Page 95 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

This was the worst of all days, the one when the sorrows did not come singly, like the writing in the library said, but in battalions – the girls ran away, the babies were abandoned, Cat failed to fly and might be dying and now there were wolves.

Right at that moment it was clear they were not sure whether to eat me or the horse. I looked smaller, so probably less of a meal, and I could see they’d had one go at Red who was bleeding from a bite mark high up on her back leg. It was only then when the wolves moved a bit, as though they were connected and making a silent decision to focus on me that I noticed one had a three-legged limp, with a front leg held high up to its chest. I’d been kicked by Red a few times. I guess my bones were thicker than a wolf.

Good girl, I thought as my immediate life narrowed down into mathematics. One of me, three of them. No way I could outrun them. If they attacked, I might hit one with an arrow, but I didn’t think I could be sure of doing more than injuring it and making it angry. I definitely didn’t have time to fire more than one arrow accurately. I had my knife, but that was where the maths got hazy and futile. I tried to keep my mind clear and see an alternative to running or fighting. I looked quickly to right and left to see if I might make it to the edge of the fallen pylon and jump up on the struts, pulling myself clear of danger. That seemed unlikely, but perhaps possible if nothing else happened and the wolves were slower than they looked as if they were going to be. I was angry again, more than I was scared. But it was me I was angry at, not the wolves, they were just doing what wolves had always done, looking for something to eat and working together to get it. I’d been too fast, not slow and smooth. I’d been so keen to see Freya and Storm coming back that I’d run out of the Bunker fuelled by hope rather than sense; impatient. I’d left Cat alone in the makeshift hospital bed I’d cobbled together, and worse than that – if anything could be worse than that – I’d left the babies alone with no one to look after them. I’d had no business coming down here in the first place. If people were coming, I should have let them come to me. I suppose I was angry because I knew at some level I’d run away from the problem hoping to find a solution rather than staying with it.

And then I remembered the gun. I dropped my bow and pulled it from my pocket. I remembered what we had thought when we looked at how it worked and made sure the safety catch was down. It felt warm and not cold in my hand. It felt reassuringly heavy. And suddenly I understood why people liked them, why there were so many pictures of them in the books I’d found. It felt like power in my hand. It felt like a quick solution to the problem in front of me. I thought the wolves saw the gun and took a step back, and for a moment allowed myself to smile, as if the wolves knew what it was that I had in my hand. And then I heard the growl behind me and realised they weren’t looking at my gun or me at all. They were looking at Digger. She stepped forward and stood beside me, and I could feel as much as hear the warning growl coming from deep in her chest, and I don’t think any noise has ever sounded so sweet or welcome to me since then. It was the noise that said I wasn’t alone, that however bad the day was I still had a friend who was on my side and who would protect me as absolutely as I would protect them. It wasn’t quite as great as having Cat beside me, but it was good. Red must have felt it too, because she snorted and stamped her hooves, which made the wolves quickly flick their eyes towards her, and in that moment I lifted the gun and pointed it at the closest one and pulled the trigger.

When the Russian fired his gun it had sounded like a thunder-crack had ripped a hole in the world, deafening me and making my ears ring for the next hour.

This wasn’t that. This was just a dry click of the hammer falling on a bullet that wouldn’t fire. It wasn’t impressive. And the look the wolves gave me confirmed that. And I don’t know what made me do what I did next, other than the fact that Digger’s growling was getting louder and more comforting as she stood against my leg, but I decided to roar at the wolves. I don’t think there were any words in the noise I made, which was more like a wild animal than a person shouting but it was loud enough to make my throat sore for the rest of the evening, and it was perhaps unexpected enough to make the wolves run. I had never seen wolves this close before and maybe they had never seen a two-legged animal point something metal at them and make a click and then shout at them so loudly while a big dog stood beside him and made it very clear that if there was trouble coming she was going to be the one who brought it.

On top of that one of them had been given a crippling kick by the horse who was clearly not an easy meal either. So maybe they were just confused rather than scared but run they did, disappearing into the undergrowth as if they had never been there. Digger held her ground and didn’t chase them, but she never took her eyes off the patch of wood they had disappeared into while I went and untied Red from the pylon and led them both up the slope towards the M-way and home.

I don’t think I was the only one who had prickles on the back of their neck as we hurried away from where the wolves had been, thinking that they might start doubling back and having second thoughts about their dinner. Digger brought up the rear and kept circling round and peering meaningfully into the dreary wood as if her baleful glaring would keep them at bay. Almost like she was daring them to follow us. I always liked Digger, but never as much as I did that evening when she saved me and Red, and of course the rest of us.

Cat was still asleep and did not seem much changed except for the fact the crackling in her lungs seemed worse. The babies were hungry again, and so I fed them. I must have been halfway through doing that when I had a sudden vision of the goats being attacked by the wolves, and so stopped feeding, and ran out to the goat field to get them.

That night in the Bunker, that first night after Cat’s fall, was the busiest that the space had ever been, because the only way I could think of keeping everything and everyone I needed to keep alive safe was to have them in the same place. So the babies were there, I was there, sleeping beside Cat on a mattress on the other kitchen table, while Digger slept beside the babies. The goats seemed quite calm about being penned in the far corner of the Bunker, while Red huffed and whinnied her way through the night, clearly upset at having to be inside maybe for the first time in her life. It wasn’t a restful night but it was a safe one. And given what had happened through the long unsafe day that had come before, the day when the sorrows came in battalions, that was as good as I could hope things could be.

One of the reasons that I slept so badly was because all the things I was worried about seemed to have a barb tugging at me, like fish hooks attached to different lines all pulling in a different direction: the babies sleeping, then crying. Cat, her breathing sounding more and more as if the bundle of thorns in her lungs were dry as tinder as they scratched away with each intake and outflow of air. The goats making unfamiliar noises in the dark, mostly trying to eat anything they hadn’t previously had access to, and each time one of them knocked their horns against the window it made me think it was the wolves trying to get in. And then even in the rare moments when there was quiet in the night there was still the one hook with a line out into the unknowable future that was hidden in the darkness. At those moments I wondered if I was going mad with worry lying there, straining to hear the sound of howling in the surrounding night, trying to see if the wolves had only gone away in order to find their pack and come back with real battalions of sharp toothed fury. I only know that I slept for a moment, because I jerked awake, aware that Cat had said something.

Look after the babies.

The words came out of the dark, quiet and whisper thin, slight enough to slip into the narrow moment between sleeping and waking, a voice so delicate that I couldn’t be sure whether I’d heard or dreamed it. I lay there, unmoving, not wanting to break the moment in case it was a dream. I had fallen asleep with Cat’s hand in mine and I focused on that. Not cold. Still warm.

They’re fine, I whispered. But you must be in bad pain. I felt a twitch in the hand. Almost a squeeze. No, I decided. Definitely a squeeze.

You fell, I said. I thought you were dead.

A squeeze. The tiniest flex of the hand. Then another. And another.

Not dead yet, she breathed.

Three squeezes, three words. Like it was a game. I smiled in the dark.

And then, like a miracle, I stopped trying to untangle the catastrophe from the many ways it could get worse tomorrow, and slept.

Not much.

But just enough not to go mad. Yet.

Chapter 31

Should I stay or should I go?

The Boy and the Girl – Year 16 AG

She swam every day, partly because that’s what they had always done when on the island, but mainly because it was the moment when she felt most alive and connected to him. She swam on the long curve of white sand they called the home beach because you could easily walk the third of a mile to it barefoot across the long sweep of field grass and wild flowers, climbing over the wire fences that divided the fields on rickety stiles nailed to the wooden fence posts. When there had been crofters working the land, these fields were used to graze and separate cows, sheep and one particularly massive bull, so that keeping the gates closed was a habit drilled into her from childhood. The fact that all the gates had been left open by the last crofters to leave the land was still something she couldn’t get used to, and she had to fight the impulse to close them every time she walked past. Some sheep had been left to roam wild on the island, and the departing farmers hadn’t thought it right to deprive them of sweet field grass, or the right to roam freely over the newly ceded landscape. She’d never liked the wire fences, having scratched herself badly on her inner thigh when a teenager and trying to short-cut over one. Wire in a grass landscape, especially when that grass is not kept low by regular grazing is hard to see and an accident waiting to happen, as it becomes hidden and rusty.

There was an old lane that ran from the back of the house between two fields in a line as straight as a Roman road, heading across the smooth field grass towards the more hummocky land that marked the beginning of the machair and the upswept back-ridge of the long sand dunes crowned with marram grass that swooped down to the sea beyond. That patch of straight road running between two fields was a relic of a time when supplies came by sea, when the tarmac single-track that circled the island hadn’t even been imagined, let alone built. In her mind she called it the Road to Nowhere, and she walked it every day, and used to hang her wet towel on the strand of wire that stretched across the three-metre width of the gate at the end, a wire you had to duck under if you were tall, strung as a once-temporary-but-now-likely-permanent fix to brace the tilting gateposts at a time when keeping the gateposts in true with each other so the gate would close properly had been important.

She didn’t have a swimsuit to hang next to the towel because she swam naked. The beach had been long and private enough for that even when the world was normal. Now a swimsuit seemed like the greatest affectation. And even on her lowest days it was inarguable that swimming just felt better without clothes. She’d pretty much minimised the question of clothes too, in that she just wore a faded blue engineer’s boilersuit, with a T-shirt or no shirt in the hot summer weather, and with layered sweaters under the boilersuit in winter. There was another green John Deere boilersuit she cut the legs off and arms off and wore when the summer got too hot. She washed her limited rotation of underwear and T-shirts every Monday because she suspected once she gave up on hygiene and its attendant routines, she might start sliding down a very dark hill. Wash day gave her purchase on that slippery slope. So did drawing and painting. She’d always been a good draughtswoman, and the house had enough materials to get her going again. She sat and watched the birds and the animals of the island and sketched them swiftly and precisely in pencil. Or she’d find a rock to sit against and contemplate the entire landscape as the weather swept over it, altering the feel of it moment to moment, like moods flashing across a well-loved face. And then she’d take out the watercolours and try and capture some of that. Preserving these moments was an activity that calmed her and gave her a much-needed sense of agency. She’d go to bed feeling that at least she had, in some way, celebrated something of the day by commemorating it on paper. The other drawings she made were the ones she worked on inside, in front of the long mirror she’d brought down to the sitting room where she worked and read by the peat fire when the weather was too bad to go outside to work on her vegetable patches, or to fish.

She found she needed to keep her hands and eyes busy as much as possible because it took the top layer off her mind and stopped her thinking about all the reasons to worry and despair. Idle hands let the little devils whisper into your mind, her mother had once said, not too seriously but it had stuck. In front of the mirror she drew herself, often in charcoal, usually her face and her shoulders, but sometimes full length, naked, exposed to her own uncritical but exacting eye. And she knew it was the magical thinking she is increasingly having to patrol herself for, because she mistrusts it, but also maybe the self-portraits are a way of freezing herself in time until he comes back. Maybe the evolving versions of herself are a journal for him, so he can still partake of the missing years. Because now nearly two years had gone, there was every chance the future would multiply into more plurals. Maybe she’d chronicle her descent into bent old age, still alone, becoming both littler and less of herself, thankfully needing smaller and smaller bits of paper to chronicle her existence on.

That spoke to the only other worry she was troubled by, other than the fear that he would never make good on his promise of coming for her because the pandemic had come for him instead. The other fear was that she would run out of paper, pencils and paints.

And so began the only bit of larceny that she allowed herself in an island whose empty, furnished houses now lay open for the picking. She would go into them and look for paper and art materials. If she took anything she always left a note, because even though in her head she knew that the owners would never return since what ailed the world was not something that it would recover from, in her heart the departed people’s houses would be claimed by their children or grandchildren as they always had been. Because she hadn’t yet lived it, a future truly lacking the succession of younger generations was literally unimaginable.