Page 96 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

She could, in her darkest moments, imagine a world without him specifically, just not one devoid of humans in general. And she could imagine a world without her too. She’d imagined another way out of her dilemma. She had a general thought – that she had purposely and self-protectively not focused too hard on – that one day, if he never came, she would walk out into the sea on a warm calm afternoon and swim away beyond the protection of the bay into the gentle rise and fall of the oceanic swell until her strength failed and she sunk gently into the rocking arms of oblivion.

Chapter 32

Albatross always gets you in the end

Mouse – Year 201 AG

I think I was too exhausted and scared by everything I now had to do on my own to really notice that I was living like I was trapped in a very bad dream, until the actual nightmare saved me. Saved all of us.

On a daily level it was living, strictly speaking, but only because no one was dying on that given day. And the fact that every day was more or less relentlessly the same meant we weren’t moving, and for life to be life it really has to move. I suppose I knew that in time the babies would grow, and that’s certainly a kind of motion, but I don’t think we’d have had that time for it to happen in. Not there. Not then. Our luck had changed, even if until that point we had not really believed in something so superstitious. Maybe that’s why it took me so long to notice our fortunes had turned for the worse. If you stopped and thought about it – and I had plenty of time to think about it, even if I didn’t have the luxury of pausing much between my jobs as nurse, baby minder and food finder – if you really thought about it, our fortunes had taken a slow but relentless downhill turn ever since I killed the Russian. It was like the old-fashioned poem that Cat used to read me with the strange illustrations when we were little and liked to get ourselves a bit scared by creepy stories and poems and pictures, the one where the ancient mariner shoots the albatross, which is a huge and unlucky bird to kill.

I know the reason Cat liked reading me the poem was because the sea in it was so frightening just by itself; we used to spend hours imagining what the “slimy things” were that “did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea” And she and I would have drawing competitions sometimes, seeing who could sketch the scariest, slimiest sea monster. She liked it because it all added to her conviction that death came from the sea. Fear of the sea was, I now realise, a compulsion with her, like the mariner, who suffers from the terrible curse because of what he murdered, and interrupts a wedding to tell people about it. I never understood what the significance of the wedding bit was, but I was always pretty clear about the bird and what it meant if you killed it.

And it was fun way back then, when Cat and I pored over the book of poems, being young and using our imaginations, but things don’t have to look gruesome or slimy to be dangerous. In fact danger is all the more perilous if it looks like nothing much, and comes at you straight out of the ordinary; it can step out of a familiar nettle-patch in the rain holding a gun and change your world in a split-second. He didn’t have time to look unlucky, he just looked dangerous. But that was what the Russian had been: my albatross.

In the illustrations to the poem, you could see the artist thought the mariner had been driven crazy by his curse – he was raggedy with eyes that stared from the yellowed pages as if they were glowing and alive, as if he was looking out and could see right into you. Back in our childhood it hadn’t meant much, him being crazed by it all. Now, under my own curse and exhausted by the unchanging routine of chores and caring and not sleeping, I not only understood it, I lived it.

I’m proud, I suppose, that I carried on all by myself and I kept a grip of things for a while. But I know at the same time I also lost my mind. Not all of it, but easily enough to make it hard to remember how I did what I did. I do know I spent a lot of time in a walking daze, and the rest thinking about what Cat would do, and then doing that, as much as I could. I know that she slept a lot in the day and only really talked to me at night, which was on the one hand great, because she was talking, but on the other also not as great as it might have been, because it meant I wasn’t sleeping like I needed to. And I couldn’t, making myself stay awake because I didn’t want to miss a word because I was, of course, terrified by the thought she might take a turn for the worse and do the thing that was both unthinkable and, because of that, unnameable. Even now I can’t write it, probably for fear of tempting fate and fate giving in. I don’t remember her eating much either, but I always had water close to her hand beside her bed, as well as any goat milk the babies weren’t using.

I even rigged up a bell on a string that I ran from her bedside to the outside door so she could get my attention while I was out looking after the goats or letting Red graze around the edge of the airstrip between the brambles.

She never rang that bell, but it was good to know that she could, if she was in trouble or if the babies were crying too much, although a lot of the time I took them outside with me, especially when it was sunny. And it was sunny a lot, almost too sunny as it was getting to the parching time of the year when green turned brown and what had been lush went dry and tindery. I always found that a more miserable season than winter. And of course there was a lot of miserableness to go round. Cat’s silence and stillness was more than just sad and worrying: it made a loneliness that I felt like a physical ache in the hollow beneath my throat right where the neck joins the chest, that old empty bubble that I couldn’t ever swallow no matter how hard I tried. I used to be convinced that if I could just gulp that void down, I would somehow be able to breathe easier, but I never could.

I missed her fizziness and the way that the unstoppable, twitching force of herself kept her in perpetual motion. And I missed the way that energy used to come out in words as well, torrents of words really. I found this almost entirely silent Cat who only now seemed to have the energy or breath to speak in clutched two- or three-word sentences unnerving and alien. Of course, I knew she needed time to heal, even if I didn’t know how to make that happen as well or as fast as I would have liked.

I was pretty certain she’d always walk with a limp once she’d lain up and rested enough for broken bones to knit back together and had the energy and will to get out of bed and start moving. I feared the uncharacteristic silence that shrouded her during the day might be another thing that would remain and become as much a part of the mended Cat as the limp. And there might come a time when I could tease her back out of this shell, when we both had more energy and less to worry about. Either way she’d still and always be Cat, and that was all that mattered.

And if I had to look after her for a while as she grew back into herself? So what? And so what if she was quieter than normal? She had looked after me before I could talk at all. I didn’t really think about it like that, not in terms of repaying a favour, but if you did, it was a fraction of what I owed her.

I’m just really glad I had Digger. She filled in some of the gap that Cat left and definitely kept me anchored when the size of everything I had to do threatened to wash over and pull me under. She’d stay close most of the day but would go off hunting in the early afternoons. She’d never be gone for long, and I began to think of it as her time to patrol, as if she was checking the perimeter for any wolves that might still be out there.

I never heard any wolves at night, though I would sometimes twitch out of the thin scrapes of snatched sleep that my nightly rest had become and wonder if the thing that had jolted me into consciousness was a distant howling. It was comforting in a strange way that Digger had her own routine and stuck to it, as if there was one set of responsibilities I didn’t even have to understand, let alone worry about, because she was reliable and taking care of them. Maybe she was. Could be that she was marking trees by peeing on them and sending a message to any hungry wolves that this territory was protected so they’d better go look for easier food somewhere else. I like to think that’s what she was doing. It was after all in her nature to protect. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.

Now that the Bunker was not just a sick-room and a nursery, but a barn where the animals slept safely with us, it got pretty smelly, and though I could have put them in one of the other bunkers I never did. It seemed less effort to sweep out and mop the floors every couple of days than spend half a day patching together the pens and doors I’d have needed to do in order to make them safe from any night-time predators. I was exhausted all the time and probably not thinking as straight as I should have been. I talked about it to Cat one windy night as I lay holding her hand and looking out through the wall of windows at silvery clouds sliding past a low moon just cresting the ridge opposite.

I should move the animals, I said. Into the library bunker. It’s got the best doors. It wouldn’t take too much work to make it secure, I think.

I felt her hand squeeze mine.

There’s no hurry.

It’s the wolves, I said. Maybe they’re gone. But maybe they’re not. You should have seen them. They’re… persistent.

So are you.

And so was the wind. It wasn’t just hot because of the sun, the wind – which normally cooled things down – was also warm, which added to the sleeping at night problems. I kept the babies cool by giving them shallow baths and leaving them to dry in the air and sponging them down as regularly as I could. Most days that was fine but there were some times when I worried about them getting too hot for their own good, sharp, crispy irritated days when it felt airless even though there was a steady wind, because it was the kind of hot wind that felt as if it was snatching breath out of your mouth as it gusted past. It was the sort of weather that doesn’t change gently but only breaks. I spent a lot of time looking into the distance hoping to see a thunderstorm coming, but it never did, not in time anyway.

The heat and the wind made everything sour and testy; even sitting in the shade and splashing water with the babies wasn’t enjoyable, though they seemed to gurgle happily enough, and crawled around the pen I had built them, trying out pulling their little bodies upright on the sides. They weren’t strong enough yet, but the urge was there and I worried about how we would keep them safe if they started walking properly. I’d lie awake at night and plan harnesses and leads for them, then immediately discard that as even more dangerous, having visions of them getting tangled up and strangling themselves while my back was turned. It all underlined how much I needed Cat to recover and be back on her own feet before they found theirs.

Digger used to jump into the pen with them. She did it so neatly, planning her jump and landing very delicately exactly where she wouldn’t squash them. She’d then lie down and let them crawl all over her while she checked out their smells and, when she felt it necessary, gave them a good clean with her tongue. I expect it wasn’t very sanitary, but they giggled and smiled as she did it, and no harm came from it, as far as I could see. They just trusted her instinctively, and they would often fall asleep leaning on her, their little pink fingers curled in the thickness of her fur as if drawing a comfort from it that Cat or I could not give them. She was a fierce, fearsome and fearless dog when she needed to be, but she was also a natural mother. Maybe that’s not a contradiction. Maybe that’s the same thing. Either way, I was grateful to have her at my side in those hot days after the disaster.

So, to start with she was a calming presence. But then she got fretful, as if the weather had finally got to her too. Her once daily disappearance multiplied, so she began to come and go several times through the day. She also began to look at me when she left, and even more when she came back, with a face that seemed to tell me I was not being helpful, as if I should have understood the very serious thing she was trying to tell me. It wasn’t the direct look a dog gives you when they’re hungry, it was the one that tells you you’re being frustratingly slow on the uptake. I wondered of course if she had got wind of the wolves again. I had convinced myself they’d moved on because we hadn’t heard any howling in the night, nor seen any unusual droppings in the woods, and I knew Digger would have got wind of them and made a hell of a fuss if her nose had detected them anywhere in the area.

One thing I’ve learned is a thing that Cat always seemed to know right from the very beginning – you never let your guard down, because the moment you do is when everything comes right at you.

I was out with the goats trying to peg them in the shade one hot afternoon so we could all benefit from some cool while I milked them. The wind was constant, not too strong, but enough to make the hot air feel like a swamp you had to push through. I had the babies strapped to me front and back in what I thought was a clever harness I had cobbled together from two old rucksacks. The boy baby on my back was asleep as far as I could tell. The girl under my chin was also quiet but she was wide awake and staring up at me with that penetrating look she always had, as if she could both see me and through me to also see the unseen things behind me. It should have been an unnervingly piercing stare, that habit she had, but I always found it strangely comforting, funny even. I guess the funniness was in her expression, which was gently serious as if she was much older than she actually was. It was a very grown-up look, deep, even. It felt as if she, like Digger, was in charge of something, some duty I needn’t worry about. It never felt sinister.

What did feel ominous was the speed and urgency with which Digger burst out of the undergrowth at the far end of the airstrip and sprinted towards us along the narrow path between the bunkers and the Tanglewood. I’d never seen her run so fast or so furiously and when she got within a couple of metres of us she skidded to a halt whining and trying to bounce me out of the human stupidity I was too stuck in to understand what her dog language was telling me. She actually nipped at my arm in frustration and then spun and stood at bay, growling back down the way she had come.