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

Stay there, it seemed to be saying. Don’t move. And we’ll be down to squash you any time now.

I took a bearing on my compass. I could see a notch in the high ground looming in the distance, with a paler hill rising beyond it. If I kept the peak of the paler hill just to the right-hand side of the notch—like a gunsight—I would be on target. I took out the map and drew the shape on a blank bit of sea so that I wouldn’t forget it. Then I went back down into the church. I had thought of sleeping in there, but there were too many eyes that would have stayed watching me as I slept. They weren’t human eyes, and though the statues stared there was nothing in the way they’d been carved that reached out to you. Not like the woman in the yellow dress. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I did sit on the altar and share some dried meat and oatcake with Jip before we left, and as I sat there looking back into the body of the church, I realised I was probably getting the same view the god’s priest had had when the rows of empty benches had been full of living people. I tried to imagine what kind of noise all those metal pipes now splayed like a giant’s game of jackstraws at the other end of the room might have made. I couldn’t, and when I left the building, the strongest memory wasn’t the statues and the cruel torture they seemed to take such a grim delight in, but the glory colours of the glass windows all around them. They stayed in my mind like jewels.

The woman in the yellow dress lived in a Greek temple in the middle of the town, squatting ominously on one side of a stone-flagged square. Of course it wasn’t a proper Greek temple, but it looked like a darker version of the white one in the book of myths Joy and I had pored over by the fireside a lifetime ago, where Zeus or maybe it was Athene lived. It had the same pillars in front, supporting a big triangle of stone, making a big porch, behind which were doors and windows. The windows had been shuttered with board, maybe to protect the glass. I spent a long time trying to work out what the letters carved in stone on the front of the building said. I think it was “TO LITERATURE, ARTS AND SCIENCES”.

The doors were cracked open just enough for me to slide in after Jip. Inside were more doors, glass this time. These inner doors were what had kept the weather and the animals out. I pushed them open with some difficulty, and went in. The upper windows weren’t boarded, so I climbed the stairs. It had been a museum. That’s what I discovered when I read the labels on the walls. But everything in it had gone. Everything except in one room in the middle. It was another big and empty space, and in it was a chair and opposite the chair was a lady in a yellow dress, staring right at me. I say she was a lady because a lady is a fancier kind of woman, and the dress was as fancy as you could imagine, long and luxurious and the liveliest yellow with black bits on the edges. It wasn’t a dress you could have done anything useful in. It was a dress made to get in the way. It was, however, a very good dress for lounging in and looking at people. And her eyes were doing a very intense job of looking. She was only one painting, but there was more life in her two eyes than in all of the blank Jesuses and Marys in the church put together. She looked right at me and I knew she was seeing me, just as intently as the artist must have seen her. She looked at you and you felt… connected. Maybe not connected with her directly, but with life. Because that’s what the painter had caught, that’s what the painter had liked. Her life. Maybe just life itself. I sat in the chair and looked back at her.

Hi, I said, I’m Griz.

And then I laughed at myself for talking to a painting and her look seemed to share the joke she had not been able to make. I hadn’t been able to bear the idea of going to sleep with all the sculptures looking at me, but I decided that sleeping in this room with just her looking over me would be a very different thing altogether.

I think someone else had found it restful sharing a room and a look with her, and that’s why the chair had been placed right in front of the painting. I expect one of the last of the Baby Bust had come here to see a young face after all the young faces had gone, dead or just grown old around him or her. It must have been so sad without a younger generation growing up behind them. I think they came to sit in that chair to touch that bit of life once again. I left my bedroll and went down to deal with the rabbits.

On the way, I got distracted by a room on the ground floor. The sign said “MUSEUM SHOP” and though from the mess and the dust overlaying it all it was clear someone—maybe many people—had gone a-viking through it a long time ago, there were interesting things left. It was mostly books, but also some pencils which I took and a little brass pencil sharpener with a steel blade that had not rusted. The books were mainly old picture books about art, too big to carry, but there was a tilted shelf of small books, about the right size for a pocket; they were guides to stuff like flowers and birds and rocks and things you might see on a walk and want to identify. I decided I could afford to add two of them to my pack without overloading myself. The obvious one to take was called Food for Free ; it had a picture of blackberries and raspberries on the front. A quick look through showed it was a guide to eating things you found rather than things you had grown. It had lots of really good pictures to help identify the food that wouldn’t poison you. If I was going to forage my way across the mainland, a book that told me what not to eat among the new plants I was encountering was nothing but a gift. The less obviously useful one was called Trees which I took because I liked it, having only really just discovered a world with proper big trees in it. Looking back, I suppose both books helped me survive. But only one of them saved my life. And it wasn’t the obvious one.

I took a pile of the less portable books out with me to look at after I had made a fire on the porch between the heavy columns. I sat with Jip and paged through the larger books as the rabbits cooked, feasting my eyes on the colourful pictures that were still bright on the page after more than a century. I ate my rabbit while it was still hot, and Jip waited until his was just warm and then took it out onto the steps to eat slowly in the privacy he always favoured. Jess was different. She always ate fast, but kept looking up at you and wagging her tail, as if including you in the fun. I felt a pang at the thought of her and hoped Brand was feeding her properly and that she was safe, wherever she was. And then I remembered her chained to Saga and knew she wasn’t.

As Jip ate, I carefully unbandaged my arm and inspected it while the light was still good. I decided it looked a little better. I put some more honey on it and equally carefully rebandaged it. If it didn’t actually look better, I told myself, it didn’t look worse. That was something. In the morning I would refill the two water bottles from the river I had seen, so I drank most of what I had left, pissed as I watched the sunset from the top of the steps and then went inside for the night.

You would have thought it was a very early time to go to sleep, but then you had electric lights to keep the rhythm of your day as you liked it, not as the sun dictated. And it had been a long walk, as far as I had ever walked in one day and my feet were sore, my arm was still throbbing and the pack straps had rubbed a blister on one shoulder. I closed all the doors behind me and laid out my bedroll in front of the lady in the yellow dress, and lay down. Jip patrolled the edges of the room, ever hopeful for a rat, and then came and went to sleep beside me. I looked into the eyes in the painting and tried to think what her life had been like. There was kindness and intelligence and even a sense of humour in her face, but I wondered if she could ever have imagined while the painting was being made what would come of it, what would become of her. I didn’t think she would have dreamed that her strong gaze would go on to outlive her many-greats-grandchildren, and end up looking at Jip and me as we slept on the other side of the end of the world.