Emergency Read online

  ALSO BY DAISY HILDYARD

  The Second Body (2017)

  Hunters in the Snow (2013)

  Copyright © 2022 by Daisy Hildyard

  All rights reserved. Copying or digitizing this book for storage, display, or distribution in any other medium is strictly prohibited.

  Originally published as Emergency by Fitzcarraldo Editions in Great Britain, 2022.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Astra House

  A Division of Astra Publishing House

  astrahouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hildyard, Daisy, 1984– author.

  Title: Emergency : a pastoral novel / by Daisy Hildyard.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Astra House, 2022. | Summary: “Our narrator is stuck at home alone under lockdown, where she remembers her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. The ecological phenomena that start in her own backyard interconnect and spread out from China to Nicaragua as pesticides circulate, money flows around the planet, and bodies feel the force of distant power”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022001562 (print) | LCCN 2022001563 (ebook) | ISBN 9781662601477 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781662601484 (epub)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PR6008.I396 E44 2022 (print) | LCC PR6008.I396 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23/eng/20220125

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001562

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001563

  First edition

  Design by Richard Oriolo

  The text is set in Arno Pro.

  The titles are set in Avenir Heavy.

  ONE SPRING EVENING, when I was old enough to be outside and alone, I was sitting above the quarry on the edge of the village when I saw a panel of clay drop away from the facing vertical side and fall into a pool of water. Behind it the interior of an animal’s burrow was revealed in relief, like a bombed house with one wall removed. Inside, instead of wallpaper or dangling wires, there was one globe-shaped hollow lined with fluff and leaf mold, and passages leading from it which all ran through the roots of the turf, with one exception: the long tunnel which dropped down into the earth, then turned at an angle, in a stretched V-shape, and began to rise again. Within the passage, heading upward, there was a small animal—brown and furry, whether it was a mouse, a shrew, or a vole, I couldn’t see.

  Parallel to this creature, high above the pool of water on the quarry bed, there was a female kestrel, floating. The two creatures were at eye level with one another. The kestrel tilted and allowed herself to rise, just a little faster than the animal. Then the animal disappeared from my view, coming up through the ground; meanwhile the kestrel continued to ascend toward the clouds until, abruptly, she stopped. She stopped absolutely—as though somebody had pressed pause. Only the way her position varied very slightly, tilting one way and then another, showed that she was holding herself against a current.

  Holding my gaze on her I rose slowly and as smoothly as I could, and skirted along the track that ran around the quarry at the top, taking care to make no sudden movement and to give the bird a wide berth so that she didn’t flit. She must have been able to see me. She didn’t move.

  From the track I could see the animal again—a large vole, male, hiding under a clump of dead turf that overhung the track. He wasn’t in the kestrel’s eyeline. We all waited to find out who would move first. There was a clear bronze early evening light and a cold breeze. The grasses flickered. Then the vole made a sudden break, dashing into the open and stopping in the middle of the wheel-rut, right where he was most exposed. There was an island of grass in the middle of the track, and taller grasses across the field all around—this was the only area that was bald and open, and the only place the vole could look so dark and substantial against the beige dust. I stood at the edge of the track like a tree. He was almost at my feet.

  The kestrel allowed her equilibrium to be disturbed. She tipped her body, carved a line in the air, and came to hover directly above the vole. Low sunlight projected her shadow away from her so that it fell beyond his horizon. Still the vole remained in the same place. I could see him intimately now—his features were precise and miniature: acorn-cup ears, thread-fine whiskers radiating in all directions, and tiny hand-shaped feet. His whole body was vibrating violently. He seemed unable to move. The kestrel had paused again and my gaze moved up and down, drawing a direct line between them, like a lift between two floors of a building. I felt a sense of love arise inside me, as huge and widespread as the vole was small and specific, and it occurred to me that I could rescue him.

  I knew what this would mean because I’d done it before. When the huge black rabbit who lived in a run in our garden had a nest full of babies, my parents had told me not to touch them. I sat outside the hutch and waited for them to be revealed when their mother rolled aside—tiny pink squirming things which were in the process of becoming, from day to day, delicate versions of their parents. When they were a week or so old, skin still visible through a sheen of black fur, my mother explained why I wasn’t to touch them: the rabbit would eat her babies if they had a strange smell on them. I held my hands in front of my face but they didn’t smell like anything except, faintly, soap. My mother left and I stayed watching the rabbits for a while. Then I put one in my pocket, closed the lid of the hutch at the end of the run, and ran down the drive, along the street, and into Clare’s garden. Clare wasn’t there, but Nic was sitting on the back step with a mug of tea and a biscuit, one cigarette waiting beside her on the warm brick. She was always there, waiting like that when Clare came home from school. I closed the gate and approached, warily, up the path, until I was in front of her, waiting for a sign that she had recognized me, but she wasn’t much interested in my presence—she was still looking over my shoulder. I glanced behind me but there was nothing there, only the sun setting over the fields and the quarry. There was a small yellowish scar below the outer edge of one of her eyes which very slightly affected its shape, so there was always something unusual about her face, but in that moment she was looking toward the sun and her brown iris seemed to have been set on fire, melting diamonds of golds and oranges wheeling around the rim, which gave her a blind, illuminated fierceness, and I felt afraid of her. Then it passed and I said, “Hi, is Clare playing?”

  Nic didn’t say hello or speak in the indulgent but dishonest tone that adults usually used when speaking to me at that time in my life. Distractedly, still looking with disturbing directness into the sun, she told me that Clare wasn’t yet home because she had gone to her grandmother’s house after school. Adam was inside, watching a cartoon, if I wanted to wait.

  In the front room Adam was cross-legged on the floor very close to the television, having bricked himself into a low wall of wooden blocks. I kneeled behind him and we sat quietly together to watch a squirrel being electrocuted, then guillotined, having its head glued back on, having its eyes plucked out, and being run over by a truck, until Nic opened the curtains, turned down the sound, and asked me whether I wanted to stay for tea, and I said yes. She asked me whether my parents would mind and I didn’t reply. Then there was a thump.

  Clare’s schoolbag was on the mat where the post would land, and Clare silhouetted behind it in the open doorway.

  “Why is there a ladder on the side of the house?” she announced.

  Nic told Clare that her dad was fixing a leak
in the guttering.

  “Adam,” said Clare. “Would you like to go up that ladder?”

  Adam knocked down his barricade and toddled over to Clare, who took his hand. They went outside and I followed.

  Clare and I stood at the bottom of the ladder, holding it steady while Adam slowly climbed. The ladder did not seem to be going anywhere—it didn’t reach the roof, and that side of the house had only one small frosted window high up. Between the red bricks the mortar was covered over by mosses which traced out a regular but complicated shape, a dark green maze. Down here, near the ground, the mosses were plush, with threads like yellow walking sticks sticking out of their surfaces. Looking at their still, shadowy softness, I felt a deep calm feeling drop through me. On the upper part of the wall above me, where full sun hit the brick, they had dried to a cracked pale color but on the other side, above Clare’s head, these corpses had come to life. It wasn’t a miracle: the leak in the guttering, which I couldn’t see, was revealed by a widening spill of water down the side of the house. This had woken up the mosses who had advanced out over the brick, thickening and growing emerald and black as they wettened, like waterweed. Even at that age, I knew it wasn’t ideal for the wall. I realized that the sense of stillness that the mosses opened up inside me, which I experienced as a feeling, was in fact a pace—we were out of step. I moved through mornings and weekends, months and dinners, while the mosses, somewhere beyond my time frame, moved through their alien periods of torpor and spreading.

  When I turned away from the wall Clare’s head was almost touching mine. Her eyes were much darker than her mother’s, almost black. I must have stared open-mouthed because she dropped her jaw like an idiot. I felt something moving inside my pocket.

  “Oh,” I said. “Look.”

  I stepped away from the ladder and took the tiny rabbit out of my pocket. Holding it in my curled fist, my fingers formed a loose tunnel around it. Suddenly I felt unwilling to reveal it. Its silk fur was damp and pricklier than before, either from the sweat inside my hands or from its own piss. Clare raised her eyebrows at my hesitation, and this made my hand open like a flower, without any conscious will. The rabbit’s ears lay flat. They were thin and fuzzy, like new leaves when they first push out of the bud.

  Clare said, “Put it back or it will die.”

  I told her that I was taking care of it and Clare groaned and rolled her eyes, extravagantly reasonable, and told me that I would learn the hard way.

  A sharp voice came from high above us: “Clare, get your brother down or you’ll crack his head open.”

  I looked up. The bathroom window was tilted open like a letterbox. I couldn’t see Nic.

  We ignored her. Clare leaned one arm loosely against the base of the ladder, ready to break Adam’s fall, but he was safe, still climbing with dimpled gripping hands and flat feet. He climbed and climbed until he reached the face of the wall. Then I went home and put the rabbit back. My mother said I couldn’t go to Clare’s for tea, she’d already made something for me.

  The following day I went to see the rabbits and the mother was alone in her run. She was truly a big rabbit. I watched her for a while. She seemed calm, nibbling dandelion leaves, and I felt a sense of affinity with her because we had done it together, destroyed the babies with our colossal care. Even today, she seems to me very human in the way her principles forced her to self-destruct, and in the scale of her appetite, which far exceeded what she needed to survive—those dandelion leaves. I don’t mean that the rabbit was much like a person, more that principles and will, among most other qualities (memory, love), are not exclusively human traits by any reasonable definition. All creatures have character.

  When I started going to school I had to walk home from the school bus and this meant that I passed Grace and Matthew’s unfenced front garden where their dog Soldier lived. I was afraid of Soldier because she ran out barking excitedly whenever a person passed by on foot and she was, to me, huge—she had a syrup-colored coat which flowed out behind her as she galloped down the sloping garden. She was old, her jaw wrinkled and slackening to reveal the pointed back teeth. The scary thing was her most vulnerable place, her underbelly, which was bald and mottled brown and purple, with swollen teats. Grace and Matthew, who were kind to me, said that she was only playing, and it was true that she never jumped onto the pavement, or came onto our side of the front garden—there was no fenced division and she could easily have done it. But in spite of her regard for these boundaries, I was troubled by a vision I had of being pinned down under Soldier’s body with the bald patch obscenely in contact with my own stomach, looking up into the mouth which was threaded with lines of drool and hanging open in its slack way above my face. This image was vivid to me in a way that made it unimportant as to whether I had dreamed or remembered it. And so I started turning right just before I reached our road and walking around the block, anti-clockwise, to come at my house from the other side without passing Soldier.

  Instead I passed Alice’s house, at the back of the village, and its tree which had a hollow where Clare and I hid things. It was a thing I’d read about in a library book and the story flowed into my reality and my real life leaked back into the story. My idea, which I’d taken from a book about children whose parents were separated, was that Clare and I could leave messages or objects for one another in a secret location. Clare decided on the tree. She was older than me and decisions were her strong point. When she told me, decisively, that we would use the witch tree, I knew that she was talking about the ash tree which grew out of the very back corner by Alice Gray’s house, and that Clare’s name for it was the right name. The ash would have been taken down if it had been on any other property—you couldn’t pass it without feeling its threatening glamour, the tree was somehow exuberant even though it was so very dead. It grew out of the loose stone wall which bulged and sagged on either side of the fat trunk, and its topmost twigs went higher than the buildings, the end of its branches twisted into the sky in paused spasms, the wood blackened and rotting. There were tiny white mushrooms and larger apricot-colored mushrooms on the tree all year round, and the spores and enzymes that were engaged in the long process of digesting the wood gave the whole tree a sodden look, so that its deadness was irradiated with living.

  People said that Alice was a witch, though she wasn’t that old. One side of her body was out of sync with the other—her mouth dropped down at one edge and the corresponding leg dragged. Among the children it was understood that she had been pulling a face when the wind changed. She had short hair and round glasses and she looked like a small man, dressed in a long cloth waistcoat and combat trousers. We gravitated toward her door when we played knock-and-run. It was one of those miniature persecutions that children rehearse, with an instinct for victimizing difference, though it was also because we knew we’d get a response: Alice never went out. She was always in her kitchen, right beside the back door, so she was always available.

  The hollow was perfect: a small opening near the base of the trunk in which, if I reached my hand, I could feel a dry, football-sized cavity with a mealy floor. I passed it after school every day and sometimes Clare would leave an object inside for me, things that seem like nothing now—a lip balm or a postcard. Then there was the day when I saw a slice of cake on the low back wall of the farm, right under the branches of our dead tree. I lifted the cake and it was light, the kind of chocolate cake which doesn’t contain any actual chocolate, and still warm, the icing turning to liquid against my fingertips. It smelled good. I placed it back carefully on the wall, in the same place. The next day it was gone. I wondered if I had imagined it but there were crumbs above our hollow. Perhaps Clare had left it for me.

  When I asked her, later, playing in her garden, she widened her eyes and denied it.

  “Not me,” she said, shaking her head. “I wonder what on earth it could have been.” Then she ran away from me. “Come here,” she called from the bottom of the jungle gym. “Do this.”

&
nbsp; I went, obedient, and crossed the monkey bars well enough until I reached the final rung, which came away in my hand, dropping me seven feet onto the grass. I stood up, experimentally moving my fingers, and Clare laughed with deep pleasure. She had a manly, guffawing laugh which took over the trunk of her body, which made me laugh with her and at her at the same time, which made us both laugh harder.

  It occurred to me then that the ash tree itself had made the cake, or consumed it. The tree, like all the things that rampaged on its dead body, like Soldier, like the rabbits, like the moss on the side of Clare’s house, like the kestrel and the vole—they were all part of my community, as I then thought of it, at least as much as myself or Nic or Alice. Though our village was inside this community, the community went beyond the village. As I saw it, the whole area for miles around was part of the wood: the village, the river, the farms, the wild animals, the quarry, the stately home, the housing estate, the bacon factory, the ruined abbey—they were all surrounded and overrun by woodland which was patchily logged by the Forestry Commission, so that it was hard to identify the place where it ended or began; it ran through all these things, and all these things moved through the wood in their different ways. Birch Wood, it was called, though the name was an old one and there were no birch trees there in my lifetime. We had a silver birch in our garden so I could imagine the birch forest which used to inhabit the site, pale glowing ghost trees stretching to the horizon—but when I was there it was mostly cherry and ash and a few perfect squares of pine plantation, running to the edge of the quarry where the ground dropped.

  I used to sit at the top of that cliff for long stretches of time because I liked the view—the quarry was many different colors and they were all gentle, layered pale browns and chalks. The way the earth had been scooped out meant that I could look down on a portion of sky which was made visible in the negative: a bowl of birds soaring down below my feet. Sand martins made their homes in the sides and flew out into the quarry to catch insects; falcons came to hunt the sand martins, and I came to watch them all because there wasn’t anything better to do. That was how I was there to see the kestrel hunting the vole, which was how I came to know about the water in the quarry before the others.