Page 114 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

It was too early in the year for the full glory of spring to have strewn the landscape with its annual carpeting of wild flowers but there was enough untamed beauty and hints of the colour to come to buoy her spirits and make her ignore the light-headedness that seemed to be coming over her.

It’s the fever, she thinks. Or not enough to eat after all that spring cleaning. Again. No matter.

Clover, vetch and early thrift are beginning to speckle some colour against the rich variety of greens carpeting the machair around her. She leaves her boots neatly on top of the first stile and walks on barefoot through the softness towards the beach.

She hangs his sweater on the shovel that has defied the winter’s storms by staying upright on the ridge of the dunes, still marking the straight path home. She doesn’t break step as she does so and she strides past and on down on to the soft shell-sand below. She knows a straighter way home than the shovel indicates.

It’s high tide, so she is spared the indignity of a long walk out into the sea. Still, she pauses ankle deep and looks around her. Pete Boggarty’s island still sits in the middle of the bay, but there are no ghosts staring back at her now. There’s nothing in the whole three-sixty degrees that speaks of man. No houses, no road, no telegraph poles, no boats on the water or contrails in the sky. A Stone Age human would have seen the same landscape, felt the same wind on her skin, noted the same chill icily manacling her shins, smelled the same sweetness coming off the land.

She finds that there’s a comfort in that.

The sea is cold, but once she stands neck-deep long enough for actual numbness to take the edge off, she relaxes and feels the familiar softness and the one-ness of it all – the water, the land, the air and the light working together.

This.

This was what she had missed. This was what had always nourished her. This, almost as much as him, is what had kept her sane when she had worked in the troubled corners of the world, before the accident, before the tyre blew, before losing the baby and the hospital in Ayvalik and everything that had spooled downwards from that. This, just floating in this water beneath this sky, this secret gentleness that hid in such an often hard-looking place, this was what she had known she would always be able to retreat to, to always draw solace from. The lucky heart can have many homes, and if she could not return to him, she would have—

“This,” she says, feeling the sun on her upturned face. “This is good. This is cleaner.”

Everything is cleaner than a gun, she thinks. But as she had told herself earlier, there’s no hurry now that it’s too late. She’ll float here for a while.

Lost in this.

And then she will swim for the ocean.

But for now, especially since the cold is so bone-deep it now feels quite as warm as the sun above her, for now she’ll just lie back on the gentle swell that hints of the abyssal depths beyond the bay, and maybe it will rock her to sleep, and maybe she will dream, and maybe – since he will never now be here – maybe he will be waiting there, in that dream, and then maybe the softness of this other heart’s-home will gentle her away before she wakes and they can remain in it for ever.

Maybe.

So many maybes you could drown in them.

She smiles and closes her eyes.

Maybe that’s OK.

Chapter 40

Strangers from the sea

Mouse – Year 201 AG

I didn’t think it would end that way.

It wasn’t that I had never believed Cat’s stories about how we came to be so alone in the world, it was more that I always hoped her imaginary fears were bigger than the real threat, in the way that small things throw huge shadows if the sun is low in the sky behind them. Maybe I thought it would end differently because I mistrusted myself, because I secretly knew there was a kind of weakness in hoping that actual life would be closer to the books I liked, the ones where despite everything seeming hopeless and beyond help, there was always a happy ending that you couldn’t see coming because it only made sense when you got to it. Cat was made of tougher stuff than me, I think.

So I was not prepared, however well I thought I had done by getting us all to Glasgow and the library in one piece. The horse was happy enough in the park that was now its paddock, and the goats went where they wanted, something that didn’t worry me now they wore their bells again, and because I had Digger and she was good at hunting them out if they wandered too far into the burned-out end of the city. They perversely had a preference for the charred chaos of fallen facades and weed-choked rubble piles to the east of the M-way, rather than the more intact western end that stretched away behind the library, but with their bells and hobbles they never roamed so deeply into the scorched maze of ruins that we couldn’t find them, however hard Devil tried to lead them astray.

Getting over the journey was stretching into a long enough time that the decision about go north or stay was beginning to look like it would answer itself through a kind of inertia I suppose. I’d even begun to explore empty houses when they looked safe, and Cat didn’t scold me for it too much. I don’t know exactly how long we’d been there, but it was long enough for both the sense of a season turning to have crept up on us, and for me to have decided on a provisional Five Things I liked about a city. In fact, I was telling Cat and the babies about it as we walked through it on the day it happened.

I told them that I like imagining what it must have sounded like when we stand in the middle of what was once a tarmac road but is now a long strip of grasses and brambles and small trees stretching away between canyons of tall buildings pressing in on each side. I imagine all the people in those buildings, all their talking at once, all their feet tapping past on paving stones now deadened with moss and leaf-mould. I don’t know what cars and buses sounded like, but I bet they were noisy. It must have sounded harsh and busy all the time. Now it’s quieter than the open country somehow. As if the buildings deaden sound, swallowing it maybe.

I like watching birds flying in and out of the holes that used to be glassed-in windows. Sometimes they’ve been burned-out, sometimes the glass has just fallen out, or broken. But all these cliff faces of buildings that once used to be glazed and shut up against the weather have lost that fight. And now birds fly out of the light and disappear into the shadows within, just treating the abandoned inner spaces like caverns they can nest in. Gutted houses with fallen roofs are slowly becoming landscape again, and the birds are inhabiting them and filling that new landscape with life. They don’t worry about what those empty shells sounded like when they weren’t empty.

I like the writing on the buildings where you can still see some of them, faded, rusted, peeling but still readable, the names of the shops written big, but also the little labels on the doorways of the stone houses behind the museum, the ones with all the names on them. Some are carved in brass. It’s a bit like the names in a graveyard, but there aren’t dead bodies behind those doors. Not many anyway, and those remains that I have found are more like clues that there once were bodies there, now rotted away to something quite clean and natural, just dry bones and hair and scraps of clothing, all meat and skin long gone. No rotting to smell any more.

I like exploring different neighbourhoods and imagining why they are different, what it says about who lived there and why. In some streets the big houses are divided into lots of little homes, like a rabbit warren, each with its own front door inside the house. whereas others are all one house. Obviously where the richer people lived. What was that like, having different levels of humans? Did the rich ones feel guilty for having all the space, or did the poorer ones not mind that they lived all crammed together? Maybe they liked being closer to other people. Maybe the rich ones got lonely in their big spaces.

I like the foxes and the squirrels. The foxes seem really happy to have taken over ownership of the city from mankind. I see more of them here than I’ve seen in the open country. They share ownership of these empty buildings with the birds. They also seem quite calm about us as we walk by, Digger and I. There’s no sense of threat to them, not like their bigger cousins, the wolves. Instead, there’s a kind of interest: They watch alertly, taking on everything we do, missing nothing, just in case they have to run. They also have an extra redness to them at sunset, just like the trunk of the old Scots pine at the airfield we used to live on. The same thing goes for the squirrels.