The End of the World Is Bigger than Love

by Davina Bell

  ‘You should probably overtake me and go up first,’ I called down to Winter over my shoulder once I was a few metres up. ‘I don’t want you getting squashed by an avalanche if my foot slips. These rocks look mean.’

  But she was still just standing at the bottom, holding her pillowcase, a big question mark on her face.

  ‘Put that in my backpack if you like—I’ll wait here and you can pass it over when you catch up.’

  She didn’t move. My foot slipped a little from underneath me, and the rubble caught one of my blisters, right in its watery centre. ‘OW!’ I yelled as I turned back to the wall and scrabbled to get a hold again. ‘Winter, hurry the fuck up. This whole thing has a time limit, you know.’

  Behind me I could hear the slightest scrape of stones, which meant that at least she was making a start. And as I paused to wait for her, my feet stinging, it struck me that this whole mountaineering thing was going to be harder than I thought, and absolutely nothing like the time we’d practically jogged up the steps to the top of Montmartre. Up there, it was all rooftops and chimney pots and blocks of cream light, and you couldn’t find a single ugly thing to snag your eye on—it was totally, dreamily, heartbreakingly perfect. Boy, did we ever love Paris. Didn’t everyone before it got bombed flat out of existence?

  There was nothing there now—just scorch marks in perfect, elegant rings. I had seen pictures from a drone. I’m not sure entirely how Pops came to have them, those shots.

  ‘Hey,’ I said as I tried to shimmy back towards Winter, ‘do you remember when we climbed up the—’

  I turned to see Winter, still at the bottom, vomiting nothing over and over again, like a cat trying to get out a furball.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Food poisoning?’—which I thought was pretty funny because she hadn’t eaten for about a zillion years.

  Winter didn’t look up, not even to acknowledge my dark comedic genius. She just ghost-barfed again with a terrifying combination of effort and agony. You’ve probably guessed this—and, yes, I probably should have thought about it—but it was her wrist; she couldn’t raise it up to shoulder-height without being sick with the pain, and her face was completely white, and the shaking was bad now, like she was holding a jackhammer, and I want to say ‘convulsing’ but I’m not entirely sure that’s right in a medical sense. How Winter was going to get up that mountain was a Mystery (capital M), almost as big as what happened to King Charles and Camilla when their plane disappeared.

  I threw off my pack—could come back for it later—and half-climbed, half-fell down to where she was doubled over. It sounds gross, I know, but if there’s one thing I loved doing, it was holding back Winter’s hair in these situations. ‘It’s okay, chicken,’ I said as I bent over beside her, trailing my fingers along the back of her ribs, trying not to shudder at the hollows they found there. ‘Hop on my big old back and I’ll give you a ride till you’re feeling better.’

  She nodded, the tiniest nod, and for some reason my throat closed over with trying not to cry. All I had wanted for so long was to hold her. As I knelt down so she could lay herself across my back, I wasn’t sure if she was actually on there or if she’d just slung her pillowcase over my shoulder, she was that tiny, and I felt Sad Sad Sad. She could only hang on to me with one hand, and even that didn’t have much strength, so I had to reach back and grab hold of her legs.

  Oh.

  Truly, they were just bones, and even touching them felt wrong, like she was made of chalk dust and would crumble. But if I wasn’t holding on, she’d just slip straight off. How was I going to balance—to climb? As I paused to think it over, I smelled the waft of Winter rotting.

  Should I have been force-feeding her all this time, holding her down and pressing her jaws shut like you do when you give a dog a worming tablet? Should I have gone on a hunger strike of my own—refused to eat till she did too? Should I have made her eat to prove her love? Withdrawn my love until she ate? And maybe I should just have asked straight out: why?

  But the trouble was, there were so many things we didn’t like to talk about, so many knots that were too tricky to untie, and so I had chosen the coward’s way, trying to convince myself at every step that Silence = Love.

  I tried to steady myself, my hands around her legs, her good arm tucked under my chin, which I’d clamped down over her wrist. I lifted one foot to set off. But my centre of gravity was all off, and the rocks slid under my feet, and the orange-purple of the clouds loomed above us, and that leaden sky was so oppressive that sweat was running down into my eye sockets. There was no way I was going to risk toppling backwards onto Winter. It would be like squashing a duckling in a sandwich press.

  ‘This isn’t going to work,’ I said down into my chest. ‘I need a second to figure this out. If I lift my chin, can you slide back off?’

  She didn’t answer, of course, but I felt her little muscles tense, ready for the landing. And even though I tried so hard to do it all gently, when her toes hit the ground, the jolt of it—the pain—made her sick again. Through the gloom I could see tears on her lashes and I felt that particular anger that is part despair. I thought back to that bear—how he had ripped the door clean off the drone plane and tossed it to the ground. He could have carried her now so easily, and knowing that made me want to rip things off the sides of the world and throw them around. Everything was always squeezing shut around us.

  I gloomed and stormed for a while, wondering where all the heroes were who popped up in novels when you needed them most. ‘Why isn’t life ever as good as it is in books?’ I asked Winter, who was sitting writing in her notebook again. ‘Are we doing it wrong?’

  It wasn’t until I was lying with my legs up the wall, which in yoga is called Viparita Karani (the Fountain of Youth pose), that I figured it out, the climbing thing. I knew that pose from when we did Gifted and Talented Yoga. It took about three hot seconds for the G&T kids to memorise seventy-seven Indian pose names and, boy, was Zephyr, the teacher, impressed. And while we’re discussing extracurricular activities, it was lucky that we’d done all those Flexible Thinking workshops at our school in Japan, because that’s how I came up with what Pops would have called an Elegant Solution to that big pile of rocks, and, yep, I’ll admit, I was smug.

  ‘You just kick back, One-armed Susan,’ I said to Winter as she sat writing in her Book of Love. ‘I’ve got this.’ I pulled everything out of my backpack except The Outsiders and the one crucial item I’d need, left them in a neat pile, and put it back on my back. I set off again, feeling the lightness that comes with big ol’ fashioned hope.

  But soon every single stone found a corner of my blisters to poke in to, like I was stepping up onto little blades. Every three seconds I had to pause—I was panting like that bear used to pant when he had spent too long by the stained-glass windows in the heat of the afternoon.

  But I made it.

  And the moment I hoiked myself up onto that path, I actually gave myself a cheer. ‘You can see everything from up here!’ I told Winter as I shucked off my pack. ‘I reckon when we get up a bit higher, we’ll be able to see old Bartleby.’ And she looked up, like she was actually interested.

  I got to work then, finding a good anchor point, and it wasn’t far along the path before I found what I was looking for: a boulder, immoveably heavy, plump like a panda’s stomach when he’s been hitting the bamboo hard. I took the string of fairy lights out of my pack and tied one end around that big, friendly rock, using the knots that Walter had showed us, proud that I still remembered. I paused for a second, thinking about that guy. It seemed so beautifully impossible that he had ever been with us; we had been alone so long.

  When the knots were done, I pulled on that rope—I mean really pulled, to see if it would hold us, and I guess if there was one upside to my sister being light as an actual feather, I had just found it. It seemed pretty sturdy, and so I tied the other end round my waist and stood with my back to the edge of the path, which felt scary, but not in
that familiar way that our lives usually were. I leaned back out over the shelf of rocks and I let some rope go. And I jumped—BOING!—over the edge and down, shrieking a little as I swung back in and had to push my feet off the stones to swing and drop again. Over and over I abseiled down that slope, till the rope ran out, which was only half a metre before the bottom and not a hard drop at all. You probably think that the whole thing sounds risky, but it’s okay—we did Gifted and Talented Abseiling when we lived in Tokyo, too. Our instructor was called Eric and he wore a purple bumbag—even inside—and was he ever a nerd for safety. The climbing wall where we went each Sunday was forty floors up a skyscraper, so we were used to heights. Pops could hardly bear to sit in the cafe there and wait for us, because he really wasn’t, so eventually he let us go alone, across town, and boy, were those fast trains packed with a trillion girls in white knee socks who I was dying to be friends with. It had its own karaoke booth, that climbing gym, and weren’t they the most golden afternoons, the two of us harmonising through the soundtrack to every Disney movie ever in between drinking peach bubble tea, which you could order just by pushing a button on a screen.

  ‘Didn’t that remind you of Tokyo?’ I asked Winter when I reached the bottom, and she looked up in surprise, because I didn’t talk much about Tokyo usually. ‘The abseiling, I mean. Hop back on. We’ve got this nice old handrail now.’

  With the light rope to pull us up on, hand over hand, I didn’t need to fret so much about my poor feet or toppling backwards. Once Winter was on my back, I put my pack on over the top of her, sort of wedging her in, like one of those carriers that strap babies to dads’ chests in the park. She felt more secure there, like a bony koala, and once I got up some momentum, boy, were we swinging along. As we got a little higher, the air felt cooler, and though the mountain was so tall it was an actual joke, the idea of reaching the summit didn’t feel quite as ridiculous as before.

  I really had to grunt to heave us up to that boulder and get us over the lip of the rubble, onto the path proper. I thought my knee would pop right out of its skin with all the weight that was on it, like a pea splitting out of a pod. But we made it, and I stood there at the top, wheezing, feeling Winter flicker against my back with the pulse of my breath. I swear I saw stars with all of that effort—that they were actually saying to me, ‘Nice job!’ And when eventually my vision cleared, the path ahead was curving round the mountain to my right, smooth and dark and wide and even as the road of icing on a race-car cake. It was beautiful to me in that way that breaks your heart—you know the one. A choir in a church, the glow of a candle lighting a face, the soundless swirl of falling leaves.

  The endorphins from all that climbing were flooding my brain so fast that I was actually laughing. ‘Imagine if endorphins were actually mini dolphins!’ I said with delight, and promptly started crying. Boy, brain chemistry is weird.

  When I’d composed myself, breathed deep, I said, ‘I should probably fetch the fairy lights. Do you think you could walk?’

  I felt her shake her head. Hot joy ripped through me like fire. ‘It’s okay, kid,’ I said. ‘Rest in me.’

  Winter

  Where I Think It Might All Have Started:

  Egypt—Alexandria.

  My father was already here. Another flight through the dark. We brought nothing from Tokyo except Pete and books, which came with us everywhere. We thought that our mother was working on something super secret. We were excited to be allowed to come along.

  My parents were often at the apartment. It felt strange at first, to have them home, and then cosy. So we didn’t bring up why we weren’t back in school when weeks stretched to months. They only left to take turns going somewhere we weren’t allowed to follow. My father’s lab, we assumed. A recording studio where my mother charmed guests.

  After a few weeks, our father hired a driver, Ammon, who was allowed to take us out on our own. We would bring back treasures from the city. The big citadel on the edge of the sea.

  We found a favourite spot for hibiscus ice cream.

  I liked the way Arabic felt on my tongue.

  ‘We could spell Mediterranean practically the minute we were born,’ Summer told Ammon as he pulled up at an outdoor market on the way back to the apartment, where Pete was always panting on the white, shiny floor. ‘Mississippi, too.’

  Ammon had a son. And his son had a son. He had cholera, that boy. ‘No good, no good,’ Ammon had said, shaking his head. ‘Okay, I stop here. You buy something nice your mother? Pretty things.’

  ‘We’re on it,’ said Summer, bursting out of the car. Even the time taken to swing out the door was wasted for her.

  ‘Thanks, Ammon,’ I said. ‘We’ll only be a little while.’

  ‘A turquoise scarf,’ Summer said above the clatter: the donkeys and the bartering, pots clacking, wheels of all sorts through the dust. ‘One of those pashmina things—you know what I mean? That’s what she’d like. And don’t go getting all emo about the people with nobody buying stuff at the stalls. This is capitalism at work, and it’s fine.’

  ‘I want to buy something for Ammon,’ I said.

  ‘Pops is paying him, like, a squillion dollars to drive us round,’ said Summer. ‘He’s not doing this out of the goodness of his heart, Winter. He doesn’t need some touristy piece of—’

  ‘Because of his grandson,’ I said.

  I found a necklace of blue beads at a store at the end of the row. They clinked in my hands, like teeth. The day was so hot. They were like cool chips of ice in my hands.

  ‘How much?’ I asked the lady in English, then in Arabic.

  She smiled and reached out to stroke my cheek. Her hand was so hard and so soft.

  ‘WINIFRED.’ It was a man’s voice, loud and urgent.

  We had been trained. We had practised this exact scenario a thousand times.

  And perhaps I was distracted by that lady’s hand.

  And perhaps I was happy just to hear my name—my real name—after all those years. Because I did exactly what we’d been told not to. Just this one time.

  I looked up. I turned my head.

  Above the din of the market, Summer shrieked, ‘RUN!’

  But I froze. I hadn’t learned, back then, what it was to run.

  Someone grabbed my ankle. My stomach hit the ground first. The necklace broke, beads skittering out like my thoughts.

  My wrists behind my back, the door of a van.

  And then Summer’s toes against a man’s shins, down at the height of my eyes. The crack of a kneecap. How she grabbed my hair, right at the skull. How I thought it would break. How I thought we would die.

  Summer half-carrying me, half-dragging, under stall tables, a body-roll over a storm drain grate, back to Ammon. How bad I felt for the dust we left on his car seats as he drove us in wild loops to an airstrip on a sand dune.

  It wasn’t hard for them to trace us after that through a chain of money and hidden eyes.

  They took our mother from the apartment.

  By the time my father returned from wherever he’d been, she was gone.

  We weren’t allowed to read the note.

  Sometimes at night I’d imagine fingers around her neck, pushed in so far that purple bloomed on her skin, an opening iris across her throat.

  Summer

  On one side, above us, was the smooth, dove-grey rock of the mountain, and on the other side, the drop beneath us was ankle-snapping. But the path was easy to walk, and it kept curving around to the right, which was towards the side of Our Mountain that we knew so well and away from that purposeful swirl of blue mist and the squeaky charcoal carpet.

  Even in the half-light, the meadows round Bartleby glowed green, the colour of emeralds on museum pillows, lit from below. We could hear the rush of the river working its way down the mountain, wending through the trees, and FYI, I have always wanted to use the word ‘wending’ in an actual sentence. The trail was so wide and smooth I could practically have skipped, but I trod very care
fully on account of Winter’s arm. I imagined I was gliding with a book on my head, that the path was a pillow to cushion my steps.

  ‘Remember the story about the street being covered in hay?’ I asked Winter, hoping to trick her into talking again, because it was just the kind of heart-swelling story that Winter loved. And, sure, I failed, but I went on anyway. ‘How the guy in—where was it? Milan? He was dying, and so loud noises hurt his poor old brain. The mayor sent out a decree: “Cover the streets with hay!” So that the horses’ hooves wouldn’t make that sharp clopping, you get it? All the footfalls would be cushioned, like on carpet. Isn’t that the nicest—hey!’

  We had rounded another little bend, and suddenly there it was, way below: Bartleby. Tiny and perfect, like a miniature wooden carving from an old-fashioned railway set. It looked so peaceful and idyllic that it was hard to imagine all the awful things we’d seen there. It was like a picture of the outside of a concentration camp taken in swirling snow, and when you don’t know any better, you see all that European wintery goodness and think, That’s pretty. I stopped walking just to stare at it. I know it’s impossible, but I swear I could smell its particular smell: cool stone, sun on grass, the mossy walls of the shady moat. I felt the part of my mind that says ‘HOME’ light up in flashing neon, and that sort of surprised me. We had lived in other houses longer, and Bartleby was such a complicated knot of refuge and prison and heaven and hell. But I guess now it was all we had.

  And from up here, I felt nothing but fondness and peace, like an astronaut must feel for Earth when he sees it from space, and a saying popped into my mind. It was Winter’s favourite, for reasons that shall not be discussed here.

  I recited it: ‘We live on a blue planet that circles around a ball of fire next to a moon that moves the sea, and you don’t believe in miracles?’