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

There was a last flight of steps up to an open viewing platform above the room, and the door to that was stiff but scraped open enough for me to slip through it and out into the wind. Once there had been high metal railings all around the walkway, metal bars that rose above my head and then curved back on themselves, but now almost a whole side—the one facing north—was missing. From the condition of the other metalwork, which was burst and shaling flakes as if the rust consuming it was a fungus, it had probably rotted off and fallen into the ballroom below. Maybe that was the thing that had broken the hole in the roof, and had let the saplings in.

There was also another thing that made me feel sad in the same way the bundle of rags and bones on the rollercoaster did, though this pile of clothes was not especially ragged and there were no bones at all. There was a pile of surprisingly well-preserved clothes that had been neatly folded and placed under a pair of boots wedged beneath the bottom of the railings, right next to the gap above the distant hole in the roof. It may have been nothing more than a pile of clothes and a pair of old boots, but my imagination created a man—I think it was a man from the size of those boots and the red hooded jacket beneath them—stripping off like a swimmer and standing naked in the wind before taking a long final dive through the ballroom roof far below. I have that kind of mind, the one that makes fantasies from scraps of evidence. When we were little, Bar used to put us to bed, and after she had read or told us a bedtime story she would give us three things to weave our own stories about as we went to sleep. She always chose odd, unconnected things, like a seal, a mountain and an umbrella for example, and I would begin making a story that soon turned into a dream and a good night’s sleep.

Something moved in the breeze on the edge of the railing where it had broken off. It was a chain, like a necklace, made from lots of silver steel balls linked together. There was a pendant hanging from it and it was this, twisting in the wind and reflecting the light that had caught my eye. I unhooked it and looked at the pendant. It was a small rectangle with rounded edges, with a stubby tube jutting down off the bottom end of it. The tube was solid, but stippled with random holes of different sizes which dented its surface like tiny craters that caught the light. It must have been stainless steel to have lasted this long without tarnishing. It was an odd thing, and although I immediately added it to the story I had made of the final moments of my imagined naked diver—as he took it off and left it hanging there with the clothes he left behind—it did not feel like a sad or a bad thing. In fact I took it as a good luck sign, because the symbol pressed into the centre of the rectangle was my lucky number, 8. And the 8 was surrounded by a circle from which arrows radiated outwards to all the points of the compass. The little story I made up for myself about the pendant was that it was lucky, meant for me and as it seemed to be my special number inside a symbol that meant “you can go anywhere”, I should definitely take it and wear it. Not least because if I was to find Brand and Jess in this whole unknown world I was marooned in, I would need every scrap of good luck I could lay my hands on. So I took it, looped it over my head and put it under my shirt.

Of course I know it’s foolish to be superstitious, and that in this world you have to work hard to make your own luck, but I was on my own then and in low spirits and was looking for something, anything to stiffen my courage. Even as I did it, the sensible part of me knew I was clutching at straws, but when you’re in danger of drowning you will grab at anything that might just keep you afloat.

Behind the palace there had once been a town and that was where the burned smell that had been competing with the sea breeze all day was coming from. The sprawl of buildings and the vegetation which had re-colonised the streets between had caught fire, and done so quite recently, since there was no new green in the grey-black scar that stretched away inland. Sometimes, back on the islands, a lightning strike will set a fire among the heather, and then the wind will take the flames and blow them across the slopes, leaving dark wounds which green over the following spring and in a couple of years grow right back into the landscape, leaving a patchwork that time fades and adjusts and—after a while—erases. This had the same wind-fashioned shape and was new burn, definitely this season’s fire if not quite this week’s or this month’s. The blaze had stripped away the green covering that still blurred the outlines of the unburned streets which remained to the north-east, and it had revealed the pattern of the old roads and buildings that lay beneath the softening leaves and grasses like a hard skeleton. The long lines of houses marched up the slope away from the sea, following the billow of the low hills behind and snaking up the valleys between them. The procession of burned-out shells were too regular and straight for nature. And they also seemed determined to hold hands in a long chain. Like there was an extra strength in companionship as they hugged the land for comfort. That’s what I thought then, anyway. I had, after all, just taken a bang to the head.

The streets had burned too. It must have been an inferno. Last year and the year before had been drier than ever, though Dad always said every year got hotter, which was the reason the old jetties on the islands were mostly underwater, whatever the tides. The rains came less often, he thought, but when they did they were harder. So on the one hand they were more violent, and on the other more or less the same amount of water landed on the islands every year. The burns ran and the springs sprung and the small lochans that laced the island were still there. And though the heather and the grass might get drier sooner in the summer, the islands were almost as watery ashore as the sea they were surrounded by.

Lack of water wasn’t going to be an immediate problem on the top of the tower either, because as I was looking out over the burn scar, trying to make sense of the landscape beyond, a matching dark cloud slid over us and began to spit and then pelt with rain.

I retreated inside and listened to the shower lashing the windows. The sea below was beginning to stack up with long incoming white-topped rollers. I was pleased to be under cover. I had wondered if I could see all the way back up the coast towards home, but I couldn’t: it was too far and the shape of the coast and the islands didn’t correspond with what I remembered of them at sea level.

A big gust of wind blew the door shut above and I got a shock from that, but as I sat there and felt the walls and the floor around me I was reassured by how solid it all felt. I’d begun to wonder if the tower might fall down because someone was moving around on it after all these years of rust and wind, but strangely the storm reassured me. The viewing room was waterproof and there was no hint of shake inside. If it had stayed up for all these years, more than a century since anyone painted it, I thought the likelihood of it falling down on this night of all the thirty-six and a half thousand nights in between was so tiny that it wasn’t worth thinking about.

Also: tree houses. I had read a couple of books that had other kids having houses in trees to play in. I used to dream of sleeping in a tree, with the leaves moving around me in the wind, like waves. The problem with the islands is that there are no trees on them. Not really. The wind scours everything down to heather height, and those that do find purchase are seldom much taller than a person. And certainly not tall enough to climb, let alone build a house in. The viewing room seemed like the best tree house in the world.