Page 53 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Freya violently shrugged off the comforting hand and shook her head.

No, she shouted, voice cracking under a rising note of panic. No! Stop it. He’s hurting her! He’s hurting her!

By the time we’d joined her at the window, Storm spared us a quick look clearly meant to tell us something, but it was so short and intense that I couldn’t read anything except the intensity. And then I saw the dogs, locked furiously together on the other side of the glass.

Shoot it! screamed Freya. Get an arrow and shoot it!

He’s not hurting her, said Cat. He’s not. It’s not…

Fighting? I said, because it wasn’t.

No, said Cat, No. It’s… they’re not fighting. They’re…

She looked at me.

It’s the other thing, I said to Freya. Look. It’s the other thing.

They’re fucking, said Storm.

And of course fucking is exactly what they were doing. I knew the word, I’d just never seen dogs doing it. In fact I’d never seen anything bigger than a rabbit doing it, and certainly not up close like this. And you couldn’t live in a landscape overrun with healthy rabbits and not see them furiously making more rabbits, as Cat used to call it when I was little. But even rabbits got skittish if you got close enough to take a real interest, unlike Digger and the new dog, who carried on completely oblivious to us or anything we might be doing. More than oblivious in fact, as we found out as time went on, because in the days after this it seemed like they made a point of doing it wherever I happened to be looking. I’d be talking to Cat, and there they would be, pumping away in the background, just over her shoulder, or I’d be in the tank on my own watching the road for the dog’s owner who never came creeping up on us at all, and instead of the feared strangers, there Digger and the new dog would be going through the whole quivering business all over again.

It must have been fun for them because for a while it was all they could do, that and disappear off hunting together. And then after that, more fucking and some sleeping and then off they’d go again. But it didn’t look completely fun, not to my human eyes at least. It looked serious, and kind of desperate and maybe painful too. Not because of just the occasional snarling and biting, but more the staggering around, he on his two back legs, thrusting away at her rear end with a kind of furious, clutching intensity. It was as if they were both locked into doing something outside themselves, gripped by a compulsion that had taken over their bodies and was using them like puppets. The reason I started to see it like this is because every now and then I’d catch one or the other of them giving me a side-eyed look, and however intensely their bodies were involved in the fucking, the side eyes always seemed like they were trapped and somehow apologetic about this whole business. It also just seemed sort of painful and raw. And I wasn’t the only one who thought that. Freya got so distressed by it all that Storm had to pull her away and make her go back to lie down where she couldn’t see it at all.

It reminds her, said Cat. You know…

I nodded. The dogs were doing it because they clearly both wanted to, despite it looking sore and often on the edge of violent. If someone did it with someone who didn’t want to, well, I didn’t like to imagine that, but I understood why Freya was so upset.

She’s still a bit broken, said Cat quietly. Because what he did to her didn’t stop after he attacked her, did it?

I think it was about then that Cat stopped being so hard on Freya. I know it was when I began to feel a little less bad about killing the Russian. It had been accidental, or at least my body had fired the arrow before my mind realised it had decided to do so, but maybe the instinctive, unthinking-but-knowing part of me had been smarter than the thinking part, because if the Russian had gone on to try and rape Cat I’d have definitely killed him. Except if I’d waited for thinking to catch up with knowing and doing, maybe he’d have already shot me, or cuffed me and I wouldn’t have been able to help her at all. Of course I’d known in my head that what he done to Freya made him a very bad man, but maybe it took seeing the dogs in the grip of their intensity to make me really understand the violence he’d done to her. Back then when I was still close enough to innocence, I began to feel a little bit easier about the reflex that had loosed the arrow into his throat.

Now?

I wish I’d killed him even sooner.

Which means I’m the opposite of innocent. Which is guilty, I suppose.

I said that to Cat and she said guilty was the wrong word. She said I was responsible, which was the right word, because I’d definitely done it. But responsible didn’t mean wrong. Sometimes tough things had to be done to bad people to stop them doing worse. She just said to see it like that and not to feel a bit guilty about it.

I thought about that for a while and then told her I still felt bad, but not unbearably so. Like it was still something, but not a thing that I was going to get slowed down by any more.

Cat grinned, I remember, and said that’s what growing up is, most likely. Just carrying the load of who you are and what you’ve done, and trying not to let the burden of all that drag you down as it all mounts up. She said trying to do most things right was good enough, and there’s no point thinking about the bad stuff behind us because we can’t go back and change it.

We’ve got today, Mouse, she said. And tomorrow if we’re lucky, and not too stupid. But yesterday? Yesterday is not for us. Yesterday is for the ghosts we leave behind. Let them live there and look after it.

After three days of no strangers creeping up on us following their dog, I began to realise they too were phantoms that existed only in our imaginations. We relaxed and returned to our normal routine while the dogs seemed to do more and more hunting and less and less fucking, until it tailed off to nothing on the fourth day or so. Which was a relief, not having to avoid watching it all the time.

We should give it a name, said Cat. Him. We should give him a name.

He won’t be staying, said Storm. No point naming him when he won’t be around.

He’ll stay, I said.

I don’t think he will, said Storm.

How do you know? I said. He likes Digger. He likes us.

He likes us because he’s used to people, said Storm. His people. He’ll go back to them.