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

Anyway, what with the fish stink and the darkness, I got an attack of what Brand had called the get-me-outs, and had to un-panic myself for a moment by concentrating on calming my breathing right down. Bar taught me that. She also taught me the difference between fear and panic. Fear’s not a bad thing. It’s quite a useful thing in the right circumstances, where it’s a good response to something dangerous. Panic’s not useful for anything at all except thrashing around and—likely as not—running smack into the very thing you’re scared of.

I really couldn’t make anything out in the cabin. I felt my way back towards the cockpit, barking my shins on something sharp-edged. Then I tripped on something else and went sprawling across the map table as one of the hanging bags clouted me on the side of the head on the way. The map was clipped to the table with magnets and it shifted and tore a little as I hit it. I steadied myself on the cabin wall and then I put my other hand out to brace myself, felt a pain like a bee sting and found I’d jabbed the needle end of a pair of those things you use for making circles on paper into the fleshy part of my thumb. I yanked them out with a bad word and sucked the tiny but painful hole they’d made.

As I stood there, I had time to think. The paper that had moved under my hand gave me an idea. The map was important to him. It was how he found his way around. So I would take it. I carefully stood and folded it, shoving it inside my jerkin, and went back out into the cockpit. I thought it might be good to use the knife which I seemed to have drawn from the sheath on my belt and start cutting all the rigging around me, maybe even slash the sails. But breaking things does not come natural to me. Too much of my life, of our lives, has been spent making and mending and trying to rescue broken things and make them useful again. And a good boat that works, even the boat of a bad man, is still a thing I could not feel right about damaging. That’s what’s called a scruple. But there were other ways to slow him down.

I ducked carefully back into the cabin and picked my way back to the fore-cabin door, taking the padlock. Keeping a close eye on the still-illuminated window on the shore, I crept along the side of the boat until I came to the anchor chain, which I pulled on until I got enough slack to padlock it to a ringbolt set in the deck. If things got to the state where he was chasing me and tried to get underway quickly, he’d have a lot of trouble doing so with an anchor that wouldn’t lift. I smiled as I thought about it. And though I didn’t damage the boat, I did allow myself the small pleasure of dropping the key into the dark water on the other side of the grab rail.

I thought about taking more time to ransack his lair, maybe to take things to bargain with him for the dog, if it came to that. But I felt unclean being on board. I know that’s a funny word. It makes no sense at all, but that was how I felt. Not because I was trespassing. More because of something about the boat itself. That smell in the fore-cabin wasn’t just a smell you sensed with your nose. There was a story in it, and though I did not know what that story was, I did know it was sad as much as it was bad. As I said, I didn’t believe in ghosts or made-up things like that. But I do believe in atmospheres. And the atmosphere on that boat—on that night, in the deep dark with no one else aboard and no friendly moon in the sky—that atmosphere did feel more alive than it should have. It felt like it was watching me, waiting for me to do something wrong. It was just an atmosphere, a feeling maybe—but it had better night eyes than I did.

I got off that boat before it made me feel any colder in my bones, though the night was mild for the time of year. The mooring knot didn’t come loose with the single jerk I had planned for it, and I took longer than I was happy with sorting out the mess I’d made, and then I was floating free, and with relief powering my arms I paddled to dry land—which was actually wet and slippy with treacherous bladderwrack and strands of kelp covering the rocks below. Solid ground came as a huge relief, even though I now had to stalk Brand in the dark, with no clear plan as to how to confront him or—better—steal Jess back before he noticed.

I pulled the kayak into the grass above the tideline. Looking around, I wasn’t able to see where Brand had put his dinghy, but there were so many humps and hummocks in the darkness that I could have wasted a lot of time looking, so I dismissed a half-formed plan to cut it loose and headed for the church.

Moving quietly was easy as the grass was soft under my feet. But even if I had been louder, I still would have heard the noise that stopped me in my tracks.

I knew it was music, but it was not the kind of music we made when we sang around the fire, and it was not the kind of music that Bar made when she played the tin whistle she had found still wrapped to the instruction book it had come with in the old art centre shop on Uist. It didn’t sound like Ferg’s strumming on any of the guitars he’d salvaged.

It sounded like angels crying.

I know angels don’t exist any more than ghosts do, but if they did and they were mourning something big—like the passing of the world perhaps—that’s what it would sound like. Because angels are meant to be pure, and this noise, this music was lots of things I had never heard before but most of all it was pure. The tune was high and sharp and it rose and swooped back and forth above everything, and then all the bright notes that had been gathered up so high to dance with each other tumbled down with a kind of desperate and inevitable sadness that made a hole high in my chest, a void like a lump I couldn’t swallow no matter how hard I tried. It made my eyes wet. And as I blinked I thought of Joy. I had felt that heavy hole in my chest once before and that was after she fell out of our world. Hearing the clean, terrible grief echoing in the stone cavern of the church didn’t just bring her back to me. It made me feel treacherous because I had let time dull the sharpness of her loss. Forgetting is a kind of betrayal, even if it’s what happens to all grief. Time wears everything smoother as it grinds past, I suppose.

I was too short to look in the high window and see what was making the beautiful sound, so I snuck round the corner to the door, which was cracked open, letting a lance of light spill across the grass beyond. I kept close to the wall, feeling the old stonework as I edged round and looked in.

The noise was, of course, Brand. He had a lantern at his feet and he’d lit a small fire on the paving stones at the centre of the cavernous space. I’d never seen a ceiling as high. It was so high, it kept disappearing as the firelight below flickered and threw shadows across it.

Brand was wearing my father’s coat and had a violin tucked under the long flame-coloured spade of his beard, and he was half turned away from me as he played it with a long bow, sawing slowly back and forth across the strings. His eyes were closed and he swayed as he played, his long hair falling forwards and backwards as his head moved in its own separate dance. It was like the music was a dream he was both making and getting lost within.

Because his eyes were closed, I let myself watch him longer than I meant. Because the music was so beautiful, so unexpected, so something I had never heard before, I stopped—for a moment—thinking about Jess and getting her back.

Lost in music. That’s what they used to call it. On Eriskay there was a house with a shelf that was not full of books, but these thin brightly printed cardboard envelopes with big black plastic discs inside them. Dad said they were records with music trapped on them, but the playing machine stood on a table by a broken window on the weatherward side of the house. It was cracked and the mechanism had rusted out, so we could never free the music on those discs. Instead I spent a day pulling them out and looking at all the covers. One was called Lost in Music and I remember it because there were four people on the front and they looked like me, or at least I thought they did. I mean, not like me exactly, but they had normal-coloured skin like us. Not pale and cold like Brand, whose skin and sea-coloured eyes always seemed at odds with the warmth of his hair.