A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  Don’t worry, Ellis said. We’ve not got so many that we’re going to let her rot in there. She’ll be fed and watered as good as you. We’re not bad people. She’ll come to see that. We’ll treat her well.

  By “not so many” he meant breeders.

  I don’t remember much more of that day because I spent most of it dazed by seeing Joy alive, and then seeing her full of hate for me. I was torn apart. Like the lightning tree I had found on the ridge, the source of the light I’d seen from the tower. I was split in two—my heartwood blasted and burned out. I was dead on my feet. I couldn’t get the taste of blood out of my mouth. It, and the thought that it came with, made me sick. Literally. I lay on the bed ledge, my mind stumbling around the horror of it, trying to catch up with itself, deaf to whatever Brand kept saying through the slit in the door, and then I felt my body convulse as if rising in rebellion against the facts of the day. I only just made it to the bowl before I threw up the contents of my stomach in what seemed like an endless chain of convulsions. It felt like I was trying to vomit myself inside out, and when it did finally stop I was left shaking and weak but too tired to be able to find any relief in sleep. I lay there, convinced I would never sleep again. The horror of Joy pushed everything out of my head. I don’t think I thought of Jip or Jess or anything other than the nightmare I had woken into.

  Somewhere in that blurred-out day, they brought me food and they brought me water—water to drink and water to flush the steel toilet. They set up a length of old steel pole poked through my window and poured from a distance as I mechanically filled a jug and the buckets. And then they asked if I wanted anything else and I did have enough sense to ask for my backpack and they brought it and took anything like a tool or a knife from it, as well as medicines, but that’s at least how I got this notebook I’m writing in.

  Welcome to the now.

  Chapter 37

  The now

  I suppose everything becomes a routine that you can get used to if you do it all the time—even sadness and horror and loneliness. I miss Jip and Jess, though I do sometimes catch a glimpse of them being walked on a rope in the distance through the trees. I find I miss them even more than my home, which is strange. Maybe it’s because they are close enough to see and almost near enough to touch.

  I have been stuck in this concrete box, on my own and writing all this for twenty-three days. It feels like I am never going to be allowed to leave.

  I have quarter of a pencil left. I will have to ask for more.

  They feed us well enough and they keep the water coming and they often ask if I want things. I say I want to get out and it’s so routine that they think it’s a joke when I say it and laugh like they’re sharing something pleasant and fun with me. They’ve explained being walled up in this cement box is all for my own good. It’s for my protection (from Brand) and theirs (from the imaginary germs I might be carrying to blight them). They probably believe it. They say that when I am allowed to leave here they will make it up to me and I will like them and their home and want it to be mine. I try and smile and say maybe, but I don’t smile well when I would rather shout. I smile to help them relax about me.

  They do not know what I do at night.

  They come and sit on an old stool outside my window at any hour of the day and ask all sorts of other questions. About my family, how I got here without being eaten by wolves, would I like to know about their god because he’s really good at helping you understand why the world has trials and tribulations and how it’s all a way for him to show his love, and much other stuff like that. They keep their masks on because they believe in germs too.

  I tell them my family is dead, because I don’t want them knowing where they are, and I tell them that I was safe deeper in the mainland because Jip is great at keeping wolves away. I want them to feed him and treat him and Jess like something of value. I also tell them I’d like to know why—since they seem to think breeding is such an important thing—that their god is a father and not a mother. I told them I did like the sound the bells on their church make though.

  And that’s true. I like hearing them at the end of every day when they all go in to have a big pray-up together, because that means there’s one less day until they come and knock down the wall and get me out of here, and then all I have to do is grit my teeth and trust that Brand will be good on his word and help me escape before it gets too grim or repetitive. Though since Brand and I aren’t talking at the moment I write this, maybe I do also hate the church bells because they might just be marking off the time until he betrays me again.

  Ellis told me that my liking the bells was a start and that I should likely come to love his god because his god loved everyone. I didn’t argue. Everyone in my family likes the lobsters we pull out of the deep clear water. I don’t think the lobsters like us much. Nor do I think they’re obliged to do so.

  Ellis asked me if I’d ever been with a man. His manner was equal parts swagger and furtive.

  I didn’t answer.

  He dared to come closer, as if shy about being overheard.

  He told me I should like it. He told me in a soft voice that made my flesh creep. That he would make me very happy. That it was not a painful but a wonderful world of sensations he would introduce me to. He told me not to worry about disappointing him, that he would show me how to give him pleasure too.

  I think he stumbled as he left because the glass on his gas mask had steamed up a bit. I saw him wipe it as he took it off and walked away.

  When Brand and I were still talking, I asked him about Joy’s hand. Why it was twisted. Why she wore a glove.

  What he told me hit as hard as that knotted fist coming through the bars.

  I only know what they told me, he said. I don’t know how much is true.

  Just tell me, I said.

  He was looking at me through the Judas hole in the door.

  Ellis gave her a child, he said.

  Do you mean he gave her someone else’s child, or that he made her pregnant? I asked.

  He made her pregnant, he said.

  There’s a word for that, I said.

  I know, he said.

  But I had no words. Just sadness. And a sudden need to find Joy and hold her and say I understood why she was so hard and angry. I was still a fool. Soft. I didn’t know anything.

  She carried the baby but it was delivered dead, he said. Maybe once upon a time doctors could have saved it.

  Joy. Breaking my heart again and again. I sank to the bed and stared at the floor.

  She was too young, said Brand. That’s what the woman said.

  What woman? I said.

  The tall one who was beside Ellis, said Brand. Mary. She’s called Mary like the mother of their god. She said Tertia was too young, so the baby died and then she was useless as no life could cling to her womb any more.

  Her hand, I said.

  Ellis wanted to try again is what she told me. Years later. Maybe he said it was for breeding, but I expect it was just for the doing of it, said Brand. He has hot little eyes, Ellis. He tried to force her and frighten her with a hot poker from the fire. That’s how her hand got burn-scarred into a claw like that.

  He burned her hand, I choked.

  No, said Brand. She said no. And she said that she wasn’t frightened of him. He said he’d see about that, and he put the red poker in front of her face and asked if she was still so brave and…

  His voice trailed off.

  And? I said. And what?

  And she was, said Brand. She just grabbed the hot end and pushed it right back into his face. So her hand is puckered and pulled out of shape by the burn scar, and he nearly lost an eye, and carries her mark across his cheek beneath that mask.

  Good for her, I said.

  Yes, he said. Good for her. Tough little nugget. No doubt she’s your sister. Looks like you too.

  That’s why I first cut my hair short at the back and sides, like a boy. Because even when Mum was at her worst she’d
see me and get distressed, thinking I was Joy come back. I thought Dad would be angry with me for hacking off my pigtails, but he wasn’t. He said it looked good and even tidied it up for me. Now I think maybe he also wanted me to look like a boy in case they came back, looking for more young girls to steal. I don’t know. I just like my hair like this. Out of the way, no fuss when you’re in the wind, working.

  I do know that’s why he introduced me as a boy to Brand. For my own protection. It was a warning, even then. Do not trust this stranger. Any strangers, really. That’s why I went along with the lie with John Dark. Dad’s always been overprotective about me, but somehow in his eyes Bar’s always been big enough to look after herself. He’s not used to the fact I grew up and am just as tough as her now.

  Was it always safer being a boy than a girl, even when you were alive?

  I thought about what else Joy had said.

  Do you think they sold her? I said. My parents?

  His eyes went away from the Judas hole. I heard his body slide down the door into a sitting position, leaning back against the metal.

  Do you? he said.

  Not for a minute, I said. Not for a minute.

  For a tithe, he said. Would they have paid her as a tithe?

  You mean because of what she said? I said. So they’d leave the rest of us alone?

  Yes, he said. Would your father have done it?

  I didn’t have to think.

  No, I said.

  Because you’re so sure he’s a good man? he said.

  No, I said. Because he’s not soft.

  No, he said after a bit. No. He didn’t seem to be.

  He isn’t, I said. Any more than I am.

  Or I, said Brand.

  We’re not the same, I said. You’re not the same as us.

  Maybe, he said. But we’re all from the north. Things are harder there. And soft doesn’t get much done.

  He was like that, Brand. He always said one thing too much. He liked the sound of his voice I think. So he would overspeak and get braggarty—and then you trusted him less than if he hadn’t gone on.

  “We’re all from the north” was the sort of thing that sounded good until you tapped it and realised it was hollow as an empty bucket.

  I’m sorry she hates you, he said.

  And then he was like this too—he could say just the right thing, the words that swung in under your guard and got right to the core of you.

  Me too, I said. But I don’t know what to do about it.

  I’ve been thinking about it, he said.

  She’s not your sister, I said. You don’t have to.

  No, he said. But I can’t help thinking that she could have been. And what it must feel like.

  He could get so close with his words that you had to hate him to keep yourself protected from him.

  They poisoned her mind, he said. They must have done it to try and make her accept what had happened. To stop her trying to escape, because if you all had given her up, then where was she going to try and run to?

  She was so young, I said.

  This world? he said. It’s so far past old, nobody’s young any more. We’re all living on borrowed time.

  That doesn’t mean anything, I said after I’d thought about it, giving his words another good tap in my mind.

  I’m just trying to say we’re all on the edge, he said. You know what extinct means?

  Sort of, I said. Yes.

  Well, that’s us, he said. Humans. Sort of extinct.

  That’s when we were talking. Now we’re not. It’s all because of the Leatherman and what I do at night. Which is lie under my bed and scratch away at the wall. I started doing it to mark the days, using the sharp screwdriver bit to mark a day in the paint. Except the paint cracked and flaked off and revealed the powdery plaster underneath. When I scraped some more I found the plaster was just a thin skin on top of those knobbly blocks you used to build with—bigger than bricks and with hollow spaces in between them. I went under the bed and did some more scraping, and very quickly had the plaster off a block and decided if I could move the block I could crawl into the next cell, and if I could do that I could maybe do it to the half-wall at the end under the bars where Joy had hit me.

  Brand told me I was crazy.

  Then he told me they would hear me.

  Then he told me I would get us both in big trouble. And then he said he’d have to tell them if I carried on because even if they didn’t hear me at first, when they eventually found out I was trying to dig my way out they would know he had kept quiet.

  I told him he had to do what he had to do. And I had to do what I was doing.

  He didn’t tell them.

  But he did stop talking to me.

  I told you a book saved me. All the time I was lying on my side, scraping the cement out of the gap between the blocks I thought of The Count of Monte Cristo, an adventure of mistaken identities and a man who doesn’t give up as he tries to escape the impossible Chateau d’If.

  My if was equally impossible. If I got through one wall, why did I think I could get through the next? But you can’t let ifs and buts stop you. So I kept eating and sleeping and writing in this notebook and scraping when I wasn’t and was sure the Cons weren’t around to hear. I became a sort of dazed character in my own adventure, unsure of the outcome, only knowing I could not stop, wherever I was going.

  And however much I strained my eye to look for her, I never saw Joy again. Though some nights I would wake up and look at the window, sure that she had been watching me as I slept.

  It was a stronger sense than a dream, almost tangible, like a scent of her in the mind, but whenever I jumped to the window to see her, the night was always empty and only peopled by my unfulfilled hopes drifting away in the dark.

  Hope eventually became just like half the things that had stalked me on my journey across the mainland: not really there at all, just something prowling around me in my mind, distracting me from the darker truth of my situation.

  There is one other reason Brand and I have stopped talking, and maybe I’m not writing about it because I’ve caught my story up to the now and every day is so much like the other that I’ve started to ration things.

  Because when I have written it all down I won’t have you to talk to, and will truly be on my own.

  Chapter 38

  The then

  I am the one who took that photograph with that last bit of writing on the back and put it between the leaves you hold in your hand as you’re reading this. First I reread all the words that came before—the story in the book—some of them now hard to make out, the lines jammed in close to make the most use of the paper, sometimes so thinly scrawled I had to guess at what they were. And having got to the end, I thought that I should slide the photograph between the pages and explain how my story and that photograph came together and ended up so very far from the place my book was stolen. There are only a few of them, but I think there are enough empty pages left to do so.

  My name is Isabel. My mother used to tell me it was a pretty name. She said it was her mother’s name. And yes, Isabel turned to Grizabel in my father’s mouth when I was too small to walk even, and then it got shortened to Griz—and now you know my fancier name, the one that doesn’t fit me at all.

  What I didn’t know, although I suspected it, was that it was Joy who had stolen my book.

  I told you stories saved me. This one did. Because she read it. And like a magic spell or a prayer—all the right words in the right order—that changed everything. Or maybe it was a curse. Maybe a curse is sometimes just a desperate prayer seen from the wrong end.

  There was—after all—a death to come.

  But first there was a noise outside my window. Two days after the book had gone, I had put all my energy and despair into scraping away at the mortar around the block in the wall beneath my bed.

  I had scraped and scraped and gouged and hacked and swore until my hands hurt and my back felt like it was never going to u
nbend and be straight again. And then as I was hunched on my side in the tight space beneath the bed, my ears caught a noise and I stopped.

  I heard nothing else, but the nothing that it was sounded dangerously like someone else being very still and listening right back. For me. So I rolled quietly out from under the bed and lay on my back in the middle of the floor and looked up through the darkness at the moonlight slanting in through the barred window.

  Are you sick? a voice said.

  Joy’s voice—but very different to the last time I heard it spitting at me.

  I stopped breathing, not consciously, but as if my body had just forgotten it was necessary. I was trying to work out what it was that had changed in her tone.

  Yes, I said. Sick of being in here. But no. I haven’t got a disease.

  Good, she said. Because I’m not wearing their bloody mask.

  An arm reached out and then her hand—the scarred one—hooked one of the bars and then her face swung into the window, cutting out half the moonlight. And there she was. Looking down at me.

  To me, in that moment, she was a wonder. She looked like I did, I realised. And she looked like Mum. And she wore her hair like Bar’s. I don’t know if it was because I was starved of them or just starved of any people to look at, but I stared at her for a long time just drinking in both the strangeness and the familiarity of her.

  Joy, I said, sitting up.

  Mum’s not dead, she said.

  No, I said carefully. No—she’s not. She doesn’t talk though. But she still smiles and her hand is still her hand and she likes us to sit and hold it with her.

  I was slowly getting to my feet—moving deliberately carefully so as not to spook her into leaving.

  She won’t like my hand, she said, a catch in her voice. It’s just an ugly claw now.

  I reached up and put my own hand on it. She flinched and tried to pull it away. I didn’t let her. I gripped it. There were scar ridges but it just felt warm and normal. Like a hand should.

  Brand told me how it happened, I said. I’m so sorry. And I’m so happy that—