Page 115 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Until I came north, all the squirrels I’d ever seen were pale and dirty brownish-grey. Here they are smaller than the grey ones and redder than the foxes. The trees in the park beyond the library are full of them. I enjoy sitting still and quiet and watching for them. They’re smaller than the greys, but just as lithe and acrobatic. One evening I was sitting in the park with the babies sleeping in my lap, my face to the sky as I tried to get the last bit of warmth from the setting sun. Digger was away hunting something in the street behind the buildings beside me, and I became aware I was being watched. I slid my eyes to my left and there were three foxes stretched out on a first-floor balcony to my right, also sunbathing. They looked back at me, calmly alert, the white fur on their cheeks and inside their ears in stark contrast to the red of their fur. And then another streak of red fur flew between us as a squirrel raced past along an ivy swagged phone line and we all turned to watch the squirrel, and then when it leaped from the tilted telegraph pole to the seemingly too-distant tree beyond and landed squarely on it before disappearing round the trunk, we turned back and caught each other’s eyes, the foxes and I, and it was as if we shared a thought and nodded, admiring the speed and athleticism of the squirrel. Then we went back to sunbathing. I think that moment of connection could only have happened in a city, where the foxes just seemed less on edge than the ones I was used to.

I was telling Cat all this as we pushed south down one of the roads that fed on to the bridge. I had taken the big red handcart and now used it to bring everyone along on my foraging walks through the city. I kick myself for it now, but I’d got used to the squeak of the right-hand wheel as we went along, and though I’d meant to take it apart and fix whatever was making the noise before it wore the axle out, I somehow never had it high enough on my list of priorities at the end of the day to have the energy to actually do it. It seemed unimportant. Not something as critical as it turned out to be. Anyway, I was still trying to decide if we should stay in the library through the coming winter, or if we should head north with our new maps and try and find the right place on the mainland to light my signal fire and try to get the attention of Bear Shirt and friends on the island. If they were there. I think I’d told myself that if we stayed, I’d definitely fix the wheel, and if we went, it’d be a waste of effort. Excuses trip you up just as much as unseen obstacles.

Cat didn’t seem to have her Five Things about a city figured out enough to share them, so the game fizzled out and talk turned to the big decision we had to make as we walked on over the river, the babies awake but quiet in the cart that squeaked along in front of us as we went.

Cat never liked me crossing that broad stretch of water on the wide road bridge. I think it was because the breadth of it meant it was too close to opening out into the sea, but I liked coming here at sunset and looking downriver, watching the sky change from simple daylight to all the complicated colours of dusk. This far north there seemed to be more reds and oranges and purples and mauves in the sunsets, but maybe it’s just something that happens close to the sea. Anyway, I liked watching them over the darkening silhouette of the great arc that soared across the next bridge along, like a giant’s bow braced from bank to bank.

Maybe I made too much about the library, I said. Maybe I was wrong thinking it was a place they would go. Or a place that others, like the one they talked about, would come to. It’s certainly not somewhere they stayed for long even if they did come by, is it?

Perhaps, Cat said. Perhaps not.

I think in my heart I’d always known I’d left it too late to follow them. They would have been far ahead of us and even if they’d taken a couple of months to find a good enough boat to make seaworthy, they were long gone. And likely enough they’d found a boat somewhere much further south and had moved on even faster. And I knew I had to press on. I just felt so tired by the thought of it. More than tired, I was spent and blown, both physically and in my mind. I was so worn out by worry and being responsible that I sleep-walked through most days so far beyond second wind that I wasn’t even sure the longest rest in the world would get me back to feeling energised ever again. In truth I wanted Cat to take the weight for a bit.

Will you be strong enough to go north? I said. I mean, if we do go?

If we go, Cat said.

I mean, if we don’t wait until spring, I said. Staying here might be the sensible thing. There’s enough food to forage and put by for the winter. Up in the north I don’t think there’ll be such good opportunities. It’s not just us. It’s the goats and the horse. I think it’s all heather up there. I don’t think there’s good winter food for them either.

So we stay, she said, as we reached the middle of the bridge and turned to look at the sunset already pinking the distant hills beyond the city. I was so busy watching the sky that I might have missed it if Digger hadn’t reared up on the railing and barked excitedly.

I looked down and there they were.

Right below us, on the edge of the river, looking back into my shocked face, tying their small sailing boat to the side just below the bridge behind us on the north side. We’d walked over them too busy admiring the reflections on the rosy mirrored surface of the water to notice them. Two of them. People I’d never seen before.

They were as surprised as me, but one had the presence of mind to raise a hesitant hand and wave.

Hey there! he shouted, with an encouraging smile, then shouted something else that got lost in the wind. He beckoned me, clearly wanted me to come across and lean over so they could talk to me. But my feet wouldn’t move because my mouth was too dry and my heart felt like it had stopped.

Strangers, I said.

From the sea, said Cat.

And then she said, Save us, Mouse.

And because she had never asked me that, because she was right, because she had always been right, I didn’t run the cart across the bridge to speak with them. I just ran over them, heading north, head bowed as if that would keep me out of their sightline when they cleared the bridge, running furtive and scared, ignoring the complaining wails of the twins as I jolted them in the cart as I fled, powering up the slope of the M-way, heading for home and safety.

Maybe I wouldn’t have sprinted away if I’d been more rested or thinking straighter, but those three words had haunted me my whole life, and now here they were, made flesh, maybe to end it.

Strangers from the sea. The worst of the worst, the real bogeymen, the death of all hope.

I didn’t decide to break into a run, I just started moving fast without thought, but then I did think to duck and keep low, and that let the fear catch up and work into my head like a wedge, and then the running broke me instead. Every pounding footstep smacked that wedge deeper and deeper as I raced lopsidedly uphill on the old M-way towards the library, forcing the crack in my mind wider and wider with each pace until it was so wide that nothing was there to hold the pieces together and my lungs ached and my heart felt like it was going to explode and then my brain just split apart and stopped working. It stopped sifting what was real from what was imaginary, stopped me making good decisions I should have been making and worst of all, stopped me changing bad decisions I’d already made.

It was everything that betrayed me in the end. It was loss and pain and fear and exhaustion and probably not eating right, or enough, and it was all the not-knowing – not knowing if I’d done the wrong thing bringing us to this place so far north, so unknown, so close to the sea, so foolish, so reckless to do it on the strength of one overheard conversation round a strangers’ fire, risking everything on the stupid conviction that Bear Shirt was a good person. A person I’d liked at first sight. More than liked. Been attracted to, because I was lonely and even Cat my only-one wasn’t enough to make me feel not-alone in the way I wanted. Which was a betrayal. Mine not hers. But that betrayal was what put that crack in me, and without that crack and the wedge of terror at death from the sea maybe I wouldn’t have broken, not then anyway. But I did break, and it felt like bits of me were shaling off as I ran, my mind shattering all around me until I could only hold onto one idea, an idea that pounded along with me matching the lopsided rhythm of the cart and squeaky wheel I was trying to force up the hill ahead of me.

Run and hide.

Run and hide.

Run and hide.

I nearly made it, jinking up the slip road and finding the library within easy reach, just where it should be, spirits lifting at the sight enough to give me a second wind to ride out the stitch in my side.

But once you’re on a losing streak, everything slips away from you.

It wasn’t just me that broke. That squeaky wheel jolted off the cart as I careered it into the first step up to the library entrance making the cart jerk sideways so it nearly spilled the babies out on to the hard stone, but I flung myself forwards and just caught it by the edge, pushing it against the tilt before they fell and dashed their brains out on the cold granite, at the same time slamming my left side into the sharp right-angled edge of a step, so hard that something serious popped or snapped inside me, but adrenaline rode me through the pain and I just scooped them up and scrambled us to our feet and ran inside the big double doors and slammed them behind me.

Safe.