Page 54 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Cat looked at me, then nodded.

OK, she said. Yes. That’s smart. Probably right too.

Storm allowed herself a smile, as if she appreciated the compliment.

You don’t know that, I said,

For some reason I wanted the dog to stay. I liked him, and having two dogs made it seem like Digger and he were a family, so she wouldn’t have to be by herself without an only-one of her own.

Like I said, back then I may have become a killer but I was still innocent about life, and that’s how I thought: Simple things, bright colours, black and white, no shades and no shadows, or none that I didn’t think would be banished by tomorrow’s sunshine.

I don’t have to know it, said Storm. Freya knows it. Freya told me.

Cat and I looked at her, then each other, then back at her.

Freya knows stuff sometimes, said Storm. She’ll know stuff, and then it happens.

That’s not how things work, said Cat.

That’s how Freya works, said Storm.

Cat snorted with a noise caught halfway between laughter and disbelief.

You’re saying she can see the future? she said. Like a fairy tale? Like magic?

There’s no such thing as magic, snorted Storm. I’m just saying, sometimes she says something is going to happen – and then it does.

But it’s not magic? said Cat.

No, said Storm. It’s Freya.

Cat tilted her eyes at me. Storm caught her. I wondered if she would bristle, but she just shrugged and grinned a bit.

I know, she said. It’s weird, but it’s also true.

I still don’t know why, but back then, before we saw the writing in the sky it became very important to me that Storm was wrong about Freya being able to see the future. The best way I can explain it is that there was something in the way Freya was so sure about things despite being younger than us, that really got under my skin. I know it irritated Cat too. There was a kind of smugness that went along with the gloominess. Cat said we should probably try and rise above it as we hadn’t suffered like she had, and Storm overheard us and looked furious, but then shrugged and said we shouldn’t beat ourselves up over it because Freya was sometimes just a pain in the ass, just like we were, and there was a beat while we all tried to figure out if that was a spiky barb or just joshing like friends do, and then another moment of relief and surprise as we all realised it was.

Cat and Storm and I were out checking the fish traps on the river when we saw the writing in the sky. The fish traps were something Cat had seen in a book a long time ago, and we had learned how, and now we strung them in the waterway and checked them every couple of days. Sometimes there was nothing, sometimes too much. We just took what we called the fatties and let the rest go. Every now and then we would take the entire contents of a crowded trap and would smoke what we couldn’t eat fresh, but somehow neither of us liked fish enough to eat as much as we caught. It was good food to keep you going but it never seemed substantial somehow.

Cat was showing Storm how we emptied the traps, up to her knees in the water while the young girl held back, hovering on the edge.

I wasn’t exactly in a bad mood but Freya had sent us on our way with a gloomy prediction that there was no real point going because nothing good was waiting for us.

One of the things I noticed about living with more people than just Cat, was that they left the taste of their moods in my day if I let them. And I found it hard not to carry away a bit of the dark cloud Freya walked around with all the time. Maybe staying unaffected by other people’s moods was a skill everyone had when the world was full, probably it had to be like that in case you drowned in the sea of everyone else’s emotions. I found it hard enough dealing with just two new people. And so I was still irritated at finding a piece of Freya’s dark cloud had followed us into what was, apart from that, quite a nice sunny day. Certainly the sky was blue in that clean-after-the-storm way, with no clouds in it.

You believe it? I said. That Freya can see the future?

No, said Cat. Maybe she made a couple of lucky guesses but nobody can see the future.

People see ghosts, Storm said.

This was something she and Freya believed and could not be argued out of. They’d never seen one, but their mother had told them it was so, and now she was gone it had become a matter of faith with both of them. It was one thing I nearly got to tease Storm about, which I did by taking it very seriously. They believed ghosts were people stuck in the old days who were unable to move on. They had lots of ideas about how and why they got trapped that way.

So, if ghosts live in the past and we live now, who lives in the future? I said.

That’s a crazy question, said Storm. The future hasn’t happened yet.

Maybe there are different kinds of ghosts, I said. Maybe future ghosts are already out there. Just waiting for us.