Page 67 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

I know the Bear Shirt stranger didn’t dig this one up, said Cat. Sure as sunset, that never happened.

Then who did? said Freya. If you’re so clever, who did?

There was a rustle in the grass behind her and she flinched and then relaxed a bit as Digger walked out of the wood edge and went across to sniff at the bone-bound bit of torso. She didn’t seem that interested. A couple of sniffs and then she looked up at us, as if to ask what all the fuss was about.

Digger? I said. Maybe it was Digger?

The dog heard her name and looked a question at me, head cocked to one side. My face clearly didn’t contain the answer she was looking for because she turned round and pissed on the ribcage.

And that might have been one of the only times I saw anything close to a smile pass fleetingly across Freya’s face. I was definitely the first time I heard her say anything nice about the dog.

Yeah, she said. Maybe. Clever dog probably wanted to make sure the bastard was dead.

She turned and shouted at Storm who was already jogging back towards home, carrying the baby on her hip as she went.

Where are you going? she yelled.

Other baby, shouted Storm. I left it to see if you were in trouble. Because you were making such a fuss. Now it’s yelling too.

A distant yelp of aggrieved baby misery floated towards us from the other side of the M-way.

Freya stared at Cat and me. She looked suddenly more exhausted than I’d ever seen her.

I can’t believe I trod in him, she said.

Well, you did, said Cat.

Must have been horrible, I said. The feeling. The realising.

She stared at me as if I shouldn’t have dared to speak, and I could see anger beginning to kindle in her face again, but then she slumped down into herself somehow, all the energy gone.

Yes, she said. Yes, it was.

Cat tilted her head at me and then at the bones all round us.

Let’s get these things back underground, she said.

I must have looked a question back at her, because she shivered in exasperation.

Because it’ll be tidier, she said.

What wasn’t tidy was what happened next. Not right away, not while we were gathering what we could and tucking it back to sleep under the ripped-out root plate. Not even what happened that night, after we’d scrubbed our hands and got some food going. Not even what happened the next day or the next, although with hindsight it was already beginning. What untidily happened was that Freya finally began to unravel.

Chapter 22

Everyone a seed

The Boy and the Girl – Year 14 AG

The Girl found herself on the point of giggling when the idea was first presented to her, not because it was funny, but because of the way the scientist put it; he asked her to consider it for the greater good, to look beyond her own biology, so limited to the narrow confines and ageing processes of her own body, and to allow them to take her ovaries and womb for safekeeping – keeping them alive for her, but outside her. He had a neat scientific name for the process: ectogenesis. It was an old name, he admitted, but a new and experimental procedure that had never been attempted and was relying on an equally novel and unproven device.

“Yes, sure, it’s a kind of a Last Chance Dance,” he said, his mid-Atlantic accent grating a little as he looked her with the kind of willed eye contact that immediately made her feel he was trying just a bit too hard not to look shifty about this. “But if I can be honest, this late in the party, a Last Chance Dance may be all we have…”

This was not the bit she giggled at. This was the bit where she in her turn willed herself to look reasonable and interested in the marvel of cutting-edge medical technology, the “Exowomb” that he was showing her on his iPad. He called it the “Host Apparatus”. It looked innocent enough, as if a discreet centrifuge had had a baby with an equally unassuming desktop refrigerator, but was, he assured her, a truly remarkable host among hosts, a place where her precious womb could be rehoused, and her almost miraculous ovaries could be nourished. More than nourished, hopefully even rejuvenated and kept young beyond their years by the use of “novel hormone enhancement” techniques which, if applied in situ, might also possibly work, but only at a certainly fatal cost to her, the current host.

“Machines,” he said, “don’t get cancer.”

And it wasn’t being described as her own womb and ovaries’ “host” that made her giggle, either. That was triggered by the accompanying government lawyer leaning forward and suggesting in a low, confiding voice, that it might make it “conceptually more palatable” if she “flipped the script” and looked at their proposal not from the personal perspective, but the planetary one.