Hildyard Emergency

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-913097-82-0
Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Emergency is a novel about the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth. Stuck at home alone under lockdown, a woman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. Around her in the village her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. In the woods and quarry there are foxcubs fighting, plants competing for space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes cake. These local phenomena interconnect and spread out from China to Nicaragua as pesticides circulate, money flows around the planet, and bodies feel the force of distant power. A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, brilliantly written, surprising, evocative and unsettling, Daisy Hildyard's Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era.

Daisy Hildyard holds a PhD in the history of science, and has previously published essays on the language of science, and on seventeenth-century mathematics. Her first novel Hunters in the Snow received the Somerset Maugham Award and a '5 under 35' honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her nonfiction book The Second Body, a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hildyard, Daisy

Leseproben

When I was considered old enough to work with sharp implements I was sitting in the classroom one day with a scalpel in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other, watching something moving under my lens. I used the scalpel to part the dark material until I reached it – a fine neon-green curved line, humped in the middle. It looked like a caterpillar but it was as fine as a hair. I put up my hand, the teacher didn’t see me. He was new – Ms Carr’s maternity replacement – and I couldn’t remember his name. I waited, but he was facing the other way, squatting beside Lyona’s desk to remonstrate with her in a low voice. Several girls had refused to touch the owl pellets. They said that it was shit. The teacher said that it was in fact not shit. My arm began to ache. I put my hand down and picked up the magnifying glass again.

The magnifying glass exploded everything in view. When I held it over the pellet, I could see the baby caterpillar climbing up the dead material as though it was a mountain. Then its front end disappeared inside and I realized that the caterpillar was feeding; death was only recycling. The creature who had made that fur and skin, already half digested in the owl’s stomach, had not ended so much as spread itself out as its vital energy transitioned away, atom by atom, each chunk the size of a baby cater-pillar’s bite. I felt it in my own body – not the objects but the animating energy passing through. It made me feel a bit sick. Butterflies.

The teacher had told us to report to him if we found worms in our pellets: clothes moths, he said. ‘They eat fur and feathers but they also love school uniforms, yum yum.’ He was one of those who speak to children as to idiots. But he still had his back turned to me and so I turned back to my desk. Then Lyona squealed and my hand jerked and knocked the pellet into two separate dry clumps. Something new poked out of one of them. It was white and still. There was a piece of fluff stuck to one side.

‘Bone.’ I hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

The teacher came immediately to my desk. ‘Great to see that some of our ladies aren’t squeamish,’ he said in Lyona’s direction. He crouched down beside me and grinned as though we were pals. I didn’t like being called ladies, it was a word adults used when groups of girls were doing something wrong.

‘What do we have here?’

The others around me were all looking now. I felt embarrassed by my filthy caterpillar. I pointed half-heartedly with the scalpel.

The teacher squinted into my magnifying glass, then stood up quickly, brushing his hands around the pockets of his trousers though it wasn’t dusty.

‘That isn’t from your pellet. Where did you get it?’

I stared back at him, and waited for an ally in the classroom to create some friendly distraction, but there was nobody there.

‘You’re not supposed to look at just anything that crawls across your desk.’

I shrugged. I could look at any bit of the classroom and I’d see the same thing. Before I could protect the caterpillar the teacher brushed it with the outer edge of his little finger and it smudged into the desk.

 ‘Now,’ he said in the same jocular tone. He used a pair of tweezers to move the tiny bone onto the sheet of paper entitled Key which was lying on my desk. On the paper, there were printed images of other tiny bones, teeth, claws and feathers.

My tiny bone was set with tinier teeth. The teacher removed one with his tweezers. ‘This has no root,’ he said, ‘so what’s that, then?’

I looked at him and he looked at me. He raised his eyebrows, ‘Hm?’

I said nothing. The teacher took the sheet of paper between finger and thumb and allowed it to shake, very slightly, until I looked.

‘All you have to do is read it,’ he said. With great effort, he smiled.

Eventually I recognized my bone’s square teeth in a picture on the Key and said that it was a vole.

‘It’s pulling teeth with you lot, ha!’ he said. ‘I’ve never taught such a slow class.’ After that we all worked in silence for a while, heads down over the shit on our desks.

The bus was half full on the way home, secondary school had not yet gone back. It was a hot day, the leaves were still green, apples red on the trees along the road.

I walked home from the bus-stop with Adam, Clare’s younger brother, who talked in long cascades, which made little space for conversation. He was telling me about the diary he was keeping in which he recorded everything he did that day – everything including cleaning his teeth, and how he was planning to take it into school for show-and-tell, but this made him remember his Swiss army knife, which he’d taken to the previous show-and-tell, and every one of its blades … He couldn’t stop when we reached the gate and so I stood there, as I often did, thumbs looped into my rucksack straps, waiting for a break in his streaming thought.

At the top of the lawn, at the side of the house, Clare was sitting in a chair with her feet in a paddling pool. She looked grown-up. She mirrored Nic, facing her on an identical chair on the other side of the pool. Nic waved at me and I walked up the path to say hello.

Clare had been fed on cake and cherryade, doctor’s orders, all summer, and she had filled out, a little, but her face was still hollow. She looked fragile, as I approached, until she waved merrily at me and said ‘Hiiiiiiiii,’ as though she was imitating or mocking me. I sifted my mind for something tactful to say, but Clare spoke before I could settle on the right thing.

‘Nice woolly tights.’ She guffawed.

I looked down at my legs. They were thick and bright purple, wrinkled at the ankle. My mother had laid out warm clothing, ignoring the heat outside, because it was the autumn term. They were children’s tights – not the tissue thin opaque tights that adult women wore. Women who laid out their own outfits. They were saggy and bobbly. The heat in my hot legs flowed up through my body and burned out in my face, but Clare, laughing, looked hard into my eyes as though we were sharing a joke that nobody else understood and then I started laughing, because I’d worn those tights all day without knowing how embarrassing they were, because I hadn’t been aware that tights actually mattered or how much, because my mother was wrong, and because Clare was laughing, and because and because, and because, and then it was bleak but we were still laughing. Suddenly, Clare stopped. She stabbed a finger in the air. ‘Are you taking Adam swimming then?’

I looked in the direction she was pointing. The hill, with the river on the other side of it.

‘He’s not allowed on his own and I’m too weak to walk it,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘He wants to go.’

I nodded. Clare smiled and tilted her head. ‘Go on then,’ she said.

There was already a group down at the river and I left Adam with the rest of them. It was hot but I hadn’t jumped off the bridge since a boy from one of the farms had jumped into a piece of underwater scaffolding, which hadn’t been taken down properly after the last time the bridge was repaired. He smashed a kneecap.

I wandered up the slope and climbed over the fence into the grounds of the abbey, following the line of a foot-wide stream of water which was channelled down to the river in a stone gutter. The line ended in the abbey grounds, at a large oblong zinc water-butt which had a constant stream of water slopping smoothly over its lip – the spring.

There was deep dense vibrant green watercress growing around the edges of the trough which was tall, the rim chest-high for me. I submerged my fingertips. The trough stood in full sun but the water, emerging from deep underground, was icy. I allowed my hands, then my wrists, to disappear. The cold was a relief. Tiny bubbles appeared on the surface of my skin, like in a fizzy drink. My arm went in and then my elbow, each area of skin paling as it was submerged and then crusting with tiny bubbles as though freezing to the spot.

There was a bang like a gunshot behind me. I turned, drying my hands on my top, but it was only a vehicle backfiring – a big old Land Rover, creamy-coloured with rust patches. The ghost car. Thomas Gray was in the driving seat. The passenger door opened and a woman, white-blonde hair, fell out, shrieking with laughter. The woman was familiar to me but I couldn’t place her. She screamed as though pretending to be horrified and then laughed wildly again, jumped free of the car, leaving the passenger door hanging wide. The engine was still running. She jumped over the abbey fence, kicked the honesty box so that it rattled, and shrieked with laughter again. She jogged towards me.

When she reached the spring I saw that it was Cat, the firewoman, though she looked different – her hair was longer and she was red-faced, breathless. She was still chuckling to herself. She plunged her bare arms into the water, splashed her face, and...