Page 32 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Explains it, I say. Not just why they spat on the body and kicked it so much. Why they don’t like me.

Why? she says.

Because I’m a man, I say. A man did that to her.

Oh, she says. I suppose. Yes.

I stop looking at the side of her head and join her in staring up at the stars. They look back down at us, all of them completely indifferent to whatever we’re going through. In some ways I felt as far away from them as the girls felt to us back then, like we knew the worst that had happened to one of them but at that point I don’t think we even knew anything else about them. I think that’s the order it happened in.

But like I said, remembering is strange. Some things stay sharp, other things that I feel are probably just as important as what I do remember from those times seem to have gone fuzzy or to have just fallen out of my head completely. I don’t know why it works like that. Because some of the things I remember are small and useless, like remembering Cat laughing so much one day when there were still only two of us, laughing so out of control that she couldn’t stop. We were out picking blackberries. We were sitting under a really old tree, a grandfather of trees really, relaxing in the dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves that were stacked in drifts overhead, making all the shades of green you can imagine, a green so green it was almost like being underwater. Cat’s tongue was blue with berry-juice as she laughed, because she had easily eaten as many as she had picked. I remember her blue tongue and berry-stained teeth, but I don’t remember what the laughter was about, which is the real pity of it as Cat didn’t often lose control and let laughter sweep her away like that. What was she laughing at? That’s a detail that tumbled out of my memory so quietly that I never noticed it leaving until it was gone.

I wish it hadn’t.

I wish I could remember the joke.

On the other hand, I wish I didn’t remember killing the man who hit her with the cuffs. I wish I could forget the spasming legs and the soles of his boots and his heels grinding into the ground in the rain, pushing his dying body deeper into the nettle patch like he was trying to get away from me, as if he could be killed twice. I remember the girls spitting on the body. That’s all big stuff, where our lives took a turn and went somewhere we hadn’t thought they might go. That I do remember.

I know our lives took another turn when Storm started talking to us both properly, right after we discovered Freya was pregnant, but I can’t remember the moment when she began to speak to me as well as Cat. It must have been a shock or a surprise. Because I remember days of silence, when the closest Freya especially got to talking to me was her pointing and nodding or shaking her head. Storm wasn’t much better, and then one day Freya must have started talking to Cat properly, so we found out about the baby on the way, and then though she started off looking at me with different shades of distrust, Storm did begin to talk with me. But I’ve forgotten the surprise of it, and the first tiny hint we might even become friends. Maybe it was when we were with the horses, when she was teaching me to ride. But then maybe it wasn’t. So that’s something big that’s fallen out of my head too.

I do remember Red dumping me on to the ground and realising she’d managed to land me in a pile of horse manure, and Storm laughing and then suddenly losing the smile as I winced and running across to see if I’d hurt myself, then pulling me to my feet and laughing again when I said I was OK.

I didn’t mean to laugh, she said.

I didn’t mean to look funny, I said, brushing the manure off my shirt. Red had other plans.

I do remember sharing that smile and thinking it was suddenly almost normal between us.

It was after that I think that Storm started to tell us the big truth about their lives in bits and pieces, not all at once, so it was like patching together a new coat from scraps of old ones. And somehow – and maybe it was the way she told it – their story was more like a fairy tale than something that actually happened in real life, though it was a dark one, without a proper happily-ever-after tacked on the end of it.

I also remember Storm told me some of it when she’d got curious and confident enough to climb up the Tower and see what I was doing up there on the nights when I went up to get away and sit in the pilot’s seat under the stars. And I think she told me some of it even later, when she was bored enough to join me and Digger hunting or checking the traps, when we were teaching each other things, the reading-for-riding deal we made, when we really were almost friends, or I thought we were, which is the same thing really. Until it isn’t.

I don’t know how much of it was true. Cat agreed, but neither of us could see why they would lie about any of it. Maybe they were filling in their own gaps. Maybe stories of our parents before we were born are all like that, like fairy tales we half make up because we weren’t there and only ever know the incomplete parts that we were told.

So what Storm told me one night on top of the Tower was this:

Their mother was a twin like them, and those twins lived with their family high up on the other side of the North Sea. And because of something that happened in that family the two young women, the mother and her twin, left and sailed south and found a place to live in the sun far away from whatever or whoever was bad in the family, so far south that none of that would be able to find them again. And they were happy and lived in an orange grove on a hill that was like an apple orchard except with oranges which are fruit that is juicy instead of crunchy, and you don’t eat the skins. Being on a hill with a view of the two wide bays to east and west of the spit of land it stood on meant they could see all round and a long way out to sea, and so spot any sails that might have decided to follow them from the north.

The mother and the aunt liked it there because it was just the two of them and because it was hot, hotter than where they had come from, the bad home they called the winterlands because they still had snow up there most years. Where they now lived, in the orange grove, there was never snow and even the winters were warm enough not to bother them.

They lived there for two winters and three summers and no sails ever came looking for them from the winterlands, and they were happy enough. But then one day they woke to a sound they had never heard before in their lives. It was music being played on an instrument they found out was called a violin that rose and fell on the still morning air, sometimes low and mournful, sometimes wild and happy as it swooped up and down the highs and lows of the tune. They ran to the edge of the terrace of their house and carefully peered down through the orange trees to see that a strange boat with red sails had anchored in their bay. The music was being played by a bearded man sitting beside a fishing rod propped on the bow rail, as if he was calling the fish to dance their way on to the hook on the end of his line.

Their father – because that’s who the man on the boat became – was a traveller, he said, an explorer who had sailed far and wide, looking for people and collecting things to trade with any that he found, though he admitted he had not found many people at all. In fact, the mother and the aunt were the first he and his dog had seen in over a year. They, after initially being suspicious of his easy smile and his generous way, decided they liked him. He was young like they were, and clever with his hands and could make them laugh. He played wonderful music and was full of stories about the places he had sailed to and the other places he wanted to go. He came from the North Sea too, from even higher up than them. They had been raised in an archipelago, which is a long word for a scrabble of little islands, all smooth rock and pine trees, but he had been born deep down the sharp end of a long fjord, which is a long high-sided valley full of water cut into the unforgiving coastline of once upon a time Norway. His father had been a sailor too – as had his grandfather and those that came before him, most likely – a trader and a tinker, threading his way from settlement to settlement, looking for the remnants of humanity, mapping them on old paper charts that he adjusted as time took its toll and families that had been clinging on five or ten years ago, when last visited, had disappeared or dwindled or gone away to join up with other diminishing groups to cling on for a few more years. He had left it when he was old enough to sail his father’s boat, leaving the day his father died, and they burned him like an old king on the steep edge of the shoreline. He said living at the bottom of a fjord had made him feel like the walls of his world were always closing in, squeezing the breath out of him when all he wanted was big horizons and a whole wide world to breathe in.

He had his father’s boat and his family maps, and decided to go and see who was still out there, and what he might find along the way to trade with them. He found fewer people than his father and his father’s fathers had found, but he also encountered many things they hadn’t, the most delightful of which, he said, was the girl’s mother and aunt. Except of course they weren’t a mother and aunt yet, just two young women living a happy life in the sun on a hill overlooking two bays, surrounded by orange trees.

That changed, but not in a bad way, not to begin with. And not, in the end, because the man did anything wrong. It was what he didn’t do that was bad, which was return. Because one day he left, and didn’t come back when he said he would.

That was a bit that Cat and I couldn’t make sense of, but it had happened in the sort of myth time before the girls were born, so they were just repeating what they had been told, and maybe that was just kindly meant lies told to explain to them why they had two mothers and no father.

Because he didn’t come back, but of course he left something behind, two things actually, since nine months later Freya and Storm were born. Although Storm said it might have been nice to have had a father, especially one who could sing and make music dance in your head, they had an extra mother instead, and so the four of them stayed together and were a happy family. They weren’t a happy family among the orange trees however, because one day, maybe six months after the traveller had gone and they’d admitted to themselves that he wasn’t coming back, maybe because he had drowned or his boat had foundered somewhere over the horizon, two boats came into view with sails that were the wrong colour – not red like his, but still familiar.

The way Storm said her mother told it, the family from the north had come south looking for them as they feared, and because luck is a joker, in the whole huge haystack of the world they had accidentally sailed into just the place where the needle they were trying to find was hidden. That was the bad news. The good news was that they came at dusk and dropped anchor in the East Bay, not the next one along, where the mother’s boat was moored. If they had arrived earlier in the day they might have sailed on and seen it, or dropped anchor where they were and gone for a short walk up to the ridge with a view of both bays. As it was they moored, slept on their boats and when the sun rose on the next morning they found nothing to see in the West Bay because the mother and aunt of the two girls had gone.

They went north, thinking that the family would keep searching southwards and not have any reason to double back on their tracks. They went a long way, to France Storm said, and this time they found a river and sailed far down it so the girls when they were born grew up on a wide and gentle river surrounded by land. They had their two mothers and a happy life hunting and growing things. But always with one eye to the river, Storm told me later, when we were almost friends and talked about things.

One eye to the river, she said. Because this river was one our father had told our mother that he loved. Because the city at the end of it had so much good stuff to find, hidden among the ruins.

So their eyes stayed on the river as much out of hope of seeing him as fear the family from the north might find them. But he never came and neither did the family. In some ways it sounded as if their life was quite like ours, except with parents to teach them, instead of just books.