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

Most interesting of all, there was a multiple speckling of holes in one specific area. It was in the middle of the sea on one side of the map, but on the other it nestled right above what I had as a child—when I thought the mainland looked a bit like someone sitting down, seen from the side—thought of as the country’s bottom. There was nowhere else with that concentration of holes, and nowhere else with so many different coloured pencil lines radiating from it. When I looked closer and read the word Norfolk printed across the land next to it I felt a little jump of excitement. He had said he’d been raised on the Norfolk Broads.

I remembered his words when he was trying to apologise for saying he was going to cut out my tongue. He’d said when you tell a lie it’s always better to put a grain of truth in it to make it stick. I decided he’d salted the lie of his life story with a grain of truth. And Norfolk was that grain. The lie was about having left it and never gone back there. Maybe I wanted to believe something to make sense of trying to find him, maybe I needed that excuse to go exploring. I’ve had time to wonder about that, and I think that’s true. But then I just knew—again maybe because I had to know something to stop me drifting off anchorless and rudderless—that those holes were his home. The place where he was taking my dog.

I fell asleep on the bench with Jip at my side, and I slept well despite everything. My body was exhausted but my mind—having made a decision—was calm enough to let me sleep long and deep.

The nearest hole in the map—the first a pencil line went to—was a city a long way south of where I was. Blackpool. When I woke, I again had that tug to go home, but the wind was from the north and Jip was on the prow with his back to it, as if he knew where Jess was going, and so we followed.

That journey is a blur to me now. I knew little of navigating by a map, because all my life I had sailed a small chain of islands by sight, never venturing beyond a seascape I knew. But I could read a compass and knew where the sun rose and set and with the map now pinned to the table in the cabin I thought I could feel my way down the coast, and feel is what I did, in more ways than one.

I still hadn’t set foot on the mainland, remember, but the further I got from home the more it crowded in on my left shoulder, like a presence that was watching us, waiting for me to look squarely at it and notice how irresistibly it was beckoning me. It was like the dark pull of a magnet, always there. Always invisible. Impossible to ignore.

If I’d had sea charts and not a map of the roads criss-crossing the once crowded land, I probably would have kept my bearings better. Two days of fast running slipped past. I spent a night at the tip of a wide firth that cut back north around a big island and led beyond that, I think, to the river that Mum and Dad had gone up a lifetime ago to collect the Sweethope , the one where they had slept in the library and closed up the doors as they left to save the books. Again, I felt a tug to go and see that, and I nearly did but Jip was on the bow looking south again and so we followed his nose instead.

Passing houses and small villages on the shore was odder than doing the same thing on the familiar islands. There I knew every house was empty. I found myself less sure of it the more houses I saw. Some of the buildings still had unbroken glass in the windows, even after all these years of neglect, and they would wink the thin sunlight back at us as we passed. Every time that happened, I had the strangest feeling that they were trying to get my attention. I could often feel the hairs going up on the back of my neck as we went on, as if they were doing something behind me. Like laughing. Like they knew I was making a big mistake.

On your own it’s easy to let unsettling thoughts like that get under your skin. Did you—in your crowded world—have those kind of quiet moments where your own mind had room enough to stalk you and play games? Or were there too many other people to let you hear the songs it wanted to sing to you—the bad ones as well as the good ones? I still had no idea how full of others your world was at this stage, not having begun to walk the remains of it, but I felt the loneliness it now radiated sharply enough to take the picture of you out of my rucksack—where it lived as a bookmark in whatever book went with me—and pinned it to the map, maybe so I had some company other than Jip. I had no pictures of my family, so you had to do the job for them, I suppose. Just having another human face to look at helped.

Because some of the sailing was monotonous and the mind likes to drift, I found myself jolting out of a daydream on more than one occasion convinced that I’d dropped my guard and that the feeling of being watched was more than real, that it was some sixth sense telling me that Brand was out there. He was hidden against the dark land mass, stalking me, instead of the other way around. When that happened, I’d scan wildly about me, raking the sea and the mainland shore for a sign of him. But he was never really there, not where I could see him. He was only in my mind.

Jip’s day was always the same. Wake, stand on the bow until we got underway, then sit in the cockpit by me, with breaks for eating and shitting and pissing. He was suitably embarrassed about these last two things, which he normally disliked doing while anyone was watching, but we made a deal where I pretended not to notice while he was doing it and then he pretended he couldn’t see me sluicing the piss away with seawater or flipping the turds over the side with the rusty trowel I kept on the boat for just such embarrassing moments. I went over the side, taking care to keep the wind behind me, pissing or crapping, and Jip studiously ignored my contortions in his turn.

The cuts and scrapes on my arm from the shellfish weren’t healing as fast as I would have liked, which I put down to the salt in the seawater and the constant spray off the waves. When I covered them with sleeves it was worse, so I kept them bare and hoped the air would eventually dry them out and let them scab over. I thought the clean seawater would at least stop them getting infected. It certainly stung like it was doing something.

Halfway between a big island that I thought might be the Isle of Man and the mainland, I found a strange sight. There was a tilted forest of broken windmills like the ones on the islands back home, except these ones were in the middle of the sea. When I first saw them I couldn’t think what they were. I remembered that story about the old Spanish man who thought he was a knight in armour and that windmills were giants and went off to fight them on an equally old and bony horse. Except these weather-bleached windmills looked more like the bony horse. Maybe like giants’ skeletons—with the occasional unbroken propeller blade jutting into the air like a sword.

I sailed close to this forest of metal tubes and slackened sail so I could drift past it and look up at them towering above me. It was a strange, quiet moment as the sun bounced off them while we passed through the tiger-stripe shadows they cast across the sea all around us.

Jip barked at some of them. They didn’t seem to mind.

Whatever they might have been defending, if they really had been the giants of my imagination, was long gone, but in my mind now they still stand as gatekeepers, because after I had passed them a whole new world of wonders began to unfold.

When I turned away from them to look at the mainland, I saw something that made me tighten the sails and tack towards it. A huge tower jutted above the biggest scrabble of houses and buildings I had ever seen. A city, I thought. This is what a city looks like.

As I got closer, the sun was already dipping low in the west and the light did that thing of reddening everything it fell on, giving the world a golden glow. The tower was made of metal and looked a bit like the one I’d seen pictures of in Paris. But the one in Paris did not rise out of the roof of a brick palace like this one did. As soon as I saw it, I knew I was going to climb it, just to see what the world looked like from up there. Just to see what a bird sees.