you want I can go back and get it, the taste might even have improved.”
She grins, flashing a set of perfect white teeth, her eyes reflecting the smile, amplifying it even. I get the feeling of having just passed a test without realising that I was being tested.
“Brian, huh?” She passes the bottle back. “Don’t suppose you drove up here Brian?” I shake my head.
“Well, fuck it. I guess we’ve got a long walk ahead of us then.”
I take a drink, and pass her the bottle again. She looks at it, then up at me.
“Say, what are you doing out here drinking scotch anyway? Didn’t you have a girlfriend with you when you landed?”
I shrug, and the expression that passes across my face is something I have no control over. Evidently it tells Alice everything she needs to know about why I am out here.
“Fuck, she was the girl who died giving birth wasn’t she? I am sorry, I can really put my foot in it sometimes.” She doesn’t let the faux pas stop her though. “So that’s why you’re out here drinking? Where’s your kid then?”
“In Manhattan I expect. Michael and Camille are taking him out for his birthday.” This sounds a lot worse when I say it than I thought it would. Alice’s reply surprises my though.
“Given up on him huh? Yeah, I can see how that might happen. Thought you were made of stronger stuff though.”
“I haven’t given up on him,” I tell her, the casual acceptance of my weakness putting me on the defensive. “I just need some time away from him today. It’s too much for me to deal with.”
“No, I get it, totally. I mean, you survived the end of the world, found each other, taught yourself to fly a fucking plane, crossed the Atlantic to join a community of total strangers, decided to have a child, and after all that I can see how you might not be able to make it as a dad. But hey, it’s cool, just let me get back on my feet and I’ll leave you to your self-pity.”
Her words are a punch in the face, and I stand there for a moment, slack-jawed, anger and pain boiling away just below the surface. She’s right, in so many ways. Clare would eviscerate me if she saw me right now.
“Here,” I hold out my hand and Alice hands me the bottle. I move it to my other hand. “Now, give me your arm.”
I shift so that my centre of balance is closer to her, and haul her upright. She stands with her weight on her left foot, the right hanging useless in the air. I stoop and move myself under her right arm, which she hooks around my shoulders.
“You good?” I ask her.
“Just fucking peachy. Can we get this over with?”
We set off at a slow pace, which only gets slower. When we make it back to the cabin some three hours later the whisky bottle is long empty, and I am certain that I hate Alice Reynolds.
I sleep that night in the only chair, Alice taking the small bedroom. We work through the whisky at a steady pace, both of us in need of pain relief of different forms, the conversation keeping strictly to neutral topics – the history of the village, plans for the future, mutual acquaintances. Alice seems to know little about the daily business of the village, her knowledge of its inhabitants limited to stories of their arrival. I challenge her on this, keen to earn back some level of self-esteem even if it is at her expense. Maybe it’s the booze, or the pain, or both, but Alice starts talking, and it all spills out.
“It was Joshua’s idea, that message, using my name. He said people would be more likely to come if they had somebody to identify with. There were just the three us at first, the only survivors in New York, maybe the world as far as we knew. Well, Michael you know was a radio operator in the air force, and he rigged up the transmitter.” I didn’t know that about Michael, nor did I know that he was one of the founders of the village. It’s not something he’s ever talked about.
“But the message was Joshua’s idea. We recorded different versions of it as people turned up, and the idea developed. Within a month we had dozens of people arrive from all over the east coast. Camille came from Toronto, and she and Michael hit it off the moment they laid eyes on each other. That’s when Michael and Joshua fell out, and Mike left us for a year. By the time he and Camille returned there were almost a hundred of us. Well, everyone turned up expecting me to be running the show, but it’s always been Joshua, I mean, after Mike left, Joshua just sort of took over. Then people stopped turning up, and the transmitter died, we just didn’t bother replacing it. So, I am the one that everybody knows from the message, but really I am just tagging along for the ride, you know?”
I’ve never been up to speed on village politics, preferring to keep myself in relative isolation at the edge of the settlement. When we first arrived it was seen as part of our mystique as the only people from outside the north american continent. After Clare’s death it just became part of my personality as a grieving single father. Consequently there are only a handful of people in the camp that I know any better than by name. I just assumed that Joshua was acting as Alice’s mouthpiece in his daily running of the community. It has never occurred to me that Alice’s position is so insubstantial.
“So that’s what you’re doing out here? Avoiding the village?”
“Yeah, I guess you could call it that. I spend a lot of time just wandering around, communing with nature, you know? I think my presence in the village just reminds people of what life was like before they came here. It’s Joshua’s gig, and he doesn’t need anybody sharing the limelight.”
“Oh yeah,” I say, “it sounds just… peachy. Blundering around the woods, falling off rock walls and being rescued by a delinquent limey who would rather wallow in self pity. I bet that your careers guidance counsellor never predicted this life for you.”
She laughs, a raucous “ha!” that seems too loud for the small cabin, and then winces as her ankle moves slightly. I open another bottle of booze – our third – and take advantage of the opportunity to chuck a couple more logs on the fire. Alice adjusts her leg with apparent difficulty. Her ankle isn’t broken, but it is sprained and possibly even fractured. Out here there’s precious little I can do to help her, our only option being to travel back to the village in the morning. Neither of us are due back until the following afternoon – Alice was staying in a tent that’s pitched about three miles in the opposite direction from the village – and there’s no way to drive this far in anyway, so the journey will be the same ponderous affair as getting back to the cabin, only stretched over ten miles instead of just over two. Neither of us is looking forward to it.
I share my dinner of a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich with Alice, and help her hop into the bedroom where she simply collapses onto the bed, right leg raised awkwardly to protect her ankle. She throws one of the covers at me, and I snatch it out of the air.
“Yeah, night then.”
“Brian?”
“Yeah?”
“I am sorry, about earlier, I mean giving you a hard time. I don’t deal with crisis very well.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s been one of those days, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah, it has. Good night.”
I stretch out in the chair, opening the stove up to let the last log burn out in a glow of red embers. My last drunken thought before I fal asleep is that I might not hate Alice after all.