Page 111 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Cat didn’t ask me why, though I waited for her to do so. More and more our conversations were like this, holes in the flow, where they’d once been seamless. So I told her.

It made them easier to leave, I said. It made them less like people. But they are people. And we like them.

Yes we do, she said.

So we should choose them good names, I said. Because we’re never leaving them.

She didn’t reply again. I thought about saying something but I didn’t, not then, not that night because there were still chores to be done before bed, but next day as we were gently climbing a long arc of road cantilevered round a steepening slope of grass covered upland like a grand terrace I said something about how it looked like the road was finally taking us somewhere different, that maybe we’d start seeing Glasgow in the distance in a day or two, once we came up out of the lowlands, and she still said nothing.

We rode on for a bit, me keeping an eye on a cloud that looked like it might be lurking beside the saddle that led between the two hills ahead in order to ambush us with a late afternoon soaking. I’d learned to be more suspicious of the weather since we came north of the old border.

You don’t talk as much as you did, I said. Is it your lungs?

It was something I’d been thinking about a lot, but not saying, ever since we left the Bunker, really.

It took her a while to answer.

I’m just tired, she said.

I should have waited until you were really healed before moving out, I said. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault—

It isn’t, Mouse, she said.

Sort of is, I said.

Funny how – when you look back on things – you can be equally right and equally wrong about them.

Glasgow surprised us a couple of long days later, sidling out of a rain shower as we rounded a hillside on a long upsweep of land. At first, I just stopped the horse and tried to make sense of what we were looking at as the visibility cleared and revealed the vastness of the ruined cityscape in front of us. I’d seen villages and towns, but I’d never seen so much building all joined up and in one place. At this distance it was a huge jumble of broken land, too far away to really make out individual houses, with great swathes of low-built ruins punctuated by high-rise blocks and occasional spires and towers. It seemed to go on for ever and I felt more sick than relieved to have made it there with all of us in one piece because, staring at the size of it all I began to doubt I’d be able to find the library hidden away somewhere within that broken maze of overgrown and partially incinerated ruins. A couple of hours later, as the M-way looped its way out of the open country and pulled us deeper into the built-up areas you could see a lot of it had been hollowed out by flames, and recently too, because the tarry smell of burning grew stronger as we went on.

I wanted to check the map, and the babies were complaining so loudly that it spooked the goats who I swear kept looking at me as if to ask why I wasn’t doing something about it, so when we came to the obstruction I stopped to let the horse drink from the water pooled across the dip in the roadway, and set about the endlessly repeated routine of feeding and changing.

The obstruction was a huge road sign that had once towered over the road, but which seemed to have slipped rather than fallen off the stanchion that had held it over the roadway, in that it lay against it, leaning like a giant playing card, tilted at forty-five degrees – making enough of a lean-to roof that I thought we could shelter under it if the rain clouds gathering to the east of us swept in to catch us in the open. The paint was very faded but most of the white lettering was clear and visible against the pale grey blue of the background, reading “Wish—” and below it “Motherwell’.

It read like an instruction, and I scowled at it as I began to wrangle the two babies. I was mothering as well as I could – and I didn’t wish their mother well at all. I wished she was here to help. I wished Freya hadn’t abandoned them. I wished a lot of things, but then the routine movements sort of calmed me enough to realise that this was a junction to outskirts of the city called Wishaw and Motherwell, and I paused to look at my map and was able to confirm exactly where we were.

That’s a relief, said Cat, her voice coming over my shoulder as usual.

I just grunted, irritated at the sense of being overseen as always but somehow unaided as ever.

Maybe, I said, looking at the burn scars and ruins on either side of the roadway. But I still don’t know how we’ll find the library in all this. It’s a maze. A giant broken maze.

Perhaps it burned, she said.

That’s not helpful, I said sharply, probably more sharply than I should have, hating the edge of unpleasantness that added a cut to the words even as they slid out of my mouth.

The thing is it really wasn’t helpful, that kind of talk. I felt exhausted suddenly, once more defeated by the intensity of my need for Cat to help more being instantly cancelled out by my painful understanding why she couldn’t. I didn’t say anything for a while, just concentrating on sorting the baby out. The silence hung between us like a barrier, and I hated that too, the way it wore me out even more, this wall that seemed to be growing between us in a place where there had never been one before. Cat must have felt the same, because she was the one to break it.

I was joking, she said.

Well, it’s not funny because it might be true, I said. And then why did we do all this?

More silence added another brick or two to that wall. I could feel her watching my back.

You’ve done well, she said.

I’ve done everything, I said and though my words were no longer sharp because I was so bone-tired by it all, they still curdled in my mouth, too sour and mean to fully sweep that wall away. I think at that point I’d just started to hate everything about our situation, but myself most of all. I shrugged and reached for the other baby who was now crying and clearly needed a change too. The sense that I’d achieved something good in getting us all this far was spoiled, and I was the one who’d done the spoiling, all by myself.

You’re OK, Mouse, Cat said.