A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  I hadn’t been naked in a long time, not since swimming in the pool behind the house I’d burned. And I hadn’t been naked in front of anyone who was not my family ever. I was tired and wet and cold and exhausted and I thought, in my heart, that John Dark was probably in a coma she wasn’t going to come out of any time soon, if ever. What I really thought, especially after seeing the bruises on her broken ribcage, was that she was dying. I had no idea what internal damage she might have suffered, and certainly no hope at all of healing it, whatever it turned out to be. So bone-tired, wet, cold and sledgehammered by the day’s events, I stood in front of the flames, naked, my hands braced against the high lintel of the mantelpiece and let the fire warm me.

  Her eyes were open when I turned to warm my back. She stared at me. I stared back at her, and then I twisted away and pulled a blanket around me. When I looked at her again, her eyes were closed and I don’t know if she saw anything.

  She didn’t say anything about it the next morning, or indeed anything for the next two days. She hovered between a dull unhealthy sleep and a waking that was pained and undignified. I fed her when she was awake, pesh and the broth from the boar meat, and between bowls and pans and wet cloths to clean her up with and a tarp under her blankets to lie on, we coped with her need to piss and shit despite being unable to move. It didn’t worry me, but she hated that part of it.

  The only good thing was the swelling on her nose got better, and although both her eyes remained yellow and purple and bloodshot, they were on either side of a more or less symmetrical face again.

  I think I understood her silence. She was like a terrier that had been hurt. She had just gone into herself to heal. I came back into the room on the first morning, bringing more firewood and Jip had climbed on the sofa and lay against her, giving her his warmth. He looked at me.

  I said it was bon.

  Chapter 28

  Onwards, alone

  It all comes down to pissing and shitting in the end. That’s what Dad used to tell us about getting old and ill, or looking after those who were injured. He wasn’t wrong.

  Now that things had taken a turn for the worse, I began getting more and more worried that Brand would arrive at his home and then leave before I got there. I resented the time I was losing by nursing John Dark. And I could have left her and gone after him at any time I suppose, but she wasn’t able to move off her bedding to take care of herself, so I would have been condemning her to dying in her own mess. I couldn’t do that.

  Days passed in a blur of sameness. Feeding, helping her do what she had to do, cleaning her up when she did it while she was unconscious, again and again, day after day. It was harder because she either couldn’t or wouldn’t talk, and I began to worry she couldn’t see either because sometimes she squinted and sometimes she stared with wide-open eyes that didn’t seem to react to what was happening in front of her.

  She wasn’t dead, but maybe she was just dying slowly. She certainly didn’t seem to be getting any better. I filled my days when she slept by reading books from the library, but the pleasure I normally took from it was damped, because I knew I should really be on my way to Brand and Jess. Too much time to think made me second-—and third- and fourth-—guess my belief that he would be there. I went back and forth over my reasoning as to why I had been so sure the marks on the map meant that Norfolk was his base, and every time I did I came up with more reasons that I had been a fool to set out on such a crazy quest on such thin evidence. I punished myself for chasing an illusion just because I had wanted to take action rather than accept the impossibility of my loss. I told myself I should have stayed home and looked after my family and been satisfied I still had Jip.

  But I kept coming back to the same thing.

  Brand had stolen my dog. I didn’t actually have a choice. He had to expect me to come after him. It was a matter of loyalty. Even if I never found her, I had to try. I had to give it my best shot. I knew in my better moments that I was doing this because I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself—or Jip—if I didn’t.

  And so, on the principle of planning for a better future, even if it seemed unlikely, I kept my mind calm by keeping my hands busy. That worked better than just sitting and reading and living in my head with all the echoing doubts bouncing around inside it. I made John Dark a pair of crutches. Then I dug a hole just outside the door to the garden, as a toilet, and I knocked the bottom out of a sturdy wooden chair that had armrests and planted it over the hole. I filled a bucket with wood ash from the fire and left it by the chair.

  I wondered about making her a chair with wheels, but none of the wheels I could find turned any more: they were corroded in their axles or the rubber tyres had perished to nothing. I started getting jealous of the attention Jip paid to her. That was stupid and mean-spirited, but I felt it. I began smoking meat in the large fireplace and when done I hung a good cache of it from the walls. I found as many pots and pans and bottles as I could and filled them with water, leaving them round the edge of the room.

  I don’t know if she knew what I was doing. She watched me and her face gave nothing away. The bruising was fading to all the colours of a pale rainbow, and as it disappeared her skin was now always as grey and washed out as her hair.

  I lived those days like I was slowly drowning in despair and a large part of that was because I didn’t know how to do two things I knew were the right thing to do, two things which cancelled each other out.

  In the end, she showed me.

  I woke to find her gone. The dawn light was watery and the fire was cold and long gone to ash. I sat up and looked around. The crutches were gone too. So was Jip.

  She was on the seat over the hole in the garden and she was crying. I think it was partly from the effort to get there, and partly out of frustration, because one of the crutches had toppled away into the grass and she couldn’t quite drag it back into her reach with the other one. She looked away as I came out onto the dew-soaked grass, and I picked up the crutch and gave it to her without speaking. After a bit, I realised she was sitting motionless because she didn’t want me to see the effort it was going to take to get back on her feet. I went back into the room, but watched her from behind, through the window. She got shakily upright, and then swung herself precariously to the door, where she leant and panted for breath. The effort of keeping her splinted leg off the ground was exhausting. She was trying to use muscles she hadn’t used for many days, maybe even weeks. I had stopped counting because the mounting tally of wasted days felt like it was pressing down and slowly suffocating me.

  She looked at me and nodded. I helped her get from the door to the sofa and she lay down and went straight to sleep.

  She didn’t exactly get better then, but she got more mobile. I think she knew something was wrong with her head and something else was wrong with her body inside. I would see her wince in pain and hold her hands to her temples until whatever was hurting her went away. It made me think of Dad wanting to drill the hole in Mum’s head when she’d cracked her skull. I couldn’t see any fluid coming from John Dark’s nose though. And I certainly didn’t go looking for a hand drill.

  She asked for things by pointing. I brought her the dictionary and I brought her a pencil. She pointed at the record player and I put music on. Then she waved me away, wanting to be alone.

  I went hunting with Jip. He caught a rabbit and I shot two, though I missed another and spent an irritable half-hour searching for my arrow in the middle of a tangle of brambles.

  When I came back, she was sleeping. She woke and ate and then went back to sleep. I read until it was dark and then went to bed myself.

  Dawn came with a poke in the ribs.

  She stood over me, jabbing with her crutch. I sat up and she handed me a note. She must have spent all the time I was out hunting stitching the words together from the dictionary. She didn’t know how verbs work in English, but it was painfully clear what she meant. As I unfolded it, she swung herself out into the garden
and made noisy use of the hole in the ground.

  I know this is exactly what she wrote because I have the note still, folded into the book I am writing in.

  YOU TO GO TO FIND YOUR DOG NOW.

  I HURT ME NOT TO BE BETTER.

  I NOT TO WANT TO BE SEEN LIKE THIS.

  I TO BE HAPPY TO LEAVE ALONE WITH MY MEMORIES.

  WATER. MUSIC. FOOD. HOLE IN GROUND. THANK YOU, GRIZ.

  TO GO QUICK. NOW. IMMEDIATE.

  BEST WAY TO SAY GOODBYE.

  TAKE HORSES.

  If she believed she was going to get better, she would have said take one horse. It was telling me to take both that made me wipe my eyes.

  But she was right about a fast goodbye. There was no point lingering or arguing. She had given me permission. She had solved my problem for me.

  She came back and stood leaning in the doorway.

  Bon? she said.

  I nodded.

  Veet, she said. Allay veet.

  I left her the saddlebags full of stuff from the packhorse. I dragged them inside and put them close to the sofa. She nodded. It wasn’t just useful things she had collected, there were memories in there she had brought through the tunnel from France. Then I picked her a basket of pesh and took a bag for myself and saddled the horses.

  I gave her the basket when I went back in to say goodbye. I caught her scratching Jip behind the ears, which he was enjoying, though she pretended she hadn’t been as soon as I entered the room. I found I didn’t know how to say goodbye properly. She beckoned me closer and suddenly hugged me so tight I think she wasn’t just hugging me but all the ones she had lost.

  Or maybe she was making the most of her last moment of human contact.

  Then she spoke English. She must have learned it from the dictionary. Her voice was ragged and raw, and the words sort of twisted in her mouth and came out with a French flavour, but it wasn’t hard to understand.

  Griz, she said. Griz. Thank you, friend.

  I squeezed her back and said “friend” too, then the rest of the words I wanted to say got choked up and stuck and we both stayed like that until we had composed ourselves. Then she let go and pushed me back firmly. She held out another folded piece of paper.

  Not to read now, she said carefully.

  And then she kissed me on both cheeks and sat back down on the sofa, avoiding my eyes and waving me away with a hand gesture as imperious as a queen.

  I rode away with that familiar unswallowable lump of loss stuck behind my breastbone. As I did so, I heard the record player start to play the fast and happy tune we had laughed and danced to, and I knew she wasn’t dancing but putting a brave face on what was to come and trying to cheer me up. I heard it three times and then either she got too tired to wind the player again or we had got too far away to hear it any more.

  Jip kept looking up at me and then stopping and looking back at the house, and then running to catch up and look at me again, as if asking me a question I had no good answer for. Once the sound was gone, I picked up the pace, moving faster than we had before. Now the decision was made, there was no good to be had from taking any longer than necessary.

  We got many klicks beyond the hogweed field before night fell, and found ourselves on the edge of a more varied terrain that stretched away flat and featureless ahead of us.

  I watered the horses in a pond and hobbled them for the night.

  Only when I had eaten and laid out my bedroll did I take out the note. It was too dark to read by then, but I poked the fire back into a blaze and turned myself so that I could read it. It didn’t say much, but in a way it broke my heart and made me feel terrible about leaving her all over again. I still have it here in my other hand as I write this.

  YOU TO LIE TO ME, GRIZ.

  IT OK. I TO UNDERSTAND.

  BUT I TO KNOW WHY YOU ARE SO STRONG.

  YOU TO REMIND ME OF MY DAUGHTERS.

  And yes, my eyes were stinging as I closed them to start chasing sleep that came in unsatisfactory fits throughout a long cold night. And no, it wasn’t because of the woodsmoke.

  Chapter 29

  First sight

  I know reading has made me sentimental. Dad doesn’t read much other than practical books that don’t have stories in them, and apart from sometimes sitting with Mum and holding her hand by the fire when he thinks we aren’t watching, he is not a needlessly tender man. He’s brisk, often curt, and decisive. He gets things done, like he has a list in his head that he is always adjusting, adding to and ticking things off.

  I made myself more like him as I rode away from the Homely House and John Dark. I stopped myself from wondering each night as I made the campfire if she had died during that long day, if she was lighting her own fire as I lit mine, or if the Homely House was quiet again, and now the home of a new corpse. I didn’t read any of my books, not even the new ones. I told myself I didn’t need to soften myself with distractions like that, but that if I succeeded in my wild quest I would allow myself as much reading as I liked as a reward. Instead of reading, I just used the map and the compass and tried to make sense of where I was, to keep on track for where I was going.

  My biggest piece of luck was looking for shelter one night as the rain set in again, and finding what I took to be a big metal lean-to, overgrown with creepers. There was room for me and the horses under it and it was only when I lit the fire that I saw the underside and the giant writing and realised it was a large, miraculously still legible road sign which had fallen and ended up tilted against the trees that had grown up around it. It took a night of lying there thinking, but once I worked out what to do it made it very easy to get a sense of where I was: I just looked at the distances to various towns, and used a piece of string to measure those distances against the scale printed on the bottom of the map. Then I found the towns named on the sign and drew circles of the right diameter to match the distances—and where they all met had to be where I was.

  Knowing my position gave me an added sense of purpose as I pressed on. I ignored the houses that I passed and wasted no more time viking through any of them. I slept under the stars, or under John Dark’s tarp shelter, and I disciplined myself to focus only on what lay ahead. I suppose it was like what being a soldier must have been, preparing to go to war. Not wanting to fight, but getting your head straight so you were ready and as unsurprised as possible in the face of whatever fate held in store. Every morning, I woke and practised with my bow, fifing three quivers before I ate and moved on for the day. At midday, I fired three more. At night, just before dark, I fired a final three. Jip often stood and watched me, as if wondering why I was hunting tree trunks, or how many times I expected to bury arrowheads in one before I killed it.

  I sharpened my mind by trying to remember every moment I could of those I’d spent with Brand, so I would be able to read him better when we next met. I practised the arguments I might have to make. I also sharpened my knives.

  I tried to make myself go cold inside, methodical and unemotional like my dad. Jip made that difficult because he was having such a happy time, running all over this new terrain, exploring the sights and the huge variety of new smells that the changing landscape must have presented him with. Even with a simple human nose, I could tell things smelled different: for him the mainland must have been like me discovering the bigger music on the record player. The islands are simple—sea, salt, heather, wildflowers in the machair. They were like music made with a guitar or a tin whistle, or Brand’s single violin. The mainland with its variety of plants and flowers and trees must have been like a huge orchestra for him. Tannhäuser through the nose. He hunted with me and he slept close, sharing the warmth. His happiness was infectious. He brought me rabbits and a rat and early one morning chased a hare over the low ridge ahead of me, and when I crested it, ten minutes later, he was standing, hare-less, silhouetted by the still rising sun, nose to the light breeze, tail stiffly behind him, staring at what should not, according to my map, be where it was.

 
It was a sea marsh, and beyond it, sending a tang of salt even I could smell, was the sea itself. Much closer than the map had led me to expect it might be. The land had gone, swallowed by water that had risen as the world had got hotter. On Eriskay, you can swim and look down on the old ferry jetty sunk a metre or so below the waves. On Berneray, you sail in and moor your boat to the chimney stack of houses that used to line the foreshore. So although the world is still a big place, the dry bits of it are, I suppose, smaller than in your time. And the flat lands on the east, one bordering the North Sea, had now gone under it.

  Which made sense of the map which had put Brand’s base so very far up the river from the estuary. Because now it wasn’t hidden away so far from the sea at all. The sea had come and found it. That explained lines I had thought slapdash, the ones that “flew” over dry land. Because that land was not dry now, but marsh or seabed. I got off the horse and found the new binoculars, steadied them on a low tree branch and took stock of the terrain ahead. The trees thinned out and gave way to a sort of in-between land where dry spits and peninsulas jutted into the marsh. The marsh was covered in great expanses of reeds in some places, like flat islands in the water, dotted with wading birds, and in other places you could see the shape of the huge fields that had once been here by the skeleton remains of old hedgerows with their feet in the shallower water. The carcasses of several old buildings were tilted and half collapsed in the water here and there all across the marshscape, looking surprised to find themselves shipwrecked. Some of the old giant electrical pylons had survived a century or so of storms and the power cables they had supported as they marched in heroic swags all the way across the land curved down into the water here and finally lost themselves in the incoming waves.