Page 17 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe—”

“So, it’s just random” she said. “Bad luck.”

“I think so” he said, after a bit. “Yes.”

“Doesn’t feel random,” she said, looking at the scars. “Feels fucking personal.”

Chapter 8

The quarry eats its own

Mouse – Year 201 AG

The girls are both pale, but one is more so and the other one has a free hand clamped over the paler sister’s mouth. There’s no way they cannot be sisters because they look so completely like each other: same long blonde hair rat-tailing over their faces, same eyes staring at us, caught in the same shocked moment as we are, two pairs of strangers, eyes locked on each other across a chasm of air that contains nothing but the endlessly falling rain. They are both wearing boots that are too big for them and the same sort of patched and age-worn blue cotton trousers that I’m wearing, with baggy shirts worn on top – one with blue squares on white ones, the other the torn yellow of the rag I mistook for a person. The one with blue squares also wears a bulky leather coat that hangs off her like a dripping crows wing. The other has an orange rain cape hanging off the back of her neck

The dog strangle-howls. It seems to wake everyone out of the shocked paralysis.

She’s broken her arm, says Cat. The one in the leather coat.

Now she says it, it’s obvious. Her arm seems to be twisted out of her shoulder at a very wrong angle. The gagging hand clamped over her mouth, her sister’s hand, is leaking blood down her chin from where she’s clenched her teeth into it.

The other one’s stopping her screaming, says Cat. They’re scared of us. They were hiding.

We’re not going to hurt them, I say.

I know, Cat says. But they don’t.

Cat has shucked the go-bag off her shoulders and is rummaging in it. She looks up at me.

What are you doing? she says. Mouse! Get your rope.

The dog is whining desperately. The girls are still unnaturally silent, swinging slightly above the long drop as the rain streams down their hair and falls off their boots into the void below.

I’ll go, I say. My fingers are wet and clumsy-stupid as I fumble, trying to free the loop of rope from the tie-down on my bag. Cat has already made a rope sling around her legs, like a harness, and is holding her hand out impatiently.

I’ll go, I say. Cat!

I know she won’t agree, but I have to. It won’t make it better after what I did to their father, but because of killing him I know I at least have to stop them from falling. Cat yanks the rope out of my hand and ties it to her harness with swift, decisive tugs.

No, she says. I’m lighter and you’re stronger.

She looks into my eyes in that way she has, the one where she thinks she’s reading my thoughts.

Mouse, she says. You’re still going to rescue them. You’re just going to rescue me too. Don’t pull until I say. Keep a hold now. In case the edge gives way.

And she sits down quickly, legs already dangling over the precipice, and carefully reaches for the thick cable. She ties off her homemade harness around it, making a safety loop. She looks up and sees me.

If I slip, this will catch me, she says. Mouse. It will be fine.

She’s good at knots. We both are. But old power cables are thick, nasty things. These ones have been hanging there in the sun and rain and snow for ever. The black plastic rubber covering has got brittle and is breaking up like all plastic does in the end, cracking and shaling off in long curving strips. You can see the grey twist of aluminium wires inside in a several places. They look like the exposed sinews of a rotting animal. In a couple of spots, the aluminium wires have already broken and are sticking up like sharp barbs waiting to jag into Cat if she slides too fast or moves in the wrong way.

Yes, I lie, it will be fine. Come on then.

It won’t be fine, I think, as I belay my end of the rope round the tree trunk so I can brake against it if the cable snaps. Win or lose, it won’t be OK.

If the cable snaps, then I could lose Cat and the girls.

If Cat succeeds and rescues them, the prize for winning is that we have to tell them their dad is dead. And who killed him. If they don’t already know it. None of this is fine. There is just bad and worse.