Page 28 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Maybe they’re keys Cat said. Keys to doors that mean something to him.

Should we keep them? I said.

No, she said. They’re doors we’re never going to see.

Still, they were shiny and somehow interesting. Maybe I just liked the distraction of them. Easier to look at than him. Maybe they were keys, I thought, and wondered what exactly it was like where he came from if it had such complicated keys to it. Or maybe they were just decoration. I couldn’t really tell if he was a man who liked to wear decoration because I was busy trying not to look at his face and make any more memories of him that might visit me later. So I left his necklace where it was and moved my attention to the other end of his body, far away from those open eyes that saw everything and nothing. His boots were good, well patched with nice grip on the soles, but they weren’t actually a pair to each other, and they were much too big for Cat or I, so I left them. His trousers were also patched and repaired, and they were so oily with grime that the rain beaded on them. Maybe he’d sewn them together from old waterproofs. He had a bulging side pocket on the thigh of one leg, and I opened it and found a soft leather bag which, when I opened it to see what the hard-edged thing inside it was, turned out to be a pair of binoculars, small and very powerful. I put those on the ground to keep because they were useful.

Those look good, said Cat.

Yeah, I said. Feels a bit like I’m robbing him.

Yeah, she said. No. We’re just doing what we always do. He doesn’t care. Waste not, want not.

I didn’t tell her that I wanted all this not to have happened. Instead, I tugged at something in the pockets of his hooded raincoat.

Cut them, Cat said. We’re not going to keep the coat. Too much blood on it. So just cut them open. It’ll be quicker and we’re drowning out here.

I know she was being brisk and practical because she was trying to inject a bit of normal Cat-ness into the very not-normal day to make me feel better and help us both get through it, but slashing his pockets felt a little too much like skinning a deer for me to do it, so I went through the rest of his pockets with my knife still in my belt, listening to Cat sucking her teeth in frustration as the rain spattered through the nettle leaves drooping all around us.

He had two curved holders, heavy with bullets which I recognised as being the same as the one poking out of the bottom of his long gun. I added them to the pile. There was a little tin box about the size of a pack of playing cards which had something I couldn’t read printed on it in a foreign-looking writing, Greek maybe. It was held shut with a twist of copper wire. I handed it to Cat while I quickly checked the other pockets. There was a big folding knife and then his pockets were empty and all that remained was the pistol he’d dropped, lying where his heels had hacked a shallow dent in the ground. It was black plastic and dull metal, scuffed and worn and the moment I put my hand round the handle I wanted to throw it away. I didn’t, because it might have gone off and who knows where the bullet would go, but I know I wanted it out of my hand fast.

What? said Cat, watching me put it back down. It must have looked to her as if it was too hot to hold.

Nothing, I said.

But it wasn’t nothing. It was a something. It was a waiting thunderclap. It was the weight of it, the way my hand just closed round it so easily, so seductively smoothly fitting the curves and contours in the handle as it was designed to do, a shape made specially to guide that one finger so very comfortably onto the trigger. It was so cleverly crafted that you almost didn’t notice how easy it would be to twitch your finger and unleash that ear-splitting thunderclap that could end someone as easily as my unthinking arrow had: one twitch of a finger and a world ends. And it was so well made, so cleverly designed that once it was there, hefted in your hand there was, however much your top-brain didn’t want to do it, a tiny wheedling voice whispering to your under-brain telling you it needed to be used, and that you wanted to feel that power just the once, just for the noise, just to feel what it felt like to fire it.

I’ve picked up tools with handles worn smooth by the hands of long dead people, and have sometimes felt a sort of intent, like an impulse left by long use – the saw that wants to cut wood, the axe balanced just right so that it swings almost as easily on the upswing as the downstroke, even an old rusty draw-knife that – once we had sharpened it – just seemed to want to skin the bark from the lumber we felled. All of those tools said “use me”, but they said it honestly. They said it straight out. But the gun wheedled. The gun whispered – alluringly – like it was enticing me into something highly pleasurable but a just bit dirty, a little forbidden, hence the need to murmur the call to action. Looking back I tell myself that I’d set enough traps to know lures are always beguiling, and always deceptive, and that’s why I couldn’t get it out of my hand soon enough. I know it’s fanciful. I know that the gun had no will. I know it was just a cleverly made tool. I know plastic and steel and brass and lead and even gunpowder can’t think. I one hundred per cent know all of that with my top-brain, the part of me I can control. Nevertheless, I also believe the gun wanted to be fired, and I know for sure, more than anything that remains in the world, that I now wish we’d buried it along with the man.

Cat had opened the tin I’d handed her. I watched her face and saw her eyes sort of stutter. The dog reached its head up and tried to sniff the box, obviously interested in what was inside, and Cat raised it out of its reach and closed it again with a hard decisive snap. When I asked her what it was, she shook her head, holding the tin with her fingertips as if it was dirty, swallowed then bent and stuffed it back inside his clothes like it was a relief to do so.

What? I said.

You don’t need to know, she said. Let’s just get him out of here.

She wouldn’t tell me, not then, and maybe because I was so used to her protecting me I let that pass, trusting her as I always did, despite really wanting to open the tin and see for myself.

Did you get the rope? I said.

The rain was getting stronger and a wind was getting up, beginning to send it slantwise into our faces.

No, she said. Just do up his coat and we’ll drag him by the hood. Let’s get this done.

So that’s what we did. We put the pistol and the magazines and the knife under the tank with the long gun, and then we buttoned him up, all the while trying not to look at his face which was waxy and still stuck in that wide-eyed snarl of surprise as we each took a grip on the hood of the coat and pulled him down the slope towards the culvert under the M-way. The dog trotted ahead of us, quartering left and right sampling what were obviously a lot of interesting new smells, though it kept looking back to make sure it was going where we were going. In any other circumstances it would have been companionable. Later it was, even more than the girls were really. Then, a dog was just one more novelty in a day full of them.

The long-hooded coat worked well enough as a kind of sledge, and the fact that the ground was slick with rain helped us pull him along more easily. I tried not to look back as we went, but I did once or twice, and the sight of his boots bobbling along behind him reminded me of the death-dance they’d done backheeling him deeper into the nettle-bed, which made me feel even worse about all the things I was trying not to focus on, so I tried to concentrate on what was ahead of us and avoid any obstacles or sharp snags that might tear the coat that was now part sledge, part shroud. The downslope was easy enough but once we emerged from the culvert that had by then become a choked and gurgling stream, the terrain flattened out and even began to slope uphill. As we approached the edge of the Miserable Wood we began to feel the dead-weight of him become harder and harder to pull, and as the gloomy trees loomed over us we stopped for a rest, breathing hard. I noticed neither of us looked back at him. Instead, Cat’s eyes raked along the wood’s edge, looking at the tangled rampart of brambles and fallen roots.

It’s going to be a tough old pull to get him to the quarry, she said. Take a long time and I think we should get back to those girls.

I nodded. She nodded towards a semi-circular rampart of roots and earth newly thrown up where an old tree on the edge of the wood had toppled in the last winds, a couple of hundred yards down the wood-edge. The outliers always went down when the wind was strong and came out of the north-west, because the other trees didn’t give them any protection.

We could tuck him in over there, she said. Lot closer than dragging him up to the quarry.

And it’s downhill, I said.

It was a good plan. I hadn’t much liked the one where we were going to toss him into the quarry, because there was no guarantee the body wouldn’t hang up on the cliff face and just stay there rotting slowly away in plain sight, like an accusation. So we went left and didn’t say anything, just listened to the rain and the sliding noise he made as we dragged him through the tussocky grass and bracken. We rolled him into the half-bowl shaped hole the falling tree had made as its shallow root system tore out of the earth, and he tumbled and thudded to a splashy stop in the deep puddle at the bottom of the slope, his face turned to the root wall as if he was ashamed of himself for what I’d done to him.

We should have brought the shovel, said Cat.