E. C., she said, and stopped her horse.
She grimaced as she got off, and had to catch hold of the saddle to stop herself stumbling to her knees. She didn’t like that I’d seen the weakness, and made a great show of teaching me how to hang the horse’s reins over its head so they dragged on the ground in front of it so that it wouldn’t walk off, and then took things from her saddlebags and beckoned me to follow her up the hill of debris.
I left my horse and did so. There was broken glass beneath the moss, so we both trod carefully, but the building had been down long enough for nature to have bound it back into the earth and made it stable. And then, following her footsteps, I found myself at the top of the greenish hill the rubble was now turning into, looking down into what had once been a football field. It was now a hidden oasis of deeper green, with a stand of what I now knew were oak trees at one end, and a thicket of flowering hawthorn in the middle. Rabbits darted among the long grass around the trees, turning tails as white as the May blossom when they ran away at the sight of us. Jip immediately set off like an arrow, his mindset on serious business as he plunged into the undergrowth.
The other three sides of the stadium were in better shape than the one we were standing on, but on two of them the jutting roof that had once sheltered watchers from the rain or sun had dipped and collapsed in on the endless rows of faded pink plastic seats below. Trying to imagine the number of people this arena must have held, what that looked like, what that must have sounded like, made my head hurt. Does absence have a weight? I think it does, because I stood there feeling crushed by something I couldn’t see. It was a much stronger feeling than the one I had when looking at a landscape full of empty streets. Perhaps it was because so many people had once chosen to come and squeeze in close to each other in this single space. Again, there are no such things as ghosts. It didn’t feel haunted. But it did feel like something. Like it had once been peopled—and very densely peopled—and now it just wasn’t. It was unpeopled, in the same way something can’t be undone unless it has first been done. This was the atmosphere I had been trying to understand ever since I stepped on to the mainland, and it was a very different feeling to just being empty. It was more like loneliness, not mine from finding myself alone in this world, but this world’s loneliness without you. It had known you, and now you’re gone—and maybe this is just for a while, perhaps until the signs of you having been here are worn away and your houses and roads and bridges and football stadiums have been swallowed back into nature—it will miss you.
Or maybe I’m going a bit mad thinking like this and then taking the trouble to write my crazy thoughts down so that a long-dead boy who will never read them will know what my theories are about a world he can never visit. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend so long on your own, like I do now. Maybe I’m just talking to myself.
Anyway, the rest of the afternoon was a very good day. Until it wasn’t.
Once she had got moving, John Dark seemed happier about the pain from her wound and walked much less stiffly. She led me into the middle of what had been the field and closed her eyes, holding her finger to her lips. I listened. And then I heard it, just as she opened them again and looked a question at me.
It was a low humming noise, a gentle sound that filled the background and seemed to stroke the ears. Bees were thriving in the huge walled garden that the stadium had become, and there were a lot of them.
There were two fallen trees that had begun to rot from the middle out, and beside them was a strange kind of wooden shed on wheels. Maybe someone had, at the end of things, decided to come and live here behind the protection of the stadium walls. Maybe she kept the bees. Her shed on wheels had become a kind of huge beehive, and there were bees in the fallen trees too. It was a very protected space, and the meadow that the field had become must have been a ready supply of bee food.
John Dark pointed at a recent campfire and pointed at herself. I understood she had been here not long ago. This was how she knew about the bees. She then pointed to one of the fallen trees and grinned. We were going to get the honey from inside the trunk.
We worked together more or less in silence, and she was able to show me with deliberate movements what we were going to do. I don’t know if the silence was in order not to stir up the bees, or just because in doing something physical it was easier to mime, but it was a strangely calm and intimate way to spend time with another person.
I felt closer to her in those few hours than I had to anyone outside my family, now I look back on it. Even when working with the Lewismen, there was always a distance. Perhaps because we were two tribes—working together but supported by the others in our own family who also shared our difference to them. With one person, all those barriers went away, and we just talked with our hands and eyes.
Like I said. Intimate.
She built a fire on the ruins of her last one, and fed it until it got going. Then she moved the burning coals using her knife and the flat of a small hatchet and held them in front of the opening in the fallen trunk, right against the wood so that it began to scorch and smoulder. She fed that baby fire, indicating that I should keep the mother fire going as she did so. Then she started putting damper material on the smaller fire making it begin to smoke. The trick was to keep the core of the smaller fire hot enough and then to damp it with just enough material to keep it smoking heavily. Then she had me go into the stand to break off a plastic chair bottom. I shattered a couple because the material had become brittle with age, but on the third try I got a rough square and came back. She then had me fan the smoke plume so it entered the rotten hole in the trunk.
I should say that before we did all this we wound some sacking material she had in her saddlebags around our heads, and fastened our clothes so there was little chance of any of the bees getting in and stinging us. She had gloves too. I wound more material around my hands instead. I once read an old comic about an Egyptian god who came back from the dead as a mummy. That’s what we looked like. Half grotesque and half ridiculous. And me waving the seat back and forth, trying to create a breeze that would force the smoke in and the bees out. But of course there was no one to see us or laugh at the spectacle we must have made amid the smoke and the swarm of bees beginning to exit the trunk and buzz around us, out where the air was less thick.
She took her hatchet and began to hack efficiently at the rotten wood, enlarging the opening and exposing the honeycomb. The bee’s nest was formed in great rounded lobes of beeswax that looked fleshy and a little unearthly. I think it was the organic shape of the lobes that were in contrast with the geometric regularity of the honeycomb from which they were made. There were still big clumps of bees crawling over the fat lobes, which made them seem alive. We moved the fire closer and fanned the smoke until most were gone or just drowsing. And then, without warning me, she reached in with one hand and chopped a couple of the lobes free. The bees got angrier and less drowsy at that point, and some flew into the slit in my face covering that I’d left to see out of.
One of them stung me on the eyelid. I tried to keep fanning but the pain was like a hot needle had been stabbed into my eyeball. I gasped and staggered away, dropping the seat.
I heard her laughing and stumbled after her. The bees were buzzing louder as we emerged from the protective haze of the woodsmoke, but amazingly we weren’t followed by a large cloud of them trying to sting us in revenge for our theft. We stopped and sat on the crumbling cement steps at the far side of the field.
She looked elated, and carefully put the stolen honeycombs on the grass at our feet. Then she looked at the smoking tree trunk in the distance.
Mared! she said.
And then she took her largest water bottle and walked back into the smoke and the circling bee cloud. I thought it was a heroic thing to do. And it was the right thing too. I liked her for doing it. She kicked the fire away from the entrance to the trunk and poured water to douse the smouldering end. Having stolen some of their honey, sh
e made sure that their home was not burned down at the same time. She even picked up the seat and put it on top of the hole she’d widened, giving them a new roof. Then she half ran, half danced out of range of the bees, laughing as she came. Once more, she looked younger than the face she normally wore. She sat next to me and unwound the sacking strips, using them to wrap the first piece of honeycomb which was about the size of her head in circumference, though flatter from the side. Then she clicked her fingers at me to take my bandages off to wrap the second piece. My eye had swollen alarmingly so that I could only see out of the other one, and she looked surprised when she saw it—though whether at what it looked like or at the fact I had not made more fuss about it I never knew.
Because at that point, the other—unsuspected—bee that had got inside my layers began to vibrate angrily against my neck, and everything began to go wrong fast. As I tore open the fastenings at the neck of my shirt, she saw something and her eyes widened. I saw it and thought for a moment that she had seen my secret, but then I checked and she looked away, and I knew it was not that but something else, something she was hiding. And because I was relieved it was not the one thing, and because my eye was really hurting quite badly, I did not take time to think too much about what the other thing she was reacting to might have been.
She rummaged in her bag, and took something out which she shoved in her pocket before turning back to me. She leant down and broke off a piece of honeycomb, squeezing the gold honey on to the finger of her other hand.
Then she pointed at my eye and held up the honeyed finger.
Bon, she said. La me-ay say bon poor sa.
I let her reach over and daub the honey on my bulging eyelid. It felt sticky and warm and then things suddenly got confusing and fast and then shockingly painful. Not the eye, but my neck, because on what was, because of the eye, my blind side she pulled the thing that she had shoved into her pocket out again and looped it quickly over my head and tugged it tight.
The thin copper wire of one of her rabbit snares bit into my neck as she leapt behind me and yanked my knife from my belt. It happened so fast I was frozen in confusion for a second, and then I was choking and trying to get my fingers under the noose so I could free myself. And then she hissed in my ear and jabbed the tip of my knife into the base of my skull, not hard, not enough to break the skin, but enough to warn me to be still.
She said a lot, very quickly, spitting and hissing the words out in a long stream of anger. I don’t know what she was saying, but it was not good. And then the knife hooked under the silver steel ball chain of my pendant. She worked it round until she could hold the pendant and look at the lucky eight in its circle of arrows.
She went quiet. I didn’t move. I was sure I could feel blood dripping from the wire around my neck. It could have been sweat.
All I could hear was the hum of the bees in the distance, that and my heart thumping away in my chest, like a panicked secret trying to punch its way out into the open air.
Pew-tan, she spat. There was wonder and disappointment in the way it came out. And anger. A lot of anger.
She yanked the chain so that it snapped. She hefted my pendant in her hand, staring at the symbol pressed into it.
My lucky eight, at the centre of all those arrows going everywhere.
But like I said, not good luck.
And with the wire round my neck, and the very angry woman keeping it cinched tight—not going anywhere either.
What? I said. My voice sounded ragged. What?
She held the pendant in front of my good eye and unleashed a torrent of words, only three of which I got as she showed me the symbol, too close to my eye to really focus on.
Ooh ate eel? she said. Ooh ate eel?
Chapter 21
Key ay voo
The pendant was a key. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that. I only know it was a key because she showed me the word in her dictionary later, when she was trying to get me to tell her where I had found it and what had happened to the person I had taken it from. It doesn’t spoil anything because whatever the key was made to open remains a mystery. This story is not about a mysterious journey that ends up opening a wonderful door with a magic key. It’s not that kind of story. I’m writing this on the wrong side of a locked door, has no key and I don’t know if it’s ever going to open.
And I only have her word, I suppose, that it was a key anyway. It didn’t look like any key I’d ever seen. And she was less interested in the fact it was a key than in how I’d got it and who from. I tried to explain I had found it on the top of the tower, but my answer seemed to make her even more angry. She didn’t believe me. She kept asking where the man was. Her finger kept stabbing the words “where man?” And whatever I managed to communicate to her was just wrong—no man—what man?—found key—found key on tower—not know—all the answers seemed to rub salt in some wound I couldn’t see.
She shook me angrily and looked deep in my eyes.
Ay voo? she said. Voo, Griz. Key ay voo?
All I could do was shrug, still bewildered.
I don’t know what you want, I said. But I’m not an enemy.
She tied my hands behind me with more wire, and then she loosened the noose around my neck. It was while she was tying me to the flaking metal holding the seats to the stadium steps that Jip came back, looking suddenly confused as he dropped a rabbit at my feet and then looked at us both, sensing something was wrong. She straightened up and spat some words at me, and then went away, towards the horses.
Jip looked at her and then at me and whined, confused by the fact I hadn’t picked up the rabbit or ruffled the fur between his ears.
We’re in trouble, boy, I said. I pulled against the wire binding my wrists but stopped as it bit into my skin.
Jip saw me wince. He trotted up the steps and looked at my hands, pinioned behind my back. He whined, unsure of what was happening.
It’s okay, I said. It’ll be okay.
He licked my wrists. I scratched his neck with my fingertips. As best I could. Then he moved away and barked.
It’ll be fine, I said. She’ll calm down.
She didn’t. She came back, leading the horses and set them to graze on the overgrown pitch. Then she carried my bag up the steps, past me, and into a doorway where the steps disappeared inside the stadium. The landing made a square concrete-lined cave in the slope of the arena. She made her camp there, lighting a fire and unrolling her bedroll. If I scrunched round, I could sort of see what she was doing.
She was talking to herself, low and angry. She undid my pack and tipped all my possessions on the floor in front of her. Then she painstakingly spread them out and sorted through them. I don’t know what she was looking for, but she didn’t find it. That made her even more angry and she squatted on her haunches and looked at me as if everything in the world was my fault. Her silence and the flintiness of her stare was unnerving. There was no trace of the younger version of herself, the one that she had let out earlier in the day before the light began to fail.
As it got darker, the concrete roof and walls of the landing in which she had set her campfire made a warm square in the surrounding darkness, but all that did was make me feel the chill of the evening coming in. It was colder than it had been, and you didn’t have to have a dog’s nose to smell the rain in the air. Jip walked up the steps and looked at her. She ignored him. He sat down and barked at her. She might as well have been deaf for all the attention she paid him.
She gave me no food, no water and just left me sitting against the seat frames. I tried sawing the wire against the old metal stanchions, but it was too painful and, from what I could feel with my fingers, all I was doing was cleaning the corrosion off them, taking it back to the smooth metal beneath. The wire seemed no closer to breaking and I stopped. If anything was going to get sawed through, it was my wrists. I had no choice but to sit it out. Literally sit, because she didn’t bring me my bedroll or allow me to lie down. I’ve spent uncomf
ortable nights in strange places, and can sleep almost anywhere if I’m tired enough, but that started out as the worst night of all. Then things went downhill. And then—with the visitors—they fell off a cliff.
To begin with there was the physical discomfort. The longer I sat, the less of me there seemed to be to provide some kind of padding between the cold concrete and my bones. Then there was the awkwardness of sitting with my hands behind me. It made my shoulders and my neck ache, and it made my arms numb. I kept wiggling my fingers to make sure I wasn’t losing circulation. The least uncomfortable position was to let my head lean back until it rested on the plastic seat bottom, which left me staring up into the night sky, but did rest my neck a little.
It didn’t rest my brain though, and it was that as much as the physical discomfort that kept me awake. I tried to keep it calm, but I had no luck with that. It raced away, whirling furiously round and round like a windmill in a high wind. I kept replaying everything that had happened since I encountered John Dark. I had thought we had a sort of trust between us. She had certainly helped me—rescued me even—and I in turn had helped her with her wound. I had imagined we had also found a way to understand each other with our miming and pointing at words in the dictionary.
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