A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  He holds her hand sometimes, in the dark by the fire, when he thinks none of us notice him doing it. He does it privately because he thinks we would see it as a sign of weakness, a grown man needing that moment of warmth. Maybe it is. Or maybe the weakness is hiding the need, which is something Bar said to Ferg one evening when she was upset and no one knew I was listening.

  I’d had enough time to leave the ram, whistle in my dogs from their rabbit hunting and sail the narrow sea mile back home to warn the others long before the traveller came ashore. I could have taken my time, because sharp-eyed Bar had seen the red sails too and they were ready and waiting, which meant that she and Dad were at the shoreline and Ferg was nowhere to be seen. Bar was not sure it was necessary for him to be hiding and watching over us with the long gun because she thought the boat under the red sails looked like the boat the Lewismen used, and that maybe they had just found new sails. The Lewismen were a six-person family who lived five islands north, the closest people we knew, and we knew them well. Bar wore her hair in a long plait that now reached down her back and she would, in time, pair up with one of the boys. This was what she had decided, though being Bar and thus contrary in all things, said she did not see why she should be in any hurry making a choice as to which of the four it was to be. It was not as if they were going anywhere, or as if there were four other girls they might pair up with instead. They were a practical family, and we sometimes joined together to do things that needed more than four pairs of hands, but we never took up their suggestion that we move to be closer to them, and they never thought of moving south. Or if they did think of it, they did not think well of the idea. But they were our neighbours and the only other people within a hundred miles. They were just the Lewismen to us, though they had a family name which was Little. And when the red sails got closer we all saw Bar had been wrong, that it was a different boat beneath them altogether. It was bigger and the man at the tiller had hair that streamed behind him like a banner in the wind. All the Lewismen cropped their hair close to the skull for cleanliness, even Mary the mother did so, though she was in fact more mannish than woman, for all that she’d borne four boys.

  The long-haired traveller proved to be the only person on the boat, though at first sight it seemed too big for one person alone to sail. He neatly drew into the shallower water in the lee of the small headland that topped our beach, showing a good eye for a sound anchorage, and hailed us as he dropped anchor. His voice was hoarse but strong, and he said he was alone and wished to come ashore if we would have him. He had things to trade and indeed had been told of our whereabouts by the Lewismen, who he had left two days before. He bore a letter from them, which he waved in the air, the paper white against the darkening sea behind him.

  Dad beckoned him in, and he dropped a small dinghy over the side and rowed in to the beach. I helped him ashore, and we pulled the boat above the tideline together.

  I felt Dad’s hand like a warning on my shoulder, as if I’d been too enthusiastic and unguarded, but then he ruffled the short hairs on the back of my head which he only does when he’s feeling kind.

  I’m Abraham, said Dad, nodding at the stranger. Call me Abe. And this is my boy, Griz.

  Hello, Griz, he said with an answering grin that I liked the moment it split his thick red beard in a flash of white.

  And then the dogs barrelled down to surround him before I could ask his name. They barked and snarled and arrived in a great tangle of teeth and tails and then, as he knelt to greet them, the tails started thumping and the snarling turned to whines as each dog seemed to want to be patted and petted by this stranger from the sea. He had the way of dogs, and he told us he had lost his own one only weeks ago, over the side in a storm around the North Cape and he missed him like an arm. She was a half Husky crossbreed called Saga, clever like a man he said, white, black and brown with a brown eye to match her ears and a blue one to match the sky. He’d had her safely kept below in the small cabin, but when he fell and hurt himself as the boat slammed into the trough of an unusually big wave, Saga heard him cry out in pain and—being a clever dog—pawed the latch and came to help him. The next wave took her over the side and he never saw her again, not even a head bobbing on the face of the mountainous seas piling up behind the stern as the wind blew him beyond any chance of finding her. He showed us the scar on his head, and we could see in the gentle way he ruffled the fur of our dogs as he spoke that the hurt was deeper than the healed skin.

  Like I said, it was a good story. And—as I found out later—some of it was even true. The dog with one brown eye and one blue being clever as a man, that was true as death itself.

  Looking at a new person is not something you would have found as interesting as we do, I expect. You lived in a world full of new people all the time. If you lived in a city, they must have flowed round you like a great mackerel shoal and you’d be just one of thousands or millions, still yourself alone in your own head no doubt, but part of something much bigger too. Here, every fresh face is an event, almost a shock, every new person rare enough to seem like an entirely new species. The traveller looked like no one I had ever met. His long hair, for a start, was thick and wavy and the colour of flames. A redhead. Something I’d read about and seen in faded pictures but never met in real life. The hair was a startling colour, as alien and abrupt as the explosions of orange flowers we found on the other islands, always close to old gardens, flowers my mother called crocoz, when she still spoke. She knew all the flowers and plants. Bar told me she said crocoz weren’t native to the islands, but were tough survivors, like us. And he was not just a redhead, but a redbeard too, a slab of a thing that jutted as far down in front of his face as his hair hung behind it. His skin was pale but weather-beaten and his eyes, which peered out at the world from beneath the high cliff of his forehead, were dangerous blue. I don’t know why I thought the blue was dangerous, but that was the word that jumped into my head as I saw them. Maybe it was because they turned on me in the same instant and just for a moment, as he caught me looking at him, I saw them without the smile that followed, and I do know I thought it then and that this is not something I added later, after things happened: I definitely thought dangerous blue, but then I thought better and discounted it.

  Maybe you, swimming in a world full of difference and choice, were better tuned to believing your gut when it came to people. I had—still have—little to compare people with. So I dismissed the dangerous blue in his eyes when he smiled at me an instant later, and decided it was just different, the blueness, only having seen brown or green eyes before. And when he smiled it was hard to think of those eyes as cold, but maybe that was part of why he was hard to keep a hold of in the mind, juggling the two things at once, the fire in his hair and the shiver of ice in his eyes. The face that was hard as a hammer when it was not smiling and the smile that seemed to warm the world when it found you.

  You look like a Viking, were the first words I said to him. And he did. I had seen him, or faces like him, in history books and old pictures, men in horned hats carrying axes and plunder.

  And the second words he said to me, this man who had sailed out of the north, were:

  What’s a Viking?

  Which shows that even a question can be a lie if asked in the right way.

  Chapter 3

  Who are you?

  It was one summer while we were a-viking ourselves that I found you. When Ferg began to tease me for wanting to write things down because who in the whole empty world was going to read it, Dad said that it was a natural result of reading so much. He said if you read a lot you start to think like a writer, the same way as if you grow up with a fiddle player in the house you start whistling and learning the tunes without thinking, like Ferg had. I read a lot. I’ll get to that. Dad plays the fiddle. I told him Ferg maybe had a bit of a point, since I didn’t know who I would be writing for as everyone I knew already knew my story because they’re a part of it. But I wanted to maybe keep a diary sort of thing, and
so he said then just write like you talk, don’t be fancy, and I said but when you talk you do talk to someone, at least most of the time, and he said then just use your imagination: he said imagine a someone and keep them in mind as you write and I thought of you, the boy with my face.

  So. You.

  You’re in a photograph I found in a house up in North Uist one summer. This time we were looking for parts to scavenge for the windmill that gives us electricity, and Dad knew there were windmills of the same type up near where North Uist is joined to Berneray by the old causeway. We’d sailed the lugger up there and he and Ferg were gutting the turbine off an old fallen mill while I went on the scrounge through the big house on the skyline. We’d decided to camp in the house overnight. It was somewhere we had visited before, solid, stone-built with a roof that still held out most of the weather. Better than that, it had a lot of full bookshelves in it, and a thing called a snooker table.

  It was one of the old buildings, a large farmhouse that had been added to over the years, so it sprawled expansively when compared with the other island houses. The walls had once been whitewashed but now little of that remained, so it was a grey house with a dark slate roof and intact glass windows that seemed to watch me approach up the old drive. A car had rotted to the axles and stood amid the long grass by the back door as if waiting to pounce. The door was not as easy to open as it had been when we visited three years before, but I was bigger now and managed to kick it open carefully enough that it would sort of close after us when we left. I left it open as I waited for the dogs to scramble ahead of me and put any waiting rats to flight.

  Jip and Jess tore into the house, feet scrabbling on cracked plastic flooring as they went, whining and barking as they always did when excited, but there was no sound of rat murder close or distant, and they soon stopped their noise and trotted back to meet me, looking disappointed and a little bit hurt as is their way, as if I had promised them fun which had not quite materialised.

  Something had changed in the house since we had last been there. I couldn’t say what it was, and I couldn’t see or smell anything that put me on edge, but there was a difference. Before, it had been like many of the houses we went into, damp and mouldering, full of things you could see as poignant or pointless according to your way of viewing the world. Dad, for example, would turn photographs of people to the wall as he passed through derelict houses. I don’t know why he did that. He said it was to give the spirits rest, but then he doesn’t really believe in spirits, or he says he doesn’t. Bar, my sister, has the habit too, and she says it’s to stop all the dead eyes watching us.

  I don’t think she believes that.

  I think it’s just to try and scare me, because she does like jokes and teasing when she’s in a good mood. Apart from the books, it’s little collections of things that people used to put on shelves that fascinate me in the empty houses. It’s not just the photographs, a lot of which are faded so badly they just look like water-damaged paper now, unless the rooms are dark, but the little china people and the mugs and jugs and bits of glass and wood and stuff. Ornaments. Trophies. Mementoes. Things that meant something to people once, meant enough that they’d make a space for them and display them, something to see every day. We don’t really have ornaments, or the time for mementoes. Everything we do is about surviving, moving forward, keeping going. No time for relics or souvenirs, Dad says when we go a-viking, only take the useful stuff. Maybe that’s why I decided to write this. A souvenir I can carry in a pocket. Anyway.

  The picture of you.

  The picture of you was definitely a memento. You meant something to someone, even if it was just yourself. I found you under the snooker table. And the way I found you was strange and secret, and because a photo is a small thing, I took you and no one knew and now you live between the pages of the notebook I write all this in, and until someone reads this, I suppose you’re still a secret.

  I’d been in the snooker room before, the last time we were in the house. The room was almost filled by the table, which was covered by a dustsheet that had begun to deteriorate into rags at the corners, where maybe a hundred years of just carrying its own weight had worn holes. We’d taken the cover off and rolled the bright balls around the pale green playing surface, trying to bounce them into the pockets. Once there had been poles to hit the balls with, but now the racks that had held them were empty. I had liked the smooth motion of the balls and the healthy smack and clack as they bounced off each other. Not much runs so true in our day-to-day world, patched together as things are. There was a big wall of books to the left side, and a shuttered window at right angles to it. I’d already been through them, but now I was older I went back to see if the grown me would find books I might not have liked the look of last time.

  The shutters were stuck shut, and though I could have wrenched them ajar I didn’t. Light not getting into the room was helping keep the books safe, and I knew I’d break the shutters opening them which would make closing them harder. Hinges rust, and where they don’t screws do, rotting out of old wood that no longer holds them. So I got out my fire steel and lit my oil lantern and used that instead. Then I dropped the fire steel and it rolled under the skirts of the snooker table.

  We hadn’t found you the other times we were in the house because of the boxes. Someone had stacked boxes of cork tiles under the table, filling the space. They were the same cork tiles peeling off the floor in the kitchen down the hall. What we’d missed was the fact that the boxes were arranged around the edge of the table, and that the centre of the space beneath was empty, like a square cavern, a room hidden within a room. My fire steel had rolled into the narrow crack between two boxes, and I only discovered the secret when I moved one to get at it.

  Fish oil lanterns throw more smell than light, but even by the soft glow mine gave off I could see someone had once used the space as a concealed den. It was the reflection of my flame in the glass jars on the opposite side that caught my eye, jars with candle stubs in them. Old candles burn better than the ones Bar makes, so my first thought was to scavenge the stubs, and see if there were any unburned ones left too. So I crawled in, and that’s how I found the chamber of secrets.

  Someone had slept here, what must have been long, long ago. There was an unrolled sleeping bag and blankets and pillows, and there were books and tins and medicine packs lining the inner wall made by the boxes. A string of tiny little lights was taped all round the edge underneath the table-

  top, the kind of things you used to put on Christmas trees in old pictures I’ve seen. But of course they weren’t lit and never would be again. It made me think what the hidden space must have looked like when they had been—cosy, cheerful, maybe a bit magical even. On the bottom of the table, which was slate, someone had glued a few of the cork tiles to make a decorated roof to the den, a roof and a pinboard. The board was covered in photographs and drawings.

  Maybe it was because of the string of lights that would never be lit again, but I found I wanted to see what the space looked like when it was illuminated by more than my smoky fish oil lamp, which is why I lit some of the candle stubs, and why I lay back on the crinkly sleeping bag. I felt the synthetic filling crumble to dust under my weight, and that’s when I saw you. You were the picture right above the pillows. You must have been the last thing whoever slept here saw before they put out the lights, and you would have been the first thing they saw when they woke in the morning. Or maybe that sleeper was you. Maybe this was your den. Either way, you were important to someone. Loved. Mourned maybe. Or celebrated. Or both.

  In the picture, you’re doing a star jump on the beach, and next to you is a girl who must be your sister. It’s a bright sunny day. You look very alike. She’s smaller. The picture has caught you both at the top of your jumps, frozen for ever between sand and sky, your arms and legs wide, laughing, eyes flashing with glee. You’re looking right into the lens. She’s looking at you with a wild and happy look that’s so fierce it hurts me to s
ee it. And beside you on the other side is a short-legged terrier also jumping and looking at your face, mouth wide in a smile or a bark. And just as I sometimes think you look a lot like me, the girl looks familiar too. If I squint and imagine, then she looks like Joy might have been. Maybe that’s why I took the picture. Because of course I have no picture of my once bigger—but now forever little—sister. Maybe I thought it would help me remember when I get older and more memories jostle in and fill the space that used to be just the two of us. Or maybe the slight likeness is just the reason why I’m writing this to you. All I know for sure is that I’ve never seen a picture that made me so happy and so sad at the same time. And even without the girl—which is what the picture looks like when it’s folded to fit in my notebook, it’s you and your dog—like the last happy people at the end of the world, before the afterwards began.

  Or maybe I’m writing my life to you because the people I could talk to about things are gone, or can’t talk back to me any more. Dad says I think too much. Says I ask too many questions. Says he thinks the lack of answers always makes me unhappy. Don’t know if that’s true. Do know he hates the asking. As if it takes something away from him, not knowing how to reply. It’s just information I’m after, not responsibility for something that is far too big to be down to him anyway. And why does he spend all the time when he’s not working or playing the fiddle with his head in a book of facts if he’s not looking for answers too?