Page 105 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

You’re just guessing, said Cat.

I wasn’t. I pointed at the handprints where people had put their palms down in paint then printed them on the walls. There were big hands everywhere, but they always surrounded two pairs of little ones. I pointed to the splay of hands on the bottom of the green barn door. It was so covered in writing that the handprints seemed like a signature.

I’m not guessing, I said. I’m deducing. Deducing means—

I know that, said Cat.

We looked up at the big double doors in the arched opening and the writing that covered them like a tombstone:

Tread softly gentle passer-by, for beneath the roof of this barn, sleeping like a king under a hill lies King Arthur, mightiest of nelifs, most loyal of friends, the last freed elephant of England.

King Arthur was an elephant. A nelif-an, I worked out. The barn was cavernous and vaulted like a chapel, and in the middle of the floor the body of an elephant had been very carefully laid out, lying on its stomach like Digger sometimes did, resting but alert. The massive skull lay between two forelegs stretched out in front of it, and the rest of the bones and skin were stretched out behind, like a massive puppet waiting to be picked up and used again. Except the body was so massive that it would have defeated any puppeteer. It needed a giant but of course it was the giant. The dried skin that remained had shrunken in on the bones beneath like a tent. Rats had probably eaten the flesh long decades past. There was no smell of rot anywhere any more, though there once must have been. Thanks to the roof remaining intact the place actually smelled clean and dry. And so that’s where we spent the night undercover, sleeping with a dead elephant.

The saddest things were the graves. They were human sized, low mounds dug in the floor laid within the protective space between the elephant’s front legs, each with a wooden marker. One read DAD the other was more faded but you could read MU… and fill in the rest.

What do you think happened to the children, I said.

They got old, Cat said.

Everyone gets old, I said.

If they’re lucky, she said.

I hoped that they’d been lucky, these kids with the colourful parents and the much-loved elephant.

Where do you think the elephant came from? I said, later, after the babies were down – cleaned, fed and sleeping happily next to Digger.

From a zoo, Cat said.

That’s what I had been thinking. I knew what zoos had been, and I said that I supposed as people got too old and there were no younger zookeepers to take over, something had to be done. These people had adopted an elephant, and then they had loved it.

Cat didn’t say anything.

I wonder who adopted the lions, I said.

Maybe they escaped, Cat said.

I thought about it. I thought about the last old people in a world that had been full and sort of safe when they were young and how it would have been for them suddenly finding it emptier but now with lions where once there had only been foxes and badgers.

Maybe that’s where all the cats and dogs went, I said.

Maybe, Cat said. Maybe not.

I went to sleep thinking how annoying she could sometimes be and dreamed of elephants.

The next day we finally saw the sea in the far distance. And though we crossed no real border between the southern and northern countries, that was a day when everything changed again, as if the rules that we’d lived by till then altered a bit – and looking back I wonder if we took some magic onwards from the elephant. Or maybe I just left a bit of our rigid way of seeing the world behind, and so started to notice things that made no sense but worked. Or maybe it was just a result of the sickness I was still carrying, fever dreams that had never quite burned out, but left char marks in my head.

I tried to talk about this with Cat later, but it was one of the increasingly many things she didn’t seem to have the energy for. So that was something else I had to carry on my own. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel resentful about that too.

Chapter 36

Things to do. Things not to do. Adjustments to be made.

The Boy and the Girl – Year 16 AG

Park the pain and have the PTSD later.

That seemed like a good starting point for coping with the nightmare that had driven into her world. She leaned on the quad and tried not to look at the slumped pile of clothes behind her, the almost headless body that had once been her attacker. Her staved toes and twisted ankle were beginning to throb a little, the pain surprisingly bearable right now but promising to be really bad when the adrenaline wore off.