Emma slips the blue velvet off its hanger. It’s cut from a pair of curtains one of Chris’s old ladies gave him back in the summer. It mustn’t be pressed; crushed pile never recovers. She has been making bags since she inherited the machine. The loss of her grandparents – first her grandmother and, days later, as he’d always hoped, her grandfather – was followed by the loss of her job when the library closed. It was not how these things were supposed to happen. Great sadnesses should arrive one at a time. For them to come all at once felt remarkably unfair. How Emma missed her grandmother’s abrupt, interrogative phone calls, and the knowledge that though he rarely added anything to the conversation, her grandfather was listening on the upstairs phone, like God. And how she missed the many different aspects of her old job: organising reading groups, showing older people how to use the internet, visiting schools to promote the Summer Reading Challenge and, most of all, studying people’s symptoms and prescribing useful books.
Emma likes to say she started sewing bags because they’re easy to make and good for the environment. Mostly, though, it was because using the machine made her feel close to her grandmother. This blue velvet bag will house a newly purchased copy of The Monster Storm, a picture book Dylan used to love. She’ll sew a pair of yellow button eyes above the bag’s front pocket and a series of white felt triangles will poke out of the pocket’s lip, like teeth. It’s a Christmas present for her nephew Elijah, who is a bit of a monster.
Emma measures and cuts a pair of handles, folds them in half and, holding the iron a couple of inches above the fabric, blasts each strip with steam. She folds again and pins the handles, ready to sew.
Behind her, the door opens. She turns; Chris fills the doorway, hair damp, face shiny, a white, pink-eyed rabbit in his arms.
‘It’s the boy one. Hold him.’
‘I’m busy.’
‘Just for a moment, to get a feel for it. You’ll need to—’
‘Not here.’
‘Come down, then.’
Emma sighs. Chris smells sludgy, a combination of dirt and sweat. And the heels and toes of his socks are darkened where water must have leaked through his boots.
She leaves Elijah’s bag pieces for later and follows Chris to the kitchen where he places the rabbit in her arms.
‘Hand there,’ he says. ‘Like that. Then he won’t struggle. That’s right. Gentle, but firm.’
Emma can feel the rabbit’s insides: the motor of his heart, his pumping lungs, the chassis of his ribs. She glances at Chris. The middle years, marked by anxiety, self-doubt and a growing awareness of one’s mortality are, she recently read, the unhappiest of one’s life. She won’t characterise Chris’s unhappiness as a mid-life crisis. To speak of it as such would be to invite jokes and questions about whether he has bought a motorbike or started going to the gym. And how would she respond? ‘No, he is stockpiling food and foraging on the beach.’ Chris has hit his forties like a rut in the road and rather than accepting he has likely had half his life, and, for him, the world will one day end, he appears to be worried that unless he does something about it, the world will end for everyone.
The rabbit flicks his ears; they are veined and translucent, delicate as petals. It occurs to Emma that the purpose of handling the rabbit now is to make it easier to kill him later, and it feels as if they are in a Brer Rabbit story and Chris is the stupid bear or fox, certain to be outwitted by this quivering creature.
MADE OF MEAT
It’s easy to open the understairs cupboard and flick the consumer unit’s main switch. Chris does it one-handed while the boys watch television and Emma sets the table. A moment later, he’s assailed by complaints.
‘Chris! The electric’s gone again.’
‘Dad! The telly’s off.’
If decarbonisation happens, people will be more dependent on electricity. Eighty per cent of power outages are due to erratic weather, and it’s not like the weather’s going to get less erratic, is it? Preparation is key. If it weren’t for the freezer, Chris would cut the electric for a whole weekend and see how they cope. But they would lose Ziploc bags of pitted cherries and stewed apples, blanched spinach and peas, chopped chillies and rhubarb, slow-cooked red cabbage, ice-cube trays of carrot-leaf pesto and much more. They are too dependent on the freezer. Emma is happy to make jam, but she won’t learn to can food because she once read a novel in which a woman accidentally poisoned her mother-in-law with a jar of home-preserved runner beans. ‘Imagine if I killed your mother,’ she says whenever he encourages it.
Chris is doing his best to prepare them. He read that turning down the thermostat by one degree can save almost a hundred pounds a year, which gave him the idea, back in the autumn, to switch the boiler off altogether. It’s been a mild winter so far. And when it’s been cold, they’ve managed. The shower and cooker are electric, and Emma boils the kettle to wash the dishes. There’s an open fire in the lounge, though Chris prefers to save the wood for emergencies. He makes subtle comments during the news: ‘What would happen if we were in a hurricane?’ or, ‘How would we cope without water?’ He chooses television programmes that include survival and has solicited family involvement in the creation of bug-out bags. He holds fire drills and frequently reminds Emma and the boys that bad things can happen at any time.
Last year he had a customer, Arthur Thursby, who’d lived in Cockermouth when Storm Desmond hit. Chris managed to convince Emma to have Arthur and his wife Shirley round for tea, during which he’d hoped to be treated to a full account of the horror of the floods. He assumed Arthur and Shirley had been married for years, but widowed Arthur had met divorced Shirley during the clean-up.
‘That flood was the best thing that ever happened to us,’ Shirley said fondly, thwarting Chris’s plan.
No matter. Talking about possibilities and listening to second-hand stories can’t come close to personal experience, and that’s what this is. He waits a few seconds before calling, ‘I’ll just see what’s up …’
He is noisy, now, jiggling the contents of the cupboard – the hoover and the boxes that house Christmas decorations – while lifting the unit’s lid and allowing it to knock shut.
‘Nothing doing,’ he calls.
‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light,’ Emma shouts back good-humouredly. ‘Candles, then,’ he hears her saying to the boys.
‘I’ll walk down the lane after tea and see if it’s just us,’ he calls.
‘It won’t be, though, will it?’
‘Isn’t usually,’ he lies.
The kitchen smells of coconut and coriander. Tea has been sweating in the slow cooker since morning. Emma serves the curry in bowls; then she sits heavily and smiles. Her concerns seem to be shrinking like Russian dolls, each smaller than the next. She reduces waste by preparing the broccoli and cauliflower stalks alongside the florets, whisks the accompanying gunk from tins of chickpeas into meringues, and trawls charity shops for second-hand wool and fabric. Meanwhile, he’s left to worry about phosphorus depletion, mass extinction and wildfires in Chile: the world is burning, and Emma is smiling at lit candles and curried vegetables.