by Davina Bell
Three times that afternoon Winter had called up from the bottom of the stairs to offer me snacks and encouragement. She never came up to the bell tower. Most things to do with Pops spooked her right out, and the three things that were left there, out of sight if you weren’t used to looking, were so close to his heart they were practically ventricles. I had sent her away, all sniffy. ‘Real artists starve for their craft,’ I called. ‘But when I’m finished, can you make that dehydrated beef bourguignon?’
When it got too dark to see the page, and I closed my notebook, and looked out through the west arch at the sea, there she was, where the waves slid up on the shore: not heating our dinner on the camp stove, but struggling with the weight of a full backpack as she tried to pull herself up onto what seemed to be a sort of homemade raft.
I stood up and leaned right out over the stone balustrade, and when I squinted I could see that it was plastic barrels, tied together—some of the empty barrels of fuel that Pops had brought with us to power up the generator, which we hadn’t been able to use for ages. On days when it was super hot, we’d take the empty ones up the mountain, launch them on the river, curl our tummies over the warm, yellow plastic that smelled like a baby doll we’d once had. We’d ride them back down, our arms outstretched so that we could hold pinkie fingers as we floated.
But now, as she tried again and again, unsuccessfully, to jump up onto her raft, Winter clearly wasn’t waiting for me to join her on a nautical adventure. The big backpack was dragging her down pretty hard. It must have been heavy and that’s when I realised: Winter wasn’t just planning a short picnic with the dolphins.
You know that feeling when your head goes hot hot hot at the same time as your insides turn to ice, and you sweat right at your hairline while your stomach clenches up, like it wants to turn inside out? That—that’s the feeling I got when it dawned on me that Winter was running away, or trying to. That however you tried to look at it, she was running away from me.
Just when I could hardly see her through the gloom, Winter gave up. She pulled the raft onto the sand and looked around to make sure nobody was watching, nobody as in me, and I bet you’re thinking that this is the moment when I stormed down the 362 steps of the bell tower and out onto the beach to confront her, waving my arms, all bold and loud and mad.
But I didn’t.
My legs were shaking too much to move anywhere, and as she dragged the raft across the lawn and scampered off to stash her supplies, I sank to my knees, closed my eyes. And when I came down and Winter was serving up a dish of steaming dehydrated French beef stew for me to eat by starlight, I didn’t say anything at all. I didn’t ask where she thought she was going, or why. Was I frightened of the answers, or did I know them already? I just said, ‘The way you make this—it’s so good,’ and tried not to throw up as she beamed at me proudly.
I’m not sure why I was so shaken, so surprised, because after Pops left us, I was the one who wanted to hang around when Winter had begged, over and over, to do the one thing we could that would allow us to leave. ‘There’s nobody here to take care of us,’ she wept. ‘Nobody knows that we’ve even survived. Please, Summer? Please can we just go?’
‘I’m still here,’ I’d say sourly. ‘I can take care of us. And it’s not so bad, just you and me. Besides, Pops wanted us to stay. We’re doing this for him.’ I would turn my face away from her fear and her red-rimmed eyes.
So after Edward arrived and I saw how much Winter loved him, how much he adored her—that’s when I could finally relax a little, because now she had something to stay around for. Like a mound for her to stick a flagpole in and claim her place in the world. Eventually I stopped getting edgy every time she left the room, and when he would pad after her, I’d try not to mind that he’d left me behind. When he was around, she seemed to forget that there was even a way we could escape from here at all. And after a while Winter overcame her squeamishness and took the bear to the forest so he could put his paws in piles of leaf litter and commune with the spirits of his forebears, or whatever she thought he was doing in the forest. If only I had gone along with them—well, you’ll see.
Winter
‘What’s with all the reading, anyway?’ Edward asked one night. He was lighting the fire.
We were reading in the pews, Summer and I, our feet sole to sole. Summer liked them that way, all lined up. We had two copies of Gone with the Wind. I read faster, but I waited at the end of each page. I knew she liked us to turn them together. It gave me a chance to watch how he moved. Smooth somehow.
‘It’s kind of, you know…passive,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be up and doing something than sitting round like this, flicking pages with your thumb?’
‘Passive?’ bristled Summer. ‘Flicking? You think ingesting deep truths about the human condition to better understand humanity is passive? That’s the most meat-heady thing you’ve said yet, and that includes your views on soft-plastic recycling. Did you miss the memo? Reading is the new social media—people are crazy for it. Have you ever even finished a book?’
He sat back on his knees. He ran his hands through his hair. His jawbone popped out as he clenched his teeth.
‘You can’t read,’ I realised, and wished I hadn’t. When I looked up, I could see the part of him that could fight off a wolf. Something hard passed over his face.
‘Winter can teach you,’ Summer said breezily. ‘No probs at all. We were at a camp in South Sudan once and, I kid you not, she taught a bunch of kids their ABCs, and they couldn’t even speak English to start off with. We ended up taking turns to read them Anne of Green Gables out loud, and they lapped it up like a bowl of melted ice cream. Boy, those kids were tall. Taller than you, even. Maybe.’
How I loved Summer then, her straightness. It wasn’t always easy to love her that true.
‘I can teach you,’ I said. ‘If you want to learn. I can help.’
‘Can’t,’ he said, and his voice was husky. ‘I’ve tried before.’
‘But you can speak,’ I said. ‘You can see. That’s all it is: words and looking.’
Edward looked up at me and winked.
‘And Winter is patient,’ said Summer. ‘Heaps more than me. Even if you’re a total cheese brain, she’ll get you there in the end. She could teach an Eskimo to rollerblade.’
‘I don’t think you’re allowed to say Eskimo anymore.’ I felt shy. ‘I think it’s Inuit.’ I turned to Edward. ‘You’re teaching me to run, remember?’
‘Vaguely,’ he said.
‘WHAT? Winter can’t run.’ Summer frowned at me. ‘Why would you even want to? And where?’
‘In the forest,’ I whispered.
‘Well, that’s the most idiotic thing I ever—’
Pete woofed, and raised his eyebrows.
Summer clicked her tongue and turned back to Edward. ‘Just say yes already. I know a book you’d go totally nuts for.’
Edward smiled. ‘I guess it’s time I understood humanity a little better.’
Summer
Us and Edward and the beach at sunset, right where it rubbed shoulders with the meadow, and that feeling like the one you get from a movie where there’s a bunch of kids in a performing arts school and they all understand The Pressure of Being an Artist, and they walk along in a row with their arms around each other’s shoulders, boys and girls, like it isn’t awkward—like it’s actual, deep, respectful, abiding love that will last way after the applause at the end of the end-of-year show, where they are hoping to attract talent agents, even though you and I both know that eventually they’ll be going up against each other in auditions.
There was Winter, turning cartwheels on the sand with her toes pointed, and me talking about rodeos, and the bear trying to nibble the waves, not understanding the fundamentals of solids and liquids and gas, and us laughing at his sweet pudgy face, biting down on our teeth because we could have squeezed his skull till his eyeballs popped out, that’s how much we loved him.
And then
the BOOM, which was the crash of a plane hitting the base of Our Mountain, and the hum and the silence, which was the propeller slowing and me freezing up and Winter running across the grass towards the wreck, and the bear following, so that I had to sprint not to be left behind as they circled the oozing smoke, like it wasn’t about to pop in a giant orange cotton-wool fireball.
‘Get away!’ I screamed, still running. ‘Get away NOW—Winter—GET—A—WAY.’
But I knew that while there was a chance of a chance of a pilot trapped inside, Winter would be there, thrusting her fist through the window without even so much as a tea towel wrapped around it, and it was useless to wish otherwise. I could almost feel the heat from the explosion that was going to rip her into fragments so small, I’d have to sweep them up with a paintbrush. You can imagine my relief when the bear overtook her, bounded past and leapt onto the creased-up wing, stretched to full height as if he wasn’t a bear but a volunteer firefighter crossed with a superhero. And in a movement that was graceful and frightening both together, he flexed his arms and bent and ripped off the pilot-side window, just like that, as if he were lifting a tray from an oven.
By then I’d reached Winter and was pulling her back and away, and her elbows were pummelling my ribs, pow pow pow, like tennis balls being served straight at me by a tall Russian dude, and we were both shouting ‘No!’ but for different reasons. It was only when she kicked her heel back into my kneecap that I let her go, more in surprise than pain. Turns out I wasn’t the only one in for a surprise, because by the time Winter had climbed up next to Edward on the wing, he had leaned back from the cockpit and had his head on one side, scratching it, all confused, because there wasn’t anyone in that plane—the pilot’s seat was empty. The whole plane was empty.
As Winter ran her hands over the dashboard, I said, ‘It’s a—’
‘I know what it is,’ she said sharply, and that’s when I knew just how top-of-the-roller-coaster frightened she was.
And so, yes, I admit it might have been overkill when I said, ‘They’re coming. They know what’s here.’
Winter
It wasn’t the alphabet he had trouble with.
It wasn’t the sounds or the letters.
It was holding the words in his head as he ran along the lines. They were like train carriages, uncoupled.
I started with joining two at a time. I wrote them down big: I see. You are. We feel. I wish.
‘What do you wish?’ Edward asked.
I looked over at Summer, who was darning.
I looked up into Edward’s eyes. I saw my reflection—a tiny me, twice.
‘I wish…I wish that my mother hadn’t died the way she did,’ I said.
I saw Summer freeze.
Edward nodded, but he didn’t ask for anything more.
And I didn’t regret it. I took the pen. ‘Try this one,’ I said.
‘Right now,’ he read eventually.
And then there was a roar. A crash that shook my skull.
BANG went the mountain.
Up swirled the flowers.
His hand on my arm.
Down fell my heart.
Summer
After that, the planes came more regularly—not crashing, just circling like lost, dreamy albatross. But I convinced Winter they were just drones sent to take pictures. ‘It’s just part of a standard government mapping procedure,’ I said.
‘Which government?’ asked Winter.
‘Oh, shut up,’ I said crossly. ‘You don’t always have to know everything.’
‘I thought they were banned, the drones,’ said Winter. ‘After that horrible thing with the acid and—’
‘I said, shut up.’
We hadn’t found any explosives attached to the plane that had crashed on our grass. The empty cockpit reminded me of those driverless cars that were popular for a while, until the prank where hackers all around the world drove them into frozen yoghurt shops remotely at the same time, like some sick flash mob, and all those people died—kids still clutching their fro-yos, sticky and melting and pure.
But how long till anyone dropped by in person to check the whole scene out? Gradually the background mosquito-whine of the planes became the soundtrack to something—the return of some kind of uneasiness that we’d thought we could finally stop running from.
Thank goodness for Edward, that bundle of golden happiness. We just had to look at him and we were beaming—could waste half a day folding newspaper hats and trying to get him to wear them, weaving him meadow-flower garlands, giving him foil packets of black-pepper-and-lime-flavoured cashews and watching him try to pop them open.
I wanted to teach him things, fill him up with the goodness and light that I wished somebody would pour into me, like lamp oil. And I’d tried not to mind at the start, but now whenever Winter took him anywhere alone, I would pace and ache and act all aloof, like I didn’t care, while I fretted a thousand frets. Basically, I acted fourteen and in love, which is what I was. Or were we fifteen now? It felt strange not to know.
‘Let’s take him up to the bell tower,’ I said to Winter one evening, betting she’d say no and I would have him to myself. ‘We can show him the sun setting over the sea. We want to cultivate an artistic sensibility in this guy, am I right? Painters love sunsets.’
‘I don’t think he can see that far,’ she said doubtfully, but of course that’s not the reason why she wouldn’t come.
‘Suit yourself.’ And to Edward I said, ‘Come on, you big potato. Let’s go and get you a poet’s soul.’
Lucky for me he was tuckered out by the time we reached the top, had hardly made it up all 362 steps, or he could have caused all kinds of problems if he’d really been sniffing around.
Though it was tricky now the bear had got so plump, I scooped that rascally guy up in my arms and nuzzled him, did the thing where we rubbed our noses like Eskimos (Inuits?), swung him high over my head and turned him upside down so his fur flipped and he looked like a baby with a comb-over, all serious eyes and plump belly, and I seem to remember he had fat rolls on his thighs but maybe that’s just wishful thinking. I’d pretty much forgotten the sunset by then; it wasn’t nearly as eye-popping and spectacular as my love for Edward. As I’d tried to tell Winter, I could practically see my feelings for him streaking across the sky like the northern lights. But I knew, I just knew, that she thought she loved him more. Not that it was a competition or anything, but you try being a twin—it’s hard not to always be measuring yourself.
‘Now, usually you’re not allowed up here, you scamp,’ I said to the cub as I spun him around. ‘And if someone comes, no matter how official they seem, they’re not allowed either, okay? Not terrorists, not tech dudes in baseball caps, and not you ever again, you roly-poly dream. Ooooh! I could eat you up. This is where the SECRETS are, and you’re Just. Too. Silly. To understand those.’
I wasn’t actually joking about any of that, and maybe that bear could understand more than I thought, because I swear he frowned then and wriggled free of my arms, dropped to the ground and ambled over to the north arch to take a peek out at the world.
‘Careful, sport,’ I said to Edward. ‘Watch yourself up here.’ Just like Pops had said to me a hundred times—a thousand.
If you didn’t know what was in the bell tower, right now you’d probably be thinking something like, Oh, how nice of that nerdy dad to keep his daughters so safe on that beautiful island at the end of the world! How smart to find it, so far away from everything rotting and tortured and dark. And, hoo boy, I feel as if it’s my duty to point out that it’s not as simple as it seems, but is anything?
What you should actually be asking as you read my very neat, small, tidy writing (which, can I say, is not easy to execute when you’re left-handed) is some kind of version of this: what did their dad do that was so bad that he had to drag his charming pair of daughters to camp out like fugitives at the ends of the earth?
And, well, I guess it was sort of bad, though he wa
s actually trying to do something boomingly, globally, totally GOOD, at least to start with. But things don’t always turn out how you want them to—ask most people here, I bet, not that I’ve seen any since I arrived.
So—it came out later—my dad wasn’t studying axolotls at all. He was the guy who figured out how to put free wi-fi in the takeaway coffee cups that nobody was using anymore on account of the role of disposable packaging in environmental carnage and also because they didn’t want everyone else to think they were arseholes. By then the shame factor around single-use objects was high. This was around the time that the phone companies got everyone hooked on looking at the internet on their mobiles approximately a zillion times per day as if they seriously couldn’t help themselves, and then jacked the prices right up so that—no jokes—people started getting bills that meant they had to sell their houses and move into the weird white tent cities that sprang up around the edges of the actual cities like inside-out bread crusts. You probably remember what went down then—all the kinds of things that happen when people feel desperate and hard done by. Black markets, hostages, dodgy deals, you know how it goes. For about a year, the world was data-starved and mean with it. People were on fire with jealousy, which was fitting, given that huge stripes of the planet were on fire too.
So when Pops figured out how to pick up internet via the little fibres in cardboard, and people, with some light googling, could tap into the networks that were still around (government ones, mostly, and rich people’s), boy, was he a hero for three hot seconds. He was on about twenty-four thousand podcasts and even a TV talk show. Once Winter and I found a clip but we couldn’t watch past the theme music because it was the one with the host who makes everyone dance along to the opening credits. We shrieked and slammed the laptop shut. Let’s just say Pops might have been one smart dude, but he did not have an innate sense of rhythm.
