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

You probably wouldn’t have been so excited by a tower. You had aeroplanes after all. And helicopters. For me, it was the closest I would ever get to flying. You also would have known that this wasn’t a city either. Just a town.

It was high tide. A long metal fence stretched away in front of the buildings sticking out of the water, and lamp posts and flagpoles jagged into the air all the way along behind it, their feet in the water too, some of them leaning drunkenly like the windmills behind me, but most of them more or less upright.

A big jetty stuck out into the sea and I thought I would sail there and tie up to it. When I got closer in, I realised it had once had buildings on top and a deck that had all been gutted by a fire. There was some kind of giant metal wheel that hung bent and melted off the side of the jetty half underwater. I took real care drifting in beside it in case there was debris just below the surface, but there wasn’t, and I tied off to a stanchion that seemed to have enough metal in it beneath the flakes of rust to hold.

And then, after all my excitement about finally putting my feet on the mysterious mainland—I didn’t.

I sat on the side of the boat with Jip and looked at it all and tried to make sense of it.

The sea lapped the front of the buildings behind the sunken fence rails. That wasn’t too surprising. I knew the sea level had been rising for years. Maybe if the Gelding hadn’t happened they’d have built a wall to protect the city, I thought. Now the buildings on the front were themselves that wall. I let my eyes travel along it, wondering what it had looked like when those doors let in all sorts of different people instead of just the sea. Some of the frontages had had letters on them, but they were mostly gone or illegible, and those that remained made up nonsense sentences—_ALLROOM _ UNHOUSE! COM_DY __USE_EN__! _OAT _RIPS _AS_NO __ACH _OURS I__ _REAM _INGO! _ROUPS WE_COME.

I read them out loud to Jip. He didn’t seem to be able to make sense of them either.

About half a mile down the front was another crazily melted assembly of criss-crossed metal that seemed a bit like the giant wheel beside me. It ran round the perimeter of a group of other structures that I could make no sense of, dipping and swooping and loop-the-looping as it went. It wasn’t as high as the tower, but it was very tall at the top. I wondered what kind of thing needed a giant fence like that. The wind that always comes off the sea as the sun dips whickered at my neck. I pulled the sheepskin tighter around me. Away in the distance something screeched. It might have been a bird.

Tomorrow, Jip, I said. We’ll go ashore tomorrow. In the light.

I didn’t remember and the bowstring didn’t care.

The arrow took the big rabbit just forward of where I was aiming at the shoulder and smashed through the neck bone, killing it instantly. It was a good shot but I wasn’t congratulating myself. I’d forgotten that the cuts and grazes on my forearm still weren’t healing properly so instead I was swearing and holding my arm where the loosed string had ripped at the scabs and salt blisters as it passed, raking it raw and painful again.

Later I’d skin the rabbit before cooking it, but right then it felt like I was the one having a taste of being flayed.

The big rabbit wasn’t a rabbit when I got to it. I think it was a hare, and if I’m wrong about it, it’s the kind of rabbit I’ve been calling a hare ever since—longer ears and much more powerful legs. I’ve only managed to shoot a couple other than that first one as they’re harder to catch unawares than normal rabbits. Maybe longer ears hear better. Jip has run his heart to bursting trying to catch a lot of them but never managed to kill one for himself, which he takes as a personal affront. Every time he’s gaining on a hare, it notices and boosts for the horizon, or maybe they like teasing terriers, because they have an extra kick of speed that they can turn on whenever they like.

I now knew the structure that I’d seen the night before was not a giant fence but a rollercoaster because when I got into the shadow of it there was an old sign saying what it was, and though it was blistered and corroded it was still readable. And I knew what a rollercoaster was because I had seen them in a book about American holidays. They had carriages you sat in which whizzed you up and down and people put their hands in the air on the down bits and screamed. I mean, in the picture they were smiling and shouting, but the words said everybody screamed in excitement.

Nobody was screaming now. The place was quiet apart from the creaks and clanks the wind teased out of the old metalwork and the rotting buildings beneath.

I had thought we would climb the tower first, once we came ashore, but when the sun came up the tide had gone back out to sea and the Sweethope ’s keel was scraping the sand below. Worried that if the tide went further out it might snap, I threw out the anchor and loosened the lines attaching it to the jetty so it could float a little freer. Then I took my rucksack and my bow and arrows and climbed carefully along the side of the jetty towards the shore. I had the map folded into the pack too, because I thought if I climbed the tower it would help me get my bearings if I compared what I saw with it. Taking the pack wasn’t anything special, though as it turned out it was a lifesaver. It’s just how we were. We carried our own water, packed our own food and always kept the basics to light a fire or tend a wound close by. No one else was going to help us if we got into trouble. It was just second nature. I also had two of the big plastic water bottles looped round my neck to fill up at the first opportunity.

Fresh water and food, those were always the priorities on any trip, but on this day I had thought to break habit and celebrate my first steps on the mainland by climbing the tower and looking out over it. Jip had other ideas, and wouldn’t be carried easily. Negotiating the skeleton of the jetty was tricky enough with pack and bow and two water bowsers clunking round my neck, so I dropped him in the water and he swam happily to shore under his own power.

The retreating sea had left the strip of ground in front of the houses standing a few feet above the waterline. Wet sand spilled into the open doors and windows, and the half-buried hulks of old cars were scattered along the whole length of the sea front. Some were just humped roofs, lurking like giant beetles; others had been tossed by the storms and were showing rotted wheels and rusting axles to the sky. Jip walked out of the water, shook himself, looked back at me, wagged his tail and turned to sniff his way into this whole new world of unfamiliar and exciting smells.

I followed him ashore with a little more difficulty. The jetty had been gutted by fire and I had to test my footing every step of the way to dry land. When I took the last—or maybe that’s the first—step onto it, I dropped the water bowsers and looked about me. The tower dominated the skyline to my left. The palace it grew out of was not golden in the morning light but red-bricked. It seemed vast. Until then the biggest building I had been in was that church where Brand had played the violin. This palace building was many churches big. Jip had, however, followed his nose to the right, down the sea front, towards the rollercoaster. Though at that point in my mind it was of course still a mysteriously giant fence. I took out an arrow and fitted it to the bowstring in case we startled a rabbit, again out of habit, and followed. It wasn’t really a hunt because I couldn’t keep my mind on it. There was too much distraction. The place had a funny smell, not a bad one, but a bonfire, charred smell. I decided it must be the jetty, though the smell stayed all the way down the front as I looked into the broken windows and up at the bits of old signs that hinted cryptically at what the different buildings had been for. On closer inspection OAT RIPS were offering boat trips and the suggestion to USE EN was actually amusements—the big sand-floored room with the low ceiling bellying ominously down over it didn’t look that amusing, though the rows of corroding, burst machine cabinets jammed in beneath had wild cartoony drawings on them that had once clearly been brighter and more colourful than they now were.