C Fletcher - A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

Amen to that, he said.

That’s the last thing I remember either of us saying because then I must have yawned and fallen asleep right there and then, foolishly warm in the fire and the sense that I had made a new friend.

I didn’t know I was wrong. Or how soon I would find out exactly how easily I’d breathe away from the safety of the sea.

I knew something was badly awry the moment I woke. My head was hurting and, as I staggered up to my feet in front of the cold fire, it was as if my legs had forgotten how to walk in time with each other. The house was silent and there was no one else awake. But outside there was a noise that drew me stumbling to the door and out into the thin slant of rain.

The red-sailed boat was not at the mooring.

It was just rounding the headland at the south of the bay, so nearly gone from sight that its bows were already obscured by the rocks. Brand was at the tiller and he saw me in the instant I saw him and, just before he too was swallowed by the jagged bulk of land, he smiled, his teeth flashing unmistakably white in the red of his beard, and he half shrugged and half waved and then was gone.

Two things stopped me in my tracks, beyond the fact that he was leaving without a farewell or any attempt to trade for the much-boasted converter. First was that he was wearing my father’s rain jacket, the good yellow one with the peaked hood, which made no sense. Second was a delayed recognition of what his smile and shrug and half-wave had meant: it had been a farewell and a strange and almost good-natured admission of guilt. Honesty ran one way through the gesture, while dishonesty crossed it at right angles, like the warp and weft of Ferg’s weaving. Brand was in that moment two things at once. But only one thing mattered.

He had stolen my dog.

I knew that with cold certainty the moment I saw Jip alone in the water, barking and swimming far out in the bay, so far out that he must have fallen or been thrown off the boat in whose wake he was struggling. I saw his head bobbing and heard the shrillness in his bark and knew that Brand had taken Jess, who was nowhere to be seen.

And then I was shouting to wake the others and running for the dory. He had not cut our boats loose, but he had thrown the oars into the water and the tide was slowly dragging them out to sea.

As I ran, I noticed without stopping that the racks that had been thick with drying fish were now empty. He had stolen our food too.

The chill in the water bit at me as I dived out to get the oars, and then I splashed back into the dory and was about to unshackle it to get to my boat—which was moored in the lee of the rocks behind which Brand had disappeared—but as I took a breath I saw Jip was going to make it ashore under his own power. I had a second thought: what was I going to do when I chased Brand down? I had not had to think at all about setting off to get Jess back: that had been a natural reflex. My first thought had been to scoop Jip out of the water and then get the Sweethope under sail and start the chase without waiting a moment longer, knowing every moment of delay was putting more sea room between me and my quarry.

Then I realised I might need a weapon, so I left the dory shackled and ran back to the house, intending to get my bow and a long gun. As I ran, I was gripped by a sudden dread that the others were dead because I could not see anyone moving or responding to my shouts or Jip’s barking.

They weren’t dead. They were drugged and—once shaken awake—vomitous and disorientated. Brand had poisoned them to sleep by putting something in the marmalade. That stubborn ram that had chipped my tooth the day before had actually saved me, because without the pain from the sugar I too would have eaten enough marmalade to be as drugged and useless as they were. Brand would have got clean away and we would never even have known in which direction he had gone, or how to begin chasing him down.

There would be days ahead when I realised that might not have been the worst option.

But right then, in the moment, full of adrenaline and anger and betrayal, all I could think of was getting after him as soon as possible. I tried to explain to Bar who was the least affected by what had happened, and as I did so I grabbed food and stuffed it into a bag. Then I kissed Mum, who looked at me blankly but seemed to squeeze my hand back as I said I was going but would be back with Jess, and I took Ferg’s gun, and made sure he was lying on his side so that he would not drown in his own vomit before waking. Then I grabbed arrows and my bow from the hook by the door and ran for the dory where Jip was waiting, barking at me to hurry up.

Dad tried to stop me, stumbling after me and mumbling that he would come, that I should wait until he could get his head straight, and then he bent over and threw up what looked like everything he had ever eaten and I said I could not wait and he may or may not have heard me because he stayed doubled over, retching as Bar came out and held him upright, and then I just turned and left them, sprinting for Jip and the dory, and within four minutes I had got to the Sweethope , tumbled the dog aboard, followed him into the cockpit and slung my kit over the companionway down into the small cabin space—and two minutes later I had unloosed from the mooring buoy and tacked out into open sea, my eyes scanning for the tell-tale, treacherous red.

I was so intent on finding the small scrap of colour now halfway to the horizon that when I finally did and risked a fast look back to wave, I had cleared the headland and could no longer see my home or my family.

I had left without farewell.

Or blessing.

Or knowing if they would recover properly.

You can fall out of your own safe life that quickly, and nothing you thought you knew will ever be the same again.

Those thoughts came to me later.

In that moment, in the wide empty world, all that mattered to me and Jip, who was quivering on point at the prow of the boat, was the tiny shard of red in the sea ahead of us.

That was how the hunt began.

That was when things were simple.

That was when we thought we were just chasing a dog thief. That was before we went into the empty mainland and found we were chasing something else entirely, something we didn’t even know we had lost.

That was how I ended up going where I’ve been. Into the ruins of your abandoned world. Seeing what I’ve seen. Doing what I’ve done.

And doing what I have done is how I ended up here. Alone. No one to talk to but a photograph of a long dead boy with his dog and his sister. Nothing to do but write this down for people who will never read it.

Solitude is its own kind of madness.

Like hope itself.

I couldn’t see red sails. The wind was blowing out of the north-east, and Brand had got out of the wind shadow of the great cliff at the back of our island a good quarter of an hour before I was able to get the Sweethope loose from its mooring. She was a small enough boat, though you might have called her a yacht. One person could manage her if you were lively about it and knew how to do it, but in truth it always went a bit smoother with two, and the pair of bunks below always reminded me she was not quite designed for one sailor. But I was used to sailing her on my own. By the time I’d got out of the bay and rounded the rocks to the south, he’d been able to put on every scrap of sail he had and must have been running at full speed ahead of the wind, putting more and more sea between my dog and me as I struggled to get out into the faster air.

And struggle was the right word. It felt like the boat was dragging herself through a peatbog. It was my frustration, I knew, but the sea around us seemed sticky, like it was trying to suck at the hull to slow us down. I think Jip sensed something similar. He stood on the forepeak and barked his own frustration into the sea-waste ahead of us, looking back at me every now and then, as if our slow progress was something I could do more to fix.