Page 33 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Then, years later, the aunt didn’t wake up. That’s what Storm said. She didn’t die of anything, not any illness or an accident, just of not waking up.

I suppose she died of a surprise, she said. Because that’s what it was for all of us.

After the sadness of the aunt who was also really a mother dying, their real mother decided they should move, because although her dying had just been a bad surprise and even worse luck, where they were was where that bad luck now lived, and she thought they should go looking for somewhere with better luck in it. The girls didn’t want to leave the riverside place that was their home, neither the house nor the tree under which their aunt now slept. They didn’t want to leave her there, left in the cold ground, abandoned and alone. Their mother told them they weren’t really leaving the aunt behind because you take the people who you’ve loved and who have loved you back with you wherever you go, in your heart. And she told them they could always look up at the moon, because wherever you went the moon would always be there, and they should imagine their aunt was up there looking back down on them, and that way they’d never leave her, not really, and so would never need to feel alone. That was so like what my mother had said to Cat that it made me shiver when she said it.

So they packed up the boat with all the useful things they might need and took them and the happy memories of their aunt and sailed back out into the wide world beyond the river looking for a better place to be.

Or maybe a father, said Storm, again later, when we were almost friends, and she was going back over the story. I think maybe our mother was looking for a father for us, but by then it was too late. Because we were already grown.

And of course what they found wasn’t a father, it was a Russian with a dog we now called Digger, and he came across them by unhappy accident.

They found their new place to be, and it must have been away down on the coast far to the south of here, a place their mother called the lizard. It was a long jut of land you could hike to the rocky spine of and see two different seas on either side of it. It was a much bigger version of the way they could see two bays from their old home in the orange groves. This was a rockier place with different trees, wind-stunted things that dotted the moorland and huddled together out of the weather where the land folded itself into the creases that channelled the streams that came gurgling down off the high ridgeline.

They were happy once again, cosy in a stone-built house with a high-walled garden that hid the evidence of their cultivation from any eyes that might pass by on the empty sea below, just as effectively as the rock-bound harbour folded into the tangled cliffs hid their boat. The village that twisted its narrow streets down to the harbour had burned a long time ago. The girls carried on growing up flitting through the roofless shells of the houses, picking the berries that grew there in the protection of the scorched walls, or sitting in the sun tucked out of the wind and listening to their mother reading them stories or giving them lessons among the ghosts and the ruins. The ghosts were just the stuck memories of all the generations of fishermen that had once lived there, the mother told Storm, and were not anything to be scared of. Storm told me she wasn’t scared because she couldn’t hear them even if Freya could, and Freya wasn’t scared because she said the ghosts weren’t at all interested in the girls or their mother and only talked to each other about the past, almost as if the ghosts didn’t believe in the future the girls were living in, any more than Storm believed in them.

It wasn’t whispering that Freya heard, she told me. It was just the wind rubbing its shoulders on the old walls as it pushed past. Just the gusts of air, and the words Freya’s imagination made out of them.

They weren’t lonely the three of them, though they did miss their aunt a lot. But they were old enough now to realise the long walks their mother took along the cliff tops were as much about hoping to see the red sailed ship as they were for watching for the family she feared was still out there searching for her somewhere. And they were old enough when it happened. Old enough for their monthly blood to have come in and become a habit they had stopped noticing. Old enough to go rambling away from their home, looking for things by themselves. Old enough even to stay away for nights camped out beneath the stars, or under the roofs of the more trustworthy derelict buildings they found themselves near at close of day. That seemed odd to me, that their mother would let them go off alone, given all the accidents and bad luck that might happen to them.

No, said Storm. Not odd. Clever. She was teaching us how to be alone in the world, because one day she knew she wouldn’t be there. Except she cheated, although she didn’t tell us till much later.

We were sitting on the roof of the Tower when Storm told me this. I remember her smiling as she talked, and maybe I remember because –like Cat – she didn’t smile easily, and this was one of the times she did, smile with her eyes fixed on the horizon to the south as if she could see all the way across the hills and valleys and forests to the coast and the harbour still twisted into the fold in the cliffs where all this had happened.

She admitted that she let us go, thinking we were on our own, and then followed secretly, tracking us as we went in case we got into difficulties, Storm said. She did that a few times. And she only made herself stop following us when she saw that we didn’t do stupid things or get into any trouble. And we didn’t. We weren’t the ones who found trouble or anything we couldn’t escape. She was.

The way Storm told it, it went like this: She and Freya had been away for three days and were in a hurry to get home because the only rule was you never stayed away longer than you’d said you would, because then worrying would start and they didn’t want to upset their mother. They were excited because they found a house built into the side of a hill with big windows looking out at the moorland, and inside there was a lot of useful stuff that no one had taken in the long-ago when there were still lots of old people but not enough new things being made for them any more. There were waterproofs that seemed unworn in special packaging, clean and unrotted, there was a big room full of tools, including a huge telescope that they were carrying back to show her, so she could see the moon close up, as they had done the night before. They’d stayed up late with it, looking at all the lines and craters that distance had always hidden from them. They knew she wouldn’t see her sister looking back at them any more than they had, but they thought she would be as delighted as they had been to look through the telescope and see the depth of space and the infinite fields of stars stacked up behind the familiar lights of the normal night sky. They tied the telescope to a pole and carried it between them, figuring that the effort of bringing it all those miles was more than worth it for the smile it would conjure from their mother’s face. I think remembering that view of the moon and the unseen stars was what made her like coming up on top of the Tower and stargazing with me. Or maybe she just liked getting out of the Bunker some nights, like I did when it all got too atmosphere-y.

Anyway, Freya was leading when we came over the ridge, Storm said. And at first I was angry when she dropped her end of the pole and started running for the house because she’d damaged it after we’d carried it so far.

If her first thought had been for the telescope, her second thought erased it instantly. She saw the unfamiliar horses and the house already ablaze, and then she was running as well, towards the two men struggling with their mother. She heard Freya scream at them and saw one of them, the bigger one, turn and see them. Then she saw her mother kick his legs out from under him and buck hard against the other one who was trying to hold her from behind. Storm saw blood spray as her mother butted the back of her head into his face and burst his nose. She saw her long pale hair fan out as she spun and kicked the attacker hard in the chest, sending him tumbling backwards through the flames that were already filling the doorway behind him. His heels caught on something lying across the step, something Storm realised was the body of a third stranger, and he dropped straight backwards, rigid as a falling pole, his head hitting the stone floor inside the flame-filled room with a crack that she could hear over the roar of those flames and the screaming of her sister who was still running towards her mother, a crack she heard over her mother’s warning shout as she saw her girls running to the rescue, a crack so final that the legs sticking out of the flames in the door didn’t move a bit, a crack so loud that the only sound that could drown it was the thunderclap as the last stranger rolled over and pointed something that spat a smaller more vicious flame that punched something into their mother’s chest and blasted her off her feet, blowing her backwards into those same flames, backwards and out of their world for ever.

Freya didn’t break pace. Instead, she seemed to accelerate her already breakneck speed and made as if to run straight past the man as if he didn’t exist, shouting for her mother. And she would have run into the flames to try and pull her out if the man hadn’t swung the gun sideways, chopping into her throat as she passed, stopping her as brutally as if she’d run into some old invisible fence wire. Her feet kept going but left the ground as her head stopped dead and she made a strange brutal half cartwheel before slamming onto her back right at his feet, choking, shocked and winded. Storm had not even realised she had her machete in her hand until the Russian – because of course it was the Russian – turned to look at her.

He didn’t look scared, she said. He didn’t look surprised to see me running at him with the blade. He just pointed his gun. So I just stopped. And dropped it. Like a coward, Freya says.

Because he had the gun pointed at you? I said.

Because he had it pointed at her, she said. She was just lying at his feet trying to breathe. He couldn’t have missed her. But I should have kept running at him. I shouldn’t have dropped the machete.

You saved your sister, I said.

Not from him, she said, looking about 100 years old as she did so. Not from him. I saved her for him, that’s what Freya says. And she’s not wrong.

Their mother had killed two of the Russians, one of whom was a woman. The one in the house he let burn along with their mother. They sat on the ground, cuffed together watching the house blaze until the roof fell in, in a shower of sparks while he dug a separate grave for the woman.

He took a ring from her finger before he started throwing the earth over her, and then he just sat on the mound of the grave staring at them in the red light of the burning house as the night fell, tossing the ring up and down in one hand like it was a coin he was using to make a choice.

Which he was, said Storm. Though we were a long way from there when he finally acted on it. Freya’s hand was too small, her finger wasn’t big enough, so he put it on a string around her neck. The ring. He put the ring on her then, you know. He put his stink on her later. She says she still smells it on herself.

We sat together for a long while, looking up at the night. And then Storm cleared her throat and broke the silence.

I don’t remember if I ever thanked you for saving us, she said. You were brave. Both of you. And you’re kind feeding us and looking after us. I hope I thanked you. But I don’t remember—

I’m sure you did, I said.

In fact I was pretty sure she hadn’t, but it didn’t matter to me because she was doing it now. I understood that they were both shaken and traumatised at the time, and then things just got away from us all.

OK, she said.