by Davina Bell
Then don’t forget about all the books, my mother’s books, all those juicy classics, and there were so many of those that by the time we got to the end of her collection, we were excited again about the ones from the beginning. Like the first day of school after the summer holidays when you can’t wait to get there and see if your friends have new haircuts. Winter loved to be read to, though often I had to skim the parts that I knew she couldn’t handle, like Beth from Little Women dying, and any scene in Pride and Prejudice that featured Mary, the loser brainiac sister who everyone in her family picked on.
‘Poor Mary,’ she’d say, her eyes full of everything. ‘They all make fun of her. But she’s still a person. I wish I could tell her.’
‘Don’t be a feather,’ I would say. ‘She probably went off with her big old brain and cured cancer and laughed all the way to Baby Dior, where she bought a zillion-dollar cape for the little girl she had with a handsome professor.’
‘She’d never have believed a professor could love her,’ Winter insisted. ‘I know.’
Pops started working all day and all night and we were alone most of the time, left to wander and Self-Educate. All the normal things in life fell away like those big old rocks, the Twelve Apostles, which crumple into the sea one by one at random moments—suddenly there and then not. I wonder if any more of them have done that lately, because of course I wouldn’t know. We didn’t have the internet (don’t get me started) and we couldn’t duck out to get a newspaper on account of there being no newspapers by then. No shops, no buildings, no civilisation—just us in that big old church.
Autumn came, and then winter, and then the apple trees were smug with fruit, and it was summer again. Gradually the days just seemed to smudge into each other, because it’s not like Pops took weekends off from his homemade laboratory, which was really just the part up above the church at the back where the choir would have sung—I don’t know the exact word for it and Winter isn’t here to ask, and I want to say vestibule but I know it’s wrong.
Even though it was all kinds of crumbly, Bartleby was so beautiful that some days, with the sky peeking in and the ivy vines climbing up the inside walls, my throat would close up. I haven’t even got to the stained-glass windows or the baby grand piano with the honeysuckle growing out the top or the cool moat around the edge that somehow always left our hair soft after swimming in it. The church was so big that even though Winter and I were basically jocks, we couldn’t have thrown a football from the back to the altar, and the roof was so high that, at the start, it felt like someone was sitting up there in the rafters, watching us mooch around and reading the thoughts floating up from my skull. And, sure, we’d been in churches before, but at first camping there seemed kind of wrong and, like, unholy, if you get what I mean? Eventually, though, I made my peace with whoever might have been peeping down at me, and once we strung up some golden fairy lights and hooked them to the generator and made little nooks for sleeping and reading and a sort of ping-pong table, and we figured out how to fly a kite out through the (very large) hole in the roof, it felt cosy, like one of those self-sufficient caravans that the Famous Five used to get around in on their summer hols. From up in the bell tower, with its four stone arches, you could look out in every direction, like you were in the crow’s nest of a tall ship.
When the ninjas came and ransacked that church—turned over every tin, ran up and down the bell tower, flicked through each page of my mother’s books till they were satisfied there was nothing to steal but our dad—Winter wanted to go with them. Of course she did. Winter would walk into a fire for anyone, and, boy, she’s lucky it was just us, that we didn’t have some evil older brother who liked pulling legs off insects, because her whole daisy-picking-earth-child thing would have got her completely pummelled. It was bad enough to see her climb out of the piano that day in her lemon-and-white-striped dress, no shoes, and hold out her hands, twisted politely together so they could snap the cuffs straight onto them and Pops wouldn’t have to leave alone.
Weird thing was, they didn’t want her, those guys, so I’ve never felt too bad that I didn’t come out from where I was hiding under the ivy, all gallant and feisty, to hold her back. I just stayed where I was, my feet tucked up, hanging from strands that were as thick as old sailing ropes, and watched them wave her away, barely looking at her, even though she was beautiful. I know that’s a big-headed thing to say given that we’re identical, split from the same zygote and all, right? And get this: there wasn’t a freckle or a birthmark or a knobbled bone or a narrow, forceps-squished face that set us apart—physically, at least. Nothing except for the wisp of a scar on the bridge of her nose, which I secretly wished I had too. We used to push our palms and the soles of our feet together just to see, and even the white specks in our nails grew out at identical rates, and our eyelashes fell out on the same days, and you’re thinking, As if, and believe me, I KNOW. It wasn’t normal, whatever that is. And that’s not even the weirdest part of this story, which takes a lot of twists, let me tell you.
But, yes, even with her home haircut, Winter was time-stoppingly beautiful, and maybe never more than when they led Pops out through the big arch that must once have been home to a huge church door, and she was just standing there, her wrists still twined together, her head tilted to the side like a dog’s when it hears a strange noise. I knew we would never see him again; he would die with his secrets sealed up in his mind—except the ones he’d left with us.
I could say that I’d never loved Winter more than at that moment, too, but that would be another lie because the day I loved her most was the last day I ever saw her. The day we came down from the top of Our Mountain. And I guess this is the story of how we got up there, and why, when all I wanted after Pops left was for everything to stand still. For it just to be us forever and always, with Winter safe and close enough to loop my thoughts around her like a lasso made of light.
And this probably isn’t a Spoiler Alert but, FYI, everything changes, and by everything, I guess I mean everyone, and by everyone, well, I guess you get who I mean, and maybe that’s why only one of us really survived.
Winter
He arrived late in our second spring on the island. By then we were alone. He walked out of the forest, and slowly.
He never said where he came from. I didn’t ask. I think I knew.
He was a boy, mostly.
He was wild, but not wolf-wild or fox-wild.
I made him a nook. I fetched water in a cup.
His hair stuck up. His skin glowed brown. He was shaking. He was tall. He needed something. Maybe me.
Summer
You might be trying to figure out what we ate on that island, or perhaps you’re just thinking that it was soylent, which was that liquid food/sludge that most of the world was surviving on by then, but you’d be wrong and here’s why. Out the back of the church was a hall so crumbled and cave-like, I wouldn’t have been surprised if we’d walked in one day and knocked ourselves out on a low-hanging stalactite. That’s where Pops had built a Great Wall of Canned Food, and that sounds sort of gross, but it was good stuff, which wouldn’t have surprised you if you’d met our dad, who liked fancy things. There was a stack of some kind of French chestnut cream in posh jars, and there were sliced Mexican chillies, like floating green wheels with spokes, and these tartan tins of Scottish Christmas shortbread in the shape of highland terriers, which is what we’d eat as a treat if we were up to date with our reading, which mostly we were. I know you’re thinking we were pretty tame, but you try being wild when you’re in the wild—it seems pretty stupid.
It was actually kind of spooky out the back of that Emporium, so big and echoey, all flickering shadows, so we didn’t go too often. When we did, we just grabbed things blind and stuffed them in a huge sack in that way you do when you actually just want to get the hell away, which was maybe why we became so good at adjusting to unusual flavour combinations that we could have seriously killed on one of those cooking show compet
itions they had before everything on TV was just calming shots of tropical island scenery on a loop, and warbly panpipe music.
And, sure, out in the forest there was many a tasty bird, a woodlands animal, and if you knew how to start a proper fire (which, FYI, we did), there was wood galore and you could skewer those into some tidy kebabs to barbecue al fresco. But as if Winter would have been okay with munching on a teeny squirrel or a gosh-darn bluebird, and besides, the effort factor was high because the axe was pretty blunt, and I had tried a bunch of things, but I just couldn’t seem to sharpen it. Back then I wouldn’t even have dreamed of unsheathing The Knife. The motor blades on our father’s massive generator had cracked almost as soon as he left, and of course we had no idea about how to fix that kind of thing, so we just packed away the kettle and the fairy lights, and said goodbye to all our appliances. Instead we hung our clothes on the generator to dry when we washed them in the moat with hotel hand soaps, which we seemed to have about a zillion of, and got by on kerosene lamps and sleeping huddled up in winter.
Truth be told, we got seriously loved up on the whole Playing House thing, hauling buckets of water from the river, scrubbing our clothes on stones. We’d read enough Little House on the Prairie for that to seem dreamy, all the baking and foraging and darning and living in semi-rags, dresses made from T-shirts and shoes made from bits of old tyres because our feet were growing fast, and wearing nine jumpers on top of each other for warmth, and tapping sap from weeping trees and taping up twigs to make scratchy brooms and the satisfaction of finishing complicated quilting patterns using cut-up priest dresses, which I want to call tussocks but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. From where I am now I can see that all that homemaking was probably to do with controlling things that felt out of control. Being our own mothers, or something, like, psychological. But at the time it just seemed really nice compared to the last few months of our old life: all those midnight bolts to the door of a waiting black car with tinted windows, rolling into it while it was half taking off to a weird abandoned airstrip where a plane with a sharp little nose would always be waiting, its propeller already ticking like a sped-up heart.
Sure, from time to time, Winter would get all mopey—would ask stupid questions, would open the curtains that we had agreed to keep shut.
‘Why doesn’t Walter come to find us?’ she asked one hot evening. We were lying on our backs in the moat, its surface rippling with echoes of stars, our bodies white whispers below. ‘Why has he never come?’
‘We’ve been a lot of places, Winter. And it’s not like he could just email.’ I trailed my fingers through the water. Together, apart, together, apart. ‘How would he even know we were here?’ I said, not wanting to really get into the whole Walter thing.
‘But if he loved us,’ said Winter, standing up and squeezing out her ponytail, ‘couldn’t he tell?’
‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘He put a tracking device on the back of one of the unicorns we flew here on.’
‘I always knew where Mama was,’ she insisted. ‘I could tell. Even in Tokyo—’
In one motion I flipped myself over and slapped her so hard, the sound made us wince, made us deaf, and my hand burned raw, and I couldn’t catch my breath, my chest was that tight with fury.
Her dog started to bark so loud, it was like a saw in my ear. ‘Shut UP,’ I yelled, and flicked water at him. He stumbled back in shock and whimpered.
Winter didn’t cry. She just sank down and put her face in the water, maybe because some part of her was dripping blood—the corner of an eye, a nostril.
She stayed like that for ages, long after my hand stopped stinging. By the time she lifted her head back up, my collarbones ached with regret. And sure, I’ll bet now you’re thinking, Hoo boy, that Summer is a real psycho. But I wasn’t—not usually. I just loved Winter with everything in me—till sometimes I sprang leaks and it burst out of me.
‘Why does everyone who loves us always leave?’ she asked, and I swear she was asking the stars—that she was no longer talking to me at all.
‘I’m still here,’ I said.
She looked over at me, and even through the gloom I could see that her lip was split and blood was trickling down her chin, down her neck—that when she licked her lips, she would taste it.
‘Just so you know,’ I said coolly as I pulled myself up out of the water and onto the flagstones that bordered the church. ‘Pops told me never to tell you, but Walter died. He was captured. Ages ago.’
It wasn’t even true—well, it might have been by then. Who knew? But it was worth it to see her cry all the tears I never could, her big eyes leaking and gorgeous.
Winter
At first, the boy slept, hot and turning. He glowed like old fire.
Summer said not to go near him. That it might be catching. That it might be a trick. He would crack us in half, mess us up in nasty ways.
She was sure of so many things. Each of them like a pin in a board, trapping me under, a fluttering scrap.
She said we didn’t know what the world out there had become. We had been alone there so long on that tiny island, in that tiny church.
But in the night, I couldn’t bear it.
My chest beat like wings.
I went to him with a wet rag.
His lips were cracked deep. They ran with blood. His tongue was a white sea-sponge in his mouth.
He didn’t say anything—not for days. Until his fever broke, he just looked.
His eyes were all of the world. I wanted to stand on the feeling they gave me, so no one could see it.
They made me want to be alone for the first time ever.
Not alone by myself. But alone without Summer.
Alone with that boy, under the moon.
Stroking his hands.
Forever.
Summer
Sure, after our father left, we probably should have scratched the days into the bedpost in neat stacks of five and counted them up to keep track like they would have in an Enid Blyton novel. But we didn’t really have beds, just piles of communion cushions made into a sort of cosy nest, and who could bring themselves to scratch things into a pew? Well, maybe plenty of people, but not me, and totally, completely, definitely not Winter. And besides, we knew what season it was on account of the weather, and I don’t think we really believed we’d be there that long. Who can imagine forever?
We tried it once. We were down on the edge of the sea, which, kid you not, was a swimming pool’s length away from the church with only that green lawn between. That’s where we were lying, looking up, talking about infinity, and, yes, we were nerds, so it’s lucky we were diving prodigies, or we probably would have been called a lot worse than freaks. But other kids seemed to respect the fact that even when we were standing on our hands ten metres up on a big old plank, we weren’t even the tiniest bit scared to bend our elbows and push off and pike and twist and tuck before cutting the water like neat blades and leaving behind only the tiniest ring of bubbles, like a goldfish makes when it blurps. I don’t mean to be immodest here, but in the minds of everyone who’s anyone in the diving world, we had pretty much won the Olympic gold medals in synchronised diving for the next zillion years with perfect tens in both categories (three and ten metres). To tell you the truth, it was getting a little boring. Like someone giving you a perky round of applause every time you breathe.
‘You can’t tell me you can visualise infinity,’ I said to Winter that day on the lawn, the sunshine finally warm again—our second spring on the island. We were looking up at the clouds, which were racing away as if they had somewhere good to get to, perhaps a cloud ball, which is something Winter would have loved to imagine, and I’ll keep that stored up to tell her when she gets to this place I’m in now.
I looked up at those clouds and I said to her, ‘Nothing goes on forever.’
‘It does, doesn’t it,’ said Winter happily and closed her eyes so her eyelids would get sunned too, because heaven forbid you should neglect you
r eyelids or anything else that might need the sweet and inextinguishable rays of your compassion. That’s why Pops and I would privately roll our eyes at old Winter, and say to each other with only our minds, ‘What a sap, am I right?’
‘It’s nice, isn’t it,’ Winter said then, ‘not knowing what day of the week it is.’
I said, ‘Don’t be stupid, it’s—’
And when I said, ‘Saturday’ and she said, ‘Wednesday?’, something inside me went cold, because Winter was ridiculously clever, and I wasn’t, like, totally stupid either. But before I had the chance to go into full hiding-my-breakdown mode, Winter said, ‘Summer, what’s that moving?’
Well, it was a plump brown bear waddling out of the trees at the bottom of Our Mountain.
Except there weren’t any bears on that island.
So what was he really?
Winter
‘Look at that moon,’ I said to the boy, hot-sick in his blankets. ‘You wouldn’t want to miss all those moons we’ve got coming. And the sunsets. It’s worth staying just for those, isn’t it? All peaches and orange and berry and plum. We grow those things here—all of them. We have trees. We make jam in late summer. If you stick around, we’ll put it on a scone for you. We don’t have cream or butter. But if the scone’s hot, you hardly notice that it’s a bit floury.
‘I was reading, just today, a quote about suns. Well, it was about Islamic women in extremist regimes. Saying how they’re like suns trapped behind walls. Isn’t that sad to think of? A thousand splendid suns all tucked away, blazing into nothing.
