Page 48 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

So over the fish and chips, they made a contingency arrangement, though neither of them actually believed they’d ever need to use it. The idea was – should the already overstretched sinews of the modern world snap – to make their way to his grandparents’ house in the Outer Hebrides, the one where they’d met, fallen in love and subsequently spent their summers. That way, should things go even wronger sooner than expected, and society begin to collapse into widespread civil unrest, or if the wheels fell off in any number of possible ways, both anticipated and unanticipated, they would know where to find each other.

That was the what. All that remained was the how.

She asked if he had a plan for that.

“Not yet we don’t.” He grinned, looking round and then leaning in again to whisper, “But we do have hope.”

After his visit she was surprised to find herself also feeling happier and lighter about things too. Maybe it was because even though the world might be juddering to a halt, they both had something positive to do. And maybe this unaccustomed lightness is why she found herself doing the thing she’d somehow been avoiding up until now, which was making friends with some of the other “guests” at the facility.

The facility made much of the fact that mental wellbeing was taken as seriously as bodily health, which manifested itself in everything from group therapy sessions (not mandatory but strongly recommended), one-on-one therapy sessions (only mandatory if you had declined the group option) and a wide programme of physical activities, again all highly recommended in the interests of sound mind/sound body.

Never a natural joiner, the Girl had an instinctive dislike of the group therapy sessions, but since the other option was a weekly one-on-one with the Chief Psych Officer, she chose to pull up a chair and join the circle of other would-be mothers. She did this hoping that she could get away with sharing less of the spotlight if it was split across the larger group. Partly this was because of her natural inclination to be private, but mainly it was because the chief psychiatrist was the same woman who’d come to the house to recruit her all those long months ago, the woman who said “frankly” too much. The Girl had taken to calling her “Frank” in her messages to the Boy, a childish nickname she found herself sharing with one of the other aspiring mothers, a woman from South Shields whose quiet line in deadpan snark appealed to the Girl, almost as much as it seemed to irritate the staff. She was called GJ, and when GJ turned out to share her view of Frank the beginnings of a friendship were put in place.

GJ, like the Girl, also loved the sea and where the other residents used the gym and the heated pool, she was a cold-water swimmer, and every morning before breakfast would walk down to the town and its wide sweep of beach that curved away to the south of the old stone harbour. The Girl took to joining her, despite her dislike of rising early. She found herself enjoying both the invigoration and the ritual of it almost as much as the sense of a small friendship starting to kindle. The two of them walking down to the beach, the Girl in an old towelling robe and a bobble hat, GJ – unmistakable even though her face was always hidden in the deep hood of her voluminous and garishly neon camo-pattern Dri-Robe – became one of the informal stations of the cross by which the security team marked the day. Because there was of course a security team. They worked in the basement of the old main building, monitoring the CCTV coverage of the facility on a wall of screens that captured all the comings and goings of both guests and staff – and of course their visitors. The level of coverage might have seemed innocent enough since after all this was an important research facility trying to crack a planetary conundrum, but the fact that some of that coverage extended far beyond the confines of the facility and took in important transit points like the local railway station and the slip roads onto the major roadways connecting the small town to the wider world hinted of a much broader surveillance protocol.

It would also not have calmed the more suspicious minds among the putative mothers to know that chief psychiatrist Frank had access to all the camera feeds on the widescreen monitor in her office, and spent many hours toggling through live and recorded video and audio of the women in her care as they went about their lives, public and personal.

Chapter 17

In heat

Mouse – Year 201 AG

The babies changed everything, in the way I expect babies always did even when the world was full of them. Our days got a whole new rhythm, to start with because we all slept and woke when the babies did, and then because we had to deal with Freya’s sadness which blew in out of nowhere about a week after the babies came. It was a different thing to the spiky complaining Freya we’d got used to. It was quieter but somehow more dangerous, like a thin crack that runs deep. Mostly it was like that because she was exhausted all the time, which was understandable because she had to feed two babies and one would sleep as soon as it had been fed while the other took its place, and then the feeding one got full and fell asleep just in time for the first one to wake up and decide it was hungry all over again. Storm never really left her sister’s side and was really good at helping her. We all changed their rag nappies at one time or another, but Storm did most of all. Cat and I took turns at doing the washing and the drying, and most of the time the Bunker looked like it was decorated for a party as the cloths were strung up to dry wherever we could stretch a line.

I escaped with Digger whenever I could to go hunting and gathering. I said to myself that this was because we really needed to keep Freya properly fed because she was making so much milk for the little ones, but the truth is it was a relief to get out of the Bunker and be my own person out in the wide world again. I felt guilty until Cat admitted she felt the same, then I just felt bad we couldn’t do anything to help Freya get out from under her cloud of despair, a cloud that got thicker and heavier day by day. There was nothing in First Aid and Safety for Dummies or Midwifery that explained what was happening to her, but Cat was sure it was a bad reaction to the births.

Again the fact that our sleep was being disturbed all the time probably explains why the next few months blended into a thick and samey soup. Through it all Freya dimmed, to the point that even I, who had been on the receiving end of her sharpest barbs, began to miss her old spikiness. She just seemed resigned to existing from feed to feed. And though she remained dark as ever in some ways, she was also somehow uncharacteristically manageable, teary now instead of shouty.

And that worried us most of all.

Then one day, when spring had turned to summer, I was milking the goats and became aware of someone watching me from the deep gloom between the copper beech and the big solitary Scots pine that is my favourite tree in the world and most definitely one of the Five Things I like about trees. The watcher was in the beeches, which is how I’m sure it’s summer because the beech’s branches were bending under the strain of carrying the clouds of purple leaves so dark they almost matched the shadow beneath. And I tensed and then the watcher moved, and I saw that it was Storm. And I was shocked to see that she was crying.

Because Storm, like Cat, didn’t cry. She was too proud to let herself be seen in this state.

What? I said. What happened?

Nothing, she said, trying for a smile and getting halfway there. Nothing…

And I’d have believed her if it wasn’t for those tears and the way she said “nothing” with such a heavy silence tacked on the end of it, a silence that was just the right shape to have a “yet” added to it.

Come on, I said and put an answering grin over it to take the edge off. There’s always something that’s wrong.

There was a long silence. The only noises came from the goats.

You miss your mother? she said.

It wasn’t a question I was expecting so I sat back and thought about it for a long beat.

Well, I said. Not miss, because I don’t have any memories of her. I was very small. I do wish I had known her. And my dad. But miss is the wrong word. Because I never knew them in the first place…

You’re lucky, she said.

Because you remember yours? I said.

Of course I remember her, Mouse, she said. I wasn’t little like you were when she was killed. I remember her because I knew her properly and she knew me. And I remember how she died.

That’s horrible, I said. I didn’t mean…