A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  I knew I was strong, and I wasn’t too worried about my arm in the long run, but I was just worried enough to walk along with a niggle at the back of my head. At the time it wasn’t a big thing, but it was annoying. Like a tiny stone in your boot.

  Before I set off, I picked up a few small pebbles and put them in my right-hand pocket, and then as I walked I tried to count my paces. This was a trick Dad had taught us on the long beaches on South Uist. A klick is a kilometre and once you’ve calculated how many of your steps that is, if you count paces you can see how far you can walk in a day. Or you can look at a map and if you know what direction you’re going and how far you’ve travelled, you’ll always know where you are. That’s the theory. I wasn’t yet aware I was in the process of testing that theory until it broke. I was just trying to count to one thousand, three hundred and fifty, which is my count for a klick. There were a lot of new things to see as I walked and I had to concentrate on not losing count. To help with that, every time I reached one thousand, three hundred and fifty I put a pebble from my right hand pocket into my left, in case I lost count.

  I walked twenty-five pebbles that first day. I remember that. It was a round number. I walked them along the grown-over road because it went almost exactly in the bearing I had taken from the tower, with my glass bottles and the orange light. Because I had known that once I was on the ground the ridge where I had seen the fire would not be visible to me, I had marked the nearest landmark that I could see along that line. It was a sharp needle that had looked small when I saw it, but as I got closer I could see that in fact it towered over the surrounding landscape. It was a church steeple. I supposed they were called that because they were steep, but of the ones I have since walked past, it still seems the tallest and the sharpest, scratching the sky with a tiny bent cross at the very tip of it. What became apparent as I got closer was that it was in the middle of what must once have been a city. As I write this I realise I don’t really know the difference between a city and a town, except one is a lot bigger than the other. I suppose if I had a dictionary I could look it up. But I don’t have any book other than the one I’m writing this in. If it wasn’t an official city, it was certainly bigger than the town I’d left in the morning, and fire had not destroyed much of it. Or if it had, the fire had visited a long time ago and the living green had grown right over the char and ash it may have left behind. That doesn’t mean the city was intact. It was definitely well on the way to turning back into landscape. Like I said, nature will take a building down if you give it enough time. The rain gets in, the cold turns water to ice in the winter, the ice swells the building cracks and then seeds sprout in the cracks in the spring and all you have to do is wait for the roots to push the walls and the roofs further apart to let in more seeds and rain and ice and eventually things fall apart just as surely here on the mainland as out on the islands.

  I wonder if it would be sad for you to think that the wild is well on the way to winning back the world you and your ancestors took and tamed. I can imagine it might be, especially when I see the amazing stuff you all built. I have seen things I could not have imagined, not even from the pictures I used to pore over in the old faded books back home. I have walked in the shells of buildings that I cannot believe were possible to build. I don’t know how someone could have got so much stone up into the air and left it so well made that it stayed there. And it’s not just the buildings—it’s the bridges and the tunnels. I am still awed by the power and the cleverness that went into building them, power and cleverness that must have been an everyday thing to you. But buildings are no different to trees really. Or people. Eventually they fall over and die.

  I walked into the city and the ruins of the buildings seemed to rise and close in around me the nearer I got to the steeple. It took me two pebbles to get there from the edge of the countryside. Animals had worn tracks which wove along through the grass and bushes that filled the gap between them, the gap that had once been streets. In the mud and the leaf mould I saw the tracks of pads—like rabbits, but some bigger, and I saw hoof marks, which surprised me. I shouldn’t have, because we keep ponies on the islands, but somehow I hadn’t thought there might be ponies on the mainland. I turned a corner and found myself face to face with a fox. He was big, the same size as Jip, and his fur was a deep orange, except for the flash of white on his chest and at the tip of his tail. He looked at me without surprise but with that great stillness that comes over an animal preparing to run the moment they think it’s safe to turn their back on you.

  He was standing at the foot of a great slope, which was the top floor of a building that had collapsed. All the floors had been concrete and there had been no walls. I think it had been made to put cars in. Anyway, the floors had fallen in and were stacked on top of each other like a tilted spill of oatcakes. The grey of the concrete was cut up into car-sized boxes by faded yellow lines which immediately looked like a giant ladder the moment the fox turned tail and ran for it, loping up the slope as Jip gave chase. The fox disappeared into a door faintly marked EXIT at the top of the slope, and Jip would have followed him had he not heard the sharp whistle I gave, and stopped dead. He gave me a reproachful look, pissed on the side of the exit door and then trotted back down to the road beside me.

  I was itching to go a-viking in the huge buildings I was passing but I had everything I needed in my pack or on my belt, and I didn’t want to distract myself from my plan. Or rather, I did desperately want to distract myself and go hunting through the lost bits of this new territory opening up all around me, but I wanted to get my dog back even more. I had worked out how far I would have to walk to get from the tower to the place on the other coast where I was sure—from the marks on the map—that Brand called home. If I could walk thirty klicks a day, I could be there in ten or twelve days. Twelve days was not so long. But I could do my viking on the way back, was what I told myself. Once I had Jess. I hoped that Brand was sailing straight home, and I believed he might well be as his boat had been loaded to the gunwales with things he had picked up on his travels. Of course I had no idea as to how I might rescue her, but I was sure that I would come up with one once I saw the lay of the land. There were a thousand things wrong with this plan, not least that I was basing everything on the map I’d stolen, and hanging every hope I had on the web of pencil lines that radiated from that single spot on the east coast.

  So. No viking. And if I was to be true to the plan, I should have walked past the steeple and gone another five pebbles before making camp. But I was tired and the day of trees and then the mass of overgrown buildings was so new to me that I felt somewhere between stunned and dizzy with the novelty of it all. So I decided I could make up the distance tomorrow. I sweetened the decision by telling myself I should try and climb the tower that supported the steeple and check out the next landmark on the compass line. The church was easy enough to find, though I did have to lace my way to it through a maze of smaller streets where red-brick buildings were tumbling into the dense thickets of brambles choking the roadways between. When I got there, I found it stood on a sort of point, above what looked like a river of trees that forked away on either side of it. I could see a real river sparkling in the sunlight beyond that. What I didn’t know then, but now do know, having seen a lot of country, is that the river of trees was actually the old railway lines, and the reason the tops were level with me was that they were in a groove that had been cut down into the land for them to run along. Railways fill with trees faster than roadways, perhaps because the rails were laid on loose stones, instead of the hard skin of a tarmac road. What I have found is that if you try and follow a railway on an old map, you make better time walking beside it in the clearer fields than you do trying to wind your way through the undergrowth that has enthusiastically recolonised the tracks. They’re more like greenways than railways now.

  The church doors were locked, or corroded in place. They were made of heavy wood that had seemed to have hardened instead of rotting. The
iron railings around the church had corroded into an uneven and unwelcoming barricade, and the stone forecourt was buckling with weeds and saplings. But the windows were all intact, at least all the ones I might have reached were. There was a big round window at one end, like a giant stone flower with coloured glass panels radiating out from the centre. There were broken panes there, but no use to me in getting in.

  I would have given up, but Jip chased something fast and sleek under the arch supporting the tower, and when I followed his excited barking I found he had chased the rat inside the building, through a door I had missed. The door was actually locked, but a gutter above had failed, so that water had striped down the side of the church in a years-long stain and pooled in a depression under the tower. That had rotted the bottom of the door, making a dog-sized hole that he had pushed in through. I pulled away at the wood until it was Griz-sized, and crawled in after him.

  Inside was wonderful and awful. The windows that had looked drab from the outside radiated light and colour over the high-ceilinged interior. The glass showed bright pictures of bearded men in robes doing things and women with scarves over their heads looking up into the sky and holding babies. The ceiling was a complicated structure of wooden supports stepping up to the peak, and on every possible perch there were more statues of men in beards. When I was small, I read a children’s Bible that told all the important stories, so I’m pretty sure most of the painted women were the Mary because their faces were the same, only the colours of their scarves and robes and the things they carried were different. Some carried babies, some odder things like wheels and flames. All of the beards can’t have been the Jesus, but I know the naked ones nailed to the crosses were. The statues weren’t just up on the roof supports. They were everywhere, big and small, free standing or hanging from the walls. The church in Iona had had one or two, but this—this was what a crowd felt like. It was the most crowded empty space I’d ever been in, and I had the nastiest feeling that they had all been waiting for me, or someone, to disturb their peace and quiet.

  Although one end of the church was pretty untouched by time, at the other end there was a jumble of long metal pipes where something that I think was a musical organ had fallen down. In the books I read, people came to church for peace, or to talk to a god, or just to be with all their neighbours. I didn’t think this was a comfortable place to talk to a god. There was too much pain in the statues, too much relish in the way they were made. I think relish is the right word, if it means a delight in something. It felt like the sculptors had made the statues with a real liking for the hurt of being nailed to that cross. Maybe that’s my ignorance rather than their fault. Maybe loving the pain was a thing that made sense if you believed in invisible things like this god. I just felt… disconnected from the meaning of all that enjoyment. Like someone was giving the punchline to a joke I hadn’t heard the beginning of. Maybe I should have read a grown-up Bible to see what the point of it all was, but we had no time for gods where I grew up. It had passed, they had passed, just like you all had passed. Gods are just stories now. Bar said that’s all they really were anyway: stories to make sense of lives of those who wanted someone else to take charge of them, rather than cut their own way.

  Bar read different books to the ones I did. Books of ideas, not stories, and practical books about how to do things or make things grow. They never interested me as much as a made-up book about people. But I liked the way her mind worked.

  I found a small door that led up to the tower. The confined space made me a bit breathless, tightness rising in my throat as I ascended. I had the strange feeling of walking up into a dead end. I began wondering how I would get out of this narrow twisting stone spiral if the door at the bottom slammed shut and the one at the top wouldn’t open. I would be stuck like a bug in a bottle. My calm mind knew the door at the bottom would not slam shut as the wind couldn’t get at it even if there was a wind, which there wasn’t, and there was no one else who would push it shut as the world was empty. My fear-mind had other thoughts. The door at the top did open, though I broke one of the hinges tugging and kicking at it. I stepped out onto a stone platform that ran round the base of the steeple. Looking up, I saw the height of it and the bent cross on the tip, and I felt the huge weight of stone balanced overhead like a threat. Did you ever go to the edge of a cliff and feel a kind of pull, something sinister but exhilarating making you want to jump? The mass of all those stone blocks seemed to hang there with a similar kind of tug.

  Stay there, it seemed to be saying. Don’t move. And we’ll be down to squash you any time now.

  I took a bearing on my compass. I could see a notch in the high ground looming in the distance, with a paler hill rising beyond it. If I kept the peak of the paler hill just to the right-hand side of the notch—like a gunsight—I would be on target. I took out the map and drew the shape on a blank bit of sea so that I wouldn’t forget it. Then I went back down into the church. I had thought of sleeping in there, but there were too many eyes that would have stayed watching me as I slept. They weren’t human eyes, and though the statues stared there was nothing in the way they’d been carved that reached out to you. Not like the woman in the yellow dress. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I did sit on the altar and share some dried meat and oatcake with Jip before we left, and as I sat there looking back into the body of the church, I realised I was probably getting the same view the god’s priest had had when the rows of empty benches had been full of living people. I tried to imagine what kind of noise all those metal pipes now splayed like a giant’s game of jackstraws at the other end of the room might have made. I couldn’t, and when I left the building, the strongest memory wasn’t the statues and the cruel torture they seemed to take such a grim delight in, but the glory colours of the glass windows all around them. They stayed in my mind like jewels.

  The woman in the yellow dress lived in a Greek temple in the middle of the town, squatting ominously on one side of a stone-flagged square. Of course it wasn’t a proper Greek temple, but it looked like a darker version of the white one in the book of myths Joy and I had pored over by the fireside a lifetime ago, where Zeus or maybe it was Athene lived. It had the same pillars in front, supporting a big triangle of stone, making a big porch, behind which were doors and windows. The windows had been shuttered with board, maybe to protect the glass. I spent a long time trying to work out what the letters carved in stone on the front of the building said. I think it was “TO LITERATURE, ARTS AND SCIENCES”.

  The doors were cracked open just enough for me to slide in after Jip. Inside were more doors, glass this time. These inner doors were what had kept the weather and the animals out. I pushed them open with some difficulty, and went in. The upper windows weren’t boarded, so I climbed the stairs. It had been a museum. That’s what I discovered when I read the labels on the walls. But everything in it had gone. Everything except in one room in the middle. It was another big and empty space, and in it was a chair and opposite the chair was a lady in a yellow dress, staring right at me. I say she was a lady because a lady is a fancier kind of woman, and the dress was as fancy as you could imagine, long and luxurious and the liveliest yellow with black bits on the edges. It wasn’t a dress you could have done anything useful in. It was a dress made to get in the way. It was, however, a very good dress for lounging in and looking at people. And her eyes were doing a very intense job of looking. She was only one painting, but there was more life in her two eyes than in all of the blank Jesuses and Marys in the church put together. She looked right at me and I knew she was seeing me, just as intently as the artist must have seen her. She looked at you and you felt… connected. Maybe not connected with her directly, but with life. Because that’s what the painter had caught, that’s what the painter had liked. Her life. Maybe just life itself. I sat in the chair and looked back at her.

  Hi, I said, I’m Griz.

  And then I laughed at myself for talking to a painting and her look seemed to share the joke she had
not been able to make. I hadn’t been able to bear the idea of going to sleep with all the sculptures looking at me, but I decided that sleeping in this room with just her looking over me would be a very different thing altogether.

  I think someone else had found it restful sharing a room and a look with her, and that’s why the chair had been placed right in front of the painting. I expect one of the last of the Baby Bust had come here to see a young face after all the young faces had gone, dead or just grown old around him or her. It must have been so sad without a younger generation growing up behind them. I think they came to sit in that chair to touch that bit of life once again. I left my bedroll and went down to deal with the rabbits.

  On the way, I got distracted by a room on the ground floor. The sign said “MUSEUM SHOP” and though from the mess and the dust overlaying it all it was clear someone—maybe many people—had gone a-viking through it a long time ago, there were interesting things left. It was mostly books, but also some pencils which I took and a little brass pencil sharpener with a steel blade that had not rusted. The books were mainly old picture books about art, too big to carry, but there was a tilted shelf of small books, about the right size for a pocket; they were guides to stuff like flowers and birds and rocks and things you might see on a walk and want to identify. I decided I could afford to add two of them to my pack without overloading myself. The obvious one to take was called Food for Free; it had a picture of blackberries and raspberries on the front. A quick look through showed it was a guide to eating things you found rather than things you had grown. It had lots of really good pictures to help identify the food that wouldn’t poison you. If I was going to forage my way across the mainland, a book that told me what not to eat among the new plants I was encountering was nothing but a gift. The less obviously useful one was called Trees which I took because I liked it, having only really just discovered a world with proper big trees in it. Looking back, I suppose both books helped me survive. But only one of them saved my life. And it wasn’t the obvious one.