The End of the World Is Bigger than Love

by Davina Bell

  ‘But then I thought…I still think, well, we’re those suns, aren’t we? Tucked away in here all day. Like we’re locked in a big cell. We’re suns, too—at least, a little. Summer would never admit it. And I know we’re lucky to still be alive and it’s safe here. But sometimes it feels so small, this church. Like a jar. And I look out at the sea and I think…Well, I guess I don’t know what I’m saying, just rambling. I’m out of practice. Usually I only have Pete to talk to.

  ‘I checked your back, by the way. And it’s fine—no bruises, no lumps, and your skin is still brown. I hope you don’t mind. You know how it is with The Greying. Summer says that everyone would know now—everyone everywhere.

  ‘If I just keep talking and you just keep breathing, that’s a fair deal, isn’t it. In and out, just like that. You should be proud, how well you’re doing. I’m proud of you and I don’t even know you. I’ll be here—every night, I’ll be here. You just sleep.’

  Summer

  We wrapped him up, that bear, as if he were a loaf of still-warm sourdough bread in a brown paper bag. For the first few hours, tight in his blanket, he shook like he was sitting on top of a dryer. He must have been scared, not cold, because it was spring then, and the sun was still rising and setting, rising and setting, like a super-reliable yo-yo, and the days were clean and blossom-warm.

  Boy, was that bear cute. He was small and soft like…well, like a teddy, and that’s how he got his name. Edward. I had to grit my teeth a lot when he was lying in my arms and looking into my eyes as if I and only I were Love. Sure, he wasn’t quite a baby, but something in us must have wished he was, because we carried him round on one hip, even though it hurt our backs. I swear if we’d had access to a bonnet, he would’ve been getting around in that daily. I talked to him, that bear. I purred, ‘there there,’ and crooned and asked him questions that I answered myself and said the kind of rhymes I imagine a mother would murmur, though how would I really know? Never had one. But if there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s that a heck of a lot of things rhyme with ‘bear’, and it was nice to chat with someone after all this time—maybe a year?—of just us and old Bartleby. How was I to know what would happen after that?

  I rocked him and swayed and walked around and, using all my might, lifted him up under his arms so we were face to face, and I rubbed our noses together, and kissed the flat little patch of fur between his eyes. You pretty much get the whole gooey picture, and if you’re thinking, Um, hello, wild animal?! then you’re smarter than we were, and we once tied for first place in an International Maths Olympiad, I kid you not.

  Winter didn’t talk to him—not even a whisper. She just held him on her lap, quiet and tender, and sat by the stained-glass window and looked out, not down, and she didn’t tuck the sheet in or fuss about, blowing raspberries onto his pudgy beachball of a tummy. As I watched her, I felt impatient to have him back in my arms—could feel the weight of him there already—and those hours waiting for my turn were complete torture, like when a cake’s in the oven and the crust is baked but you know the middle is still runny and you just want to pull it out and stick a spoon in anyway.

  But on Winter’s lap, that’s where he stopped shaking, and I swear to you that he yawned and stretched out his arms and smiled at her, and shook his head back and forth as if to say, ‘What the heck have I just been doing? Fool!’ Winter lowered him to the floor and off he went, loping in a happy kind of hop down the aisle, like he was fizzed up on communion wine. As we chased him around the church, we were laughing. He was so quick and funny and nosy and sweet, and here’s a word that people don’t get to use enough: gambolling.

  After about an hour, he needed an actual nap like a real baby, and he tucked himself under the altar, coiled up like Pete would sleep each night in the crook of Winter’s knees.

  We watched that bear for ages, not saying anything, both just deep in loving him, and maybe it wasn’t even him—maybe it was the idea that something else was out there in the world.

  At first, it didn’t occur to me to do anything but love him till it hurt, so that’s what we did.

  Winter

  I went to that boy. Night after night. Pete came, too.

  Gradually he cooled down.

  At first, his throat was too tight for talking. But some nights he winked. The flutter of his eyelid on the skin of my heart.

  Eventually he croaked out his name. It sank into me like a cutter through dough.

  In the mornings, Summer felt my yawns as if they were hers. ‘I am warning you, Winter,’ she said. ‘You don’t know where he’s from or what he wants or how he even got onto this island. What if he’s actually some kind of kinky murderer who’s going to stuff us into a rubbish bin and pour acid on us so that our bones melt? Or if he’s been sent to steal all of Pops’s stuff, like those—’

  ‘He’s not,’ I said quickly. ‘He hasn’t. I just know.’

  ‘Your problem,’ she said, ‘is that you always believe the best in people. It’s like a disease with you.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Not everyone is sweetness and light and floral aprons. Just look at your dog,’ she added. ‘He looks harmless enough and yesterday he tried to chew off my face.’

  ‘He’s not my dog,’ I said.

  But Summer wouldn’t hear that. There was so much she wouldn’t hear, so much that I wasn’t allowed to say. I had stopped trying—my voice wasn’t loud enough. ‘Please let the boy stay,’ I said. ‘Just till he’s better?’

  ‘Or dies,’ said Summer, and thought for a while. ‘Well, just don’t think I’m helping you dig a grave, because remember the blisters I got when we buried the guinea pig? I couldn’t hang from the monkey bars for ages after that.’

  ‘Thank you!’ I said. I curled my arms around her neck. Even her neck felt stronger than mine. I didn’t even mind the lie about the guinea pig. The hole we dug was so much bigger than that.

  ‘Just remember the rules,’ Summer warned. ‘Don’t you even think about mentioning what’s in the bell tower.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said. I never break the rules. Or at least I never did.

  His name was Edward Ashby, in case you were wondering.

  Summer

  Do you know—have you ever even thought—how handy a bear actually is to have around? Even a little-ish one, or one that starts off little, makes a great table on a hot summer’s night, when you want to pretend you’re a just-married couple at a resort in Bermuda and you eat dinner down on the sand with a white bit of cloth over the bear’s back and an altar candle on that flat part on top of its head, though this comes with a warning that crabs come out at night, and boy, do they nip.

  If you have even the most basic supplies, like the end of a bell tower rope, you can make a bear cub its own cute harness and attach it to a little cart, and it can jog alongside you, right up to the base of Our Mountain, with enough books and apples and thermos tea to last until sunset. You could get through two Harry Potters before you had to wind things up and sit on its back and ride down the mountain, talking deep about whether you’re a Ron or a Hermione or a Harry or a Hedwig the owl.

  That delicious summer with the bear ended in a confetti-pop of magic and long days out and about, and silky, salty morning swims before the sand blew up all gritty. Lunches in the meadow, plush with flowers—purple ones, mostly, but not just purple how you’re seeing it in your mind right now, I’m talking so many shades of purple that some are shaking hands with blue and some are sidling up to hot pink and the rest are having a good old time with whites and greys and browny-blacks.

  And the smell, well, it was like your mum’s high-end perfume and a Christmas tree (a real one) and a florist’s shop and an ice-cream parlour and a pile of grass clippings dumped next to a swimming pool on a sunny day and the cool stone foyer of a posh hotel; it was all of those things together. The smell—that’s what I remember when I think about those long, lazy days when we were three together: Winter, the bear and me.

  I had folded an old altar clot
h into a sling and strapped Edward onto Winter’s back, all snug, and as a Surprise, I’d cut off a couple of squares and made us headscarves so we could play out that scene from The Sound of Music where they get those rocking curtain clothes and go all loose and crazy in Vienna, singing about deer. That was Winter’s favourite, and I know sometimes I could be a little, you know, bossy, but shoot me cold if I didn’t try every nanosecond to make her happy—if every titchy thing I made us do wasn’t to keep her true heart beating on just the way it did. And considering we’d had to stop wearing underwear a while back because we were pretty low on the old textiles, I think you’ll probably get what a Sacrifice (capital S) that Von Trapp headscarf really was.

  That was the day we taught Edward to roll down the hill, that funny old bear, and to turn in circles looking at the sky until he was fall-down dizzy. We taught him to stand up on his hind legs and hold the end of our skipping rope so that we could skip without having to tie the other end to an organ pipe or the stone font where Pops told us that babies were dunked in water, back when churches were still used for holy things. And even though it took some doing, eventually that bear could arc the rope around with the best of them, so that it flicked white against that blue, blue sky, and swoosh it so it nearly touched the ground but didn’t. Blow me down if it wasn’t nice to have him around, sort of festive, like gelato, or a new nun/ nanny who makes you realise you’ve been living your life answering to a whistle when you could have been wearing curtains and choreographing marionette shows.

  And I guess I figured that if we stayed there, playing grown-ups, maybe we could stay kids forever. I’m not talking in a Peter Pan way (because, honestly? I think that guy had Issues). Summer, you are thinking, fourteen is not a kid. Fourteen can hold a machine gun on its shoulder, a baby in its insides. But to me, we were very much Not Yet Adults, in spite of what was going on under our shirts. I guess I just mean I wanted to be wrapped up safe in the way we knew the world, and the way the world knew us.

  Winter

  When he first got out of bed, I was standing in the doorway.

  ‘Hey,’ he whispered.

  Pete was tucked at my side. I was holding him back with all of my thoughts. Earlier he had snapped at Summer’s Achilles. Gnashed the air so hard he cracked off a tooth.

  ‘Here, boy,’ Edward croaked, and Pete went.

  ‘You’re a good guy,’ he said, and Pete sat.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  The boy said, ‘Fancy a run?’ and Pete wagged his whole self. And to me he said, ‘Come with?’

  I said, ‘I don’t know how to run.’ And I didn’t.

  ‘You don’t know how to walk?’ He smiled. The gloss of his eyes was silver. ‘You don’t know how to breathe? Because that’s all it is: fast walking, deep breathing.’

  He wore my father’s old pyjama pants. He ran his hand through his hair.

  I said, ‘We never did sports.’

  He cupped his palm on Pete’s head, patient and gentle.

  Pete rolled over. He waved his paws around.

  ‘He can foxtrot,’ I said. I don’t know why I told him. I knew Summer would hate it. I swallowed. ‘I’ll come.’

  But after three steps, Edward fell down, still fever-weak and shaky. A mauve egg popped up on his forehead.

  I had to call Summer to help lift him. I didn’t know if she would.

  ‘Your skeleton must weigh a lot, because there’s not much else left of you,’ she said from under his arm.

  ‘It’s my brains,’ said Edward. ‘They’re huge.’

  ‘You’ll fit in well here, then,’ Summer said back. ‘Sudoku at seven.’

  And after that we never spoke about him leaving. Not once.

  The days got longer. Edward got stronger.

  He caught things. In his hands, in nets. He dug around and pulled things up.

  He loved to carve. He loved to fix.

  We found coffee at the back of the church hall. He made it with condensed milk. Each morning, we combed through our dreams as we drank it. Summer lived to talk about her dreams.

  She stood on his shoulders to clean the stained glass.

  Pete grinned by his side wherever he went.

  Picking mulberries, still warm from the sun. Riddles as the sky went dark. My stomach hurt. I had swallowed a star.

  ‘Here’s one,’ said Summer up the plum tree one sunset. ‘What is greater than God, more evil than the devil, the poor have it, the rich need it, and if you eat it you’ll die?’

  ‘Hmm.’ He chewed awhile. Even the way he ate plums was something. ‘Tricky one, Surf.’

  ‘Surf?’ said Summer.

  ‘Summer’s a name for a surfer girl, don’t you think? All blonde and tanned and with a cute nose.’

  ‘A cute nose? A surfer girl?’ Summer rippled. ‘You have some seriously outdated conceptions of gender.’

  ‘You have a cute nose,’ said Edward. ‘Oh, wait—sorry, that’s your sister. My bad.’

  Summer threw a plum at him. It hit him in the temple.

  ‘Easy,’ he said as he rubbed his head.

  ‘You’re easy,’ said Summer.

  ‘Your mother’s easy,’ said Edward, without thinking.

  There was silence.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I didn’t mean it. Guess I’m just used to being around dudes. We say things like that. Your mother…’ He swallowed. ‘Is she…I guess she’s not around?’

  I should have known we would get here sometime. In my mind, I saw Summer and me on opposite banks of a pounding river. Between us raged our different truths. They clashed into foam.

  ‘She died when we were born,’ said Summer brusquely. ‘We don’t discuss it. And FYI, our dad was taken by ninjas.’

  ‘It wasn’t ninjas,’ I said quietly.

  But Summer ignored me. ‘The answer is nothing, by the way.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Edward asked her.

  ‘The riddle. Think about it.’

  Summer

  Winter got it in her head to take the bear for a visit to the forest so it wouldn’t forget its roots, which—as you can imagine—I thought was completely ridiculous. ‘He’s not a Chinese orphan living in America,’ I told her. ‘It’s not like he needs to go to Mandarin School on Saturday afternoons and learn one of those complicated string instruments to keep in touch with his culture. Besides, that forest is creepy. Remember the snake?’

  And, of course, though she’d been all gung-ho for it, that was enough to put Winter off, because in our first autumn we had found a snake in there, and I kid you not when I say that it had swallowed a human arm—you could see it through the skin, like the hand was wearing a snakeskin glove. If you think we’d gone more than a few steps into the forest since then, you have a banana for a brain, because even a basketful of fresh mushrooms plucked from the earth wasn’t worth accidentally picking up a stray finger or stepping over a log onto, like, a head with those white, staring eyes you always see in zombie movies at sleepovers, not that we really ever went to that many, because here’s the thing about being a twin: people kind of assume you don’t need other friends, and they’re sort of right.

  Try not to get too judgey, but I didn’t even like Winter wearing headphones to watch plane movies—I just didn’t want there ever to be anything between us, for our worlds not to be in perfect sync. And, sure, in hindsight some people could say I was a little controlling, but Winter was the best part of me, and who wouldn’t want to keep that part safe behind glass and shiny for always, especially when nobody else was going to do it?

  When The Greying started, we were in Tokyo. I would set my alarm each night just to check Winter’s back as she slept. I tried to hoik up her nightie without waking her to see if she’d caught it but, boy, does she sleep light. ‘Am I dreaming?’ she would murmur, or she’d whisper to herself, ‘Peter Pan, Peter Pan, Peter Pan.’ Who knows what that guy had to do with the whole global pandemic, but some nights, as I lay awake watching to make sure she breathed, I
would imagine him flying up onto our windowsill to keep me company, and, truth be told, it helped a little.

  ‘Dude,’ I would whisper to Imaginary Pan, ‘you know you’ll have to grow up sometime, right? It’s, like, science.’

  ‘You sound just like Wendy,’ he would whisper back, rolling his eyes. ‘Girls suck so bad.’

  ‘Good luck finding a girlfriend with that attitude,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a bit presumptuous, don’t you think?’ said Pan, all snooty. ‘Because FYI, I think I’m actually gay.’

  ‘You’re a pretty sharp dresser,’ I told him. ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘Not all gay males are stylish. You’re making assumptions,’ he told me. ‘Again.’

  When things got REALLY bad and we left Tokyo for the island, I stopped watching over Winter as she slept. Pops had brought us here to get away from the evils of the world, so I never worried about The Greying following, trailing behind us like a mournful, ashy ghost. It faded away from my thoughts, along with the internet, and dairy products, and sunscreen, and diving training, and hair dryers, and streetlights, and all the other parts of our lives that had once seemed Essential (capital E) but now felt kind of irrelevant. It stopped occurring to me to cut rectangles in the backs of Pops’s old sports T-shirts, which we rumbled around in, thinking they made pretty great mini dresses.

  And, sure, some nights I would wake and get all existential: I’d start wondering if we were already sleeping in the building we’d die in, or if we had died already and this was Purgatory, or some kind of big old holding pen where we’d dwell forever in limbo. Generally, though, I thought we were happy in our dreamy, slightly feral aloneness, half in love with reading the classics out loud to each other and perfecting our fire-making skills.

  But only a few months before that bear showed up, I was tucked up in the bell tower at sunset, writing a poem about a particularly melancholy goose who gets left behind when his chums fly south for the winter, and it sort of makes me cringe now to think about it, that clunky rhyme, the whole autobiographical angle. I’d been at it all afternoon, deep in my own genius, and now the sun was plunging down through the sky. The sea was milky in the dying winter’s light, and I had my back to the warm stone wall, wrestling with the final stanza as the world burned gently orange around me. Metaphorically speaking.