Page 30 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Their faces were the opposite, blank as pebbles and just as smooth and unreadable. Cat snorted and jerked her head at the door.

Or you want something to go bang? You want a gun? They’re out there under the tank. Be our guest. All we’re trying to do is the right thing. Be welcoming. Kind. That sort of idea. Right?

They just carried on staring back at her, faces unmoving and empty of any emotion I could detect. Cat looked away, took a breath, and when she looked back at them her own face was as vacant as theirs; it might even have looked emotionless to them, but I knew it was the calm before the storm. Cat didn’t lose her temper easily, but when she blew, she really blew – detonating like a force of nature. She took a deep breath, visibly steadying herself, speaking very deliberately.

Freya. Storm. One more time: I’m Cat. This is Mouse. This is our home. You are welcome in it. You are not prisoners. This is all odd, really, really odd for everyone, but Mouse is trying to keep us all from going even more nutty from the way the day has gone so far by making us something hot to eat. Hot food is good, right? So give him his kitchen knives so he can hurry up and do some, OK?

That got no reaction except more unreadable blankness from the girls.

I need to go get carrots from the veg patch, I said.

I’ll give you a hand, said Cat.

I didn’t need a hand but we both needed to get outside and breathe ourselves calm.

What are we doing wrong? I said as we crouched over the veg patch pulling orange carrots out of the dark earth.

Everything, I expect, Cat said.

But she was wrong. We must have been doing something right because the knives were back on the rack when we walked back in out of the rain, even though the girls’ faces seemed unchanged. I remember smiling. It felt like a truce. And a truce felt like one place to start.

Doing something about the horses was another, because they, or at least Storm, had to show us how to handle them and so she felt powerful or in charge. And we didn’t know about horses, only goats. The ones that kept me alive as a baby had died, but not before having more goats that we kept hobbled so they wouldn’t stray too far, in the way Cat had been taught by her parents. When I was small the goats also had bells on so we could hear them if we were looking for them but couldn’t see them in the undergrowth. The sound of them clacking and tinkling around us was part of my childhood, until the day Cat decided they might draw attention should any more strangers from the sea come within hearing range, and now the collars with the bells hang silently on the hooks by the back door to the Bunker and we now keep track of the goats a different way.

There are three huge fields at the far end of the Tanglewood. Once they must have had thin hedges between them, like the photographs of patchwork countryside in the picture book called Britain from Above that I loved to pore over when I was smaller. Since the fields stopped being farmed and the hedges tended, the narrow boundaries had expanded and thickened so that most small fields have dwindled or disappeared as the expanding hedges have met in the middle and eaten up all the open ground they once protected, slowly turning the patchwork back into woodland and forest. In the last, biggest fields that had not had time to happen yet. So the open land stayed clearish but protected by broad hedges that were now themselves basically as thick and impenetrable as the Tanglewood. We used these as grazing for the goats. Thick though the hedges were, they were of course not completely goat-proof since a determined goat will find a way to go wherever it wants, but it slowed them down and the fields were more than large enough to provide food for a handful of goats over a year. So any impulse to roam came from goatish curiosity and cussedness, not hunger. And goats are inquisitive. So part of every morning’s routine was to check in on our little herd to make sure they were safe and more or less where they’d been put the night before. The fields were called Big, Bigger and Biggest. Cat had many qualities but a sense of poetry when naming things was not one of them. I had named the Tanglewood from the fairy story she’d read me. I was quite proud of it. She just called the goats Brown, Not Brown and Devil. Calling him Devil was not some uncharacteristic poetry on Cat’s part. It was as baldly descriptive as Brown or Not Brown, as simple and truthful as names come. Devil was so obviously evil and wilful and always tempting Brown and Not Brown astray. It was getting Devil off the single-storey side-roof on a tumbledown church that gave me my worst scar when I fell through it and knocked myself out. I woke on my back only to see Devil looking calmly down at me through the hole, still chomping on the delicious roof grass it had scaled the side-building for, and the calmly satisfied look in its evil eyes said: Got you.

Dealing with the horses was much simpler than I’d imagined. For a start none of them was Devil. In fact, compared to goats, they were about four times the size and a tenth of the trouble. We just put them in the field we called Biggest and pulled branches across the narrow path into it, making a gate. Biggest was the best field for them as it had a pond at the low end. It also had more open grass for them to eat. In time it fitted them so well we stopped calling it Biggest and called it the Paddock instead. Paddock was a word that meant field for horses, Cat said. I looked it up. She was right.

In time I got to know the Paddock intimately, as Blue, Yellow and Red (creatively named by Cat for the different colour of their head-harnesses) managed to buck me onto what felt like every square foot of it as Storm tried to teach me how to ride. I didn’t end up much of a rider, but we did become better friends through doing it together, so it wasn’t wasted time. Until it was. And for a while, when they weren’t tipping me off, they, or at least Red, was busy trying to bite me with one end or hoof me viciously with the other. I began to suspect Devil’s bad influence working on her from the next-door field. She did calm down eventually and we became friends, as much as a person and a horse can, but despite being what I think is a forgiving person, I always remembered the nipping and the kicking and felt the friendship could have come at a less bruising cost. But the learning to ride came later, once Storm and I made our deal, which was the lesser of the two deals we made with the girls. From the start the horses liked the field and seemed happy there. They weren’t escape artists like the goats were, and I expect they enjoyed the good grazing, clear water and long periods of not being ridden all over the countryside.

I remember those first often silent – and always uncomfortable – weeks the girls spent with us. I remember trying to settle them in on that first night really clearly. They were shocked and scared of everything, including us, it seemed. None of that was surprising. They ate the hot food I eventually cooked when we gave it to them, but Cat noted they only did that after we had eaten some first. They were warier of me than Cat, but they definitely mistrusted both of us. I just assumed they were more scared of me because I had killed the man and because of that they misunderstood and didn’t realise that Cat was the much tougher and – if it came to it – dangerous of us. I’d acted on instinct, which is almost like acting by mistake because it happened without any thought. Cat would have acted just as quickly if she’d been in my place with an arrow nocked and ready, the difference being she’d have thought fast enough to know it was the right thing to do before she fired. My mind just ran slower, which of course doesn’t mean wronger: in fact it sometimes means righter.

Anyway, Cat stayed in what had been her corner of the Bunker and found dry clothes for them while I went and got the fire going in the hearth, making sure I kept out of the way because Cat said they were probably going to be shy about taking their clothes off in front of us. She was right. And even when they did change, they stayed on the far side of the fire from me.

The dog, on the other hand, seemed to like me a lot.

Cat said that was because I bribed it with bits of food as I was cooking and she was probably right about that too, though I didn’t do that on purpose, and whatever the right or the wrong of it, that dog stuck with me until the end. And the truth is that a part of her’s still with me now, all this time later, far, far away from that bunker that once was our home. In a funny way I remember thinking that the dog stuck with me because the girls stuck with Cat, as if the dog felt I should have someone too. Like out of a dog sense of fairness or something. But now I know dogs better, I think that dog liked us all about the same amount and really did hang around me more because I always did most of the cooking and was likeliest to give it a treat. At least at first. So I think Cat was right about that, the way that she was right about most things. Later we were just friends, me and the dog. She. Because we figured out it was a she even though we hadn’t seen a dog before.

I tried to make things easier for them that first night by bringing their stuff up from where they’d camped. I tentatively held out the yellow dinosaur to Freya, who looked at it, shook her head, took it and tossed it into the fire.

He gave it to her, said Storm.

He was a sick fuck, said Freya, staring at the smouldering toy as the fire caught. I hope he’s burning too.

Freya spoke a little to begin with, less after. She just took to sitting around lifelessly in the big leather coat that hung on her like a tent she hid in, armour against a world she didn’t like much but into which she’d fire little barbs of unpleasantness when she had the energy.

That first night she pointed at the dog and told Cat that naming it was stupid, and Digger was an even stupider name and we should just get rid of it. She didn’t mean let it go. She meant kill it. And she looked at me as if I would do it. But then that’s all she really knew about me then. That I killed things. And it was true enough I guess. When I imagine myself back into how I was back then, one time, sometimes, maybe I am a killer.

Chapter 12

The last spaceship

Mouse – Year 201 AG

And if sometimes I was a killer, other times I was also an astronaut, if my memories are gentle enough to let me be.

In those memories I sit in the pilot seat on top of the mushroom-shaped tower at night and look up at the stars imagining – like I often did – that I’m in a rocket, lost in space and looking for home – or sometimes that I’m the last left-behind, a galactic explorer, searching for the mystery planet where all the other people went. Anyway. I’m up there looking at the stars, about a week or so after the girls arrived. I’m worried because Freya has vomited twice in the last twenty-four hours and I know it’s not the food because we all ate the same stuff, and so I’m thinking about the strangers from the sea and wondering if she’s sick with something we might all get and die from. It’s full moon and a clear sky and it’s definitely better up on the Tower away from the Bunker which has a whole new atmosphere now there are four of us.

I suppose, looking back on it, I’m running away from it all. Not that that works, because I hear a huff of breath and the scuff of Cat’s footfall behind me as she hoisted herself up on to the roof and carefully walks towards me. I turn, surprised, because she doesn’t come up here much like I said, because of that one time she came on a windy day and swore the roof rocked a bit. She doesn’t like it, and neither, it appears, does Digger, who follows me around a lot now, but just sits and whines at the bottom of the Tower when I come up. I don’t know what the dog’s objection is, but maybe like Cat she thinks it’s unstable. But it’s made of concrete and has been standing a long time and I don’t think we’re heavy enough to make it fall down just by standing or sitting on it. Anyway, there she is, striding towards me with a very Cat face on, which means impatient and in a hurry to tell me something.