The Fall of Man

Part III chapter 3

Chapter 3

It is more than an hour past dawn before Noah finally hears Eve stir. In the meantime, he sits patiently at the dining table in the gloom of the living room. So long as the snow is on the ground, it rarely gets completely dark; at night, a sepia-yellow light radiates into the house from the white surfaces outside. While he waits for Eve to rouse herself, he watches day break along the treeline outside, through the large picture window.

The generous garden immediately beyond the window, sandwiched between the kitchen outrigger and the low dry stone wall shared with next door, originally consisted of a small patio surrounded by lawn. When they first took over the house, the long-dead grasses had been overrun by shoulder-high chicken weed and a stringy, resilient species of unidentified shrub. The square space has since been cleared, and is now encased in a home-spun quilt of borrowed glass and polycarbonate; an armadillo of car windscreens lapped together into a curving translucent tortoise-shell. In this makeshift greenhouse, Noah and Eve grow tomatoes, beans, peas, mushrooms, peppers. Throughout the long winter months, the ground outside is almost completely frozen and unworkable. Snow piles up high against the steep lean-to slope of the greenhouse. Its yield is modest, but it injects fresh produce into their otherwise unvaried diet of tinned and jarred foods.

As the sun slowly rises over the spare, leafless skeletons of the surrounding trees, a warm glow soaks into the greenhouse, and trickles through to the living room. Noah gets up to open the window, and the pungent smell of tomatoes invades the room. Eve shuffles in, looking disgruntled and a little groggy.

“Morning. Did you sleep ok?”

“Fine, thankyou.”

Her dark, shoulder length hair is thick and unkempt, and shields a sullen face. She is wearing a spacious woollen jumper that used to be Noah’s, and a pair of baggy tracksuit trousers. The clothing hangs off her thin frame. He notices with mild irritation that she has picked holes for her thumbs through the cuffs of his jumper. Her feet are jammed into a pair of well-worn fur-lined moccasins that suddenly look a few sizes too small. She pulls her chair backwards, rubber feet squawking across the wooden floor, and takes the remaining seat at the end of the table. With her fingers wrapped around the sides of the warm pan, she helps herself to the thick paste of oats and water.

“Get a bowl, Eve.”

“How long until we can go?”

“I’ve told you about a hundred times. We have to wait for the thaw. Get a bowl.          Once the freeze melts, we’ll be able to use the river to travel – float one of the dinghies down to the coast, then follow the water round till we find the city Walls. It should be a lot easier than walking. Now get a bowl…”

Noah leaves Eve to deal with the breakfast pots while he carries out his daily chores. Having been through the greenhouse before breakfast, his next job is to check on the birds. He fills a bucket with a gallon or so of rainwater and scoops up a bowlful of dried seed, pulls on a sturdy pair of Gore-tex boots and a heavy wax jacket, and then heads out the back door.

Outside, it is bitterly cold – this early in the day, the temperature rarely strays above freezing. Noah’s breath steams in front of his face. The chill aggravates his stiff joints more than he likes to admit. However, a recent rainstorm cleared a lot of the snow, and it is now just a foot or so deep. Thick with icy particles, it crunches underfoot with each long stride that he takes. He swings a leg over the garden wall, and ducks into the chicken coop; a collection of flayed shopping trolleys loosely stitched together with wire.

They never did find chickens. If there ever were any roaming in the vicinity, foxes probably caught the noisy, flightless birds quickly. Instead, Noah settled for ducks. The squat hens lay eggs most days throughout the summer, providing one of their staple food sources. After filling the birds’ feed bowl and water tray, he reaches into their plywood hutch for the day’s delivery. While he stands watching, a pair of the ragged animals bathes contentedly in a crusty paddling pool that takes up half the coop. Some of the older ones must have been with them for a decade now. Although they are easily distracted from their nesting duties, every year a small clutch of new ducklings hatches. To keep the numbers down, Noah occasionally slaughters a young adult in a small wooden outhouse a few gardens down. The prospect of fresh meat is always very exciting, but he’s never gotten used to the blood.

Each of the adjoining houses has a different crop in the ground - potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbages. There is little tending to be done; even the hardiest of pests would struggle to dig their way down through the frozen ground at this time of year. The remains of last autumn’s harvest are still piled up in sacking at the drier end of the cellar, where they dwindle day by the day. After a cursory hobble around their empire of allotments, he returns to the house to see what Eve is up to.