by Davina Bell
‘Wasn’t that man at our hotel?’ Winter whispered, cutting me off, which she never did.
‘Which man?’ I asked sharply.
She cupped her palms together and lifted them to her mouth, pretending she was blowing on them to keep warm. Then she leaned a tiny bit to her left and flicked her fingers towards a really clean-cut dude in a hiking jacket and a wholesome-looking backpack with a Canadian flag stitched to the top. He was writing something on a bauble, sticking his tongue out a little to the side with concentration.
‘That guy?’ I whispered. ‘He’s, like, a forest ranger. No way he’s the creepy type. Trust me.’
I turned and stared as the guy hung the bauble, tossed the marker back into the dish, and then put his thick black gloves into the pocket of his jacket and strode away.
‘Pops?’ I called. ‘Winter thinks that guy was following us—the guy who just wrote that there.’ I pointed, and Pops walked over, frowning, to pluck the bauble.
He read it. He pulled it close to his chest.
And then he didn’t move, not for ages.
‘What does it say?’ I asked impatiently, reaching out. But he wouldn’t give it to me.
My father sank to the ground, cross-legged, right in the snow.
‘FYI, your jeans aren’t waterproof,’ I said. ‘You’re really going to regret that later.’
But he just closed his eyes. Those icicle lights must have been on a timed setting, because they started to blink, one at a time, as if a tiny squirrel were running along the light rope, turning on each one in turn with his nimble squirrelly feet.
‘Um, do you need a hand?’ I asked uncertainly when Pops still hadn’t moved and it really was starting to get pretty chilly.
Winter knelt down opposite him and put her stripy hands on his knees. ‘You don’t have to see the whole staircase,’ she said kindly, ‘just take the first step.’
Pops looked up then, and he actually smiled, which was probably about as rare as that waterfall catching the sunset and looking like cascading fire.
He cleared his throat. ‘So we’re moving to Tokyo,’ he said slowly. ‘In the autumn. But first…How would you like to see Grandpa Walter?’
Winter clapped her hands with joy like the goof ball she was, but I had other things on my mind. ‘Hey, do you know what they’re mad for in Tokyo, Pops? Fairy lights. Can’t get enough of them. We’ll fit right in.’
And you know what? We did. After that summer with Walter on the island, we started our new life in Tokyo with suntans and full hearts. We loved our skyscraper school and the Harajuku girls, with their gelato-coloured hair and mint-green knee socks with bells on them, and that there was nothing you couldn’t get from a vending machine. We loved everything manga and the maid cafes in Akihabara, where girls in aprons made us wear bunny ears and tickled our noses with feather dusters. We loved Minami Tatako.
Minami came into our class mid-term, which caused a little stir, like when you shake up salad dressing in a jar. There was something about Minami. And, I kid you not, it was the very next morning that, unbeknownst to each other, Winter and I came into the kitchen, ready for school, both with our hair parted just like Minami’s, straight down the middle and silked flat against our skull, imagining that our eyes were big and round and dark and full of some kind of snow-kingdom magic, like hers seemed to be, and that we glided, not walked, as she’d done that first day.
Oh, you will have read about it in books—a magnetic personality, a hypnotic beauty—but all those words are just paper in the wind when there is someone you want to be and be around and be part of and never apart from, and that was Minami, and we both felt it, Winter and I. We couldn’t look away and our ears were sore with straining across the classroom to hear if she spoke, because it didn’t happen often, and her voice was gentle and her handwriting was thin-elegant perfect, and even though our school was an International School and we were used to all types of genius clowns blowing through, Minami was Something. She folded paper so crisply, the edges meeting perfectly every time, no overlap, which Winter particularly loved.
Minami wanted to be a vet when she grew up, but get this: she was actually a film star. Well, an actress, and that’s what she was doing in Tokyo, because she was filming a scene from the movie adaptation of a famous book that we actually technically couldn’t have loved more and had read approximately nine zillion times. Here’s a hint: it was Bridge to Terabithia. After a few weeks of rehearsals, she even cut off her hair so she could be more like the girl in the story, who’s an A-grade tomboy and doesn’t give two hoots about hair styling. ‘Isn’t she brave?’ Winter and I would say to each other as we brushed our teeth.
‘Minami Fever’, our father dubbed it, and for him to pick up on it, it must really have been a Thing, because he came in and out of his lab so rarely that it was like he was flipping a book with his thumb and the little cartoons at the bottom of the page were flicking fast to make a story, a life—our life, sped up and without the living in it.
I bet you’re thinking that this story ends with us befriending Minami, and getting invited onto her film set, and going skiing with her and wishing we had her perfect white fur-lined ski outfit, and staying up all night calculating what love percentage our names made with every boy in our class, and laughing.
But in actual fact, though we longed for that more than anything, we never really even had a full conversation with her—neither of us. We just sort of looked at her from across the street, the classroom, the climbing gym, aching, and had an imaginary life where we were BFFs, us three, and she came over to stroke Scout and Jem, our pair of miniature lop-eared rabbits. Boy, were they ever soft. And the weird thing is that Winter and I never even discussed it, our love for Minami—we just Knew each other’s hearts because they were basically two halves of a butterfly. At least they had been, right up until now.
Winter
Out by the dunes, I asked Edward when his birthday was. He said he didn’t know. He said he’d never had one. He didn’t need one. If you had good things, eventually you would only lose them.
The wind blew strong. We threw stones.
I said, ‘I could be your birthday. If you wanted.’
Then I pulled down my hat.
He tilted it up.
His eyes were so brown. Suddenly I couldn’t push my lips together.
He reached into my pockets and found my hands.
I’d left them there.
He pulled them out.
That night, I started to sew.
I found scraps. It was all we had.
I imagined that the thread was love.
It sounds silly now, I know.
Summer
I had made such a fuss at the start about not going with Winter and Edward to race around the forest—had made it clear I thought it was lame and pointless—that even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have joined in now. I wouldn’t have anyway, because I hated being bad at things—just ask the teacher at that puppeteering course we went to one holidays. I could tell that Winter was getting good and, sure, I could’ve caught up, but I didn’t want to seem, like, desperate or anything, and, yep, I was proud and stubborn—tell me something I don’t know.
So, as the start of autumn minced in, still warm and all crimson gold, it was just me alone, out pruning the graveyard roses with nail scissors and stacking firewood like an obsessive Norwegian, cursing their love as I slammed each log onto my very symmetrical pile. I thought dark thoughts about that bear as I was stewing approximately 1.4 million apples into some kind of watery sauce, wishing we had pastry for pie.
You’ve probably assumed by now that our wish list would be mighty long and I’ll bet you’re thinking up near the top would be ‘ASAP rescue operation!’ or ‘engaging human company’ or ‘new books’ or ‘iPhone upgrade’ or ‘certainty about the future’, and that’s probably because I’m being shady on the details of what everything was like out there before we came to dear old Bartleby. If you’d seen what we’d seen, Winter and I,
you’d be quite happy too, burrowed in with nothing that came from that world except a cathedral-sized room of high-end canned food that even included a case of that freeze-dried ice cream that astronauts eat.
And as for the future, well, I just imagined we’d grow old at dear Bartleby, like a pair of elegant maiden aunts, and delight in each other’s company and the changing seasons, and as time went on, we’d get better at some things, like ping pong, and worse at others, like, I don’t know, seeing and hearing. And though we wouldn’t have done anything Grand (capital G) with our lives or had a job or gone to university, maybe we would have written some philosophical poetry with geese metaphors, or made meaningful sculptures out of driftwood, and some day when we were skeletons lying side by side with our knuckles in a jumbled-up pile, someone would find our stuff and shriek ‘Genius!’ and we’d be posthumously famous forever more, and enjoy it all from heaven while eating Bonne Maman jam from the jar with spoons.
I’d say about an eighth of our Great Wall of Canned Food was Bonne Maman, though truth be told it was less a wall than a cavern, and so of course I never much thought about it running out. We foraged things from nature, like mulberries, and dug up the potatoes that Pops had planted, and I guess we could have dried the spring grass and ground it up for flour or something like that if we’d got desperate, which we never were. So it wasn’t until the day I suddenly got a hankering for some Italian nougat, which we inexplicably had in truckloads, and sprinted out the back to find some that—BANG!—it hit me, like when a cartoon villain stands on a rake and the handle flicks back hard and hits him in the face and there’s a ring of stars round his head.
There wasn’t any Italian nougat, or any kind of nougat at all. There were only four jars of French chestnut cream left. One box of parmesan twists. The macadamia and coconut muesli we had eaten every day since forever was down to one last row of shiny silver foil packets. The huge sack of lentils that Winter had once disappeared in during hide-and-seek was empty enough to kick under your bed if you had to clean up in a hurry. All that we seemed to have in any kind of abundance was a stash of some kind of meat paste that you could boil up, though who ever would because it was Disgusting. Somehow we’d finished a zillion cans of Italian chickpeas and Spanish anchovies, which are pretty good sources of protein, FYI. I don’t remember when we’d polished off the packets of peanut brittle, but apparently we had. Or someone had.
Perhaps you’re thinking, Well, they could probably forage and hunt and wear furs and streak mud on their faces and turn a little feral, and it would all be totally fine. And as I walked out into the fuzzy autumn evening with that awful nervous stomach you get when you’re about to give a book report for a book you haven’t read because you thought the cover was lame, that’s what I was telling myself, that it would all be totally fine. There was nothing so far that we hadn’t been able to handle—we were like those tiny Chinese kids in fancy circuses who wear cute hats and start off juggling three balls and end up tricking with seventy-seven and never even drop one, while the audience goes, ‘Awwww’. But then I remembered Winter’s face when we’d gone to one of those expensive circuses, and I knew, I just knew that she was practically bleeding with how many hours those kids had to practise away from their families, maybe with someone who was brutally strict and made them do hundreds of push-ups, or who just wasn’t very kind—who didn’t occasionally say, ‘Nice job!’—and the heaviness that went into bending their springy little bodies into those tricksy arches, and the lives they might have been rescued from, and all the things the money they sent back home could do, and all the things it couldn’t.
I missed Winter.
I missed her wispy warmth, so close. With all that running, lately she’d become so pink, and brown, and freckled and light-haired and long-limbed and late-summer autumned. I could feel the earth coming off her like some weird radiant energy when she came back from the forest, all flushed, her feet hard-soled but not dry and scaly like in an advert for heel balm. And the bear, so tall and broad and solid, like a statue in bronze in a pretty town square that a million people had climbed on to have their photographs taken. ‘Do you think he minds?’ Winter would have asked me while everyone clambered on the back of that bear statue to selfie themselves into the big old cloud of Data that was just floating around us like invisible coats we didn’t even realise we were wearing.
Or perhaps, now that she knew that bear—now that she knew something that wasn’t the dull pulse of the world’s pain—she wouldn’t have said that at all. Maybe she would just have turned to look up at the day-hidden stars and smiled.
As I looked around me, despairing at the empty space where cans of sardines used to balance in delicate towers, I realised—duh! The solution was right in front of me. This right here was the way to Houdini us out of this bizarre love triangle without anybody getting hurt at all, how I could lasso Winter and draw her back in to me, like I was some kind of Wyoming cowgirl taming a brumby on a golden plain. We had to leave the bear behind or we would starve or end up eating each other’s brains with spoons. We needed to leave and find someone—Walter, maybe—who would care that we were still alive. And possibly make us nachos.
Winter
‘So what’s up there?’ Edward asked as we rounded the last bend, sprinting.
Today I hadn’t needed to stop once, and we had run far. My feet were hard now. My heart was light and floaty, a rice-paper lantern. ‘Up where?’
‘In that tiny tower at the top of your church. We’ve never been up. Pretty view?’
‘Not really,’ I panted. ‘It…it smells. Bad.’ I pulled up to a stop. Wiped my forehead.
‘I bet you can see the lights from up there.’
‘What lights?’
Edward looked at me strangely as we walked the last stretch back to the moat. ‘From the settlement,’ he said. ‘On the other side of the mountain.’
‘What settlement?’ I asked. ‘There’s nothing else on the island.’
‘But Winter,’ he said slowly. ‘This isn’t an island.’
Summer
‘That bear has cleaned us out of all the Fortnum & Mason stuff—even the currant and rosemary jelly that was supposed to go with a rack of lamb,’ I told Winter. ‘In less than two seasons! We’re down to those lentils with the sprouty bits and that weird beef drink in the jar. Either the bear has to leave or we will. We need to go up to the bell tower, I mean, and—’
‘But that’s enough, isn’t it?’ said Winter. ‘For the winter. We like broth. And in the summer we can pick things again.’
I thought of me and the dribbly apple sauce and trying to chop up kindling alone with hand blisters that sang pain, and wishing I was Laura Ingalls Bloody Wilder with a dad in the woods with a big old gun, and then realising that was just what we did have, for a while, and it wasn’t actually that good, and I said, ‘You think?’
‘Edward can have my half,’ said Winter. ‘More than my half. I don’t need it.’
And I could have smashed her beautiful, rosy cheeks in, because of course I knew that stubborn expression—that if she wanted to she could totally become a breatharian and live off the full sweetness of air in a cave, draped in some kind of toga, and no one would be able to stop her.
I sighed. ‘Don’t be an idiot. A bear can’t survive on broth and you can’t survive on half-broth. We can’t stay here, Winter. Besides, doesn’t he need to go find a cosy spot in the forest to hibernate or whatever?’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘He can sleep by the windows. With me.’
And I said, ‘Winter. He is wild.’
And even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew the truth, which was that Winter was wild, too—that perhaps she always had been, and I had been trying to carry her around in a lunchbox, sort of against her will. I don’t mean wild like smoking-behind-the-shed wild, or pleather-hot-pants-and-too-much-eyeliner-lip-synchingon-a-naughty-video wild. I mean, well, I guess I mean, ever so deeply free.
‘We need to
leave,’ I said carefully, ‘or we’ll die. It’s time to go up to the bell tower and get things happening. And you know Edward can’t follow us there.’
‘Please,’ said Winter. ‘Maybe he can catch enough food for winter. Maybe in the forest—the river…Some salmon. Please, Summer? Just give him a little while?’
And even though, let’s face it, I had murdered that bear a thousand times in my mind—had smoked its hock into a fine pancetta—of course I couldn’t say no, because Winter’s head was tilted to the side, and her whole body was rigid with pleading. I looked at the scar across her nose that I didn’t have, and I felt the boxer inside me put down her gloves.
‘Two weeks,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Two weeks from today, and if we’re not hot-smoking an entire winter’s worth of salmon, we’re climbing those stairs and we’re gone.’
Winter
‘I don’t think your sister likes me,’ said Edward. He was sitting on a tree stump, stringing pieces of wire across the hole in an old tin. ‘And she really hates your dog. Maybe it’s time we moved on, Pete and I.’
‘Don’t do that,’ I said quickly. This was our favourite clearing. I leaned back against a tree. ‘It’s not safe out there. Besides, I need you. I mean, we need you. Both of us.’
He was making them shorter, tighter, those strings, so that he could pluck them. Like a guitar.
We were up to five words in a row with his reading. We’d got there last night.
I think I like you.
We are all safe here.
Please don’t leave without goodbye.
He should have felt happy. But he looked sad.
‘She does…’ I said. ‘She likes you. It’s just…Summer is…’
‘A big old liar? A total control freak? A thousand times a day, she lies—don’t think I haven’t noticed. A million times she tells you what to do. It’s not healthy.’
I felt hard little kicks in my stomach. I couldn’t agree but I couldn’t disagree. I rubbed my feet against Pete’s back. We had washed him in the moat with lavender shampoo, Edward and I. I didn’t tell Summer. The shampoo was supposed to be for that day in the future when we would go up to the bell tower, ready to leave.
