Page 112 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

And when I didn’t reply she once again tried to reach across that barrier growing between us.

We’re OK too, she said.

Most times I liked the way she seemed to be able to read my thoughts. In that moment it just made me angry that now I had to fight to keep control of myself on top of everything else. After all, I wasn’t a kid, hadn’t been for the longest time. Crying would make me a kid again. We didn’t have time for stuff like that.

A day later we found the library. Maybe that was the miracle, or perhaps the miracle was that for the most part its roof was still doing its job and it hadn’t fallen in. It was where Bear Shirt had said it was, north of the river which we crossed by switching back on ourselves where our M-way met another one and crossing the broad sweep of water on it. Cat didn’t like the view as we did so. Too close to the sea.

The library was like Bear Shirt had described it: A palace, wide set, old and stone-built with pillars and balustrades on the roof and a curved entrance on top of which was a green dome. All the windows had been boarded up a long, long time ago, probably to protect the vulnerable glass windows and keep the inside safe. It reminded me a bit of the Bunker, once we got inside, the succession of dark rooms, but that came later as we settled in to our new home.

On first arrival I got a shock when I looked up because for a moment, I thought there was someone on the tip of the dome, but then I realised it was a statue of a woman in a dress, holding out a book with one hand while keeping her hair in place with the other. And when we got closer, we found there was another woman, this time made of stone, sitting on top of the main door, looking at a map. Somehow these two women, still looking over the building, one thinking, one offering, made me happy and sad at the same time. They’d had a long wait with no one accepting their welcome or thanking them for the watch they’d kept. Mind you, I was so tired and relieved that anything out of the ordinary seemed to make me emotional.

The building overlooked a deep cut where the M-way sliced through the city centre, just before it curved away. That cutting had saved it too, because the buildings to the east of the concrete walled ravine the roadway sat in had acted as a firebreak, so the library looked across the wide roadway at gutted buildings that had not burned in the recent fire, the one whose ruins we had walked through, but in one far enough away in time for vegetation to have begun to sprout on the roofless wall-tops and strangle the tilted facades that had been slowly tumbling into one another for years, blocking the gridded roads that had once – according to the detailed city maps we found in the library – made an orderly grid of what now was a tangled wilderness of stones, glass and steel overlaid with weeds, brambles and healthy saplings.

We found the library but no people, nor any sign they had been there recently. And despite the immensity of derelict buildings spread all around us, we found no people apart from those statues and some others we came across as we explored in the weeks that followed as we settled into our life in the library. Although we never quite settled in, not thinking we’d really be there for good. We still kept the plan of finding Bear Shirt’s group or their island. And true, it might have looked like settling in if there had been anyone watching other than those statues, but in my mind, we were resting up after a long journey, and preparing for another one if nobody came by the library. I never really thought they would, not deep down. It was only what I’d overheard Bear Shirt say about the map room and the library that gave me the sliver of hope that they might. I’d found the map room on the first day and it was as they’d described, a room neatly crammed with maps and charts of everywhere in the world, from as close as the neighbourhood around the library itself to as unimaginably distant as maps of the stars themselves, neatly kept and still well-ordered.

The whole building was well-ordered like that, except for in a few places, some where the weather had got in, others where people had made camp in the past. The place was as much a maze as a palace, and it went down as well as up, though the boarded-up windows made the upper levels seem as subterranean as the basement levels. And books, there were books everywhere – books on the shelves where they were meant to be, and piles of books snaking along narrow passages, taking up floorspace where they were not, I think, designed to be. There was an actual maze of books in the pillared entrance hall, where someone or some people had stacked books – children’s books mainly – into switch-backing spirals that double- and triple-backed on each other, making it hard to find the central space hidden at the centre of the maze, which was a big round room with a couple of beds in it, right under the arc of the rotunda. You could lie on those beds and look up at the inside of the dome which was all flaking now but once had been swagged with plaster flowers and panels, with a grand spiral staircase leading to the upper levels. I liked that space.

The babies liked the book-maze too and always seemed calm in there, though I did worry about them toppling the walls if they pulled or tugged at them too much, or even just fell against them, but they were always quiet in the cocoon of books. And once the girl had got her hand on a big, oddly shaped picture book printed on boards not paper, called In the Moominhouse: A Lift-the-Flap Moomin Story, she fell so in love with it she never wanted another one, while her brother showed little interest in books. I showed it to her because I remembered how Storm had liked the big white hippo shaped characters, I guess. This book the girl loved opened out so the inside pages looked like the inside of a house, and she would spend hours turning the pages with her chubby hands and looking at us in the hope we’d read her the words again. Cat and I knew all about Moomins not just because of Storm, having read the more grown-up books when we were little, and perhaps because we had loved the funny characters in our turn, I always took time to read her the story which involved tracing a red kite string through the house to find a kite, meeting lots of friends along the way. The girl had such a fierce attachment to the book that she’d go to sleep clutching it. She liked it so much we even thought about calling her after some of the characters.

Maybe we should call her Snork Maiden, I said.

Or Little My, said Cat.

We never did though. Maybe we never named them because there was just us and one was a boy and the other a girl, so there was never any chance of confusion. Or maybe we were too tired to do so. I can’t remember.

The big reading rooms in the wings of the library had glass and metal roofs and were pretty intact after all the time that the city and the world had been empty. So they were brighter book-lined spaces than the rooms with the boarded-up windows, with shelves reaching from floor to ceiling with walkways round them at a higher level. It was, in its way, a magical space. And perhaps because each of those thousands of books had been made by different people at different times, it still felt more human-sized and somehow sacred than any of the smaller churches we’d ever found ourselves exploring. The churches told one story, usually all about the man on the cross behind the altar. You felt this place told all the stories, if you only had time to read them.

And time was – of course – what we didn’t have. We were stuck between stay and go, sit out the winter at least in our library palace, waiting on a very long shot, or travel on north and try and find the island. Staying had a lot going for it, because it turns out a city is a good place to live when the people have all gone, especially as the last generation clearly worked together and turned what the map called Parks or Gardens into big public farms, so they could feed themselves when the shops emptied and supplies from further away stopped as there was no one to bring them, or maybe even grow them. Which meant there were apples and potatoes and carrots and big hard bobbly things that might have been turnips all running wild where once they’d been laid out in neat rows. The dying remnant of the city had worked together to feed themselves, and a century and more later the traces of their work fed us too. There was a park called the Botanic Gardens only twenty minutes’ walk from the library, and though you had to be careful of the giant collapsed greenhouse that was itself as big as a church, that was where the most edible stuff was still growing. I picked potatoes and cabbages and filled a big wheeled red cart that I found inside the library and had mended enough to use instead of the horse, who I felt deserved a rest with them. I brought my pickings and diggings back to the library to store them in case we stuck with Plan A and needed to stay the winter. And closer in there was another park, a big one where I kept the horse, making a new paddock where it had room to graze, but – thanks to an old chain-link fence strung across the space to protect more growing-beds – couldn’t escape from. The goats I just fitted with their bells and let them roam free on their hobbles.

The babies liked potato and carrot all mashed together, and for a few weeks we were happy, I think. At the back of my mind I think I knew the chance of Bear Shirt’s people coming to raid the map room was very wishful thinking, but perhaps the simplest truth of it all is that I didn’t have the energy to acknowledge that truth right then. I got my strength back, and with it my irritation with Cat and the secret shame I carried inside me about it got less and less. Of course, that made me feel a different kind of guilt, in that the treacherous thoughts I’d had about my only-one were just the result of fatigue. And fear probably. Unlike her, who was actually hurt and hopefully healing. Getting my energy back allowed me to think about how terrified I’d been that she wouldn’t wake up or ever talk to me again, and so count my blessings and get my focus back on what was important.

All the houses around us on the unburned side of the city did distract me though. Maybe they helped me get better too, because I started to feel the strong desire to go inside and search all those abandoned places. Each home, each house or flat was as full of story as a book, if you knew how to read the abandoned possessions and pictures they held. Cat was adamant I shouldn’t go into any buildings I didn’t have to, because that was how accidents happened, with floors rotting out beneath you, or ceilings collapsing on you. I knew she was right and made myself walk past all those enticing blank windows in the sandstone facades that lined the walk to the Botanic Gardens every day. And though I knew she was correct, I felt she would have joined me in a few adventures inside the untouched spaces if she’d been her old self. I felt a bit alone because of this, although the one person who did seem to share my growing fascination was the girl baby, who I would catch pointing and giggling and waving at blank windows on the sunny side of the street, as if she was trying to make her brother see what she could see.

It’s just reflections, said Cat.

I know, I said.

There’s nobody there, she said.

I know that too, I said. But there might be treasures inside. We could—

Don’t be greedy, she said.

And I understood what she meant. We were lucky and we were living in a sort of palace full of a different kind of treasure. But I still felt a strong urge to explore. I hadn’t had this feeling so strongly before, Cat told me it was the product of sleeping where we did, surrounded by actual books in the book-maze, in that I began to see the city as a different kind of library.

I now think she might have been wrong about what the baby was laughing at, but maybe she was right about me and what was pulling at me. But as things turned out, I never got the chance to find out.

Chapter 39

No more love songs, no more happy endings

The Boy and the Girl – Year 17 AG

The Girl is out of time. Not in the sense that her span on earth has run out, at least not quite yet, but in that she doesn’t feel a part of normal time any more. She doesn’t mark the hours or care too much for the contrast between day and night. She will often spend whole sunlit days cloistered inside her shuttered room, sometimes reading, sometimes listening to the record player or the increasingly crackly radio or just staring at nothing and listening to the bearing slowly wearing out on the wind turbine outside, but almost never sketching any more.

Much too often the daylight hours are spent just drifting through shallow scrapes of sleep, and then she mechanically works off the faint guilt of inactivity by walking the seashore at night, dead to even the silvered charm of the moonlight on the water. Increasingly affectless, she drifts untethered through days she scarcely notices passing, samey days that grow into formless weeks that metastasise into months. Living unmoored from time like this, she has become both almost feral in her habits, and uncomfortably numb. That discomfort at her own insensibility to the world is in fact perhaps the last strand in the fraying hawser keeping her tethered to her better self: Somewhere inside it is her old voice telling her this is no way to be, that she should not only care but also be ashamed for breaking under the pressure and listening to the other siren voices that come from the darker recesses of her mind, the ones that tell her nothing matters because no one has or will ever now come.

There are moments when the jolt of that hawser holding against the grim tides that pull at her is enough to make her snap back into herself and she rallies and tries to get a grip. She goes and harvests food from her adopted vegetable patches, indulging in periods of manic activity like storing bags and boxes and buckets of unwashed potatoes in the dark kitchen larder, unconcerned with the soil that she scatters into the house with them, or the fact the larder and the kitchen now smell earthy as a new dug grave. She gathers peat from other crofters’ peat stacks in what was once a sacrilegious and forbidden act and even, on the best days, fishes off the old pierhead or goes crabbing along the ferry ramp by the causeway. These manic bursts of her normal resolution become less and less frequent as the erosion of her remaining hope re-establishes the inexorable pull of those inner voices still selling her the bleak merits of oblivion.