Lost and Found

Do you believe a place has a spirit? I always thought it was nonsense. But now? Now there are so few places left.

Alone, in the darkness of the old radar station, I can feel the press of them – spirits of houses, streets, cities with nowhere left to go, all vying for possession of this concrete relic.

There are those who don’t even believe people have spirits. I always took it for granted. But now? Those who remain - the ones I’ve met - they’re empty inside. Me too. Worse than empty. We are all tiny vortices. We sucked the life from our planet and now we are hollow with our own power.

The air is heavy, thick and humid, and the place-spirits smell sour, almost human, in their homelessness. I wriggle back against the cold wall, into the building’s foetid embrace.

My stomach clenches, fist-like, beneath my dress, whining like an animal. I reach for the battered plastic bag by my side and draw out the day’s foragings. The leaves are already curling in the heat, and I’ve finished the ones I know are good.

Food was always safe before - sanitised, plastic-wrapped and branded. After The Collapse, when everyone fled who could, I had to learn the hard way. By the third day, I thought I knew what real hunger felt like. Peering from the bleached carcass of an old petrol car, I had seen a man with a knife peeling strips of bark from a stunted tree, stuffing them into his mouth like fries. He looked like an office worker on vacation, white beneath his sunburn, legs trembling in shock at the sudden exposure. I wanted to talk to him, to hear his story, to tell him mine. When I saw the “World’s Greatest Dad” badge on his ruck sack, I almost called out to him. But then he turned towards me, and his eyes were tidal, like drowning.

Later, I ran my hands over the smooth flesh of the trunk he’d ravaged. Bark still clung to one side. I tugged at it, but it held firm. In desperation, I thrust my face against the stubborn wood, biting at the bark with my teeth. It smelt of heat and resin and tasted like bitter melon. I wrestled with the tree until my lips stung and my face and teeth were stained brown with tannins.

I walked away hungry, by evening I had a fever and all that night I vomited a vile black bile, which probably saved my life. The next day, as I stumbled from my shelter in the car in search of water, I saw the remains of the man from the day before. Improbably, his beige shorts still sported a neatly ironed crease front and back. I tore the “World’s Greatest Dad” badge from his ruck sack and tucked it into the breast-pocket of his shirt, before swinging the bag over my shoulder.

Suddenly the beam of a flashlight knifes through the slit windows.

I jerk upright. The place-spirits scatter, whipping my withered leaves with them into the corner darkness. A flashlight. The beam slices back and forth. So familiar and so very alien that my mind scrambles to comprehend.

It is impossible. There is no electric light.

Not since the Collapse when Big Oil joined ranks against the Eco Lobby, forcing them to retract and destroy all alternative energy sources. Even as they discredited the activists and restricted their movements, they knew that the fracking was starting to fail. The yields diminished, but still the persecutions continued, and when the lights finally went out, there was no one left to provide an alternative to the darkness.

It is impossible.

The light intensifies and now there are voices too. For a moment I am trapped between the ribs of that car once more, dancing wildly between fear and hope without moving a muscle. A moment more and it will be too late to decide. I hedge my bets, reaching into the man’s ruck sack, my blind fingertips search frantically for his knife. It must have fallen through. I tear at the rip in the lining. The beam swings around the corner towards me. I clamp my eyes shut against its glare. Searing light explodes red through my lids as, finally, my fingers touch metal. But it is too small, too blunt. In terror and frustration, I crush the trinket into my palm and pray to all my lost and cowardly spirits, balling up my body behind the bag like a hedgehog and willing myself to disappear with them into the darkness.

…..

Beyond my eyelids, the light is shifting and changing. I feel shipwrecked, but I am a mermaid; my limbs at once heavy and weightless. Sounds come to me now, watery voices, flitting between the deeps and the shallows. And laughter. Then a tinkling, metallic sound, like a coin falling on a stone floor. It is close and so out of place in my ocean consciousness, that my eyes flutter open, breaking the surface with starfish lashes.

A patchwork of greens kaleidoscope above me, winking in the breeze. I watch in fascination as the leaves come into focus, and I realise that I am lying beneath, not just one tree, but an entire forest of them. Just then, something soft brushes the back of my hand, and in a flash, I remember everything – The Collapse, the car, the radar station; the biting hunger, the fear and the impossible flashlights. I stifle a cry. Snatching my hand away, I cocoon it against my shrunken belly, bringing my knees in tight, as I struggle to find my feet amid a tangle of sheets.

A loud, high-pitched sob brings me up short. My head whips round and beside the bed, in the middle of the forest, I see a small child, about three years old. Slowly, I turn back towards her, with an encouraging smile on my face, and the sobbing stops as shock and curiosity vie for control of her freckled features.

At that moment there is a rustling sound and she ducks into the undergrowth as three figures emerge from the treeline.

The tallest of the three, a lean, well-muscled woman with a shaved head and an intricate pattern of scars running down her left side from eyebrow to fingertips, is the first to speak.

“Stop!” She commands. “Where is it?”

Before I have time to react, the man beside her, older, with a grizzled beard and skin like a walnut, steps forward and grabs my right hand by the wrist, flipping it over and prying my curled fingers apart.

“Gone.” He barks. “Look –“

He holds out my hand, palm upwards, as the scarred woman approaches. In the centre is a heart-shaped imprint, about an inch long, with half a dozen fine indentations snaking out from it like the links of a chain.

The tinkling sound from my dream echoes in my head and I glance down to the tiled platform on which the bed stands; the thick knots of undergrowth which surround it on all sides. If I had dropped it when I woke, the trinket from the ruck sack was likely long gone.

“Look at me!” The scarred woman addresses me directly now. She motions me to sit on the edge of the bed, and crouches down beside me, fixing me with deep brown eyes. She has a just-washed smell of lavender, and the fragrance is so unexpected that I have a sudden urge to embrace her.

“Who are you?” She asks, leaning forward. As she does, a heart-shaped locket swings free of the neckline of her blouse. It is green metal, about an inch long. Quickly, I survey my other rescuer-captors, glimpse the wink of matching chains.

My mind races.

I’d heard rumours about resistance movements in the early days of The Collapse. Even at the end, some still believed there would be a rescue. But finally, when the darkness came and the rescue did not, the rumours fell silent. Big Oil was too powerful, too proficient in destruction. It was impossible. Yet, what else could this be?

What had that man doing with the locket? He couldn’t have been one of them, or he’d never have got himself killed with a bellyful of poison-bark, and he sure as hell hadn’t looked like a murderer… Perhaps it was just a coincidence, a cheap necklace picked up at a garage somewhere, a present for the World’s Greatest Daughter.

“What’s your name?” The brown eyes crinkle encouragingly.

I force my mind back to the present. If the locket really was theirs, there were only two options - either the man was one of them or he’d killed one of them.

But they hadn’t found the locket in his ruck sack – they’d found its imprint on the palm of my hand. In their minds, either I was one of them, or I’d killed one of them. I take a deep breath. Everything depends on my answers.

“I – “

Suddenly my mouth is dry; my brain foggy.

I try again – “My name is – “

A wave of terror washes over me as I realise that I do not know.

The scent of lavender in my nostrils seems too thick now and sickly-sweet. I fold forward wrapping my arms around my head until the floral perfume is drowned out by the spicy tang of my unwashed flesh. Within the shelter I have made of myself I try desperately to think. What can I actually remember? The Collapse, of course. Recollections in flashes – news bulletins, tweets, Facebook memes, a podcast. All media images. Nothing personal – nothing from my life. And nothing from before. Not a thing.

“I don’t know!” I sob into my lap. “I don’t know! But I’m not – I’m not a murderer!”

The image of the dead man flashes unbidden into my mind; his immaculately ironed shorts; the peeling sunburn on his legs.

A voice breaks through, thin and taut, as if its owner is accustomed to holding the weight of the world.

“How can you know?”

She asks, wearily, as if reading my thoughts.

“How can you possibly know?”

The third figure, a girl, stands before me. Twelve or thirteen years old, with sallow skin and thin mousy hair, she has an old man’s eyes, pale blue and watery.

“The capacity for creation and destruction,” she continues, “exists in all of us.”

She sighs.

“I used to think it would be easy to restore life on this planet after The Collapse. I did not understand that death is always present, always seeking a new master.

“Now I decide who must die so that life on earth can be saved.

“Those who are dying up there on the surface, whilst we watch and wait and tend these forest oases beneath the ground, are the very ones who raped and poisoned our world to the point of Collapse. It is not easy to condemn them to death, but I know that it is right.”

“You…”

She reaches out, tilting my chin between thumb and bony forefinger, before pushing it aside.

“How can I know what is right for you?” She muses, almost to herself, “how can I possibly know?”

Her pale eyes are distant. My own, fathomless: twin windows in an abandoned house. I squeeze them shut, trying to squeeze the questions from my mind.

Suddenly, I feel the warmth of a tiny hand slipping into mine. A freckled face smiles up at me expectantly as a breeze ruffles the child’s sandy hair. She wrinkles her snub nose in delight. The next moment we are laughing together and, though I have no past and no future, in the freedom of that instant, I know myself.

I am not a murderer.

The child clambers onto my lap.

Over her tousled head, the glimmer of a smile lights two pale, watery eyes.