Meg Rosoff - How I Live Now

After a while we took the milk back to the house and it started to rain and Edmond and I went and sat in my room and he smoked and we talked about lots of things and he asked me all sorts of questions that usually drive me insane like why I didn’t eat much.

For some reason I didn’t get mad at him for asking, and I really tried to explain about at first not wanting to get poisoned by my stepmother and how much it annoyed her and how after a while I discovered I liked the feeling of being hungry and the fact that it drove everyone stark raving mad and cost my father a fortune in shrinks and also it was something I was good at.

He didn’t look at me while I was talking, but after a few minutes he lay back and let his knee rest against my knee and I got another one of those feelings you’re not supposed to get from your cousin and I wondered very quietly to myself What Was Happening Here but of course it doesn’t matter how quietly you wonder things when Edmond is listening. It takes a whole lot of practice to get used to being careful about what you think in the privacy of your own brain. On the other hand, there are advantages in being able to think something that you can count on being overheard. It eliminates a lot of fumbling around.

Do you ever think about dying? Edmond asked me, talking on a tangent.

And I said Yes, all the time but mostly as a way of making other people feel guilty.

And he didn’t say anything but when, a lot later, I went over the conversation in my head I realized I never asked him the same question back.

We were quiet for the longest time just listening to the rain on the window with his leg resting against mine and a feeling flying between us in a crazy jagged way like a bird caught in a room. The feeling which had been starting up for a while now was so strong it made me dizzy and so far we’d just been pretending it was what cousinly love felt like and all that garbage you tell yourself when you want to pretend something’s not really happening.

After some more time I tried an experiment by thinking something very very quietly to myself, and then nothing happened for ages, Edmond just lay there with his eyes closed and I felt a little disappointed and a little relieved all at the same time and then just as I was moving on to other things in my head, he propped himself up on one elbow and looked at me with a little half-smile and then kissed me on the mouth so gently and sweetly, and then we kissed again, only not quite so sweetly.

And after a little while of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving, starving for Edmond.

And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.

It would be much easier to tell this story if it were all about a chaste and perfect love between Two Children Against the World at an Extreme Time in History but let’s face it that would be a load of crap.

The real truth is that the war didn’t have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop. There were no parents, no teachers, no schedules. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do that would remind us that this sort of thing didn’t happen in the Real World. There no longer was any Real World.

For a while Edmond and I pretended that what was happening between us was totally reversible. We drifted around through the day not looking at each other and acting like nothing at all had happened.

But it didn’t matter. It turns out to be true that an Object in Motion Remains in Motion. Well thank you, Miss Valerie Greene, science teacher back at dear old Nightingale-Bamford School for Girls. Whoever imagined anything you said would ever come in handy?

Now let’s try to understand that falling into sexual and emotional thrall with an underage blood relative hadn’t exactly been on my list of Things to Do while visiting England, but I was coming around to the belief that whether you liked it or not, Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.

In our case, Things Happened in spades.

The next thing that happened was we started sleeping most of the daylight hours so we could be awake at night when everyone else was in bed. Of course if you had to choose an audience for illicit love based on the people you’d least like to have hanging around, Piper and Isaac would win hands down. Isaac because he always knew by a sort of navigational instinct where Edmond was and what he was thinking, in case it wasn’t totally obvious anyway just by looking at us. And Piper because she was so good and pure that when she was confused about what was going on she just stood and stared at your face until you either told her the truth or ran away and hid. Neither of us was anxious to tell her the truth so most of the time we hid.

Things were so intense I was sure that other people could hear the hum coming off us. Piper and Isaac didn’t say anything but the dogs were upset and behaved strangely, as if the hum and the smell of our skin made them anxious. Gin refused to leave Edmond’s side, wrapping herself around his legs when he tried to go anywhere, and crawling up into his armpit whenever he sat down as if she wanted to hide herself inside him. It got so bad that he had to be stroking her all the time or she’d start whining piteously until Osbert shouted from the other room Will someone make that dog shut up!

Some nights Edmond had to lock her in the barn if we wanted to be alone but secretly I felt desperate for her because I knew exactly how she felt.

Osbert was the only one who didn’t seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.

We didn’t hear anything from Aunt Penn. It had been a few weeks since she left and every moment of every day felt like some bizarre new existence in which Not Hearing from Aunt Penn fit perfectly. You could tell Piper missed her mother and there were things I still wanted to ask her but aside from that her arrival right now in the middle of the world’s most inappropriate case of sexual obsession would have been inconvenient to say the least.

As for me? I was pretty far gone, but not so far gone that I thought anyone with half a toehold in reality would think what we were doing was a good idea.

But I would like to make an important point before this goes any further and that is if anyone feels like arresting me for corrupting an innocent kid then all I can say is that Edmond was not corruptible . Some people are just like that and if you don’t believe me it just means you’ve never met one of them yourself.

Which is your loss.

It was now five weeks since the war started.

Pretty much every day we heard about more bombs. The airports stayed closed and occasionally the electricity would sputter and go off. All the usual sources of information including e-mail and cell phones were much too slow and unreliable to be of any use and there was no television to speak of. According to Osbert you could try to send e-mails but they’d bounce back at you for no particular reason and the same with text messages. And sometimes they’d get where they were going, but not in the form you’d sent them. And sometimes you couldn’t get anything like a dial tone for hours at a time and in the end it was easier just to give up and read a book.

None of this bothered me too much since no one ever tried to call me but I guess it made Osbert nervous because it was getting harder and harder to stay in touch with his spy-crazy friends who spent their lives organizing illicit jaunts down to the pub for exchanges of information. Though they practiced looking grim, in fact they couldn’t have been happier waiting for the real action to get going so they could smoke out collaborators and look danger in the eye while carrying messages across enemy lines. We’ve all seen the movies.