Page 101 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

It was the “then” that instantly flushed all the warmth of the evening swim and the sunset and the surge of excitement she’d felt when she thought this stranger was the Boy straight out of her system. It was replaced with the icy certainty that this strangely weak-looking man was not going to be a friend, no matter how much he was trying to smile reassuringly as he moved calmly towards her.

He wasn’t much bigger than she was. He didn’t look monstrous or threatening or obviously dangerous, but his unremarkable features contained bulgy eyes that were hot and slippery, as if some secret shame slithered guiltily just beneath the skin. It wasn’t clear whether it was shame at what he had done or what he was doing – or what he was going to do.

She had a strong impulse to run, but an even stronger one not to turn her back on him when he was this close and still walking towards her.

“Hang on,” she said, struggling to keep her voice pleasant and unthreatening. “Sorry. What are you doing here?”

“Me? Just having a looky-loo.” He smiled. “No harm intended. Didn’t know there was anyone here.”

He was still walking towards her, and the more he emerged from the gloom into the last of the evening light coming from behind her the less she liked his expression. On closer inspection she saw he had a neck that was the same width as his head, and his throat was bulgy like his eyes, which gave him an unsettling toad-like look.

She held up her hand, palm out.

“Please stop,” she said. “You gave me a shock. I just need a moment.”

He was passing the wide section of tree trunk she used as a chopping block to split kindling wood. There was a hatchet with a neon orange handle stuck in it. He paused right next to it.

“My bad,” he said. “Anyone else in the house?”

She didn’t answer. He smiled wider, but with his mouth closed, which made him look even more like a toad. His eyes stayed wet and hot.

“Only I wouldn’t want to give them a shock,” he said. “Like you—”

“Yes,” she said. “My husband. And another man.”

“And another man?” he said, eyes blinking rapidly and then slowing. “So what are you? A throuple?”

It wasn’t just the calm inappropriateness of the question that was so unnerving. That wide, close-mouthed smile that was so weak looking somehow also filled her with a horrible conviction that when it opened his tongue would whiplash out of it like a toad snatching an insect out of the air. She tried to keep a grip on herself, wondering if it was the fear that was making her almost hallucinate these things, or if she had finally just run mad after so much time spent alone. The one thing that kept her moored in this unsteady moment was the solid conviction that he was real and dangerous.

“No,” she said. “Just my husband and his brother.”

“And they’re in the house?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, cursing herself for the dryness in her mouth that made her sound more like rasping than talking.

“Right,” he said, then furrowed his eyebrows “Only… they weren’t there when I went through it. Place was empty. And there was no sign of more than one person living there. One of everything on the edge of the sink. One toothbrush in one bathroom, no toothbrush in the other. Monastic, I thought. Though I thought it was someone who’d now buggered off this island with the rest of them. I didn’t think anyone was still in residence.”

His hand was now dangling casually close to the orange hatchet handle. If his eye hadn’t flicked to it and then flicked back even faster she might not have noticed.

“They just came back with me,” she said. “We were swimming.”

He looked at her closely, as if he was starting, wanting to believe her even. And then the smile did something to itself that twisted it from wide and weak to just nasty.

“In my arse you were,” he said. “It’s just you and me, and you got no reason to be lying to me or to act so untrusting and scared. I’m not going to hurt you.”

He’d have been more convincing had he not pulled the hatchet out of the chopping block.

She’d worked for NGOs in dangerous places. She well might be a woman going a bit strange and wonky living alone on this emptied island, but she was still all the earlier stages of herself under that wonkiness. She was still the tough girl who’d undergone the mandatory safety training, the escape and evasion drills, the self-defence classes before being sent in-country to help others. Because you can’t help others if you can’t help yourself.

So when he suddenly lurched forwards and tried to grab her by the towel round her neck and yank her towards him, she didn’t try and pull away but went with it, coming towards him faster and with less resistance than he was braced for, making him stumble back a step, catching himself just in time to meet the heel of her right hand punching skywards in a brutal uppercut that caught him under the chin and sent his head snapping back.

He staggered and gagged, too shocked to swing the hatchet, and then she stepped back and launched a savage kick upwards at his kneecap. It was a move taught to incapacitate an attacker and make them scream as the patella was hacked loose and north into the tendons and muscles of the upper leg. The Krav Maga instructor who had assured her that it would work – more than half a dozen years and a lifetime ago – also told her that if she was ever surrounded by a group of attackers she should pick the one who was the obvious leader and make him scream in pain before anything else happened. The thinking being that if the followers saw her do that to their leader they’d pause for a moment and that might give her the valuable life-saving time to get a head start on running away from them.

Running away was, the instructor said, always Plan A.

Always, always better to run than fight.

He drummed that into them for the four days of the course in a brightly lit gym space in east London that had a smell of optimistic citrus cleaning products laid over a faint but ineradicable base note of feet. And whether or not that applied physiology and consequent psychology was right remained unproven at this point, because the whole kick-the-kneecap-loose plan was predicated on wearing boots or shoes.