Page 27 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

“Which nurse?” she said.

“The one with the kind face,” he said.

“I don’t remember her,” she said. “I don’t remember any kind faces. Except yours.”

In the mirror world of the night-blackened window he watched her hand slide over his shoulder, a long, elegant starfish spread out across his dark shirt. His own blunter hand rose to meet it then they were both falling, but the bond held, and they fell together.

And in a world that seemed to be tumbling in its own freefall, they found something halfway between respite and equilibrium, and in it they relaxed, and in relaxing, were able to feel safer, and so healed better.

He knew she was on the mend when he woke late one day and discovered her in the garden, drawing the pair of crows that came to the bird feeder every morning with the swift strokes of the pencil he had always admired for their decisiveness. She had the rare ability to capture things in one fluid line in a way he could never match. He loved watching her work. Her ability to choose a line and commit to it unswervingly, without any second-guessing, had always seemed to him to be both open and somehow courageous, and in that was a distillation of what he had always loved about her at her core. He stayed very still so as not to break the moment by letting her know he was behind her or to disturb the birds.

“I do just love them,” she said quietly, without looking up from her sketch book, the telltale uptick of a small smile just visible on the side of her face. “Such clever birds. Don’t know why people used to say they were unlucky.”

Ten days later they were woken by an insistent knocking at the front door at eight in the morning, and the world turned upside down again.

Chapter 11

The lockless keys

Mouse – Year 201 AG

I think part of the blurriness I have in my brain about what and when stuff happened on that day is just because my head was overloaded, like when you put too much weight on a raft and it just sinks instead of floating. Looking back to the arrival of the two girls there hadn’t – and still hasn’t been – a day in my whole life when I had to take in so many shockingly new things and people. So some bits of that day have sunk to the bottom of my memory, too deep to get a grip on and pull back to the surface.

And because I was probably drowning a lot myself at the time, I noticed but didn’t pay enough attention to the atmosphere between the girls.

I definitely did notice it though, because I said later to Cat that they didn’t seem to like each other and she said they were probably just as bewildered and startled as we were – and likely way more scared than angry. I should probably have paid it a bit more attention. It might have saved a lot of pain later on. But at the time, I do remember that it felt like a relief to leave them in the Bunker and get back out into the rain, even though it meant we were going to have to deal with the dead man.

Even the dog seemed to want to get away from them, bounding happily ahead of us and looking back every now and then to make sure we were following.

Least the dog’s friendly, I said.

We should go through his pockets and his pack, Cat said. If he’s got useful stuff, that’s where he’ll be carrying it.

She must have seen something in my face.

Or I’ll do it, she said. You go and get the rope.

You get the rope, I said. I’ll do it.

You don’t have to Mouse, she said.

Yes, I said. Yes. I do.

I actually really wanted to let her do it, more than anything, more than everything except the sudden conviction that if I didn’t look this in the face I’d carry the weight of what I’d done for ever, and that it would be so heavy it might break me. And that it wasn’t fair to let Cat carry it for me, no matter how ready she was to do so.

It’s mine to do, I said. I killed him.

OK, she said. Fine. But we drag him together.

That’s what we did when we hunted. Whoever killed the deer – or the rabbit or the bird – they gutted it and plucked or skinned it. But if it was heavy – like a deer – we dragged it home together.

Going through the man’s things was as close as we were going to get to gutting him, of course, but being that close to him, touching him was somehow going to be way more unpleasant and complicated than the straightforward bloody mess of taking an animal’s insides outside and leaving them for the crows to clean up.

As I approached the nettle patch, I kept expecting him to move, to rear up and point a vengeful finger at me in accusation for what I’d done. I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t going to do that, and I couldn’t believe that he was there at all, and I couldn’t believe he was dead, that there were actually other people out there in the world and that I’d killed one of them. Too many big new things in one short day, like I said. But I had definitely killed him, as one look at his face said he was as dead as you can get, because no one can stare up into a deluge and not blink as the raindrops bounce off their eyeballs.

So I knelt by him and took a deep breath, which was a mistake and made me gag, and so then I did that breathing trick of closing off my nose, because I didn’t want to smell the mess he’d made while dying. And then I set about going through his clothes, thinking the sooner I started the sooner it’d be done.

He had a silver necklace made of tiny steel balls, and on it he had what looked like a collection of seven stainless rods with indentations on them.