The End We Start From

Megan Hunter

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780802128591
• eBook ISBN: 9780802189066
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The universally acclaimed debut novel. "Extraordinary... a spare, futuristic fable about a brand-new mother navigating a flooded world."—Vogue.com Pre-empted by publishers around the world within days of the 2016 London Book Fair, The End We Start From heralds the arrival of Megan Hunter, a dazzling and unique literary talent. Hunter's debut is a searing original, a modern-day parable of rebirth and renewal, of maternal bonds, and the instinct to survive and thrive in the absence of all that's familiar. As London is submerged below flood waters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, she and her baby are forced to leave their home in search of safety. They head north through a newly dangerous country seeking refuge from place to place, shelter to shelter, to a desolate island and back again. The story traces fear and wonder, as the baby's small fists grasp at the first colors he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds. Written with poise and poeticism, The End We Start From is an indelible and elemental first book—a lyrical vision of the strangeness and beauty of new motherhood, and a portentous tale of endurance in the face of ungovernable change. "Strange and powerful, and very apt for these uncertain times. I was moved, terrified, uplifted—sometimes all three at once. It takes skill to manage that, and Hunter has a poet's understanding of how to make each word count."—Tracy Chevalier, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl with a Pearl Earring

i.

I am hours from giving birth, from the event I thought would never happen to me, and R has gone up a mountain.

When I text him, he sends his friend S to look after me, and starts down the mountain.

S is scared, and has brought J.

J is also scared, and has brought beer.

They watch me from a corner of the room as though I am an unpredictable animal, a lumbering gorilla with a low-slung belly and suspicious eyes. Occasionally they pass me a banana.

They try to put Match of the Day on. I growl. I growl more and more, and finally I am waterless, the pool of myself spreading slowly past my toes.

They flap like small birds around the water, they perch on my giant head, they speak of kettles and hot towels.

I tell them I have to push, and they back away, reaching for their phones.

* * *

At first there was only the sea, only the sky. From the sky came a rock, which dropped deep into the sea. A thick slime covered the rock, and from this slime words grew.

* * *

Before I dilate, we agree: R will get his two nights in nature. He will climb and trek, camp and forage.

I am nearly as wide as I am tall. In the supermarket, people avoid me. Sometimes, in narrow hallways, I get stuck.

All by itself, the head balls into place.

* * *

We have planned a water birth, with whale music, and hypnotism, and perhaps even an orgasm.

My usual cynicism has been chased away by the fear of pain, of losing control, of all things bloody and stretching.

The moment of birth looms ahead of me like the loss of my virginity did, as death does. The inevitable, tucked and waiting out there somewhere.

Once, when I was about eight, I looked at a telegraph pole as hard as I could. I made a mind-photo, urged myself to remember it that night.

When I did, the rest of the day seemed like it had never happened. I terrified myself that I would do this at the moment of death, that I could trick my whole life away.

When I was a child I thought I had been chosen for our times. The ending times. The creeping times.

* * *

I am thirty-two weeks pregnant when they announce it: the water is rising faster than they thought. It is creeping faster. A calculation error. A badly plotted movie, sensors out at sea.

We hide under the duvet with a torch like children. I ask R if he still would have done it. If he had known. He doesn’t answer.

He shines the torch up into the duvet and makes his fingers into ducks. I decide to take that as a yes.

* * *

I am a geriatric primigravida, but I don’t look it.

We have leather sofas. R spills takeaway on them and grins: wipe clean.

I am thirty-eight weeks when they tell us we will have to move. That we are within the Gulp Zone.

I say whoever thought of that name should be boiled in noodles. R spends all night on the same property website. It is loading very slowly.

* * *

Man came from a germ. From this germ he was fashioned, from clot to bones to thick flesh. He stood up on one end, a new creation.

* * *

J phones an ambulance and S looks out of the window palely.

I gaze at the wooden floor. I have never noticed how beautiful it is before.

It is perfectly dusk-coloured, and the whorls are rising like dark little planets through its glow.

Between the waves of disembowelling wrench the world is shining. I feel like Aldous Huxley on mescaline. I am drenched in is-ness.

* * *

When I am thirty-nine weeks they tell us we don’t have to move, actually; it was all a mistake.

Pinch of salt, R grumbles, glancing at my belly.

* * *

R arrives four minutes after the boy is born, frowning and yellow, into the midwife’s hands. I am too exhausted to hold him. My eyes ache from three hours of pushing. My undercarriage is a pulp.

* * *

In the darkness demons flew. Their shapes made a fearful noise until a voice called out, and they were still, and the silence was complete.

* * *

I am in the hospital when R comes to tell me, but I already know. The reports have spread through the ward like infection.

In the bed across from me a girl possibly just young enough to be my granddaughter cuddles her toddler on one side and her newborn on the other.

Schoolboys visit her and let their eyes roam over my udders as they pass.

I am veined and topless, doing skin to skin with the boy, who is mysterious and silent. Occasionally he twitches, as though remembering something.

In the night a nurse with hunched shoulders like the start of wings comes to my bedside and lifts him to me. She says his eyes look like sharks’ eyes. They all do.

* * *

The lady through the curtain has no baby.

Or she has one, but he is upstairs in a plastic box filled with wires and tubes, and she wails out for more drugs.

Crash section, I hear the midwives murmuring. They give her the drugs.

She has a radio and doesn’t use headphones. She has her pain and no baby so I don’t say anything.

She likes talk radio mostly, interminable phone-ins in different accents that all pass through my body in the same way.

The phrases spill out, unstoppable. Deckchairs, document, pressure, response.

They seem to swell from under me like a bath filling up. Like indigestion. Like something no bad simile could ever do justice to.

* * *

I am eating lime jelly with the boy in the crook of my arm when I hear.

His hands circle in tiny, victorious fists. I feel that I could, all things considered, conquer the world.

The news on the hour, 14th June, one o’clock. Tina Murphy reporting. An unprecedented flood. London. Uninhabitable. A list of boroughs, like the shipping forecast, their names suddenly as perfect and tender as the names of children. Ours.

Two hours later R is there, breaking the news again, lifting the boy against his shoulder. Apologizing like it’s his fault.

* * *

The hospital now seems to be a ship, a brightly lit ark housing all the new ones aloft.

We – the women in the open-backed gowns, bursting stitches in the bathroom – are their escorts.

The food becomes a lot worse.

ii.

They throw us out on the third day. I am barely intact but the boy is whole, completely made, crowned with a name that will carry him to his grave.

We nearly called him Noah, but we heard it rustling between the curtains. A popular choice.

I am incapable of original thought, so R takes it on, digs out the list we slaved over in another universe.

Tristan, Caleb, Alfred, he recites, whilst the boy sucks seriously on my still-empty breast.

Jonas, Gregor, Bob, he intones over the boy’s sludge-filled nappies.

Percy, Woody, Zeb, he sings at the window. London swims out in front of him, darkly reflective. The boy jerks his head on the last syllable, and this decides it.

Z we call him, ZZZZ we hum, hoping it will make him a sleeper.

* * *

We load Z into his high-tech protective car seat. We drive on the roads that are left.

R puts the Beach Boys on. We get around. We get out, somehow.

R learnt to drive on a farm. He finds tracks, dog-legs, narrow lanes where birds are singing.

* * *

Z sleeps all the way along the curved spine of the country, up into the mountains where R was born.

When we arrive, his mother runs from the house with her arms open.

* * *

In these days we shall look up and see the sun roaming across the night and the grass rising up. The people will cry without end, and the moon will sink from view.

* * *

R’s father N will not turn the television off. I stay in the kitchen, the only screenless room, with my smarting pulp on a cushion and the baby mushed a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter i
• Chapter ii
• Chapter iii
• Chapter iv
• Chapter v
• Chapter vi
• Chapter vii
• Chapter viii
• Chapter ix
• Chapter x
• Chapter xi
• Chapter xii