Page 104 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Right then I could not sail a boat any more than Cat could walk. I knew as much about it as I knew how to fly. So even if it did happen that I found a boat that could be made seaworthy at Glasgow or anywhere along the coast, in terms of sailing my way across however narrow the strip of sea between the mainland and their island, it would be as useful to me as a lump of concrete.

Light a fire, she said. On the mainland. Be brave, Mouse. Don’t give up.

Same to you, I said, and found myself tripping up on my words. If I do this, and even if I don’t, don’t you think of giving up either, Cat. Not ever…

In those days I was close to tears most of the time, mostly through fatigue, but also because I was haunted by the fear that every conversation we had might be the last, that things might spin just out of reach, beyond my ability to grasp them and pull them back to safety. I never said it like that to Cat because I knew it was important she shouldn’t add to the stress on herself by worrying about me. She needed all her energy to heal. To get enough breath to say more than three words at a time. But still. Like I said. She knew the inside of my head better than I did.

I’m going nowhere, she said.

And I could feel her smile like a warm glow on me as she said that.

I swear it, she said.

And then I said that was good and she said don’t waste time, and by the middle of the day the babies were fed and Red was loaded up with the panniers of food and supplies and Cat made as comfortable and safe as I could manage, half lying, half propped-up in one pannier with her damaged legs protected, and the babies curled up in the one on the other side of the horse while I walked, following Digger, holding the reins and leading the way and just like that we were on the road north.

Your life can change in an instant, or a morning. In this case it was both, and maybe the speed of the decision and then acting on it so fast was to avoid time for second thoughts.

We were on the way before any of that could kick in. Following the M-way with the south and our old home at our backs, until we stopped at the Glasgow library which was, my map-book said, right beside it in the middle of the city, just before it crooked into a hard bend it would be difficult to miss. We travelled strung-out like an old picture I’d once seen of silhouettes in the desert, except instead of a line of camels and goats we had Red, who was led by me who followed Digger, and trailing behind Red were three goats that definitely didn’t like being tied to anything, let alone each other. That was our little caravan: A fragile chain of humans and animals adrift in an endless green and brown landscape.

The adrenaline of the decision and the departure wore off as the sun began its slow tumble to the evening horizon on our left shoulder as we followed the road lazily snaking away from the south. I sometimes wondered how we looked to the birds that criss-crossed the sky overhead, but mostly I spent my time worrying whether the lion was stalking us as we went. I was scared, exhausted and after an hour or so, not so convinced we were doing the right thing at all.

But it wasn’t a completely mad or even bad idea, going north. I knew from the map that it was less than a hundred and eighty miles. I’d made a point of being quite unambitious in the miles that I thought we could cover every day, more than five, less than ten. Say seven and a half miles on average, which would take somewhere between twenty-five and thirty days. Less than an old month. Even if we hadn’t had the goats and their milk to take along with us, the panniers on Red held enough oatmeal and dried apples and nuts to make mush for the babies for way more than three times that amount of time. So maybe, with hindsight, it was a rash decision made in shocked reaction to the trauma of the lion and the devastation of our home coming so hard on the heels of the other disasters, but it wasn’t totally mad: Smooth is fast, and I had still planned rationally enough for the journey in the short amount of time I had in which to do so. And Cat’s cleverness in always making a point of spreading important things out and storing our food cached in several different places had really paid off. In fact it probably did more to keep us alive than anything else. We couldn’t have moved if the fire had burned all our stores rather than just some of them. We’d have had to stay where I knew the hunting and the foraging opportunities and taken our chances with the lion, if it was still around. But of course my estimate of making the journey in short order was wildly optimistic, given how it all turned out. And I should have maybe made more allowance for that, especially because I now know anything involving babies is much more complicated than it looks at first sight, since the main things young babies do even more than just eat and shit and grizzle and sleep is change your plans for you on an hourly basis.

And I couldn’t have foreseen that I’d become ill on the journey. When I threw up on the afternoon after the lion and the fire, I thought it was just delayed shock. But while it may have been delayed, it wasn’t shock, it was an illness, and it dogged our footsteps as I pushed us north. The second time I was sick we were much further along on our journey. The terrain had got progressively bleaker, as a sharp wind came off the moor and woodland to our east and worried at us as we passed. In some ways it’d have maybe been easier if it was in our faces, because then I’d have known to get my head down and push against it. Or maybe it would have been so strong and unpleasant fighting it that we’d have holed up earlier. As it was, I got sicker and found it hard to keep food down, while travelling with a crosswind in one ear all day led to ear-aches that stopped me sleeping properly at night.

I was as peevish as the babies by lunchtime, and the travelling days got shorter because I often felt too sick and feverish to mount up again after looking after them and making sure they were fed and clean. I’d taken to knotting their washed nappy rags to the outside of the panniers to dry, and I always managed to keep at least two pairs of dry rags each in reserve. I’m strangely proud of that, knowing that as I slowly lost my grip on everything else I focused right down on what was important. I remember sitting on the floor in front of many fireplaces in houses that were all different except for a common dampness, making sure the wet rags got dry enough for me to shore up the fire and sleep, sometimes sewing and mending the leather bottle teats Cat had made from old glove fingers which the babies often sucked to bits while I waited, secure in the knowledge that, come the next day, they’d be ready for action. Lighting fires in long abandoned fireplaces always felt like we’d restarted the heart of the dead homes we were borrowing, just for one more night of life.

I don’t remember the exact sequence of events because, like when you spill water on a painting you’re working on and it blurs everything and runs colours that you didn’t mean to mix into each other, making a huge indecipherable mess, the fever washed all the different days together. So it’s a smudged and blotchy picture, a ruined watercolour memory of the past which has smeared details and only a foggy shape to it. But I do know that shape and some of the details. I just lose track of how they join together, and which details are real and which came out of the fever instead.

One dark colour runs through it all, and I’m ashamed of it in a way that I can still taste, like a bitterness that spoils even the good bits of memory that do loom out of the mists of confusion I was pushing us through as we trudged the long passage through the borderland. I can’t put a name on that dark colour: Jealousy is green, anger is red, but I don’t know what colour shame is. I only know it muddies all the other ones it comes in contact with.

I’m ashamed because it was in this part of the journey that I began to feel something I had never felt before in my life. I began to resent Cat. Almost hate her in tiny flashes. Not for long, not for real, but just enough that the betrayal of it spoils everything. It came in flares, nasty little bursts of bottled-up anger and frustration that I tried to keep inside me. It came because I was tired and scared and not thinking straight because of the fever, I think. I had kept to our routine so carefully, so rigorously that I didn’t notice at first, and then – when I did notice – it was too late to quench it and it would tear through me like a fire. And it would be quickly in and quickly out, because it wasn’t real hate and Cat was, even when I nearly-hated her, also and for ever my only-one.

It’s just that I was doing everything. For everyone. Almost everything anyway. I led the horse and the goats, led them to feed, led them to water, milked the goats, fed the babies, cleaned the babies, washed their rag nappies, dried them, played with the babies, told them stories and then – the moment they fell asleep, did so myself, knowing I would again be on duty the moment they woke in the night. And they always woke in the night, often many times in the same night. I snatched fragments of sleep like a starving person grabbing scraps of food. Oh, and I made fires and collected firewood, mended more teats and found houses and buildings with safe roofs for us to spend all those nights in. Different houses, changeable weather, same plod, plod northwards, same routine every day, same repetition of the same on the next day and the one after that. And all this while running a fever with streaming nose and eyes that seemed hard to focus and a dryness in my throat that never went away no matter how much I drank. And I had the shits. And all I had to help me was the conviction we had to keep moving because if I stopped I’d never start again, so I couldn’t stop because the only real help I had was Digger who hunted her own food and did patrol round us to keep us safe.

And Cat? My shameful nearly-hating of my only-one?

Still feels unforgivable. I knew better. It wasn’t just that she was talking to me less and less. I knew she was hurt. Badly. And I knew she was trying to heal. I knew she was trying to help by what she said, how she encouraged me, how she reminded me, how she kept me focused. Picking her words, probably. She even helped when I was asleep because I do remember waking in the gold light of one dawn and realising the babies hadn’t woken me and I sat up fast, convinced something had happened to them, like they’d stopped breathing or been snuck out of the window by hungry wolves that Digger hadn’t warned us about, only to find them both lying against the sleeping dog, the boy dozing and the girl staring over my shoulder, rapt and adoring and I realised they were listening to Cat who was telling them a story that they couldn’t have understood, but seemed entranced by.

I was too. Just her voice in my ear was enough to calm me, then and always. That morning was a good one. No shameful anger in it that I can remember. Maybe it was the familiar lilting rhythm of her voice as she told a fairy story three words at a time, the one about the boy and his shadow. It was a story she must have told me so many times when I was little that it was a part of me, just like Cat was.

The girl had a special bond with Cat. Her eyes always seemed to find her when she woke, and the sight of her triggered a gurgling smile. The boy seemed more inward looking, slower to smile, but warm when he in his turn found my face instead and gummed a smile in my direction. But that happy morning was the exception to a procession of colder mornings that somehow just seemed to get grimmer and more desperate, and much, much more tiring, because although Cat might have encouraged me, and despite the fact that she kept me company in all the moments when I felt so alone that it would have been easy enough to just stop and give in, that was all talk not action. It wasn’t physically helping me.

And actual physical help is what I really needed, bone-tired as I was. And yes, maybe talk and encourage was all she could do, maybe physical help was an unrealistic expectation given how things were, but I still hated it, in those ignoble moments when the anger swept in and out, I hated that she never DID anything. It wasn’t just my mind that was exhausted. It was my body. I was so tired that sometimes I sat on the horse, forcing us ever more northwards, and the reason I often found it hard to follow the outline of the old road ahead was that my eyes were full of tears that I fought not to shed. And I was tired to this point most of the time. And even though Cat couldn’t possibly see it in my face because she was behind me, she’d tell me it was OK, and that I was doing really well, and all I could do was bite down on the angry things I wanted to shout at her about that just being words, and how a thousand of them were not as useful to me as her actually doing one little something, taking the tiniest fraction of the weight of doing everything off my back. I once almost told her she was as useless at helping as Freya had been, but that was so unfair I bit it back before it got out. It would have been a vicious thing to say out loud, but even thinking it for an angry instant filled me with shame deeper than I’d ever felt. I don’t know if she could see into my head and knew what I wasn’t saying, but it always felt like she could.

If we’d been travelling cross-country, it’d have taken for ever, or maybe we wouldn’t have made it. But the fact that all we had to do to reach Glasgow was to stay on the M-way made the biggest difference. I didn’t have to stop and check our position all the time or work out complicated detours around obstacles that had occurred since the maps we had were printed. I just had to walk the line as it ribboned north, keeping our little caravan moving along a wide strip of overgrown roadway and avoid doing anything thoughtless or unplanned. But it was a wet progress, as if the weather had decided that the night of the lion and the fire that burned us out marked the turning point in the seasons as well as our story. The hot dry spell broke as soon as we set off, and the rain set in instead. Not constantly, but it did so enough to clear the air for a while, enough to seem refreshing if you were walking through a fever, until it found its way down the back of your neck and became irritating and then depressing. Especially if you were already wet with sweat from a fever as I was to start with. So it wasn’t all rain all the time, but from then on it became cooler and rained more than it shone, certainly until we saw the elephant and the sea.

It was raining the night we found the elephant. And finding the elephant did, I think, solve the mystery of the lion. I’d had my eye on the farm as a place to stop for most of the afternoon. In a landscape of greens and browns it stood out and caught the eye from a long way off. It was an old stone-built farmstead, with a house in front and a farmyard in the back, made up of low outbuildings on two sides and a big steep-roofed barn that looked like a church with the steeple cut off. It stood on a rise of land overlooking the road, which curved gently around the base of the hill on which it stood. Like a lot of these hill farms it also looked like a fortress, with the high walls on all four sides of the inner yard. What wasn’t like a fortress or indeed any farm I’d yet seen was the range of bright colours it had been painted in. They must have been thick paints designed to withstand the weather, because even lifetimes after the buildings had fallen vacant the yellow and the orange and the blue and the white blocks stood out at a distance, as if a giant’s child had dropped their toy farm buildings on the landscape. Each building had been painted one colour and was distinct from its neighbours. When we finally approached, we could see from the variations in the weathering that the pink one had once been red, the yellow one a much harsher version of itself, and that the white had actually once been silver. What also was not obvious at a distance was that the owners – and they must have been the last owners – had also written all over the buildings, in a variety of styles that were just as mismatched as the colours: some phrases were in smooth joined-up writing, some were in blocky capitals like a shout, some seemed measured and controlled, constrained within neat rectangular boxes, others snaked and curved around the structures like brambles, so you might have to walk round the house twice before you got to the end of the poem or the saying. For example, the main house was garlanded with loopy writing that followed a flight of arrows that circled the house twice and read – “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth… Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness… For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable!” Over the arch into the courtyard a long ribbon of writing spangled with stars and streamers emerged from the tip of a wand held by the side silhouette of a bearded wizard painted on the gatepost, proclaiming – “The world is full of magic things – patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper!” On the other gatepost a beady-eyed witch with a long sharp hat had been painted, pointing her finger at us with her own speech bubble that read “So sharpen up sharpish!” I don’t think she was meant to frighten the people who must have lived here. She looked serious as any witch in a storybook should, but the painter had caught a bit of a grim twinkle in her eye, and she had her name on a band round the pointy hat which read “Granny W”, so it was probably a funny painting of a relative.

All the bright colours and the criss-crossing words and phrases that had once been important enough to someone for them spend time decorating the buildings with them made the whole place feel much more abandoned than normal houses. I’ve never been to a party, but I read about them; laughter and singing and dancing and everyone celebrating and having a really good time. This felt like a party that had just ended, so close but we could have enjoyed it if only we arrived earlier, but so far that we’d missed a chance for ever that would never come again. Even though Cat and I didn’t believe in ghosts, we’d always agreed that some of the old buildings we went into felt haunted. This place felt like that, but not haunted by people or what it had been, but haunted by the fact it would never be that thing again. Which makes no logical sense really, in the way some feelings just don’t.

See? I said. This place. It’s what I was talking about. It’s haunted by the future.

No such thing, said Cat.

But I knew what I meant even if she didn’t understand it. The long shadow cast by the future of these bright buildings was darkened by all the things they would never be again as their brightness faded and the walls fell in, and one day no one would even know that there had been a farm here, let alone one that had seen such a colourful final act. Because the words on the walls were like echoes. The last occupants had not gone quietly. They’d clearly enjoyed themselves, and had loved life. And strangest of all, I think they had had children. Probably at a time when nobody else could. I’m pretty sure that though they’d had children those children hadn’t had friends of their own here and so the grown-ups gave up part of being adult and sort of grew back down into their own childhood and played with them as children to keep them company. That’s why everything was painted so vividly. For fun. At least that’s the story I made up for myself.

In the old days, before we had to do everything for ourselves to survive, children had had fun. And these adults threw themselves back into that.