Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Our Endless Numbered Days

  “Graciously written and capriciously imagined, Our Endless Numbered Days holds up a magnifying lens to the human spirit and deftly captures both its fragility and its resilience. The brilliant ending, like the best endings do, casts new light on all that comes before it.”

  —CATHY MARIE BUCHANAN, author of the New York Times bestseller The Painted Girls

  “I finished this book and turned right back to the first page to start it again. Like the wilderness into which Claire Fuller’s characters disappear, Our Endless Numbered Days is rigged with barbs and poisons, tricks and tragedies. It’s weird and wild and sometimes terrifying, but it’s also beautiful and heartbreaking and breathlessly alive.”

  —AMY STEWART, author of the New York Times bestseller The Drunken Botanist

  “Our Endless Numbered Days is suspenseful, utterly riveting, and as dark as midnight in the forest.”

  —REBECCA HUNT, author of Everland and Mr. Chartwell

  “The lasting impression of Our Endless Numbered Days, which gracefully seesaws back and forth between two different time periods, is not one of how horrid an experience can be, but of how resourceful and resilient the human psyche can become in order to survive. The result is beautiful. It will keep you turning the pages, and long afterwards it will keep you turning over in your mind the events in this haunting story.”

  —YANNICK MURPHY, author of The Call and This Is the Water

  “Powerfully imagined and written with a dazzlingly effective economy of style, Claire Fuller has mastered beautifully the building of jeopardy that the reader can see while the protagonist cannot. The ending is truly dark and courageous. BRAVA!”

  —MORAG JOSS, author of Half Broken Things

  “I was utterly gripped by the hypnotic atmosphere.”

  —ESTHER FREUD, author of Hideous Kinky and Mr. Mac and Me

  Copyright © 2015 Claire Fuller

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fuller, Claire.

  Our endless numbered days : a novel / Claire Fuller.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-941040-02-7 (ebook)

  1. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Wilderness—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PR6106.U45O87 2015

  823’.92—dc23

  2014037937

  First US edition 2015

  Interior design by Jakob Vala

  www.tinhouse.com

  For Tim, India, and Henry

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Acknowledgements

  1

  Highgate, London, November 1985

  This morning I found a black-and-white photograph of my father at the back of the bureau drawer. He didn’t look like a liar. My mother, Ute, had removed the other pictures of him from the albums she kept on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and shuffled around all the remaining family and baby snapshots to fill in the gaps. The framed picture of their wedding, which used to sit on the mantelpiece, had gone too.

  On the back of the photograph, Ute had written James und seine Busenfreunde mit Oliver, 1976 in her steady handwriting. It was the last picture that had been taken of my father. He looked shockingly young and healthy, his face as smooth and white as a river pebble. He would have been twenty-six, nine years older than I am today.

  As I peered closer, I saw that the picture included not only my father and his friends but also Ute and a blurred smudge which must have been me. We were in the sitting room, where I stood. Now, the grand piano is at the other end, beside the steel-framed doors which lead to the glasshouse and through to the garden. In the photograph, the piano stood in front of the three large windows overlooking the drive. They were open, their curtains frozen mid-billow in a summer breeze. Seeing my father in our old life made me dizzy, as though the parquet were tipping under my bare feet, and I had to sit down.

  After a few moments I went to the piano, and for the first time since I had come home I touched it, running my fingers without resistance across the polished surface. It was much smaller than I remembered, and showed patches of a lighter shade where the sun had bleached it over many years. And I thought that maybe it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Knowing that the sun had shone, and the piano must have been played, and people had lived and breathed while I had been gone, helped steady me.

  I looked at the picture in my hand. At the piano my father leaned forward, his left arm stretched out languidly while his right hand tinkered with the keys. I was surprised to see him sitting there. I have no recollection of him ever sitting at the piano or playing it, although of course it was my father who taught me to play. No, the piano was always Ute’s instrument.

  “The writer, he holds his pen and the words flow; I touch the keyboard and out my music comes,” she says with her hard German vowels.

  On that day, at that tiny moment in time, my father sat uncharacteristically relaxed and handsome in his long-haired, thin-faced way, while Ute, wearing an ankle-length skirt and a white blouse with leg-of-mutton sleeves, was striding out of shot, as if she could smell the dinner burning. She held my hand and her face was turned away from the camera, but something in the way she carried herself made her look displeased, irritated to be caught with the rest of us. Ute was always well built—big-boned and muscular—though in the last nine years she’s become fat, her face wider than in my memory, and her fingers so puffed, her wedding ring is locked in position. On the telephone, she tells her friends that her weight gain has been due to the agony she lived with for so many years; that she ate her way through it. But late at night, when I can’t sleep, and creep downstairs in the dark, I have seen her eating in the kitchen, her face illuminated by the fridge’s interior light. Looking at the photograph, I realized it was the only one I’d ever seen with the three of us in it together.

  Today, two months after I’d come back home, Ute had been confident enough to leave me alone for half an hour before breakfast while she took Oskar to a Cub Scout meeting. And so, with one ear listening for the sound of the front door opening and Ute returning, I rummaged through the other drawers in the bureau. Already it was easy to cast aside pens, notepaper, unwritten luggage labels, catalogues for labour-saving household devices, and key rings of European buildings—the Eiffel Tower jostling against Buckingham Palace. In the bottom drawer, I found the magnifying glass. I kneeled on the rug, a different one from that in the photograph—when w
as it changed?—and held the glass over my father, but was disappointed to discover that enlarging him didn’t show me anything new. His fingers were uncrossed; the corner of his mouth was not turned up; there was no secret tattoo I had missed.

  Going one by one, from left to right, I focused on the five men in front of him. Three of them were squashed together on the leather sofa, while another sat back on the sofa’s arm, his hands behind his head. These men wore their beards scruffy and their hair long; none of them smiled. They looked so similar they could have been brothers, but I knew they were not. Confident, relaxed, mature—like born-again Christians, they said to the camera, “We have seen the future and disaster is coming, but we are the saved.” They were members of the North London Retreaters. Every month they met at our house, arguing and discussing strategies for surviving the end of the world.

  The fifth man, Oliver Hannington, I recognized instantly although I hadn’t seen him for many years, either. The camera had caught him sprawling across an armchair, his legs in flared trousers dangling over one side. Smoke curled through his yellow hair from a cigarette he held in the hand that propped up his head. Like my father, this man was clean-shaven, but he smiled in a way that suggested he thought everything was ridiculous; as though he wanted posterity to know he wasn’t really interested in the group’s plans for self-sufficiency and stockpiling. He could have been a spy who had infiltrated them, or an undercover journalist producing news stories which would one day expose them all, or a writer, going home after meetings and working all the mad characters into a comic novel. Even now, his strong-jawed self-confidence seemed exotic and foreign—American.

  But then I realized there must have been someone else in the room—the photographer. I stood where the person holding the camera must have stood, and with a corner of the photograph between my lips, I positioned my hands and fingers to form a square frame. The angle was all wrong; he or she must have been much taller than me. I put the magnifying glass back in the drawer, then surprised myself by sitting on the piano stool. I raised the key lid, transfixed by the neat white row of keys, like polished teeth, and put my right hand over them—so smooth and cool—where my father’s had been. I leaned to the left, stretched my arm out across the top, and something moved inside me, a nervous fluttering, low down in my stomach. I stared at the photograph, still in my hand. The face of my father stared back, even then so innocent he must have been guilty. I went again to the bureau, took the scissors from the pen holder, and snipped around my father’s face so he became a light grey mole on the tip of my finger. Careful not to drop him and lose him under the furniture, to be vacuumed up by Ute’s cleaner, and with my eyes fixed on his head, I reached up under my dress with the scissors and chopped through the silky fabric in the middle of my bra. The two cups which had irritated and scratched fell apart, and my body was freed, like it always had been. I tucked my father under my right breast so that the warm skin held him in place. I knew if he stayed there, everything would be all right and I would be allowed to remember.

  2

  The summer the photograph was taken, my father recast our cellar as a fallout shelter. I don’t know if he discussed his plans with Oliver Hannington that June, but the two of them lay around the sunny garden, talking and smoking and laughing.

  In the middle of the night, Ute’s music, melancholic and lilting, drifted through the rooms of our house. I would roll over in bed under my single sheet, sticky with the heat, and imagine her at the piano in the dark with her eyes shut, her body swaying, charmed by her own notes. Sometimes I heard them long after she had closed the key lid and gone back to bed. My father didn’t sleep well either, but I think it was his lists that kept him awake. I imagined him reaching for the pad of paper and the small pencil stub he kept under his pillow. Without switching on the light, he wrote, 1. General list (3 people) and underlined it:

  Matches, candles

  Radio, batteries

  Paper and pencils

  Generator, torch

  Water bottles

  Toothpaste

  Kettle, pots

  Pans, rope, and string

  Cotton, needles

  Steel and flint

  Sand

  Toilet paper, disinfectant

  Bucket with a lid

  The lists read like poetry, even though the handwriting was a boyish version of my father’s later frantic scribblings. Often the words strayed over each other where he had written them in the dark, or they were packed together as though tussling for space in his night-time head. Other lists sloped off the page where he had fallen asleep mid-thought. The lists were all for the fallout shelter: essential items to keep his family alive under the ground for days or maybe even weeks.

  At some point during his time in the garden with Oliver Hannington, my father decided to fit out the cellar for four people. He started to include his friend in the calculations for the quantity of knives and forks, tin cups, bedding, soap, food, even the number of toilet-paper rolls. I sat on the stairs, listening to him and Ute in the kitchen as he worked on his plans.

  “If you must make this mess it should be for just the three of us,” she complained. There was the noise of papers being gathered. “I am uncomfortable that Oliver should be included. He is not one of the family.”

  “One more person doesn’t make any difference. Anyway, bunk beds don’t come in threes,” said my father. I could hear him drawing while he spoke.

  “I don’t want him down there. I don’t want him in the house,” Ute said. The scratch of pencil on paper stopped. “He is witching this family—it gives me the creepers.”

  “Bewitching and creeps,” said my father, laughing.

  “Creeps! OK, creeps!” Ute didn’t like to be corrected. “I would prefer that this man is not in my house.”

  “That’s what it always comes down to, doesn’t it? Your house.” My father’s voice was raised now.

  “My money has paid for it.” From my position on the stairs I heard a chair scrape against the floor.

  “Ah yes, let us pray to the Bischoff family money that funds the famous pianist. And dear Lord, let us not forget how hard she works,” said my father. I could imagine him bowing, his palms pressed together.

  “At least I am a professional. What do you do, James? Lie across the garden all day with your dangerous American friend.”

  “There’s nothing dangerous about Oliver.”

  “There is something not right with him, but you will not see it. He is only here to make trouble.” Ute stomped from the kitchen and went into the sitting room. I shuffled my bottom up a step, wary of discovery.

  “What use will playing the piano be when the world ends?” my father called after her.

  “What use will twenty tins of Spam be, tell me that?” Ute yelled back. There was a wooden clunk as she lifted the key lid, and she played one low minor chord with both hands. The notes died away and she shouted, “Peggy, she will not ever be eating the Spam,” and even though there was no one to see me, I hid my mouth behind my hand as I smiled. Then she played Prokofiev’s Sonata no. 7—fast and furious. I imagined her fingers sliding on the ivory like talons.

  “It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark,” my father bellowed.

  Later, when I had crept back to bed, the arguments and the piano playing ended, but I heard other sounds, ones that sounded almost like pain, although, even aged eight, I knew they meant something else.

  There was a list that mentioned Spam. It was on the one titled “5. Food etc.” Under the heading my father wrote, “15 calories per body pound, ½ gallon of water per day, ½ tube of toothpaste per month,” then:

  14 gallons water

  10 tubes toothpaste

  20 tins condensed chicken soup

  35 tins baked beans

  20 tins Spam

  Powdered eggs

  Flour

  Yeast

  Salt

  Sugar

  Coffee

  Crackers

>   Jam

  Lentils

  Dried beans

  Rice

  The items meander, as if my father played the “I went to the shops and bought . . .” game by himself—Spam reminded him of ham, which made him think of eggs, which took him to pancakes and on to flour.

  In our cellar he laid a new concrete floor, reinforced the walls with steel, and installed batteries that could be recharged by pedalling a static bicycle for two hours a day. He fitted two cooking rings, running off bottled gas, and built alcoves for the bunk beds—all made up with mattresses, pillows, sheets, and blankets. A white melamine-topped table was placed in the centre of the room, with four matching chairs. The walls were lined with shelves, which my father stacked with food and jerrycans of water, cooking utensils, games, and books.

  Ute refused to help. When I came home from school, she would say she had spent her day practising the piano, while “your father has been playing in the cellar.” She complained her fingers were stiff with neglect and her wrists ached, and that bending down to look after me had affected her posture at the keyboard. I didn’t question why she was playing more often than she used to. When my father emerged from underneath the kitchen, his face red and his bare back shiny, he looked as though he might faint. He glugged water at the kitchen sink, put his whole head under the tap, then shook his hair like a dog, trying to make me and Ute laugh. But she only rolled her eyes and returned to her piano.

  Each time my father invited members of the North London Retreaters to our house for meetings, I was allowed to open the front door and show the half-dozen hairy and earnest men into Ute’s sitting room. I liked it when our house was full of people and conversation, and until I was sent up to bed, I lingered, trying to follow their discussions of the statistical chances, causes, and outcomes of a thing they called “bloody Armageddon.” If it wasn’t “the Russkies” dropping a nuclear bomb and obliterating London with just a few minutes’ warning, it would be the water supply polluted by pesticides, or the world economy collapsing and the streets being overrun with hungry marauders. Although Oliver joked that the British were so far behind the Americans that when disaster came we would still be in our pyjamas while they would have been up for hours protecting their homes and families, my father was proud that his group was one of the first—perhaps the first—to meet in England to discuss survivalism. But Ute was petulant about not being able to practise the piano with them lounging around, drinking and chain-smoking late into the night. My father loved to argue and he knew his subject well. When the alcohol had flowed for a few hours and all agenda items had been covered, the meetings would dissolve from well-ordered discussion to argument, and my father’s voice would rise above the others.