Page 88 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

This wasn’t a new suggestion, but she said it now without any real power behind it. Where she had been acid and disdainful and arrogant she was now just saying words out of habit, not out of hope, and it was much worse, this Freya, the dead-eyed and somehow boneless submissive one. It was like when a puffball mushroom looks firm and swollen with potential one day, so plump and suddenly so full of life that you just know it’s going to burst, and then the next day it just begins to wither and sag in on itself instead, already dead, rotting from the inside

And that was how she was. But maybe she was also bearing the shame of nearly hurting the baby, of having been so close to doing it. Maybe, like Cat said, that was the real point when she broke herself inside. Too late to ask now. She was just lifeless that first night. Nothing more. Not enough of anything else to even resist. She ate with us, lifelessly, she sat by the conversation, part of it but not really in it, lifelessly, she even fed the babies. Lifelessly. And when the light left the sky, she even went back to her bed with her sister. Lifelessly.

Cat sat in the dark with me and Digger, looking up at the stars.

Tell me it all again, she said. So I did. I know what she was doing then as well. She was going over everything I’d done to see if she would have done it differently, and so calculate how guilty she needed to feel for not coming with me in the first place.

I know, I said when it was done. You’d have put the bell on the goat yourself and not left Storm to do it.

To my surprise she just shrugged.

Maybe not, she said. And maybe not putting the bell on was what saved you. If they’d heard the bell they might have come to see what it was, and found you.

Maybe, I said. That’s what Storm says.

So maybe it was a good thing, she said.

Yes, I said. If they were bad things. Bad people.

You don’t think they were Russians? she said after a beat. You said they wore the key necklace.

It was my turn to shrug in the dark. I looked up at the sky noting the giant silhouette of the tower blocking out a huge chunk of Milky Way overhead. It loomed over us like a thunderhead, the familiar shape of it suddenly ominous.

I don’t know, I said. I don’t know if wearing a necklace like that makes you a Russian. I mean I think it does, but we don’t know for sure do we? And even if they are, are all Russians bad, or just the one I, you know…

… killed, she said.

Yes, I said.

And the ones who killed the girls’ mother, she said.

I let my eye track along the white smear of the Milky Way until it hit the sharp edge of the tower overhead.

How many keys were round their neck? she said.

The question came out of the blue. I looked at her.

Just one, I said. Why?

There was another period of silence as if she was trying to decide whether to answer my question at all.

There were seven keys on the necklace of the Russian we buried, she said.

She said it as though it meant something important, but it wasn’t clear to me what that was.

So? I said.

I never told you. What was in that tin we found on the body, she said. I thought it was too… distressing.

I opened my mouth to ask what it was but she took a breath and rolled straight on like she needed to get the next words out fast or she’d never do it.

They were fingers, she said. He’d cut off people’s fingers and kept them.

Like trophies? I said.

Maybe not, she said. Because there were seven of them as well. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. Or maybe he was hunting people who wore that necklace with the key.

Why would you do that? I said.