Page 13 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Nettles need to be grasped, same as opportunities.

We move fast and quietly, bows low at our sides, arrows nocked and ready. We don’t go down the exit road to cross the old motorway but instead double back and pass underneath, through a water culvert, keeping out of sight and running at a crouch so as not to bang our heads. The rain has turned the bottom of the old concrete pipe into a stream, and we splash through it towards the light at the other end. My feet are soaking by the time we come out, but I’m just happy now to be getting further away from the nettle-bed and what’s lying in it.

We pause once we emerge into the rain and listen again. The howling is still coming from the miserable woods below us.

Cat calls them the miserable woods because they’re a strip of close-packed fir trees that don’t let anything else in among them to grow. Nothing interesting lives in the nearly impenetrable floor of that kind of wood: there’s just a thick carpet of rust-coloured needles and enough shadow to make it gloomy at any time of day, even in the brightest sunshine.

Luckily, it’s just a thin band of conifers, and beyond them the friendlier broad-leafed trees take over and the light gets back in, all the way to the quarry. Which is where things get dark again, not just because it’s fringed with more pine trees, but because the edge gives way all the time. It’s as if the quarry is constantly eating itself, pulling more and more of the sheer cliff face into the empty and unfillable chasm at its centre. We don’t like it there. It has a bad atmosphere. We were once out hunting and heard the most terrible screaming coming through the trees. It was so shocking and frightening, ripping abruptly through the sleepy calm of a peaceful summer afternoon with the sun still high in the sky. At first, we thought it was a person, which was both exciting and horrifying. It sounded so human and in such distress, but when we got there, we saw that it was just a big hog that had fallen over the edge and was lying 150 feet below, its back horribly broken by the rocks but not dead, because it kept trying to get up, only its back legs wouldn’t work and so it just dragged itself round and round in a circle. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, and definitely the most dreadful sound I’ve ever heard. Sometimes I still hear it in my nightmares, though by now I have lots of other dark memories to populate them with. Cat put it out of its misery with one arrow straight through the eye.

People must have known how dangerous the quarry was even before the Gelding happened, because you can still see the broken lines of fencing round it, one row laced with creepers that hang on concrete poles, and then another taller line of metal fencing that’s mainly corroded out and fallen down now, or – where the ground beneath it has been eaten by the quarry – fallen in. Where that has happened it hangs in swags on the cliff face in a sharp festoon of jagged rust. Another time we saw a deer fall in and get all hooked up in it. It just stared up at us, blood pumping from a severed artery in its haunch, too far down to get to, still suspended more than a hundred feet in the air. Cat wasted an arrow that she wouldn’t be able to retrieve just to put it out of its misery, same as she did for that hog. The edge was too unstable to climb down and retrieve it for the meat, so we just left it for the crows that circled over it for three days as they picked it clean. And that was just what Cat was like – always grumbling and complaining about wasting or losing arrows, but then doing exactly that because she saw something that just wasn’t right with her.

We follow a line of old electrical pylons that crosses the M-way, marching drunkenly across the landscape, leaning this way and that as time and decay have eaten away at them, toppling some and eroding the solid ground on which the remnant once used to stand so straight. One of the fallen pylons lies on its side straddling the divide between the dark conifers and the broadleaf woodland, and it’s there we find the camp, coming on it quietly from either side, communicating by hand signals.

The old pylons were made from metal girders joined together to make tall tapering boxes. The fallen pylon is a bit crumpled at the narrow end, but it lies on its side, like a tipped-over chair. There is a vaulted square space between its legs which have been overgrown by creepers and ivy, and it’s in this strange sort of outside room that we see the horses.

I know they’re horses even though I’ve also never seen them before because the picture books are full of them, and they figure in one of the teaching games Cat used to play with me when I was little. It was called How Big? And you played it by choosing an animal and asking your opponent how big it was, which always had to be answered with something it was bigger than, and something it was smaller than, all answers checked in The Bumper Book of Animals In Full Colour. In this case if the question was how big is a horse? A correct answer could be bigger than a deer, smaller than an elephant.

There are three of them, and they have been tied to one of the cross-braces. They’re cropping the thin grass around what is unmistakably a campfire where a single bedroll leans on two pairs of huge wide-framed saddle baskets that I later discover are called panniers, and a pair of riding saddles, one small. The horses look at us with a kind of haughty disinterest, and then carry on eating. People are clearly no novelty to them. The thing making the strangled howling noise bursts out of a clump of harts-tongue ferns and sort of moans eagerly at us, straining at a metal chain padlocked to a collar around its neck. It has shaggy, coarse-looking grey fur, its eyes are bright and excited and its mouth is full of very white teeth.

What is it? I say.

It’s a dog, Cat says.

I thought so, I say. Bigger than a fox, smaller than a wolf.

Cat moves quickly round the camp searching and looking at the ground around the fire. I watch the dog. It keeps running away to the far end of its chain and strangle-howling down the line of fallen pylons and the old cables they used to support that all lead towards the quarry. Then it runs back and moans at me, wagging its tail with such enthusiasm that it creates a fan of spray through the rain that’s still falling through the roof of ivy far overhead us.

Cat looks up from where she’s been looking at the saddles.

One of everything, she says.

Except the saddles, I say. Why’d he have three horses if there’s just him?

She looks at me for a long beat, like I should really know the answer to this, but I don’t. Then she shakes her head with a small angry twitch

For us, she says. Or for whoever he found before he got to us. But he didn’t, I guess.

How do you know, I say. How can you know that?

You know what he hit me with? she says, pointing to her split lip. The metal thing, the rings in his fist?

Yes, I say.

It was a handcuff. They go on your wrists. To lock them together, she says. To prison you.

Prison? I say.

To capture you, she says. Us. You did good, Mouse. You’re a saver.

No, I say. No. I’m a killer.

Now I’ve said it out loud that big hard bubble in my throat is really threatening to come up and make me choke and start crying. I swallow hard and try not to look at Cat. I look at the dog instead. It cocks its head and looks back at me.

You’re not a killer, Mouse, she says. You’re the gentle giant.

The Gentle Giant is one of the other books she read to me when I was little. It was one of the ones she used to teach me to read for myself. I know she’s trying to make me feel better, but making me remember sitting in the sun looking at the pictures of the big man and the girl in the straw hat he finds in the lake while she pointed at the words and sounded them out for me just makes me feel worse. Because back then I didn’t feel alone in the world. I wasn’t scared of things. And I hadn’t done anything bad yet. I was too young. I didn’t know enough to know there was such darkness stalking the perimeter of my small world.

Yeah, I said. Yeah, I am Cat. I never saw another person except you in my life until today, and in less than a moment after I did – I killed him.