Page 113 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

The long darknesses of the last winter almost take her down before the spring comes. She now lives largely on potatoes and, very occasionally, fish. She runs out of the last of her sauerkraut several weeks after the turn of a year she has not really noted and fleetingly wonders about how to keep her vitamin C intake going, until she loses the energy to think about it and forgets. Instead, she becomes more and more worried about strangers moving around the outside of the house at night. She nails extra wood across the shutters in the billiard room and sleeps with the shotgun close at hand.

More and more she finds herself talking to herself. This worries her to start with, and then it becomes so familiar that it doesn’t any more. Then she begins to lose track of the conversations, and that worries her at a deeper level. The old inner voice tells her to hold on. These endless nights will shorten, the heat return, the storms will pass.

They don’t, and by the time spring does blow in she not only feels out of time, she feels out of humanity. Fate has scraped and purged her of almost everything that tells her who and what she is. She feels like the island itself, buffeted and scoured by wind and weather that is unrelenting and comes from somewhere so out of her control that she no longer has or cares to have any defence against it.

The old hawser voice tells her not to go mad. The darker voices snigger and tell her that that particular boat has sailed – unlike the hoped-for one bringing him home across the troubled seas to redeem his promise and ensure that whatever else is happening to the world, they at least will save each other. That’s not going to happen,

She hates herself for listening to the radio, which is chronicling the stories of a world fast beginning to collapse in on itself with what she begins to feel is an increasingly macabre glee. Each news item seems to provide more irrefutable reasons as to why he has not and will not now come, given how widespread the disruption to the world is getting. The eventual terminal ruptures had been predicted, but they seem to be happening earlier and in unimagined ways, as unforeseen consequences tumble domino-like into cascading runs of cause-and-effect that themselves branch and daisy-chain into ever more unexpected results. It all highlights the folly of ever believing that a technically highly interconnected but mutually competitive world was also a resilient one. Whatever the tech-bros tried to tell the world in the past as they fought to own the commanding heights of the digital realm and the societal control that came with them, there are no effective firewalls to the spread of entropy. Only accelerant.

Ends come sooner than you think, said the dark voices. See?

She wakes one cold morning to find the fire out and the radio smashed against the shutters. She doesn’t remember throwing it. But she did. The paint on the shutters directly above the scattered shards of wrecked electronics is chipped from the strength of the impact. All the evidence is there: She threw it, and she threw it with intent. That scares her more than anything thus far.

Then the record player breaks of its own accord a week or so later. One minute she’s sitting listlessly feeding her melancholy with a soaring arrangement of Annie Lennox resigning herself to the fact there are no more I love yous, the next minute the turntable just dies and her pure voice gravels down into a slow bass drawl and then slurs to a stop, as if the machine has suffered a stroke. It feels like the universe is punishing her for assaulting the radio, and now not only are there no more I love yous, but there is no more music at all to accompany her through the day.

“No more love songs,” she says to herself as she unplugs the turntable. “And no more happy endings.”

It shouldn’t matter as much as it does, but both the silence and the sounds of the natural world become unbearable to her. And when the hawser does part, and she loses the lifeline that finally sets her fully adrift and unmoored, it doesn’t happen with a jolt or an insurmountable surge of darkness.

It comes gentle with the sun.

She’s been feverish and fractious for a week. She has scarcely left the shelter she’s built for herself beneath the billiard table other than to shamble lifelessly to the lavatory and back, sometimes remembering to drink water to stay hydrated and help with the headache, but usually not.

She can’t remember when or what she last ate when she opens her eyes and sees a narrow slash of sun lancing in from the window. She lies there and watches the dust motes slowly dancing in the golden ray of light. They seem so beautiful and calm that she remains transfixed by them for an hour or so, rolling out from under the table to track the sunbeam’s progress across the carpet as it moves across the sky outside. Eventually the thought occurs that if the sun can come in, her light must have been visible outside when its dark. She gets up and examines the telltale chink in the shutter. It’s right where she threw the radio, a small chip that split the thin wood panel beneath.

She doesn’t rush to nail another piece of wood over it. She’s enough herself to be surprised at this, and interested to find she doesn’t care.

Instead, she goes into the kitchen and makes herself a bowl of hot porridge with the last of her carefully gleaned and processed oatmeal. She sits watching the birds beyond the kitchen window as they go about their business on a morning as bright and clear as any she has ever seen, the spring sunlight as joyous as a trumpet blast, the sky high and so heartbreakingly blue that she knows it would take her breath away if she allowed herself to dwell on it.

She washes the bowl and the spoon and puts them carefully away. Somehow this action allows herself to see the neglected mess and disarray of the whole kitchen. She opens the windows and the doors and sets about cleaning. An hour later she is done in the kitchen and is now in the billiard room with a hammer, prising the loose the boards she nailed over the shutters to reinforce them. She pulls them open and lets the sun in to witness the carelessness and chaos she has reduced herself to living in.

She starts by clearing up the broken bits of radio by the window and works back into the room, tidying as she goes. It takes her nearly three hours to clean the space back into something she is happy to close the door on, everything square and clean and in its right place. She pulls her bedding clear of the billiard table and goes to the mud room where the camping equipment is stored. She takes down her red sleeping bag and unrolls it flat beneath the table. The tiny part of her that still watches herself do things notes the bag’s mummy shape, and how she carefully places the shotgun alongside it with the same precision with which, as a small child, she had laid out her bears on top of her carefully made bed each morning before going to school.

“Right,” she says. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back.”

She drags the mattress and the soiled bedclothes out and on to the midden fire beside the garage and sets fire to it and all the mess she’d let pile up through the long winter.

She stands and watches the flames take everything, using a rake to keep it all piled in the centre as it burns itself to nothing. She looks up at the plume of dark smoke reaching into the sky above her. She doesn’t worry about it giving her presence away, because she now knows there’s no one out there to see it.

“It’s OK,” she tells herself, and is fleetingly pleased to note the calmness of the acceptance in her voice.

She returns to the house and stands looking down at the sleeping bag and the blued steel of her cold final bed-mate. It would be very easy to follow her plan now and get under the table with them both. But the room is now so clean that she balks at it.

Anyway. There’s no hurry now the decision has been made. She shivers and feels her forehead. Clammy. She probably hasn’t quite shaken off the fever. Or maybe she has. That also doesn’t matter now.

“OK,” she says again. “It’s OK.”

What isn’t OK is the rank smell of herself she notices as she stands there. She strips out of her clothes and goes back outside wearing nothing but her hiking boots against the sharp stones on the driveway and tosses them on to the fire.

Back in the house she walks through the untravelled rooms and makes sure each is as tidy as she remembered leaving them. She straightens furniture here, smooths a counterpane there, but she’s only been living in the kitchen, the billiard room and one of the bathrooms throughout the long winter that she now has to accept has passed. The stone walls seem to have retained its cold and damp though, and so she takes an oversized fisherman’s sweater from the hook on the door of one of the bedrooms. She is about to put it on as she walks into the bathroom when she recoils from the wild haired madwoman lurching towards her from the mirror. She confronts the truth of herself, turning back and forth in front of the glass and wondering at the hollowness of her cheeks, the bruises beneath her eyes, the sharpness of her clavicles, and the starkly outlined ridge and groove of her ribcage. And she definitely smells.

“OK,” she says. Her voice still sounds relaxed. Unworried. Calm, even. It is, after all, somehow too late to mind.

But there is still sun outside and she has a sweater that is his and which will keep her warm enough for long enough, so maybe she should clean herself, just like she cleaned the house.

If it is too late to mind, there’s no harm taking her time.

On instinct she almost picks up her swimming towel from the chair by the back door as she passes, but then leaves it. She won’t need it.