The End of the World Is Bigger than Love

by Davina Bell

  I duck-dived, and now that I knew where she was, old Winter wasn’t that hard to spot. I kicked down and snatched her by the hair, which sounds kind of brutal, but do you know that a head of human hair bunched together has the strength to lift two elephants? I yanked with everything I had, but it was harder than I’d reckoned—she was so heavy that I wondered if she’d come across a buried stash of Nutella while we’d been apart, and I think I grew doubly strong with my anger at that injustice. I gave up on the hair and grabbed her under the armpits and kicked, kicked, kicked till I was certain I’d dislocate my ankles with the effort of it.

  All the while I was thinking back to when we did our lifesaving certificate training one weekend at a pocket-sized public pool in Tokyo, which had so much chlorine in it I swear it permanently burned the hair off our nostrils. I was trying to remember the breathing, mouth on mouth, how many times to pump the chest, but the only thing that came back was how funny it had felt to jump in with all our clothes on—jeans and a hoodie and our shoes, too—and try to swim two laps, which was part of the requirement for getting the certificate. At least I’m not wearing sneakers right now, I thought, as we burst through the surface of the water. And you want to hear the weirdest thing? As I gasped for air, a big, wet, suck of a gasp, Winter gasped too, as if she’d been holding her breath the whole time, and while I was relieved not to have to remember the finer points of resuscitation, a small part of me was peeved that I didn’t get to bring her back to life, like, literally.

  I had my arms around Winter like you’re supposed to, floating her on her back while I egg-beater-kicked us towards the shore, and I could feel her lungs working, her rib cage pushing in and out like bellows, and though we were both breathing pretty hard, honestly, Winter seemed fine. I was so gosh-darn relieved that it took all my self-control not to duck my head down to kiss her smack on the lips, which I know that she hates, but sometimes I had to—my feelings for her were just too big to keep in my own mouth all the time. By the time my foot hit the sand and I could stand up, she was standing up too, and we sort of flopped ourselves to the shallows and then stood folded over for ages, our hands to our knees, panting.

  It could have just been a post-exercise rush of endorphins, but I felt a booming wave of love wash over me. ‘You’re safe,’ I said with wonder in my heart, and I looked over at Winter to smile.

  But, oh my hat, oh my hat, she most definitely hadn’t been mainlining Nutella. And what part of it was me forgetting while we’d been apart and what part of it was new, and worse, and ambulance-ready, I don’t know. Winter was so thin, I thought I might throw up. She was so thin, I wanted to shake her till she rattled. I wondered what it is in us that cracks open when we see them, these tiny people—why it is that we feel that sick sadness, that strange darkness; what strings they are twanging deep in our hearts.

  All I wanted was to hold her down and force sweet milk into her mouth like a mother bird.

  But I didn’t. Can I tell you, was that ever hard. I said to myself, for the first time ever I said, ‘Step back, Summer. If this is what she chooses, let her be, like they say in that song, which was a top-of-the-pops hit for a reason, so just follow that advice. Let it be.’

  ‘Hey there, chicken,’ I said, all deliberately light-hearted and not-care-y, squeezing the water out of my hair. ‘What’s with the ocean, am I right? So weird. We need to get up that mountain and light that flare for the chopper ASAP because this whole caper is starting to get a bit too intense. FYI, I think that smell is dead octopus, and you know how I feel about those guys—they’re smarter than dogs. Scientists have done tests. Talk about a tragedy. Hey—what happened to your arm?’

  But she didn’t answer.

  Winter didn’t talk. Couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t—it’s all the same, isn’t it?

  She looked at me for a bit and then turned and waded back to the shore, picking her way over the crusty old sea life with her toes pointed, chest high, as if she were striding across a balance beam, one arm folded into herself like a wing. I followed behind, still breathing hard with what I swear to you was lung-ache, feeling a little dark at her lack of appreciation for my heroic deed.

  By the time I made it back to shore, she had settled herself on the sand and was rifling one-handed through some kind of bag, which I later realised was the ratty old pillowcase that she’d love-embroidered with You-Know-Who’s initials. She pulled a notebook and a pencil out of that pillowcase, wiped off the cover and opened it, and I thought it was going to be a situation where she wrote instead of speaking, flashing me notes with smiley faces at the end of them. But it wasn’t that at all.

  She just wrote to herself, her good hand flying across the waterproof page, as if she were dictating the voice of God, she was that intense about it. Every time I tried to look over, she hunched her scrawny prawn of a body over the page, and, boy, did that ever make me burn right up. She knew it and she kept writing anyway.

  And then I realised, in that way you do when your hands are busy: of course, you fool, she is writing about him. It was in her eyes—the way they wouldn’t quite settle on me. Something about her face reminded me of a cow we’d once seen stuck in fencing wire, just standing, still working cud around its mouth. A word popped into my mind, and the word was mourning.

  I’ll bet it was love poetry, whispery, fairy-floss love poetry, with a beautiful metre, an exotic rhyme scheme, because if anyone had the soul of a poet, it was Winter. And if it wasn’t that, it was a letter telling him to meet her on the top of the Empire State Building at midnight, though of course it’s not around anymore, but how would a bear know that, anyway?

  And all that joy, and all that light, and all that love, and all that hope—everything I had felt when I fished her out of the sea, it was gone. She didn’t even have a thank you to spare. I was back here again in this tight, spiky world.

  Winter

  He followed me out to sea. I dropped to the bottom. He found me there. Kicked with his heel, caught the jelly of my eye.

  As he dragged me up to the surface, I wished that he had let me be.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw my own face looking down. For a beautiful moment, I thought I had died. Or had I rescued myself?

  ‘What’s with the ocean, am I right?’ said Summer. ‘So weird. We need to get up that mountain and light that flare ASAP because, boy, this whole caper is starting to get a little too intense. FYI, I think that smell is dead octopus, and you know how I feel about those guys—they’re smarter than dogs. Scientists have done tests. Talk about a tragedy. Hey—what happened to your arm?’

  I couldn’t tell her. My wrist was broken. The flare was already gone.

  Guilt sat on my chest. I could smell its rot.

  I would see it break, her glowing heart, with all its wasted love for me.

  Summer

  ‘This stuff is the weirdest,’ I said to Winter as we trotted back across that squeaky dirt to the spot where I’d had my picnic. She didn’t seem shocked at all by this big old charcoal prairie, which was strange, but then again I had always been the effusive one. ‘But you should have seen what shot out of that plane—like octopus ink, if the octopus had done it with a giant fairy. Don’t make that face—you’re the one with a boyfriend. Where is he now, anyway?’

  She didn’t say anything, just sped up and left me behind, that dirty pillowcase bumping against her tiny back. ‘Why do I even bother?’ I muttered.

  But once we hit the road it was better, because when you’re bushwalking or mountain-climbing or any of those wholesome activities that they did in the Famous Five—watching for smugglers through binoculars, that sort of thing—you just have to be in the moment, you know what I’m saying? Everything else is just a faraway radio.

  Soon enough I was trying to be zen again, trying to keep up, whistling our old school song. ‘Do you think Pops knew about this—what it’s like on this side of the mountain?’ I asked Winter when she stopped to hold her swollen blue wrist in the freezing stream, g
ritting her teeth through the ice pain. ‘Wait—what am I saying? He made this map, so of course he did. But when would he have even had the chance? I thought he was always up there in his lab, doing his thing. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what else he was up to—like, was he watching those weird sexy robot cartoons? Remember the ones they had in Japan?

  ‘Well, I guess it doesn’t matter that much now. We’ve just got to make it to the top of this big old hill and set off that flare and BOOM! Back to civilisation. And I don’t care who I have to kiss, I’m getting a packet of cheese-flavoured corn chips from someone, and don’t start with all your chat about artificial flavouring. And FYI, I’m still obsessed with that gingerbread milkshake we decided not to get last time we were in Sydney—boy, was that ever a mistake, and not one I’m going to make twice, let me tell you. That’s what I’m going to ask for in the helicopter when it comes to scoop us up. And if they can’t make one in the helicopter, well, are they ever going to get a piece of my mind.’

  Winter started to weep right then, and while it could have been to do with the mention of artificial corn-chip colouring, I think it was actually about that bear—about leaving him behind for good when we eventually got rescued. I wondered what he was doing back there now. Sleeping, maybe, that heavy sleep that we used to sleep after diving training—the one where we had to do side-planks, pretending we were ironing boards.

  Winter sat right down and pulled out that notebook and started scribbling furiously again, her face leaking straight onto the page.

  ‘Cheer up,’ I said in a rare moment of compassion. ‘All love has risks. All love is opening up your clamshell for someone else to poke about in.’

  But that just made her cry harder. There truly is no reaching some people, I thought as I gave up and stood up and dusted the weird soot from my legs and set off again, and eventually she followed, loping along, still sniffling.

  And I guess I should tell you that I sort of screwed up here, because I actually knew the only thing that could really cheer Winter up—that could draw words out of her in spite of herself, like splinters, could maybe help her forget whatever was going on with that swollen arm. With each hour that passed, I wondered if I should bring it up—knew that I probably should. ‘Hey, chicken,’ I could have said, all breezy. ‘You know what I’ve been thinking about?’

  It was the story of how our parents had met. Boy, Winter used to shine when she heard it, all girly and hopeful and dreamy. Like we began with an explosion of glitter, she and I. I knew it all, every heartbeat—had heard it told so many times. ‘Forty-three minutes and twenty-six seconds’—that was all I would have to say to whisk us away from this blackened crust, at least for a little while. That’s how long it took them to fall in love.

  But I didn’t. Or maybe I couldn’t.

  So instead, I just got all Robert Frost–crazy, reciting every single one of his poems that I could remember even a crumb of, and though Winter often worried that there were other poets who weren’t Male and White and had subsequently escaped our attention, I think she found old Frost comforting in spite of her trickle of tears, which was pretty constant. I hoped she was going to remark on my A-plus oratory skills in her journal. I’d always loved that bit in Anne of Green Gables where Anne gets dressed up in her string of pearls and recites ‘The Highwayman’ at the White Sands Hotel, and perhaps, when all this was over, I could do that at an open mic night—the pearls, the whole bit—if people were still doing things without a measurable outcome by then, things like art and kindness. They’d been on their way out by the time we’d boarded that seaplane, both scrunched into the passenger seat, Pops swearing, stabbing desperately at the controls.

  Hours of walking, walking, walking. After trusty old ‘The Road Not Taken’, I did that one I think is called ‘Birches’ where he talks about a farm boy not being able to play baseball because he lived too far from town, which had always caused Winter’s eyes to pool up, but this time drew sobs from her little wire frame of a body.

  ‘Cheer up,’ I said. ‘I bet he practised kissing on his sheep out there on the farm, and he got so good he could tongue better than any guy in town. I bet he had, like, a zillion girlfriends, all mad for his smooching, and he married a film actress who could wear a scarf around her hair without looking silly and had champagne for breakfast, and he got around in those aviator shades that I like.’ The more I talked, the less I had to think about the ache in my legs/ back/heart, and the glue in my throat and the sting my blisters made when they passed through the air.

  When I ran out of all the Frost I knew, I just whistled ‘Moon River’, which had been Pops’s favourite song that wasn’t Elvis, and I was secretly hoping that Winter would start singing—she was such a pretty singer. Everyone had always said so. A song seemed like such a little thing for her to give to me.

  But she didn’t. Or maybe she couldn’t. So much had gone down since we’d heard it last.

  ‘Who even are we now?’ I said to Winter’s silence. Lucky for me I wasn’t expecting an answer. I wondered if even her voice was thinner.

  I went back to ‘Moon River’, and when I got to the part where the violins kick in and the lyrics talk about two drifters setting off to see the world, blow me down if I didn’t get all teary myself. Because that’s all anyone wants, isn’t it? To be one of a pair, going out into a shiny new world. That had been Pops, once, him and our mother, before we were born, so young and beardy and full of hope; I had seen a picture. And hadn’t that been me and Winter, crisscrossing all those countries in the back of that tiny plane, everything so small and simple from up there that we felt like we could pick it up in our fingers? None of it had turned out how you hope the world will be when you hear that song, all warm arms around you in the moonlight. And as I looked at my sister’s sweet face, at the past as it rolled around us like a young cloud, I thought, What have we done to deserve this?

  When we stopped for a rest, Winter sat with her head on her tucked-up knees, and I could see that she was shaking, could hear the click of her teeth like an insect’s hum.

  When Winter was running, she seemed immortal, dazzling, all fairy child and blazing light. But now that she had stopped, the power was draining out of her so quickly I could almost see it leak, and I was starting to Worry (capital W) that she might not make it, because could pain—the gnaw of it—actually kill you? And when had she eaten last? How long had we been climbing? Did I know how long a person could even live without food—was it a week? But there weren’t any weeks now that there weren’t any days, on account of the missing sun, and even though I was so very sweaty, I could sense a new chill, perhaps the ancient cool of the mountain now that we were higher up or maybe the cold of the planet in stillness.

  Winter

  ‘Are you there?’ I asked the stars. I couldn’t see them—hardly any. The world was so dark.

  ‘We are here,’ they assured me. ‘We are here and we are waiting. We will always be here. We always have been.’

  ‘I’ve done something bad,’ I confessed to the stars. ‘Really bad. And I can’t tell Summer, but I can’t not tell her.’

  ‘Then you must tell,’ said the stars. ‘Always tell. You’re just delaying the inevitable if you keep it all inside, Winter.’

  ‘But she loves me so much,’ I said.

  ‘And that’s why you can tell—tell her anything.’

  ‘But she thinks I am perfect,’ I said.

  ‘Then it’s about time she let you be human, no? So you stuffed up—who cares? Everyone does it sometime. This is just your time. Telling always helps.’

  ‘Not always,’ I said. ‘Remember?’

  And they didn’t say yes and they didn’t say no, but I knew that they did.

  Have this notebook, the white masks told me. Write about where you think it might all have started. Write your truth. Write it down.

  Summer

  When we finally reached the base of the mountain, I had to hit the hay immediately and have a nap so deep it hit
the Earth’s core. And when I woke up, I felt a whole lot better and I was relieved to see that Winter was where I’d left her, quietly scribbling away in that notebook—that she hadn’t run back to the forest, or whatever. ‘Come on,’ I said to her as I stood with a yawn. ‘Let’s get cracking.’

  But on closer look, it wasn’t going to be so easy, because once there had clearly been a path up from the base of the mountain, just like on Pops’s map. At some point, though, perhaps some yetis had had a brouhaha, because there’d been a big rockfall and now there was just a huge pile of stones, grey and black and sharp, like a steep ramp. The path started up again on a ledge above that—about the height of a three-storey house—but to get there, we’d have to do a whole lot of clambering, because either side of the rockfall was just a sheer wall of granite. Those stones didn’t look too stable, quite frankly, but there was no other option: the mountain stretched so high above us, it was like looking up at the Chrysler Building, which we had done a lot back when just anyone could go to New York, and we’d arrived there for the International Maths Olympiad, all quaking and full of wonder and drilling each other on Fibonacci sequences.

  I tell you what, it’s lucky that we had such strong ankles from all that tiptoe work on the diving boards, because you really had to watch your feet in the half-dark or you could tumble right over, tear up your ligaments, crack your patella, and then where would we be? I had to feel out each rock hold with my hands, and then move my feet all stealthily, transferring my weight at just the right point so it didn’t cause a landslide. It was actually kind of satisfying, like stacking up Jenga blocks.