Page 107 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

HAVE PTSD LATER.

She kept her routine, and the drawings spread across the walls to mark the time passing. But of course it wasn’t quite her old routine, because of the third plank in her survival plan.

Adjustments were made.

She took care that there were no lights that escaped the house to give her presence within away to any night-time searcher or passers-by. The billiard room at the back of the building was an over-grand anomaly for what had been built as a substantial enough but simple farmhouse. It had been added by an optimistic hotelier who had bought the place in the middle of the last century and tried to run it as a fishing hotel for the adventurous gentry who came north every year to try the sea lochs and moorland pools of the remote island. The vision had failed, as had the hotel, but the full-sized billiard table remained. There was scarcely room for it in the place, and in one corner you had to use a specially shortened cue to make certain angles, but there was a fireplace and it could be made snug and light-tight, so it became her after-dark refuge. She didn’t let herself call it a safe room, because that would be both overdramatic and admitting to a deeper fear of unspecified dangers that might be peopling the outer darkness that she wished to remain in denial of.

And by day she was pretty much her old, industrious self, tending her adopted vegetable patches in the adjoining crofts, swimming, sketching, painting, reading in the sun, almost never stopping to check the horizon for threats, and maintaining her boat. She fretted about the small wind turbine at the end of the field that still provided power for the house, and wondered how long the photovoltaics would survive the challenge of year after year of winter storms. She couldn’t find any manuals for either and resigned herself to not being able to fix them once they failed and decided to enjoy the luxury of the electric Aga cooker while she could. Meanwhile she made plans to rip out the electrics once they stopped and turn it into a wood or even maybe even a peat burner. She practically worked out how to fix a stovepipe to what would become the firebox, and the best way to hack a hole for it in the stone wall. She was proud of her practicality. Practical wasn’t just useful. It was planning the campaign against dangerously idle hands, and so future-proofing her hold on reality. By day she was, she told herself, crushing it.

It was only at night she changed. She ate according to the light, rising with the dawn and cooking her evening meal while there was still just enough brightness left in the sky to see her way around the kitchen before darkness rendered it a no-go area. She spent the evenings in the light-proof safety of the billiard room and come the onset of colder weather decided it made more sense to sleep there too. So she pulled a mattress down and put it under the billiard table and made a bedroom-within-a-room. She thought of it as a low-slung box-bed. Because in happier days when the house had been a holiday house it was full of books that people had brought to enjoy as a vacation read and then left for others. She was in no fear of running out of reading material, especially if she developed a liking for detective fiction. In fact, she began reading sci-fi, a genre she had never had much time for when the future was assured and more or less predictable. Perhaps because she was so painfully aware from personal experience that it was in fact now a protean and unguaranteed thing, she became fascinated with what visions of tomorrow other people had imagined for themselves and their readers. She wasn’t looking for clues. She was looking for escape routes, if only for the passage of time she could lose herself in the stories.

There was a vinyl record player and there was a radio. The photovoltaics on the roof and the wind turbine kept the lights on and the music flowing to keep her company when she forgot to worry about being overheard. The holiday house had become a repository for two generations of vinyl LPs, which split pretty starkly between cheesy pop and rock and serious classical. She tried to remember to listen to the former when she felt low, and to the latter when she needed to calm herself and let her worries drift away from her for a while. She listened to a lot of albums from her mother and her grandmother’s youth. They both seemed to have liked women singers, from Janis Joplin and Aretha Franklin on one hand, all the way up to Kate Bush and Annie Lennox. There seemed to be a cut-off at about the time LPs had been replaced by CDs, but she didn’t mind the absence of the songs of her own youth and found the analogue hisses, crackles and pops of the vinyl somehow comforting, like old friends.

Then it was her third Christmas and he had still not come. She found a string of fairy-lights under the stairs and decided to cheer herself up by decorating her now book-lined bedspace with them. Strangely, it only made her sadder. As did her decision to tape a picture of him to the slate underside of the table so it would be the first thing she saw in the morning, and the last one at night. It was the picture she took of him happy and jumping in mid-air with the much-loved dog, that gravity-defying frozen moment that marked G-Day, the day the future was put on notice, the moment the end of the world began.

It didn’t work the magic she intended. The first morning she woke and turned on her reading light to look at him was the first time she heard a terrible despairing noise that shook her to the bone, and then realised it was sobbing and it was coming from her mouth. In all the time since she’d made her escape, that long passage of increasing loneliness and inexorably diminishing hope, nothing had made her cry because she had made the decision not to let it, and so had dammed it up inside her. And as the months had turned into a year, and then years, the pressure behind the barricade had just built and built. And, absent a safety valve, at the sight of him and the dog hanging so happily above her, it just broke.

And so did she.

Chapter 37

The wizard that wasn’t and the wolves that were

Mouse – Year 201 AG

From what I can remember, at least the first time you see it, the sea creeps up on you. One minute I was looking around, before turning to try and keep the westerly wind out of my ear, and saw a horizon miles away, where the green met the sky, and then the next time I looked, that horizon had slipped a bit, and now it wasn’t quite so flat, and then I realised that the green didn’t end where the sky began any more, not quite. The light beyond the green was now water, bouncing the brightness of the day back up on itself, and the actual flat horizon was now lost at the undetermined point where the sky meets the water. The map had warned we’d be coming close to the sea as we got to the point where old England bordered old Scotland but knowing we might see this dagger of water didn’t prepare me for it. It was just odd, seeing a place where land ended and water stood between me and the horizon. I didn’t feel unmoored, but I did feel a little looser somehow, as if the horse might slip sideways on a tilt in the world that I’d only just noticed.

The sea, I said to Cat. That must be it. Like on the map. The Solway Firth.

It’s just water, she said.

I could tell she was trying to be unimpressed. Nevertheless, I stared for a long while, wondering if I’d see a boat, but I didn’t. The sea looked, if possible, even emptier than the landscape. And then a squall of rain must have blown in, because the view disappeared as we passed a slope that rose and obscured our view, and we didn’t see it again until Glasgow.

We were half a day or so north of where I’d first seen the sea when it happened. I know that because I thought at the time that maybe Cat was right, maybe the sea was bad luck for us. Also I was still having parts of the day where I would get light-headed and woozy, which was an after effect of the fever and my recovery from it. Though maybe I hadn’t really recovered at all. It’s possible I was walking with a low fever all the time. What I am sure of is that danger came calling and then reality got weird.

The landscape had changed again. The road climbed gently but relentlessly upwards as it shifted from flatter country that had once been fertile farmland into wilder terrain. All around us the hills rose up and began to hem in the road with ranks of dark trees marching along the high ridgelines on either side, like giant versions of the Miserable Wood, watching us as we passed. A low grey cloud seemed to have been hammered in above us like a lead ceiling that hid the treetops, while a thinner mist clung to a river that twisted along the road beside us for a while before crossing it at a sharp angle across which had once been a bridge.

It wasn’t a bridge any more. Time and weather had dropped the other end of it into the far riverbank, making a shallow four-lane ramp that dipped alarmingly away from us. I stopped Red at the angle and looked downwards, working on making my first good choice of the day, trying to figure out whether it was safe to use it or if we should detour. It was early, but the babies were grizzling a little, and the goats were acting a little spooked.

I sensed Cat over my right shoulder.

What do you think? I said.

It looks safe, she said.

We’d come to the point where the road, which had been slightly above the early morning mist until then, was now levelling down into it. You could feel the wetness of it on your skin. It didn’t completely obscure the view down to the river, but it made it blurry and indistinct, like you couldn’t quite trust your eyes without trying to squint them through it. Close to, I could see the surface of the slope angling down into the thicker mist was cracked and mossy. I thought it was probably not going to fall down if we used it as a way to get to the other side of the river, but I also thought of hooves slipping on the incline and the horse tumbling, legs flailing, bones snapping. It was probably a safe enough thing to try and would certainly have been quicker, but something told me to come off the road on to the scrubland beside it and approach the river that way. The water wasn’t deep. I could see that from where I was standing. It was a slow curve of shallows running over and through a wide tumble of small grey boulders. The crossing would be easy. It wasn’t deep enough to drown in.

The horse and goats seemed to resent being made to leave the road, but they did so without too much resistance, and we found a place where it had gently crumbled into a shallow slope that led down to the moorland beside it. Animals, maybe rabbits or hares or something larger had made a straightish path heading parallel with the road, towards the crossing. I led the horse through thigh-high tussocks of cotton-grass towards the low bank of mist hugging the surface of the river ahead.

I took my long stick from where I always kept it, strapped to the outside of the pannier on Red, and had a last check on the babies. They were awake but not grizzling any more. Two pairs of eyes looked up at me from their pannier-cot, and I did think about how it might be safer if I took them in my carrier and walked them across strapped to my chest and back. Somehow the idea of a horse falling during the crossing seemed much less likely than me taking a tumble and squashing one or other of them, so I didn’t. But I definitely had the thought. I looked round for Digger, but she’d loped off on some errand of her own, so I took Red’s reins in one hand and gingerly dropped down off the lip of turf on to the gravel strand along the river’s edge.

The morning sun was beginning to thin out the river mist, but there was still enough to make the far bank indistinct, like looking at something through thin smoke. I could see there were low scrubby bushes set back from the rocky beach, and behind them a dark strip of earth marked a much higher drop-off than the one I’d just stepped down – almost a low cliff of maybe five or six feet – topped by more clumps of cotton grass. To my left was the underside of the roadway. I could see it had been elevated on a series of squat concrete pillars that spanned the low boggy ground on both sides of the water making it more of a long strip of elevated road than just a bridge. The fallen section was maybe a fifth of the whole span, the rest was a dank and shadowy space that had probably been untravelled and unloved even when the world was full, and cars and lorries had thundered overhead on the north/south road.

And then something moved and for an instant I froze, the tail of my eye catching sight of a thin man with a white beard standing in the water, framed in the triangle of light made by the tilted slab of fallen roadway. He was like a wizard in a picture book. And then he must have felt my eyes on him, or maybe it was my head turning to make more sense of what I’d glimpsed and he shook out his wings and I realised my brain had leaped ahead of itself in shock and made the white chest of a huge bird into a beard and then had gone on to fool me by creating a whole imaginary figure around it, the way the mind sometimes does, and I watched the bird flap away, slow and majestic and not a person at all.

I thought that was a wizard, I said to Cat. Scared the life out of me.

Just a heron, she said.