I drank deep from my water bottle and got up a little too fast which made me retch. My legs felt bendy in all the wrong directions, and the room swam alarmingly around me as I tried to walk. I took off my soiled clothes and took them downstairs with me, holding on to the wall as I went.
I climbed out of the window and carefully walked to the pond. It was fed by a small stream that came off the slope behind it, so it wasn’t stagnant water. I drank some more and then set about cleaning my clothes. It took a lot of scrubbing and rinsing and doing it over again and again to get them clean, but I did it. The stink wasn’t just the mess I’d made: it was the sweat with which I’d soaked the rest of my clothes, lying asleep in my fever. And of course it was also me. Leaving my clothes spread out on a bush, I got into the pond and washed myself too, ducking below the surface and giving my hair a good scrub as I did so. It was deep-bone cold but I’ve never swum in warm water so the ache and tingle of it was familiar and, in its own way, comforting. I turned on my back and swam to the middle of the pond, where I floated, looking up at the sky and feeling that great sense of exhilaration that comes when you’ve been so ill you had forgotten what well feels like. I wasn’t strong, or even really over it, but I was definitely over the worst. On the mend, as Dad used to say.
You can work today because you’re on the mend.
The warmth of the day was going, however, and the sun dropping. I realised as I floated there that I must have been asleep for almost a full twenty-four hours. And it would be dark again soon.
Jip brought a rabbit to the edge of the pond and dropped it with a bark that said it was for me.
I got out and took the rabbit and my wet clothes back to the house. I broke up some more furniture and got the fire in the bathroom going again. I was feeling well enough to poke around, which got me a couple of cooking pots and a good knife from the kitchen, and in the bathroom cabinet a curved plastic pot with a flat lid and a faded label that said it was DR HARRIS ARLINGTON SHAVING SOAP. It still had the ghost of a smell, clean and sharp. I decided there and then to heat water in one of the cooking pots and re-clean my clothes with some of this soap. The lid cracked when I opened it, but I still have a much smaller puck of the soap with me wrapped in a piece of cloth. I think the smell must have really gone but I sometimes take it out and sniff it and imagine I can get the faint outline of what it once was.
That night, I wrung out my newly fragrant clothes and hung them in front of the fire to dry as I slept. I boiled the rabbit meat with a sprig of rosemary I broke from a bush by the kitchen door. It didn’t taste of much, but I ate it all and slept long and deep, waking once to see Jip lying across the door, facing the stairs, on guard just in case anything came in to see what we were up to. Comforted, I quietly told him he was a good dog and went back to sleep.
He was gone when I woke.
Chapter 16
Shooting the albatross
I got dressed and waited for him by the pond. And then I walked around whistling and then calling for him until my throat went raw. When waiting got to be unbearable, I left my pack so that he’d know I was coming back if I missed him, and then I took my bow and went looking for him seriously. I tracked back along the way we’d come, and then I returned and walked ever widening circles around the house, still whistling and shouting and listening. I froze many times, ears straining at a distant noise in the woods, convinced that at any moment it would turn into an excited crashing through the undergrowth that would end up with an exhausted but happy Jip bounding back to me. But that never happened. I ate berries when I remembered to, but I didn’t have the heart to go hunt a rabbit or find anything else to eat, maybe because I couldn’t think of anything sadder than the lonely meal waiting for me at the end of the day if I didn’t find him.
But I didn’t find him, and he didn’t find me. All that did was a darkness that seemed to come earlier than I’d expected, and a long night back in the house without a fire. I didn’t light it because I didn’t want the crackling of the wood to drown any sounds outside that might be an injured dog trying to get my attention. But in truth I knew then that I’d likely never know where he went. Or why. Or if he meant to come back and couldn’t. I told myself that accidents happen, even to terriers. Thinking of what that accident might have been kept sleep away for more than half the night.
I was awake before the dawn, waiting for the greyness to take over from the dark, but first light brought nothing but a short and depressing rain shower and no dog at all.
I was feeling physically stronger, but my spirits could not have been lower. I was so worried and sad that my thinking was nearly as muddled as it had been when I was gripped by the fever. Once the shower had passed, I sat on the stairs and listened to the water dripping sullenly off the trees pressing against the windows and tried to think realistically and practically. Again, I don’t know if it was the right choice, but I decided to look for Jip again for one more day—and then move on.
In my heart, I think I would have waited for him for ever, if I truly believed he was coming back. But it wasn’t just the house and the woods around it that I was circling. It was the nasty, heartbreaking truth that Jip would never run off and leave me. It was the very opposite of his nature to do something like that, and while he might stay away hunting all night, he would always have returned if he could. Nevertheless I spent hours walking around the woods, looking into rabbit holes, listening even, just in case he had dug himself into a tunnel he couldn’t get out of. I’d seen how far he would dig into the sand dunes at home if he thought there was a chance of a rabbit at the end of it—ten feet or more sometimes.
It was while crouching silently by one of these holes that I looked up and saw the badgers. Two of them across a patch of nettles, staring back at me, unmistakable white heads with two thick black stripes running from either side of the muzzle up across the eyes to the ears behind. The first badger I saw was in a book about a rat and a mole that went on a great adventure. That badger was wise and tough and stern and a good friend in need. I don’t know if these badgers were wise, but they looked tough and stern enough and while not unfriendly, they didn’t seem especially concerned by the sudden arrival of a human. But they did look larger than I had expected a badger to look in the flesh. They not only looked quite big but more than sturdy enough to give as good as they got in a fight with a terrier the size of Jip. As they lost interest in me and shambled of into the undergrowth, I began to wonder if there were other ways Jip might have got into trouble than digging too enthusiastically.
I found the corpse at just about the time I was going to give up. I almost missed it, but the tail of my eye must have noticed the fur and the brown paw sticking up in the air against the grey-green trunk of a beech tree. Or maybe it was the geometrical regularity of the bones of the ribcage among the chaotic shapes of the undergrowth. Without thinking, my head swung back to see what I’d so nearly walked straight past and I felt my stomach flip and something unswallowable appear at the base of my throat.
I went very still for as long as I could manage, and then found I was moving towards the body, pulled by a magnet I couldn’t escape no matter how much I wanted to.
Jip was more than my dog; he was my friend, my family, my brother.
He was not this freshly dead fox at the foot of the tree.
Relief hit me so hard that my legs went and I dropped painfully to my knees in the rough tangle of fallen twigs and beechnut shells. I found myself gasping for air as if I’d been holding my breath for a long time. Maybe I had. Since I was little, since Joy was taken from us over the high cliff at the back of the island, I’ve always prided myself on not crying when things hurt or get tough, so I don’t think I was crying, but the sobs of air I took in might have sounded like it if anyone was watching.
I spent one more night in the brick house, which I had come to hate because it was where I had lost my other dog. I sat beside the bathroom fire on my bedroll and read the book on trees by the glow off the flames. Tha
t’s where I learned the name of the beech the fox had died next to, and the fact that the little three-sided nuts spilling out of their hairy cases were called beech mast. And that they were edible. That’s about all the good I got out of that night, and again I did not sleep well. There was a wind, and the trees that were slowly squeezing in on the house from all sides rustled and scratched away at the windows all night. When I did sleep, my dreams were full of things trying to get inside the house, and trees that walked, and triffids—which were from a book I read about a very different end of the world than the one you and I are on either side of. Your world didn’t end because of meteorites that blinded everyone, or killer plants. Although Ferg said one theory he’d heard from the Lewismen was that what did it was something your lot put on the plants, something that got into everybody’s bodies and then became infectious and stopped breeding happening. That was just something he said. To me that sounds as fanciful as triffids. Or krakens. That was another strange book by the same writer. Maybe if I’d been sleeping by the shore, I’d have dreamed of krakens. But I was far inland, and my eyes hadn’t seen the healthy sea for days. I think I was as soul-sick for the sea as I was feverstruck. And now I look back on it, I also think my mind was reeling from all the new things I had seen, not just the novelty of bridges and churches and towers and trees, but the sheer, relentless immensity of what had been left behind. It was the volume of it all, pressing in on my head like the big bench vice in Dad’s workshop.
I did a spiteful thing when I left the brick house. I feel bad about it even now, though I don’t know exactly why I should feel like this, any more than I know precisely why I did it. I regretted it the first time I looked back and saw the column of black smoke rising into the still air behind me, but by that time it was far too late to do anything about it. I had walked four pebbles without turning because leaving a place that Jip had been and just might one day return to was so hard I think I might have broken and run back and waited—as I said—for ever. I had broken up the empty chests of drawers and left them spilling into the fireplace when I left, waiting until they had caught before leaving, hearing the thrum of flames vibrate through the ceiling above me as I climbed out of the downstairs window for the last time.
It was a cremation. A fire burial. A Viking funeral. An end, marked. A farewell signal put into the sky for what was left of the world to see, to honour a dog and then to be dispersed and blown away in the wind. Those were some of the high thoughts I had as I walked away towards the notch in the hills, definitely not crying. Then, when I did stop and look back, I saw it for the meanness it was. I had just hated the house for what had happened in it and had not thought of how it had sheltered me while I got better. I had burned it and the homes of the animals that lived in its walls and under its floors, and the birds that had nested under its eaves, and I had burned the crowding trees too. The trees had done nothing bad, other than grow where they could. A bad thing had happened to me in that house, but it had happened as blamelessly as the rain. The bad thing that had been done in that house, to the house, that was done by me. I walked onwards, sickened at myself, the nasty feeling that I had somehow called down bad luck on my future growing with every pace.
You know the rhyme about the ancient sailor that stoppeth one in three? Dad used to read it to us by the fire in the winter, and it chills me now to think of it as much as it did when he did the voices, and described the icebergs on the polar ocean and the other warm and sluggish sea that trapped them later, thick with sea snakes and ghost ships. It seemed to be describing another planet entirely. I felt just like that poem. Like that ancient mariner, in my case at sea in a land whose rules I did not quite understand until it was too late. I never understood why the mariner shot the albatross that had saved them, and I still don’t know why I burned the house that had sheltered me. But I did. And I did it on purpose, in a kind of vicious lashing out at something just because I was scared and confused and sad. I didn’t need to see the bright lick of the red flames at the base of the black column of smoke towering over the copse and the pond to know that, just like the rhyme said, I had done a hellish thing.
I had shot the albatross.
Chapter 17
Woe
I walked away from the accusing finger of smoke with the thumpity-thump delivery Dad had always read the mariner poem with pounding away in my brain. If you listen to someone reading a poem often enough, it hammers itself into your mind and makes it not only easier to remember, but also harder to forget. I would really have liked to have forgotten the lines that kept going round and round, the ones that said something like:
And I had done an hellish thing,
And it would work ’em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay
That made the breeze to blow!
Well, I told myself. At least I don’t need breezes to get me moving. All I need is my legs.
And I did punish them, walking more pebbles in that first day than I had done in two before I had lost Jip. I walked hard to make my body ache enough to distract me from the heart-wrenching question of why I had set off on a probably futile search for one dog and then lost the other. In shame and self-loathing, I walked through the dusk and on into the darkness, lit by moonlight until the clouds came and then I rolled into an uncomfortable bundle beneath a little rounded bridge that had once taken a small road over a single railway track. It was dry and like a house without walls on two sides. I slept well and woke to the sound of birds in the trees all around me, and stepped out into the sunlight feeling that this was going to be a good day. The feeling lasted through most of the morning, and even raised a bit as my nose caught a whiff of woodsmoke blowing into my face as I climbed the first proper slope I had so far encountered on my walk from the coast. I knew from the direction of the wind that I was not smelling Jip’s funeral pyre behind me. And I knew I must be close to the spot I had marked what seemed an age ago on the rain-lashed viewing platform on the tower, the source of the distant firelight I had seen winking at me in the storm, the spark of hope and mystery that I’d been so excited about when I had been confident and angry, and had a good dog to travel towards it with. Before I lost Jip and shot the albatross.
Some part of me must have been thinking straight and acting cautious, because I crested the slope with my bow in my hand, arrow ready.
The fire had not been manmade. Ahead of me was a burn mark just like the ones on the heather-covered slopes at home. It had blown through the bracken and gorse in the same long distinctive tongue shape. I walked the length of it, from the widest point to the narrow tip where it had begun. There I found a small stand of trees protected from the wind in a crease in the land just below the ridgeline, and half of them—on what must have been the windward side—were still green. The others were charred and it was easy to see where the lightning had struck and ignited the fire. One tree still stood—taller than the rest but dead on its feet, split in two by the strike. The halves leaned away from each other exposing the burned-out heartwood. It was somehow terrible—both the sight and the thought of the power it must have taken to do that, electricity jagging out of the sky. Even at the time, it seemed like another bad omen. I did not know that one day I would know exactly what the tree had felt like, riven in half by a bolt from out of a clear blue sky.
The burn scar stemming from the lightning tree was still fresh. No growth had begun to fill in. The smell was new and strong. The fire had been nature, not man. The spark of distant hope had been an illusion and the adventure it had lured me into was a mistaken ordeal instead. It had also killed my dog.
I was still as alone as I had ever been. I sat on the ridge and looked down at the countryside spread out below. I decided the best way to deal with the disappointment was to look at the map and try and work out how far I had come, where I was, and how far I had to go to get to Brand’s hideout. I was thinking of it as t
hat by then—a hideout. A place thieves and pirates took their plunder. It was fanciful, but at that point I was not seeing the world as it is, because I had still seen so very little of it. I know that now, now that I have had a long time to do little else but think. I was still seeing it through the lens of the books I had read about it before it died, and that coloured things. It was like the old pair of sunglasses that Bar used to wear when fishing, the ones that made the water look different. It’s not exactly like that because Bar’s sunglasses actually took away the reflection on the surface of the water and let you see what was happening below. My lens of books didn’t seem to be helping me see any hidden things below the surface.
The map was both helpful and confusing. I had a rough idea of where I was, even though I had messed up my distance counting while I was feverish, on the days when I had futilely plodded away counting steps but forgetting to mark them with my clever-but-actually-not-so-clever-if-you-forget-to-do-it pebble trick.
Before I laid out the map, I climbed as high as I could, out on to the edge of an area of high moors, and looked down. My compass gave me north, so I was able to lay the map down at my feet and orientate it in the right direction. I weighted the edges against the wind and spent a long time carefully trying to match up the features that were so confidently marked on the map with the much blurrier details time and vegetation had overgrown. It took me most of the rest of the daylight to put it all together in a way that at least half made sense, but even as I went to sleep I was not sure I’d got it right. My plan was to walk to the curving line of trees about five klicks away and see if it was, as I guessed, one of the important roads the map showed and numbered beginning with the letter M. If it was the one I thought, then walking along it would take me to a very big city in the middle of the country, and then if I confirmed that I could make my way east by following the path of old roads and a railway line until I hit the coast more or less where I wanted to. It would be better than steering by notches in the hills. Especially because on the downside of this high ground there would be no more slopes rising ahead of me.
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World Page 15
