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

The people who had left me their candles had stayed up here for fun when things must have looked terrible for the world as it aged and died all around them. Looking back, it does seem a bit crazy of me to also have been thinking about doing something because it was fun then, at the very moment when everything else had just got as un-fun as anything had ever been in my life.

I heard Jip bark from below and went to tell him I was okay and I thought we might spend the night up here. There were blankets enough for both of us to be comfortable. When the storm cleared, I intended to spread Brand’s map on the floor and see if I could match what I could see of the landscape with the shapes on the paper. So, I told myself, there was also a practical, sensible reason for my night in the sky.

I’d dumped my rucksack on the landing halfway down, not wanting the bother of carrying it all the way, so I went back to get it and to lead Jip reluctantly upwards.

He spotted the glass floor immediately and really didn’t like it. He kept to the inner section where it was solid and lay there looking at me like I was the biggest fool in the world for bringing him there.

The storm arrived full force about then and was quite a thing. It dimmed the sky and then got darker still as the air filled with grey curtains of rain. I could see them distinctly as they swept in across the water beyond the lines of white tops marching towards the shore.

I wish I’d been alive when you could go in a plane. Not just to look down on land and sea, but to soar around the clouds and look down on them too. Did you do that? Go on a plane. See what the top of a cloud looks like?

I made a pad of blankets and waited until Jip settled in next to me, and then wrapped another two round us, and sat and stared at the lightning forking down over the sea in the far distance. Jip never liked thunder, and barked back at it from under the protection of the blankets, pressing closer to my leg as he did so. I put my hand on his neck, into the familiar wiry hair, and told him it was all right, and that everything was going to be fine in the morning.

That calmed him enough to turn the barks into growls. I just wished I believed it. I thought I’d probably feel better if I ate something, but then exhaustion took me and I fell asleep alongside him.

The thunder was still rumbling when I woke, but the rain had stopped and the noise was now coming from far in the distance. The gaps between the lightning flashes and the noise were long enough for me to know the storm was now worrying away at the landscape more than ten to twelve miles away. Jip shifted in his sleep. I took care not to wake him as I moved to get more comfortable and looked down at the jetty.

The sea was still heaving, but the clouds had lifted enough to let the sliver of moon throw enough light to reflect off the surface. I thought I could see the remains of the Sweethope still tangled in the great melted wheel, but maybe I was imagining it. It wasn’t there when the sun came up. But by then I’d made my choice and seeing it wouldn’t have done more than confirm me in it. The sea had also washed away the words of warning Brand had written in the sand. Seeing them wouldn’t have changed anything either. As I said, all they did was prove he could write. Not that he’d read the right books or learned the right lessons. Maybe if he had done so he wouldn’t have burned the boat and told me to go home.

You burn boats so your troops stay and fight, because they can’t run away home. Aeneas did that when he brought those who had survived the fall of Troy to Italy and founded another empire in Rome. And the Spanish explorer whose name I can’t remember did that when he arrived in South America with his troops. He ended up taking the whole continent and all its silver and gold with a handful of violent men with guns who couldn’t go home. I’m not violent, and I’m not a man and I didn’t have a gun. But Brand had burned my boat. And in doing so had made my choice for me, no matter what he thought the message he was sending was.

I wasn’t going home. Not then, not yet, or not to my home anyway. I was going to go to his home. I was going to get my dog. I was going to take his boat. And then, when and only if I did that, I would go home.

Like I said.

Bang on the head.

That wasn’t the whole story. There was another reason. And in fact maybe the whole burning the boats thing is something I made up for myself afterwards on the journey as we walked. I certainly had plenty of time to think as I did so. And enough reason, as things got more complicated, to knit myself a nice excuse for all the harm in whose way I had put myself. Ever bang your thumb with a hammer? Hurts worse than a normal knock because you did it to yourself.

Before it got light, but after the storm had gone and the distant thunder had rolled away, taking the lightning out of sight beyond the hills to the north, I woke again, needing to pee. I went up the stairs and out on to the rain-slick platform where I added to the wetness on the ground, taking care to allow for the wind direction. It was when I was straightening up that I saw it and stopped everything.

There was a light in the darkness. A tiny pinprick on the horizon to the south-east, so small it could have been a star on the point of setting. Except it was orange and I’d never seen an orange star and the clouds were battened down overhead, so that no other stars were visible to compare it with. I clattered down the steps to get my binoculars and the compass, which woke Jip. I made him stay because I didn’t want him falling off the open side of the viewing platform, and then I went back up.

The light was still there. But it was a long, long way off. The binoculars couldn’t pull it closer, not enough to have any idea what it was anyway. The compass was useless in the blackness of the night. Dad gave it to me when I went off on my own for the first time. It had been his as a child and he said the markings once used to glow in the dark, but now they had worn out. I went back down and got a couple of the green bottles. Back out in the darkness, I sighted them carefully with my eye, so that the tops lined up with the distant orange spark. I then went back down and slept surprisingly well, knowing that when the sun came up I could look along my homemade sight line and see what was at the end of it.

I dreamed too, gentle happy dreams of walking into a village, which in those dreams looked like the one that always featured on the last page in a series of comic books I had loved as a child, an ancient thing with a stockade of wooden spikes and happy villagers sitting around a big fire having a feast while the village musician was always tied up somewhere in the picture, looking very annoyed because they didn’t like his music. What these villagers really liked was having punch-ups with Roman soldiers and eating roast boar. Except in my dreams the village was not just full of strangers, but Bar and Ferg and Dad and even Mum was there, laughing and handing out food, and there was a small girl with a kite running round and round the fire until she saw me and dropped the kite and sprinted towards me with her arms wide open and then I woke up.

At least that’s what I think I dreamed. Remembering dreams is like picking up small jellyfish—they slip through your fingers—and you never know if it’s a dream you had or if you added to the dream in the remembering. Sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re remembering a dream at all, or just a dream about remembering a dream. And if that doesn’t make sense, well, neither do dreams.

There was nothing at the end of the sight line. I was bitterly disappointed when I looked again in the light of day. But there was no unexpected settlement full of welcoming villagers waiting to help me. I wasn’t, of course, really expecting Mum or the girl with the kite, but I had gone to sleep wondering if there were people living in the empty landscape, people we had not been told about. But there weren’t, or if there were there was no sign of them and, since the one thing that hasn’t changed since the end of the world is that everyone still needs breakfast, the absence of smoke from a cooking fire seemed to seal the end of the hopeful delusion I had gone to sleep beneath.