These Our Monsters by Paul Kingsnorth

Author:Paul Kingsnorth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: September Publishing

Breakynecky

Sarah Moss

IF YOU ARE THINKING OF LEAVING, you should probably go soon.

If you are thinking of leaving, perhaps you should have left, last week or last month or last year. The people who leave first usually fare best.

The depths and surfaces of these waters cradle the bodies of those who left it too late to leave.

Leaving does not make you safe, only safer. You leave when it is safer to go than to stay. By then, nothing is as safe as it was before, when you were little.

It’s not that I don’t like it here. It’s not that I would rather have stayed. I know what happened to those who stayed.

I would rather not have had to leave, that’s all. I would rather have been safe where I was, where we all were. Most people, you’ll find, would prefer to stay at home, until the dying starts and often for a surprisingly long time, an illogically long time, afterwards.

You should go when you still have people left to leave.

I often walk along the shore, here where the river widens to the sea. I started to say that if you close your eyes it seems like home – like my home, anyway, yours is different – but whatever you can do in your mind it’s not that easy to trick the senses into a return. It’s not my sea. Between the passing of trains, it can sound like home. The birds, I think, are almost the same as ours, they were born to cross the water the way we might cross a field, and of course the water itself is the same water and it sounds the same, rises and falls the same way on every shore of the world, and the wind, too, in your ears, but it doesn’t smell like home where there are turf fires always somewhere on the air and the warm breath of the gorse, and it doesn’t feel like home on your skin because the wind here comes from the east, comes over a different sea. We used to see the sunsets, at home, and even with your eyes closed a rising sky is different.

Berwick. Here you are.

It sounded so English. You couldn’t imagine them starving in Berwick. I thought of brick houses and coal fires, of roast beef, of pudding. Roofs over people’s heads and food on the table; we had nothing to lose. I could be someone’s maid, maybe, in a black dress and white apron, or get factory work, set hours and weekly pay. Take it, I said to Séan when they came asking for men, take the work and thank them on your knees. They paid his passage, whoever’s at the top, Mr Stephenson or his friends, though of course the money had to come out of Séan’s wages. Turned out my mother had a little put by. Enough, more or less. We’ll go, I said, we’ll cross the water, and Séan paused as if there was a choice.

Anyway, step this way.

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