Page 57 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

“Obviously no,” she said, her voice quieter.

The Girl had felt bad for her.

“Well how do you know it’s always a fucking joy?” said GJ.

The moment had hung there, strung between awkward and dangerous. Then GJ took the edge off things with a sudden smile of her own.

“Nah. Sorry,” she said. “Ignore me. I’m just cranky because we’re late for our swim and I’m still half asleep. I’m just messing with you, pet. Stick the needle where you like.”

The perky nurse took her at her word, but the Girl noted that GJ’s smile was so dazzling it was easy to miss the fact that this time it didn’t make it all the way up to her eyes.

The early morning sea-swimming had become a ritual that the Girl looked forward to, as much for GJ’s company as the bracing happy-to-be-alive shock of the cold water and the warm afterglow once they’d got out and dried themselves. They took to taking a Thermos of tea with them, and would sit on the gritty sand, hunkered down behind a rock against the wind that always seemed to blow across the beach, cradling the hot drinks in both hands and often not even needing to talk to feel the bracing effect of their shared friendship and the sense that they were somehow playing truant from the facility. The swimming felt rebellious and, in its own way, empowering, maybe because they were the only ones doing it. That morning, after each had had their smile of bruises extended by another injection, she broke the silence to ask GJ if she’d ever had a baby.

“Miscarriage,” said GJ.

“Me too,” said the Girl after a beat. They sat in silence watching the strengthening early morning sunlight beginning to bounce off the waves.

“My mam said not to fret,” said GJ after a bit. “Said it often goes like that first time. First pancake she called it. First pancake is usually a mess. Said it all goes back up to heaven and comes out right second time.”

“She’s Christian then?” said the Girl.

“Fuck no,” said GJ with a snort. “She’s a school cook. Or was. When they still needed such things.”

“Now?” said the Girl.

“Now?” said GJ. “Now she takes it all out on my dad. Poor bugger. She’s got the mood swings of a mob boss, but she does know her way around a frying pan.”

She scowled at the horizon and looked suddenly sadder than the Girl had ever seen her, like a mask had slipped. The Girl held out her tin cup.

“Here’s to Second Pancakes,” she said.

GJ found her grin and turned back to meet her eyes.

“And all who toss ’em,” she said.

They clinked in a toast.

“To the tossers,” said the Girl.

“To the tossers” said GJ, and then after a long beat, “You know that’s us, right?”

The Girl had never been in a gang or a clique at school or anywhere else – she was, if anything, one of nature’s non-joiners – but she found she liked the gang of two that she and GJ were becoming. It cut through the loneliness and made the strange smiley-but-strict atmosphere of the facility easier to bear, especially as the tempo of the place changed subtly as more and more specialists began coming to see the small cohort of would-be mothers.

“We should charge admission,” said GJ. “Feel like a bloody freak show. And have you seen how some of them look at us? Little flashes of resentment, because we can and they can’t.”

“It’s not that,” said the Girl. “I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s that something’s changing. And they’re not telling us what it is.”

“Christ,” said GJ. “I’m just having a whinge and you’ve gone full blown conspiracy theory.”

“No,” said the Girl. “Something’s up.”

GJ shook her head and pushed her.

“Give over,” she said. “Of course something’s up: our bloody hormones. They’ve been pumping them into us like a firehose. That’s what’s making you jumpy.”

The Girl had to admit she might be right, but she also knew that in her working life in NGOs she’d been around enough government people and different levels of officialdom to know the look when they were smiling at you but not giving you all the information you needed. And this felt a lot like that. She decided to discuss it with the Boy when they next met – but not to do so on the premises. Just in case it wasn’t just hormones. Just in case they were overheard. Just in case the walls had ears, which was something GJ was convinced of.

“Aye well, paranoid doesn’t mean wrong,” she’d said when the Girl had expressed doubts. “Look it up in the dictionary.”