Page 41 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

No, I said. We might not know all the words, but the COED does.

C-O-E-D? said Storm, her brow wrinkling as she tried to make a word from the letters. Code? The code does?

Not how you spell code, I said smiling. But that’s a good guess. COED is Concise Oxford English Dictionary, and it is the book – actually it’s the two books – that have all the words in it and tells us what they mean.

Storm looked at me, confused and defensive again.

We can use it to find the meanings of the words we don’t know, said Cat. So the book will be useful. You did well. You will have helped Freya by finding this book.

Is it really useful? I asked Cat later when we were alone.

I hope not, she said. Because this bit, this bit is horrific… I’m not surprised everybody stopped having babies if that’s how they got born…

So, we planned for the worst and hoped for the best, and then the things happened and it wasn’t like either of those.

Things happen.

That was something Cat would say when something turned out bad, or gave us a nasty surprise when we were out in the world looking for useful things, or even just hunting. A lot of things just happened when we were out hunting. Usually it was whatever we were hunting for getting spooked by other things we couldn’t have anticipated and that weren’t really our fault.

The world doesn’t know our plans, she’d say. Or if it does, it doesn’t care enough about us to help. Or maybe it doesn’t care enough about our plans to not get in our way if something else, something it thinks is more worthy of its care, has different plans. Like how we planned to eat that deer that ran off, but the world respected its plan to see tomorrow instead. And you can’t argue with that, I guess.

She was probably repeating something she’d read, because I reckon she and I both knew the world didn’t know or care about our plans or anything else’s, because the world didn’t think at all. If that’s wrong and the world does actually think, then it thinks super-slow, not by the second or the minute, but by the century or millennia maybe. It certainly doesn’t think fast enough to notice fidgety things like us flickering through it, fleeting as mayflies, here for a day and then gone for ever. No, if the world thinks, it’s slow, like me. Maybe it likes being still and watching too, even if it can’t ever quite see us.

I don’t remember what I was thinking when the screaming started, but I do know I was sitting watching the rain lash the windows on the big wall overlooking the Tanglewood, and enjoying the kind of sizzling and spattering noise it made. I liked the sound of the rain. Still do. It’s one of the things that I find soothes me to sleep. I think when the screaming started, I was just keeping out of the way. I know the clouds were already low and very dark, because there was lightning and distant rumbles of thunder, and each flash lit up the room as well as the sky, sending the shadows to the back of the Bunker for an instant, before the gloom dropped them back down like a curtain.

The screaming was Freya, of course, and the object of the screaming was Storm, who had clearly said something that made her sister angry enough to start shouting words like she was throwing punches. I turned to see Cat stick her head round the room divider and wave at me, pointing towards the kitchen,

Mouse, she said. It’s happening.

What? I said.

The baby, she said. It’s happening and she doesn’t want it to come out. She just hit Storm.

I’ll get the stuff ready, I said, getting up off the floor where I’d been sitting.

I’ll get the stuff, she said. You get the fire going. We’re going to need hot water and—

Cat, I said.

She was fizzing in that way she had, I gripped her arm. Like I said, sometimes that worked, me just holding her and letting the fizz flow out of her, through me and out. As if I was able to ground her.

She shook her head and pulled free, still fizzing.

Mouse, she said, we’re going to—

Be fine, I said. We’re going to be fine. You’re going to make the right choices, and we will all be fine.

You don’t know that, she said, very quietly, her eyes darting back over her shoulder towards the girls’ quarters.

I do, I said. We’ve read everything. We’ve thought and talked about it. And it’ll be surprising and probably messy but at the end of things Freya will be fine and there will be one new person in the world. Thanks to you.

I said that because it was what she and I needed to hear. I didn’t really know if that was going to be true. I hoped that it was. And sometimes hope is enough to keep you going.

Of course, other times it can kill you stone dead.

So the night of blood and thunder began with screaming, starting as it meant to go on.

The way Cat and I had planned everything out was simple: She and Storm would be with Freya for as long as the labour took, and I would stay out of the way so as not to irritate her. Keeping out of sight, in this case, meant being in the kitchen area and doing all the important stuff with boiling water and keeping the kit clean and sterile. For cleaning we had boiling water and soap, and for sterile we had the boiling water again, the flame for blades and needles, and the apple vinegar which we used as a disinfectant. I also laid out the antiseptic we had, which was marigold salve, made from the flowers and the hazelnut oil we made every autumn, mixed with beeswax, and the fresh yarrow plants which I chopped and laid in the pestle and mortar next to the clean squares of thin cotton I’d use to wrap the paste I would make if we needed to stop bleeding with a dressing. Neither of us knew if this would work, if things got bad, but we made a point of behaving as if it was real old-time medicine so that at least Storm would be convinced and so maybe be able to persuade Freya if needed.