A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  Tomorrow, Jip, I said. We’ll go ashore tomorrow. In the light.

  Chapter 12

  Landfall

  I didn’t remember and the bowstring didn’t care.

  The arrow took the big rabbit just forward of where I was aiming at the shoulder and smashed through the neck bone, killing it instantly. It was a good shot but I wasn’t congratulating myself. I’d forgotten that the cuts and grazes on my forearm still weren’t healing properly so instead I was swearing and holding my arm where the loosed string had ripped at the scabs and salt blisters as it passed, raking it raw and painful again.

  Later I’d skin the rabbit before cooking it, but right then it felt like I was the one having a taste of being flayed.

  The big rabbit wasn’t a rabbit when I got to it. I think it was a hare, and if I’m wrong about it, it’s the kind of rabbit I’ve been calling a hare ever since—longer ears and much more powerful legs. I’ve only managed to shoot a couple other than that first one as they’re harder to catch unawares than normal rabbits. Maybe longer ears hear better. Jip has run his heart to bursting trying to catch a lot of them but never managed to kill one for himself, which he takes as a personal affront. Every time he’s gaining on a hare, it notices and boosts for the horizon, or maybe they like teasing terriers, because they have an extra kick of speed that they can turn on whenever they like.

  I now knew the structure that I’d seen the night before was not a giant fence but a rollercoaster because when I got into the shadow of it there was an old sign saying what it was, and though it was blistered and corroded it was still readable. And I knew what a rollercoaster was because I had seen them in a book about American holidays. They had carriages you sat in which whizzed you up and down and people put their hands in the air on the down bits and screamed. I mean, in the picture they were smiling and shouting, but the words said everybody screamed in excitement.

  Nobody was screaming now. The place was quiet apart from the creaks and clanks the wind teased out of the old metalwork and the rotting buildings beneath.

  I had thought we would climb the tower first, once we came ashore, but when the sun came up the tide had gone back out to sea and the Sweethope’s keel was scraping the sand below. Worried that if the tide went further out it might snap, I threw out the anchor and loosened the lines attaching it to the jetty so it could float a little freer. Then I took my rucksack and my bow and arrows and climbed carefully along the side of the jetty towards the shore. I had the map folded into the pack too, because I thought if I climbed the tower it would help me get my bearings if I compared what I saw with it. Taking the pack wasn’t anything special, though as it turned out it was a lifesaver. It’s just how we were. We carried our own water, packed our own food and always kept the basics to light a fire or tend a wound close by. No one else was going to help us if we got into trouble. It was just second nature. I also had two of the big plastic water bottles looped round my neck to fill up at the first opportunity.

  Fresh water and food, those were always the priorities on any trip, but on this day I had thought to break habit and celebrate my first steps on the mainland by climbing the tower and looking out over it. Jip had other ideas, and wouldn’t be carried easily. Negotiating the skeleton of the jetty was tricky enough with pack and bow and two water bowsers clunking round my neck, so I dropped him in the water and he swam happily to shore under his own power.

  The retreating sea had left the strip of ground in front of the houses standing a few feet above the waterline. Wet sand spilled into the open doors and windows, and the half-buried hulks of old cars were scattered along the whole length of the sea front. Some were just humped roofs, lurking like giant beetles; others had been tossed by the storms and were showing rotted wheels and rusting axles to the sky. Jip walked out of the water, shook himself, looked back at me, wagged his tail and turned to sniff his way into this whole new world of unfamiliar and exciting smells.

  I followed him ashore with a little more difficulty. The jetty had been gutted by fire and I had to test my footing every step of the way to dry land. When I took the last—or maybe that’s the first—step onto it, I dropped the water bowsers and looked about me. The tower dominated the skyline to my left. The palace it grew out of was not golden in the morning light but red-bricked. It seemed vast. Until then the biggest building I had been in was that church where Brand had played the violin. This palace building was many churches big. Jip had, however, followed his nose to the right, down the sea front, towards the rollercoaster. Though at that point in my mind it was of course still a mysteriously giant fence. I took out an arrow and fitted it to the bowstring in case we startled a rabbit, again out of habit, and followed. It wasn’t really a hunt because I couldn’t keep my mind on it. There was too much distraction. The place had a funny smell, not a bad one, but a bonfire, charred smell. I decided it must be the jetty, though the smell stayed all the way down the front as I looked into the broken windows and up at the bits of old signs that hinted cryptically at what the different buildings had been for. On closer inspection OAT RIPS were offering boat trips and the suggestion to USE EN was actually amusements—the big sand-floored room with the low ceiling bellying ominously down over it didn’t look that amusing, though the rows of corroding, burst machine cabinets jammed in beneath had wild cartoony drawings on them that had once clearly been brighter and more colourful than they now were.

  There were no footprints on the sand other than mine behind me, only paw prints that Jip had made ahead, and I followed him towards the looming jumble of structures surrounded by the rollercoaster.

  We both stopped by the open doors of the _AS_NO which other smaller signs explained was a casino. I knew what that was too, and wanted to see what a place where people had come to be glamorous and lose their money looked like, but there was a smell of something powerfully dead in the lobby. Jip turned away from it and again, I followed him back out into the clean air. Things die and things rot. And you don’t always have to go poking at them.

  The enclosure that the rollercoaster ran around was a Pleasure Beach, and there was more sand on the ground to prove it. There was also a wall with a huge skull wearing a Viking helmet three times the height of me snarling a warning at us as we approached. It was probably funny to your people. And I knew that. But to me it seemed a grim snaggle-toothed presence, full of real malice. The Pleasure Beach was a strange village full of grotesque things like that skull. There were oozy-looking gingerbread houses built purposely askew to loom alarmingly over you. There were all manner of metal cages and decaying machines—most with once bright but now weather-bleached plastic seats hanging off the end of them, things presumably meant to hurl people around, though that looked like it’d be torture and not pleasure at all. There was a lot of broken glass and so I trod carefully. Moving so slowly let me creep up on an animal I hadn’t seen before, and I nearly put an arrow through it until I realised it was a half-buried teddy bear.

  I saw a pair of giant birds like ostriches standing very still among some greenery and though I quickly realised they were made of plastic I still nearly jumped clean out of my skin when I looked slightly to my right and saw a giant lizard the size of a horse crouching amongst some ratty shrubs, watching me with an evil look on its face, showing just enough teeth to promise a nasty end if it leapt for me. I instantly went very cold and still. Jip walked up to it and cocked his leg on its tail. It was only then I saw that it was just another statue, made of concrete. The look Jip gave me seemed to say “so much for dinosaurs”.

  It hadn’t been real. Of course not. Dinosaurs are even deader than you are. But the shock it had given me was. I walked over to the base of the giant tangled-looking fence where there was more light, and that was where I found the sign that explained that it was a rollercoaster, and it was while I was reading it that I felt Jip go hunting-still beside me, and that was when we saw the hare lollop out of the bushes and pause to twitch its nose towards the sea.

  Once I’d
shot it and hung it off my pack, Jip got very interested in following its scent trail back into the undergrowth that had invaded this corner of the Pleasure Beach, while I climbed the rollercoaster. To start with, I only meant to go a few feet above ground to see if I could watch his progress, but it was sturdy and didn’t move at all as I went higher, so I kept going. I climbed onto the track and walked very carefully up the thin footplates that made a flight of steps alongside it. Probably not the most sensible thing I could have done, but I always kept a hand on the rail. Things built sturdily in the old world have had a long time to start coming to pieces again in the After, and I did not want to end my adventure by falling through something broken. And yes, it was an adventure. I was still determined to get Jess back, but even though that fierceness was in me, I was also excited to finally be putting my hands and my feet and my eyes on a world I had only read or heard old unreliable stories about. And the higher I climbed, the more I felt that streak in me begin to open up and breathe better in the newer, cleaner air. It came to me that I hadn’t known I had been being less than I could have been until then, when I saw there was so much more of the world for me to be myself within.

  There was a carriage parked on the very top of the rollercoaster. If there hadn’t been, I might have turned back before I got there. I don’t think that would have made a difference, but it might have. As it was, I looked up at it and thought it would be good to get to it and sit there and rest a moment, looking out at the view opening up before me.

  Jip was back at the base of the rollercoaster, barking up at me, eager I should see the rabbit he had lying on the sand in front of him. I waved and told him I’d be down in a minute. The wind had picked up again, and the sky was darkening, but I was really concentrating on looking at the step in front of me and then the next one. I didn’t need to look at the clouds gathering behind me; I could feel there was a good chance of rain coming, smell it even. I’d just sit at the top and rest a moment, then come down before it started. Mainly I was trying not to look down, because then my balance wavered a bit and I felt queasy. Like being seasick on solid ground.

  I got to the top and that’s where I found him. Slumped on the floor of the carriage, a rattle of old bones themselves weathering away to powder in the rags of what had once been his clothes, strands of long grey hair coiled like a nest by the skull. There was one rubber boot, cracked and perished with a leg bone still in it, and a backpack. The pack was thick plastic, black and with a roll top. The straps were gone but the pack itself had been designed to be very waterproof. Maybe because it had been stuffed under the seat and was protected from the worst of the weather it seemed to have survived with its contents inside.

  There was also a gun on the floor among the bones.

  The weather had rusted it into a useless lump, but it was there. So were the holes in the skull. Small one in the bottom of the brain pan where the muzzle would have pressed against the top of the mouth, and a big chunk blasted through the scalp. It told a sad but clear story. He’d climbed up here for a last view of the world and then blown himself out of it.

  I told the bones I was sorry, and then opened the pack. It cracked stiffly as I did so, and then I saw I was wrong. It was full of photographs, a lifetime of pictures—but on top of them was a lipstick and pots of make-up and a small mirror and a hairbrush. There was also a sort of metal urn, which I thought might have something interesting in. I opened it and found it didn’t. It just had ashes inside, grey and gritty. I could understand why this woman would have decided to die with her best face on, looking good for whatever came next. There was a sort of defiance in it that I could admire. But I didn’t know why she would have climbed all this way carrying something as meaningless as an urn full of ashes. I hefted the canister. It wasn’t light. And she must have been old, from the grey hairs she’d left behind. I don’t think I’d have made better sense of it if I’d had time to sit there and think about it, but I didn’t even have that luxury.

  Something made me look behind myself, back up the mile of beachfront to the tower. Even at this distance and from this height you could see how much taller it was than the rollercoaster. It seemed to be almost touching the grey clouds closing in above it. It was only dwarfed by the black cloud rising off the sea below it.

  Except it wasn’t a black cloud. It was smoke. And at its base was a fire, and the fire was the Sweethope.

  I should have run down the steps, except I could see that in the time it took me to run the mile back to the jetty it would be too late, way too late. I sat down and stared at the disaster.

  Because that feeling I’d had about being watched? Maybe some of it was imagination. But one part of it had been real. I’d come looking for Brand. But he’d found me.

  I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see his boat. I couldn’t even see where on the wide, exposed stretch of coast sweeping north to the point it might be. There was nowhere for him to hide it. Unless there was an inlet behind the point. I couldn’t see his damned dog Saga, and I couldn’t see Jess.

  All I could hear was Jip’s bark getting more urgent as if he sensed what he could not possibly—from where he stood—see.

  Scratched in the sand by the jetty end was a message. Big enough for me to read even a mile away, clear beneath the smoke pluming off the funeral pyre of my boat.

  I TOLD YOU, GRIZ. GO HOME.

  Chapter 13

  The tower

  Six words in the sand proved that Brand could write. But I don’t think he’d read the same books as me. If he had, he still might well have stolen my dog, but he wouldn’t have burned my boat.

  That’s what I think now, after all that’s happened. Then, sitting in shock at the top of the rollercoaster, watching the Sweethope burn, I just felt numb. And guilty. And scared too, of course. I had done a stupid thing—a chain of stupid things—and this was the result. I hadn’t thought it out. I’d rushed off without preparation, on my own, despite my dad trying to stop me. I hadn’t listened to him. I hadn’t listened to anything but my heart and my anger and I hadn’t used my head. Most of all I was stupid because I hadn’t used my head. And now Bar and Ferg and Dad would think I was dead for a long time because a long time is what it would take me to get back home without my boat. Even Mum would notice I was not beside her in the evenings. I was sure about that. At some level she would notice I was gone. And what if they came looking for me? How would they find me? How could we not miss each other in this huge world? They might come to harm just searching for me. Home might just fall apart. It was all my fault. Dad had been right, all the times he called me wilful and headstrong. Brand had just stolen a dog and some fish. Brand was just one of those bad things that life throws at you, like a storm or a sickness. A Brand was just something you toughened up and coped with. You couldn’t argue with a storm or a fever. It didn’t know any better. It just was.

  Me? I knew better. And I’d betrayed everything.

  If there was ever a moment to cry, that was it. And I wanted to. I felt the sharp spike of tears wanting to come. My throat was tight with the sobs waiting to be set free. No one would ever know. The old lady on the floor beside me wouldn’t. She wouldn’t hear. She wouldn’t see. She was just bones, eyes and ears long gone. But I didn’t cry. Maybe because I would have known. Maybe because Dad was right and I am too stubborn for sense. But mainly I think because it wouldn’t have done any good. The milk was already spilt.

  I took less care clattering down the steps of the rollercoaster than I had going up, but still enough not to run and risk tripping and injuring myself. When I got to the bottom, Jip pretended he was more interested in eating the rabbit he’d caught until I hoisted my pack and picked up my bow, and then he picked it up and ran with me as I headed back to the jetty. Maybe I should have been more careful. Maybe I should have worried that Brand might have set the fire to lure me back so he could ambush me or something. But the thing about maybes is that you can get lost in them and end up going nowhere. I needed to be doing.
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  And I knew, though I don’t know how, that he was gone. If he’d been setting a trap, he wouldn’t have needed to write the words he had left for me to find. Still, I kept scanning the scene ahead for a glimpse of his red hair as I thumped my way up the mile of hardpack back towards the jetty. But he was long gone. He’d left the message. He didn’t need to stick around to tell it to me himself.

  He’d also left my kayak.

  That surprised me. That stopped me short when I got up to it. That almost undid the whole not crying thing. That kayak was as much part of me and home as the Sweethope had been. It was lying on the sand below the words he’d written, and the mended paddle was leaning across it.

  It was another message. He was saying he wasn’t a monster. That always seemed important to him. And maybe in his own mind he wasn’t. I guess no one’s the monster in their own story. Monsters are just a matter of perspective.

  The Sweethope was burned to the waterline but still belching black smoke, a dead boat still floating. Sails torched, rigging gone. Unsalvageable. The fire had burned the ropes mooring it to the jetty but it had swung in and got snarled up in the great melted tangle of the fallen wheel. He must have used something to set the fire in the cabin and then just walked away. From the burned rubber smell and the persistent black smoke, maybe a tyre. We burned brittle old rubber tyres to send smoke signals in emergencies. The thought made me doubly homesick.

  I sat and stared at the dead boat for a long time. I don’t know how long, and I don’t remember what I thought of, not precisely. I do remember what I felt, which was hollowed out and rubber-legged. I felt like I’d better stay sitting and watching in case I stood up and the wind just blew me over.