Page 106 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Don’t think about that. Make a plan. Keep moving. If the adrenaline’s helping, keep it going. No time to stiffen up.

There were things to do.

These were what she decided were the short-term actions: make decisions, make them happen. She had choices about what to decide to do, after all. She could take her boat and flee the island, go back to the mainland and report this to a police force that might or might not be interested in something that had happened on a now deserted island, but would certainly trigger awareness of her own whereabouts with the officialdom she had taken such care to run from.

Or she could just run, perhaps to another island and keep living quiet and unseen by the mainland world.

Or, gruesomely, she could dispose of the body and the quad bike and pretend it hadn’t happened. She could hope he did not have friends who would come looking for him, and just carry on as she had been doing.

Everything about who she was and how she had been raised told her she should report it, that running away or hiding it was cowardice and just societally and probably morally wrong. And since he had been the attacker and literally killed himself, she had nothing to hide anyway.

Except herself.

That was one of the wrong outcomes if she chose the first course of action: she’d put herself in jeopardy and likely end up back in a facility facing the surgeon’s knife and the egg-host incubator. If those things were still running, she thought. After two years and a pandemic, in this world, who knew? The other wrong outcome that would flow from both the first and second options was that it would mean leaving her home, which was the one place in a disintegrating world where he knew to find her. Him. If she left and he came and she was not waiting, they might never find themselves together again. The two wrongs didn’t necessarily make a right, but they did allow her decision to make itself.

She hobbled back to the house, giving the dead body an unnecessarily wide berth. She found the wind-up emergency torch and went back to the quad. Shielding the light so it didn’t announce its presence too widely in what was now the full dark of night she examined the trailer. She was unsurprised to find he’d already rifled her food stores and had taken other useful stuff. She was surprised that he’d taken the full-length nude picture of herself drawn in charcoal on a roll of kraft paper that had hung on the wall next to the fire with all the other sketches and paintings. It was carefully rolled, and she almost missed it and then wished she had when she saw what it was, mainly because she couldn’t help allowing herself to imagine what he had intended using it for. It wasn’t all bad – she took it as more proof that he was on his own too – but it wasn’t definitive proof. She still behaved as if the hidden landscape contained other pairs of eyes that would see her actions if she wasn’t cautious.

So she was. She carefully reclaimed her stuff and laid it on the grass, and then she made sure the quad’s lights were off before starting it, grimacing at the noise, hoping the wind that was now rising would carry it away from any human ears that might be elsewhere in the dark, and backed the trailer up to his body. She made herself heave it up and into the trailer and tried to concentrate on the deadweight of it, not the head flopping around, bouncing on his shoulder blades and held in place by only its flap of skin and tendon. Then she drove it as quietly and slowly as she could, almost idling her way across the fields, out on to the machair and then threading her way through the dunes to a gap where a burn cut through and emptied itself on the beach.

At this stage she was thinking with unusual clarity and congratulated herself on having the forethought to come off the grass into the shallow burn and use it to cross the wide expanse of sand. The burn would cover her tracks across the tidal sand until she was far enough from the beach for anyone to know which direction they had come from, in the unlikely event they were spotted in the light of dawn before the tide covered and then erased them completely. She turned right when she thought she was far enough out and angled towards the deserted island in the middle of the bay. There was a shelving stone jumble that made a sort of ramp up on to it, where a long gone crofter had made an access point for his four-wheel drive, no doubt to ease the gathering of any sheep he left to graze the small island in the spring grazing. She paused and picked up some heavy sea stones from the shore. The heather made the going harder as she climbed the quad to the top of the rise and the flatter ground that crowned the islet.

The one feature the otherwise unremarkable lump of sea-girt grazing did have was the peat bog on the top, the one that had so thrilled their younger selves as they had dared each other and their friends to submerge themselves in it. It was dark as stewed tea, and the bottom was deep and – and this was the thing that made newcomers squeal in horror – there were bones in the peat ooze. She had always known they were only sheep bones, but as teenagers they had made up a much more sinister legend for new guests, that the bones belonged to a murdered Viking who haunted the island, the ghost in the peat bog who they called Pete Boggarty. At the time it had seemed funny. Now she was going to make it real, it didn’t seem so amusing. Certainly not the thought that she was not only hiding a body but might also be peopling the previously uninhabited islet with a real ghost.

Magical thinking, she thought, and tried to shake the unhelpful thought out of her head.

She found the bog, which was only the size of a large hot tub, with some difficulty. Then she climbed into the trailer and stuffed her attacker’s pockets with the heavy stones, trying not to focus on how cold and rigidly uncompliant the body had become, or how increasingly insistent the pain in her foot was becoming. And then she dragged the deadweight of the corpse off and down on to the springy heather, which muffled its landing into a rustle rather than a thump, and then she rolled it unceremoniously into the bog. She did it as quickly as she could, before second thoughts could snare her, and only remained there long enough to be sure it had sunk out of sight. Then she limped the fifty yards or so to the side of the islet that faced the wide Atlantic and made sure of where the cliff was. She did not want to scout for the sheer edge on the bike in case it found her before she found it and took her over with it.

She stood for a beat listening to the lazy thud and swash of the Atlantic below as it encountered the deepwater side of the islet. Once she had it all set in her mind, she went back, mounted up and gentled the quad to the sudden drop-off, and again with no ceremony or hesitation got off, kicked it into neutral, and pushed.

She was expecting a crash to come back up out of the darkness as metal hit rock below, but the only sound she heard over the waves was – perhaps – a deep noted plop that broke the rhythmic thump as the water closed over the hole she had made in the sea.

Now she’d got rid of her transport she realised she’d have to grit her teeth and walk all the way home, no matter how much her injured toes protested. It was the pain in her toes that hurt more than her ankle, which she found vaguely cheering. She could strap her toes together if they were truly broken and they’d no doubt eventually heal up. A broken ankle would have been a whole different order of problem. So she hobbled home, still thinking clearly, the dangerous magical thinking still at bay, congratulating herself that the man and his bike were hidden in what would remain untrodden land now. She gathered everything he had stolen from where she had unloaded it and carried it back to the house in a series of limping trips made easier by the wheelbarrow she picked up in the garage.

On instinct she went through all the rooms in the house with the orange-handled hatchet in her hand. She saw the mess he’d made rifling through the rooms and found no one else hiding behind doors or waiting for her around any corners. She did find an unflushed turd in the toilet, which somehow seemed both characteristic of the man and another violation. She flushed it and moved on, back downstairs to the kitchen. She made herself eat and drink before changing out of her cut-off boiler suit and into the other one, putting a sweater on beneath it. There was blood on her cut-offs, though she had imagined she’d been careful enough to avoid it. She knew she’d never wear it again, so burned it in the fireplace. Because that’s what you did, she told herself, when you hid a body. Cover your tracks. Burn your clothes. She decided she was getting light-headed, because the sudden vision of herself crouched in front of the hearth poking at the burning rags with the fire tongs like a murderer in a TV show made her want to laugh, when of course she should be racked with fear at the night’s events, both the attack and the hiding of the evidence of it. She’d definitely crossed one line. Who was to say she wasn’t travelling across another one in the unsettled marches between sane and something else? She knew the answer to that.

“Have the PTSD later,” she said again and went into the bathroom to grab a roll of surgical tape from the medicine cabinet and her last box of Ibuprofen, the one she’d been saving for emergencies since the island emptied and the shop closed. She decided this was an emergency, but didn’t take any yet, promising herself she would only do so if the pain got really unbearable.

She went to the cupboard under the stairs and unlocked the discreet gun cabinet where her grandfather’s twelve-bore lived and took it and a box of cartridges. She packed two rucksacks, snagged the birdwatching binoculars from the hook by the kitchen window, locked the front door behind her and headed down the long drive to the high ground on the other side of the road from the house.

There was a low shelter by the T-junction at the roadhead where, in earlier years, the refuse bins had waited for the fortnightly rubbish and recycling lorry to grind past and empty them. She put down her packs and the gun and took the time to pull all four of them out and leave them stretched across the entrance to the drive, not because they would stop anyone entering, because they were easily wheeled out of the way, but because if anyone came to the house while she was asleep, she would see they had been moved. She then crossed the road, awkwardly jumped the ditch trying to avoid landing on her bad foot, fell over and swore a lot before getting up and taking to the heather beyond. She climbed the slope to the high ridge, and only fell over unseen obstacles twice on the way, and spent the rest of the night in a sleeping bag wrapped in a waterproof bivvy-bag, sleeping surprisingly deeply. Come morning she pitched the low brown two-man tent just behind the ridgeline in a shallow depression that hid it from the road and any other houses that might harbour eyes, even in the far distance. She grimaced at the two badly bruised toes. She was able to wiggle them a very little, enough for her to hope they might just be badly staved and not properly broken, though they hurt quite as much as if they were. She strapped them together with the surgical tape, wincing as she did so, but decided against taking any of her valuable painkillers for now. And then she began her vigil.

She lay up in the deep heather, binoculars ready, and just watched the house and the land and the seascape beyond. If he was part of a group, she’d see them coming. She wasn’t going to be surprised again.

She’d taken food for ten days and lasted seven before she went back down the hill, limping much less than she had on the way up. In that time she saw no sign of any companions looking for her attacker. There were no lights in the darkness, near or far. Nothing moved on the road round the island, which she could see in the far distance. The only animals she saw moving in the landscape were some faraway sheep down on the machair and a family of red deer who drifted over the ridge into her dip and stopped in mild surprise at finding her there, and then drifted on, seemingly without interest or much alarm. She saw hooded crows and ravens and the golden eagle that circled overhead at the same time each day, as if it was following a set patrol pattern, and in the fields beyond the house she heard and saw a flight of geese honk into land and feed for most of an afternoon. But apart from endless distant white flashes of gulls and one skua that found itself inland enough to fly over her, she saw nothing else to alarm her.

Still sticking to her plan, she came off the hill, reclaimed the house and went for a swim. Pete Boggarty’s island still watched over the bay and she felt its gaze no more peopled and sinister than she ever had. She was, despite herself, pleased to note that she still experienced it as an old familiar part of her landscape. Just an island. Not a crime scene.

She cycled across the long causeway between North Uist and Berneray and put the bike on the Hope. Then she cast off and sailed it out of the small boxy harbour around and back across to the larger island and the more open mooring that lay beside the old ferry pier. The building of the causeway had rendered it obsolete back when her grandfather had been young, but it was still a good mooring and a secure enough place for the boat. Most importantly, it was closer to hand should she need to move fast. She estimated she could run from the house to the pierhead in less than three minutes. It just made sense, she told herself, proud at how rational she was still sounding.

She was keeping a grip. She might not even have to allow herself the PTSD at all. Which brought her to the next phase of the plan she had made leaning on the quad bike, trying not to see the dead pile of clothes in the dark behind her.

Things not to do.

Don’t lose your routine. You can lean on it, she told herself. Discipline and repetition would mark time passing and create a framework of familiarity to keep her moored in reality as she waited for him.

She persuaded herself it would be simple. She wrote it out on index cards she found in a desk drawer and pinned them among the drawings and paintings with which she had covered the tongue-and-groove wall of the living room: KEEP JOURNAL. KEEP VEGETABLES GROWING. EAT. WASH. FISH. SWIM. READ FOR COMPANY.

On one bad day she wondered if it was beginning to look like a murder-wall in a police drama, but one in which she was both victim and perpetrator. She banished that thought quickly and wrote another card: