The End of the World Is Bigger than Love

by Davina Bell

  And if you’re wondering why I’m stalling so much at this point, it’s because it feels weird to spit it out and just TELL: we’d had it whipped into us so often that this was a Secret (capital S), and things depended on it that were so very much more important than our waify little lives, and how I wish ‘whipped’ was a metaphor. We had travelled round the world for those three things—had been shot at in planes by ground-to-air missiles that only just twirled over us like Catherine wheels; had been grabbed at a bazaar in Alexandria, where Winter was contemplating buying blue beads for our driver because she felt sad that his grandson had cholera, and we’d almost been thrown into a van, so I guess we were sort of kidnapped.

  So. Deep breath! I’ll just say it, shall I?

  Here are the things that I expected to see hidden in the box at the top of the bell tower, 362 steps up, and don’t think I didn’t count every one.

  The first was a flare, and when we let it off, we’d been told, it would fly up and burst into light, like an electric green bird, and a helicopter would swoop in and fetch us—just like that!—and if you’re wondering why we hadn’t just set it off, like, eleven-odd seasons before, why we’d put up with all the rag-and-bone hardships of living like identical monks, it’s because Pops had made it very clear, on pain of death, that this flare was only to be used in three circumstances: if one of us were dying, if the world stopped turning (zing!) or if Somebody had come. We didn’t know who would answer that green ball of flame, which felt a little scary and a little exciting, like the feeling you get when you’re waiting for the guys at the pizza shop to answer the phone so you can order pizza anonymously to someone’s house, but whoever it was who was coming to whisk us away, I just knew they were going to be Handsome, and we were to give them the other two things immediately, and one was a book and one was a vial, and I know, I know, that sounds pretty lame after all the build-up, but hear me out.

  The book was a notebook, and the entire thing was filled with my father’s chunky writing, not that you’d know it, because it was in a code that looked like it had been spewed out by a machine having some really bad feelings, like a midlife crisis in hieroglyphs. And though we’d seen him writing it by all kinds of candlelight, in sunlight—had heard him swear over it, watched him kick over the stone font at the front of the church with frustration when it wasn’t going so well—we weren’t allowed to know even a scrap of what it meant in case we were caught and dunked in mineral water till we gave up all the secrets in between those black leather covers.

  I kid you not, whoever had that notebook could start the world turning again and basically save humanity. It had something to do with the pull of the moon, and magnetism, and restarting the Earth’s rotation, though I’d always imagined that once it was translated or whatever, the code was the instructions for building a giant pair of those heart-starter paddles they use on medical dramas—you know, the ones that they rub together and yell ‘Clear!’, which in hindsight is totally silly. Whoever had that notebook, they had the future and the power and whatever size ransom they wanted to charge—enough to get their teeth studded with diamonds a zillion times over.

  The vial was more interesting to me, because at night the liquid inside it was incandescent, like those glow-in-the-dark bracelets people used to wear at dance parties back when more than a hundred people were allowed to get together in the same place. Sometimes when the moon was full, we’d put on three pairs of gloves and go up to the bell tower, Pops and Winter and I, and slide the big block of stone from the wall, and lift out the tin box and click around the little row of numbers until it was the birth date of Harper Lee backwards, and open the box and pull out the notebook, and then fetch the key that was taped to the back of a copper pipe and open the lock of the black perspex box inside the bigger box that could apparently survive the fire of a thousand suns, and from a bed of what felt like dry ice, Pops would take that vial, so green and cold and luminous, and sit it on our gloved palms as if it were a dying glow-worm that could only be kept alive by still warmth and moonlight.

  This here, this was why Pops had the laboratory—had flown in all those beakers and Bunsen burners and microscopes/telescopes and all the powdered dudes on the periodic table, and neglected to remember that, at some point soon-ish, we would be needing bras. This was our father’s apology to the world: his gift of liquid hope. If he was dead now, this was what he had died for, and if he was still alive, he was living for this, not for us, and that was okay by me, but sometimes, to be frank, I think Winter found it hard to take.

  So, now you’ve got the picture, you’re probably as surprised as I was to find that when I pulled out the stone and unlocked the boxes and backwards-Harper-Lee’d and all that jazz, there was no flare, no notebook, no vial at the end. In the black perspex box, there was just a piece of paper that looked like the kind of treasure map an eight-year-old would spend all summer on—I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d sniffed it and found it had been stained with coffee—and it was scribbled with that familiar chunky black handwriting when it was done in a SUPER hurry, and when I held it up, really looked at it, I realised that it was a map of a path that led up to the top of Our Mountain, and I mean, what the hell?

  Winter

  ‘Well, are we going to blow this popsicle stand or not?’ said Summer. ‘You may or may not have noticed from inside your love bubble, but there’s nothing left here for us now—not a single thing—and it’s only going to get colder. You and I have to leave, and only us, Winter, and don’t pretend you don’t know why.’

  Summer didn’t know that there weren’t any secrets left for us to guard. That Edward knew everything. That Edward was everything now. To me.

  I swallowed. ‘Edward says that there might be supplies left in the settlement. That there might be help there.’

  Summer clicked her tongue. ‘Not this again. Read my lips: There. Is. No. Settlement. The only thing on the other side of that mountain is the sea. You can believe some hot dude we’ve only just met, but I know Pops wouldn’t have brought us here if—wouldn’t have kept us here—if it was just a hop, skip and a jump to civilisation and, like, an actual future. He wasn’t that cruel. Listen to yourself, Winter. It makes no gosh-darn sense. So are you coming or not?’

  If I slipped away with Summer, she would never know that I had told. I would escape that shame. I could fold myself back into the cocoon of Summer’s love. It was so warm there.

  But when I thought about leaving Edward, it was more than handing back the moon.

  A butterfly can’t crawl back into a chrysalis. And so I said, ‘Not.’

  And Summer said nothing and her face said everything.

  And not that much later, I could feel that she had left.

  And for the first time in so long, I was alone.

  Summer

  I thought about cutting off my hair—cutting it short right to my skull; of course I did, because isn’t that the ultimate symbol of Rebellion (capital R)? Instead I settled for a lob, which is a long bob, and I switched my part from left to right, and I have to say that I felt quite smart and grown-up when I looked in the mirror, which was actually a saucepan lid because our father didn’t think to bring a real mirror, and as I put the finishing touches on my packing, I could just hear the soundtrack to this moment playing around me, it was that cinematic and Meaningful.

  Though they were heavy, I packed almost all the cans of sweet milk because, really, we didn’t have much else to live off at this stage, by which I mean we had Nothing (capital N) and, truth be told, I was going kind of crazy, could feel my stomach eating itself in a frenzy of unemployed gastric juices. Winter wouldn’t have eaten it anyway.

  And, though it was long and sort of bulky, I packed the string of fairy lights, because they felt now like a chain of memories, and when I got away, far from here, I wanted to hang them in my new bedroom and lie on my back on my comfy bed, and reflect with all the lights turned off except these little guys, hot with the glow of another time.
I suddenly remembered one of those blankets made of silvery stuff that’s like aluminium foil that you can wrap around yourself if you’re stuck on a mountainside shivering to prevent yourself from getting shock, and I chucked that in too.

  And then I went to the bookcase and, oh, that’s when I almost sank to my haunches and put my head in my knees and gave up on the whole caper, because how could I bear to leave them, those dear compact worlds of paper and Truth? ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I whispered as I ran my fingers along the rows and rows of spines, hoping that each book would feel the love in my fingertips. When I had touched each one, and done it again to make sure, I had to choose, and I could only do that by closing my eyes and twirling my pointer finger around my head like a lasso and then flicking it down to see where it landed, and where did it land? Straight in the lap of Ponyboy Curtis.

  Oh, Ponyboy. Oh, Ponyboy Curtis, that beautiful golden gangster-child orphan who looked up at the stars and ached for something better. If you’ve never read The Outsiders, I’m so gosh-darn jealous of you right now that I could punch you right in the cartilage of your nose, seriously, because it is seventy-seven types of profound and boysy-tragic-wonderful, and I guarantee you that when it ends, when you know his gang and their particular, desperate brand of pain and stupid-bravery, you will be deeply and forever Changed.

  I could not really have had a better companion for this adventure than Ponyboy, who, in spite of his unconventional childhood, was so very street-smart and reliable and familiar with difficult circumstances and yet still had the soul of a poet, and I bet if he was with me in real life, he would have totally dug my new haircut.

  That’s what I was thinking when I marched out of Bartleby, out of the archway and over the moat and over the meadow and down to the sea, which is where the map was telling me to start—right there, on the beach, then around the shore for about a million years until I hit some path, apparently, though I’d believe it when I saw it. I wasn’t thinking about Winter—not one bit. And I didn’t look back, not up at the river bend or the bell tower or over at the edge of the forest. I just kept walking with Ponyboy in my heart and that big-swelling movie music in my head that said ‘this is the start of her new adventure’ or perhaps ‘this is the end of the world as she knows it’, and when I think about it from here, I realise that I hadn’t watched enough movies or lived enough life to really know the difference anyway.

  My positively triumphant mood lasted approximately forty-five seconds, which is how long it took me to remember that walking on soft sand is possibly one of the most spirit-shredding enterprises a person can undertake, and that all the cans, banging away at the base of my spine, added up to the weight of a tranquillised gorilla wearing an ice vest, and amplifying all that was the fact that the choppy, coming-and-going wind was whipping my new haircut against my eyeballs, and boy, did that sting, and it flapped the map around in my hand, wanting so badly to rip it, but as if I was going to let that happen after everything.

  Lucky for me, there were some pretty big distractions, and one was the sea, which seemed as if it had been scooped up and dragged out so very far away, exposing miles of sand glowing pearly in the half-light. I suppose that had something to do with the tides or lack of tides, and if you think that sounds beautiful, you would have been right except that what was left behind was like a giant morgue slab for about a million birds lying stiff with their beaks half open, feathers being tickled by the wind, and out further, almost too far to see in the gloom, were the remnants of the ocean floor, as limp and sorry as an aquarium left in the sun in the car park behind a pet store until the water has evaporated, every last drop.

  And all those things that used to be life made me even more determined to get to the top of that mountain, where I’d find that flare, which Pops must have buried somewhere sneaky, and bring back help, perhaps a superhero of some sort, who would fix this and pick up the ocean with a single finger and pop it back where it belonged, sprinkling all the dead animals with some sort of shimmery dust to awaken them and—zing!—turns out they’d been sleeping all along, dreaming of one day having opposable thumbs so they could play Xbox.

  I would save the world. Because, really, wasn’t I the only one on the Earth who could? I would save the world and Winter would come running back to me in full-on slow motion and fling herself into my arms.

  Winter

  Soon, I will have to admit that I have lied here.

  Not yet. But soon.

  Summer

  It was a blue whale and, yes, I am well aware that they had been extinct since Antarctica lost the last of its ice, but it’s kind of hard to mistake the largest mammal that ever lived when the tide’s gone out so far it’s touching yesterday and the whale’s washed up on the sandy desert of a shoreline, and its body is the length of a post-football-match traffic jam, I kid you not.

  Ten minutes down the beach, Bartleby hidden by only one bend, and holy smoke! There he was. I went and sat next to his eye, that big old guy—plopped myself right down next to it and leaned back against his skin because I knew that even if I chugged all those cans of condensed milk like they were the world’s most potent protein milkshake, I wouldn’t be able to lift so much as a flipper to save him. His barnacles alone were the size of my head, and if you think it’s sexist that I just automatically assumed that he was a boy, well, I didn’t: he told me himself later on in what was a very enlightening and broad-ranging conversation.

  ‘Jeepers, have we both ever got problems,’ I said to him as I pulled the ring on a can of milk. ‘You’re clearly not going anywhere in a hurry, and, boy, am I mad at my sister.’

  ‘I had a sister once,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Got eaten by an orca. Everyone thinks they’re so cute but they’re vicious little sons of bitches.’

  ‘You’re telling me. Don’t I know a thing or two about people who come across so meek and mild, and then—BOOM! They blow up your heart into tatters. You want any of this?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind sharing, kid.’

  I cracked open another tin and poured the whole thing onto his tongue and spread it around a bit, because neither of us was quite sure where his taste receptors were, but in the end I think he got the general flavour profile and he seemed to enjoy it. I did some handsprings and cartwheels on the sand to keep warm—basic stuff really, but he was pretty impressed, and it was nice to have an audience after all this time.

  ‘So your sister,’ he said. ‘She has legs, I presume. She can do all this too?’

  ‘Even better,’ I admitted. ‘But maybe not anymore because her legs are like toothpicks now, they’re so gosh-darn skinny. She’s got into running—like, really into it.’

  ‘Marathons?’ asked the whale. ‘The professional circuit?’

  ‘Nah, just scooting around. She’s trying to impress a bear. At least, I think that’s what it’s about. I don’t know anymore. I feel like I don’t know her anymore.’ As soon as it came out of my mouth, I knew that was the truth I’d been carrying around in my guts all this while, like a dead star.

  ‘Mmm. That’s how I felt about the seabed,’ he said, ‘when I got my first pair of glasses. I put them on and suddenly nothing was like I’d known it to be. It wasn’t good or bad, necessarily. Just different from what I’d expected. Made me a little melancholy. To have lost the sea that I knew.’

  I chewed on that for a while. I wondered, had Winter put on the glasses when she fell in love, or had I? Which of us had changed? Or had we been different all along but just blind to it, and the bear was the glasses?

  ‘Sir, was the bear the glasses?’ I asked the whale eventually, because he seemed like a pretty smart guy, and I liked his vibe—a poet-philosopher crossed with a clinical psychologist who did TED Talks, something like that.

  ‘The name’s Mikie. And I’ll need some more facts,’ said the whale. ‘Why don’t you start at the beginning? I think I have time to hear it from there.’

  And to tell you the truth, until his peepers shut once and for
all, this guy had nothing but time, and I would have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t so Magnificent (capital M) that he was beyond any pity, and so I sat back down and started from the beginning, with our names. Our mother dying. Winter curled up like a fist inside her. Diving prodigies. Et cetera.

  ‘Some questions, kid,’ said the whale when I reached the end, and honestly? It could have been a couple of hours later. Who knew? ‘Firstly: did Winter choose the bear, or did the bear choose Winter?’

  I frowned. ‘Both,’ I said. ‘Neither. I don’t know, actually.’

  ‘And could you have pursued a relationship with the bear? Was there a window of opportunity for you to make these overtures yourself?’

  I thought back on how we’d found Edward—how we’d been together in the meadow. How we’d been together every day. I thought about how it was us three and endless summer, and I wondered when it had changed. ‘I guess. But you need to understand, it’s Winter who does these stupid things—these giant, goofy gestures towards the world.’

  The whale blinked a few times and boy, was his big eye gorgeous. ‘Can you say for certain this was not romantic love?’

  Aw, well, the thing is that I couldn’t. I remembered that bear’s arms around Winter at midnight under the stained-glass stains of the moon. I remembered how she rode on his back down the river each morning; how she sat up there like a maharajah on top of a wedding elephant, grinning. I remembered sitting up in the bell tower and seeing them down in the meadow, hearing bits of old Elvis songs floating up as she lay on his chest in the sunshine, her fingers through his fur.

  ‘But he was a bear—did you miss that part? Don’t you think that was kind of a dangerous situation to put yourself in?’

  ‘All love has risks,’ said Mikie. ‘All love is opening up your clamshell for someone else to poke about in.’