Page 64 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Digger didn’t follow the dog. Which was, again, strange looking back on it. She just watched it go, shifting her weight from side to side, as if she was torn between chasing and staying, and then the dog disappeared round the curve of the hill, and she turned back and trotted up the slope towards us as if nothing momentous had just happened. I still don’t know why she didn’t disappear with him. Why she chose us. It makes no real sense, but it’s what she did, and somewhere it’s a choice she must have made for her own dog reasons. I know that I’m glad she did. And I don’t have to know the why of it to be glad. I’m glad now, and I was glad then, and I think Cat was as sad as I was to see the other dog go, despite herself. She clicked her tongue and shook her head.

We never even had time to give it a name, said Cat.

I remembered Bear Shirt swinging up onto the front of the tank, talking to the baby doll’s head.

Jip, I said.

Cat looked a question at me.

I think his name is Jip, I said. I think he’s who Bear Shirt was looking for. I heard them talking to a Jip who wasn’t there. I thought they were Russian, and maybe they were, but if so, I think they were a Russian who lost their dog, and now that dog’s gone after them.

Good, said Freya, who’d been listening to all this. It’s good he’s gone. He can follow the scent trail and find him. Then the Russian bastard won’t have any reason to come back sniffing around for us.

I don’t think they were actually Russian, I said.

You don’t know what they were, said Freya. That’s the point.

Storm nodded and pointed at Cat.

It’s like Cat says, she said. What you don’t know can kill you.

She shrugged as if she wanted to apologise for the truth of it.

Didn’t look like a killer, I said, remembering that weird bump I felt when I looked into their face, how open and sad it had been.

Neither do you, said Freya. But here we are.

Cat kept quiet through this exchange, but as the girls turned and went back up the hill to where both the babies were now beginning to grizzle in anticipation of their next feed, she smiled up at me and clapped me on the shoulder.

Hey, she said. Cheer up. If the dog comes back, he comes back. And if not, it means he’s happier where he is.

I know, I said. I’m fine.

I expect dogs can have special people just like people can, she said.

Only-ones, I said.

Exactly, she said.

I still feel split about Bear Shirt, I said. I know I was right to stay hidden, but there’s a bit of me thinks it was a mistake.

Cat got that itchy, irritated look back behind her eyes again.

Spilled milk, she said. Don’t worry about it. And on the good side, it might cheer Freya up. She really didn’t like that dog.

She doesn’t like anything, I said. You see how tough she is with the babies sometimes.

She’s just tired, said Cat. That’s all. And Storm’s surprisingly good at taking care of her.

I wonder if she could hear the same thing in her own voice that I could, which was that she was trying to persuade herself as much as me.

But as usual – to start with at least – Cat proved to be right. Once the dog had gone and it became clear after a few days waiting that it wasn’t going to return, Freya seemed to relax. She even began going for walks that took her further and further away from the safety of the Bunker, sometimes with both the babies, sometimes with just one strapped to her front with a shawl Cat had knotted for her, other times on her own. She admitted it left her feeling better, moving around again in the fresh air. And so things definitely began to improve for all of us. Even Storm now smiled more than she scowled, and once or twice I even caught her laughing at something in one of the books she was now never without. She took to reading really well. I found her in the book bunker one day, and she was crying, holding a book about blobby creatures who looked a bit like white hippopotamuses. I asked what was wrong and she said nothing was wrong, she was just happy because even though their mother could not really read she had used the pictures in these books and made-up stories that fitted them to entertain them when they were small, and now she could read them to the babies when they were older. She then went off and showed Freya, and later in the small hours of the night I heard Storm reading to her from the books by candlelight as she fed the babies, all sitting quietly together. Even Freya, who was normally made entirely out of sharp edges, seemed softened by the strange simple stories about these imaginary creatures and their friends. I think it was partly because it reminded them of their earlier life, but also because the landscape of the stories was so full of those book-friends who they had sort of grown up with in their minds, if not in reality. And once, when Cat was being especially itchy-twitchy about something that Storm and Freya didn’t think was important, they laughed at her and called her Little My, and I laughed too because I’d listened along in the dark enough to see that Cat was just like the character in the book, small and fiercely opinionated and doing what she knew had to be done before anyone else agreed. And of course she didn’t like us laughing at her and trying to explain it, which only made it worse. I think she didn’t like me laughing with the others any more than I liked her going off and having private talks with them. Neither of us had any practice at being outside a group, I suppose. But being Cat, and not actually a character in a book, she didn’t stay huffy for long, and all in all these were, in their own way, the happy times.

They might have even got happier if Freya’s walks had taken her in any direction other than the one she took when she expanded her loops around the bunkers and finally crossed the M-way. At first I was worried she might find her way to the quarry again, but she took off in the opposite direction. I happened to be watching her from the ridge where the goats were cropping the grass beneath the hazels, and I suppose I watched longer than normal because of it being the first time I’d seen her walk that way, over the old road and beyond.

I wasn’t especially worried because her walks had become commonplace events most afternoons. They really seemed to be doing her good. She looked healthier, less waxy and pale, and her mood was definitely better. It wasn’t so much that she’d formed a closer bond with the babies as that she seemed to resent them less, which was all tied up in there being much less of the negativity and doominess about her. She’d stopped bursting into tears all the time too.

I’d mentioned this to Storm a few days earlier, while we were riding the horses along the old canal. I felt almost at home on the swaying back of a horse after all the months of practice, but not enough to ride side by side with her with a hedge to her left and the canal to my right, so I was trailing behind. She stopped her horse and turned to look at me.