Page 24 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

We could put him in the graveyard, I said, by the church. You know, probably good to do it among the other graves…

It seemed like a logical enough idea when I thought it, but as I watched Cat’s head shake in disbelief, I realised it sounded strange and desperate, somehow.

That’s a mile away, she says. Do you want to drag him a mile just so he has company he won’t know anything about?

No, I say. Course not. That’d be a stupid reason. But I don’t want to have him in the ground somewhere we walk past every day. What I did… I don’t want to keep being reminded of it—

You’re not going to forget it, Little Mouse, she said, mouth twitched lopsided in a sudden, sad half-smile. Nor am I. But you’re right. We should put him somewhere we already don’t like to go.

Like the miserable wood? I say.

Like the quarry, she says. After we get them settled and warm.

The first time the girls saw the Bunker, Storm’s eyes went wide and she just stopped on the threshold and stared. Freya didn’t react much. Her eyes had gone back to focusing on something deep inside herself again, but I remember Storm’s reaction very clearly. If you live in the same place for a long time, it’s as if you stop seeing it, maybe because you know where everything is. For us the Bunker was just home, constant as the sun outside. The girls of course had never seen it before, and I watched Storm’s face as she tried to make sense of the big space beyond the narrow front door. For me their faces were the new things because I’d only ever really seen Cat’s face before that. I mean I know I saw my mother’s, obviously, and I desperately wish I did remember it, but I was too young when the strangers from the sea came ashore with the coughing. Cat’s face was the one I knew, the one I knew how to read. The emotions she let play across it were a bit like theirs, but actually a lot different. As I watched Storm especially, I began to see our familiar space through her eyes and so found myself seeing it fresh.

The Bunker’s not really just a shelter. Originally it was built as a place in which to hide an airplane, not a big one for carrying passengers, but a smaller fighter plane kept there for wars that never happened. It’s a concrete box buried in a mound of earth, facing what used to be a runway but is now so overgrown that it’s a solid half-mile strip of blackberry bush we call the Tanglewood. We know the Bunker was built as a fighter plane garage because there are seven other identical bunkers around the old runway, and four of them still have the drooping skeletons of their planes rotting away inside them. They stand perched on narrow legs and the bare metal knuckles of wheel rims from which tyres have rotted away, looking like birds that died too proud to lie down. It’s from one of them that someone took a pilot seat and dragged it all the way to the top of the Tower. There are also underground tanks that once held fuel for the planes, at least that’s what we can make out from the corroded signs riveted to the access hatches. We opened one and it smelled so chemically that Cat closed it again and decided we shouldn’t open the rest of them because there was no point knowing if they were full or empty as we couldn’t use a torch to look into the dark cavern behind the hatch to see if it was full, in case we ignited the chemical smelling gas and triggered an explosion with the flame of the torch.

The Bunker, our bunker is different to all that. Less military, more homey. Someone re-purposed it long before we were born. The front door, the one we use as a main door, is person-sized, but once you walk out of the narrow passage cut through the earth mound beyond, you find yourself in a wide, high-ceilinged cavern of space, facing the old real front door of the hangar, high and wide enough to drive a jet through. The old hangar doors have gone and been replaced with a glass wall jumbled together from mismatched window frames cannibalised from deserted houses, a giant patchwork window that looks out on an entanglement of briars three times the height of a person. Those brambles used to press grimly against the windowpanes and block most of the light until we decided to hack them back one spring before they bulked up with leaves again. We made a strip four paces wide that let the light in much better and stopped the noise of the thorns scraping the glass in high winds, which used to keep us awake at night. The window was a mosaic of smaller, different-sized windows all jammed together, and each made a different kind of noise as the thorns scraped on them in the wind, so you could never really get used to the sound in a storm. In the depths of night there was always the feeling that one of those noises could be something you didn’t want to meet trying to get in. Some of the windows were broken and had wood where the glass had once been, and they acted like drumskins, adding a rat-tat-tatting to the scraping on the glass.

I don’t know why someone would have gone to all that trouble patchworking the windows together when there must have been any number of big empty houses they could have moved into as the population thinned and then died off. I said this to Cat one day and she just grunted, but the next day, after she’d rolled it around her head for a while in the way she tended to do, she said maybe it was because living in someone else’s house, however big, might have felt like there were too many people who’d lived there already, and that the person who turned our bunker into a house wanted to start fresh and make their own home in a place no one had lived or raised kids, or got old or scared, or died. Cat didn’t believe in ghosts, but she understood that other people had done so. Whoever built the wall of windows must have done it before the brambles took over, because there would have been a clear view down the length of the runway and across the valley at the end of it. No one would have gone to that effort just to look at a sprawling blackberry bush, no matter how big it was, or how much they liked blackberries.

There was a story that Cat read me once, about a sleeping princess who dozed away for so many years that her castle got so entirely surrounded and hidden by a tangle of briars and spiky trees that people eventually forgot it was there, until one day the prince who eventually came to wake her up with a kiss had to hack his way through the forest of thorns to get to her. That’s why we call it the Tanglewood. If anyone ever came to find us from that direction, we’d hear them hacking long before they got to us, said Cat. For me it was part of a fairy story; for Cat it was always about safety, first and last – and all the way through the middle too – in the way that everything she did for us was. She was always both the bravest person, and also the most cautious, which is a funny combination now that I look back on it. It was as if she could pull off the impossible feat of being two sides of the same thing at once, like a coin. Heads and tails, simultaneously.

Anyway, that day gets blurry in my head after this, because it can’t even have been the afternoon by the time all this happened, but it feels like it was getting dark by the time we’d persuaded the girls it was safe in the Bunker and we’d given them food, and Cat had given them her bed on her side of the room because we only had two, and then had a proper look at Freya’s ankle and decided it was broken and needed to be splinted.

There’s more to splinting an ankle than First Aid and Safety for Dummies tells you with its neat drawing of a foot with a pillow lashed to it; there’s way more grunting and swearing for a start. The book said the foot should be immobilised with a pillow or folded up towel, tied round the leg in two places and once on the foot. And that’s the trouble with First Aid and Safety for Dummies, it’s mainly about First Aid, making things immobile or stopping bleeding until Second Aid – which means doctors – arrives. Only there are no doctors. So there’s no real point making a soft splint at all, because there’s no Second Aid coming. There’s always just us. So we improvise and use the book as a guide, not a bible. We wadded up some of the old blanket scraps we have collected, the ones Cat boils so they become not just clean but shrunk and thicker, which she says makes them last longer and keep you warmer. We made a splint by using them to cushion the ankle which we then secured by lashing on two bits of old chair-leg from the kindling pile to give it a permanent support.

The girl squirmed and growled and cried out as we did it. If there was anything other than hate and mistrust in her eyes as she glared at us and her sister, I didn’t see it. In fact, she did her best not to look at us at all. About the only useful instruction that First Aid and Safety for Dummies gave us was to keep her foot elevated to stop the swelling getting worse. The truth is I would have done that anyway as she was showing all the signs of shock – weakness, clammy skin, faint and reedy pulse. And she looked like she was an inch away from vomiting all the time. So I would have laid her in the shock position anyway, with her feet up in the air on a shallow pile of books. Going into shock was one of the things Cat and I always worried about since First Aid and Safety for Dummies was clear that it was a very bad thing to do. It was the kind of thing you went into easily, but which was really hard to get out of. And it said that once shock sets in, there’s nothing you can do to reverse it, going on to explain that there was an urgent need to maintain the shock position until the Emergency Medical Service arrived. Apart from that, all it suggested was giving half a glass of water to adults every fifteen minutes if help was going to be more than an hour away. So since Emergency Medical Service was at least a hundred years or so behind us in the past and so never coming, we fed her water and kept watching her for vomiting or a change in her pulse, on alert in case she suddenly got worse and we had to do CPR, which we were both well prepared for, even though we’d never done it outside practising. And we haven’t done that for a while, not since Cat had made a bad joke about kissing and it got weird and uncomfortable.

And yes. We weren’t a real brother and sister, so according to the rules that used to apply, like the ones I found in the back of an old book of common prayer that went into great detail about who a man may or may not marry, we could have done kissing and getting more weird and uncomfortable to the point where it maybe turned into the opposite of those two words, but we didn’t.

I think our relationship, being each other’s only-ones, was something those who spent time compiling those lists didn’t consider. Cat had saved me and had had to look after me since before I could even talk. I can’t imagine how lonely and scary that must have been for her, waiting for me to catch up and be able to have a conversation with someone else, let alone share the business and responsibility of our lives and not just be a liability for her to carry. So we might not have been blood relatives but I was something more complicated and maybe even closer. Something mixed-together, something that there wasn’t a single word for, her son-brother, where she was my mother-sister. You don’t find that in the back of a Book of Common Prayer. Maybe it’s in a Book of Uncommon Prayer, though I’ve never seen one of those, but it’s still a line you don’t cross. And it’s not that the thought hasn’t occurred to me. Or Cat. Our bodies have changed and grown up as time has passed. And since I went into what she called my growth spurt there were parts of my body that seemed to have a mind of their own, basically at any time of day or night, but worst of all when watching Cat bathe in the river, or when we both take off our clothes and get bars of soap and do the rain dance, which is when there’s a heavy downpour and we use it for a shower. It’s something we’ve been doing since we were both small.

We did talk about it when she noticed me turning away, embarrassed and ambushed by my body’s reaction to the everyday wash we were having by the river one spring morning.

Mouse, she said. It’s OK. I’ve read about it. It’s natural, but…

It’s nothing, I said as I turned away from her. It’s nothing. I don’t know what you mean.

I could feel the flatness of her gaze on my back.

It’s something, she said. It’s obviously something.

It isn’t, I said, furious with my newly treacherous body for betraying me so badly.

It is, she said. It’s obvious—

It’s not, I said, face burning. Nothing’s obvious.

It sticks out like a sore thumb, she said. And then she heard herself, because she made a very bad job of trying not to laugh. And then she gave up and just let it go.

I’m sorry, she said. Mouse. I’m sorry. It’s not a thumb…

And then she collapsed in more explosive laughter.

I was so embarrassed, and so confused by why I should be embarrassed, that all I could think of doing was walking into the water until it was above my waist before I turned to confront her.

I didn’t do anything, I said. It just happened.