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

So. You.

You’re in a photograph I found in a house up in North Uist one summer. This time we were looking for parts to scavenge for the windmill that gives us electricity, and Dad knew there were windmills of the same type up near where North Uist is joined to Berneray by the old causeway. We’d sailed the lugger up there and he and Ferg were gutting the turbine off an old fallen mill while I went on the scrounge through the big house on the skyline. We’d decided to camp in the house overnight. It was somewhere we had visited before, solid, stone-built with a roof that still held out most of the weather. Better than that, it had a lot of full bookshelves in it, and a thing called a snooker table.

It was one of the old buildings, a large farmhouse that had been added to over the years, so it sprawled expansively when compared with the other island houses. The walls had once been whitewashed but now little of that remained, so it was a grey house with a dark slate roof and intact glass windows that seemed to watch me approach up the old drive. A car had rotted to the axles and stood amid the long grass by the back door as if waiting to pounce. The door was not as easy to open as it had been when we visited three years before, but I was bigger now and managed to kick it open carefully enough that it would sort of close after us when we left. I left it open as I waited for the dogs to scramble ahead of me and put any waiting rats to flight.

Jip and Jess tore into the house, feet scrabbling on cracked plastic flooring as they went, whining and barking as they always did when excited, but there was no sound of rat murder close or distant, and they soon stopped their noise and trotted back to meet me, looking disappointed and a little bit hurt as is their way, as if I had promised them fun which had not quite materialised.

Something had changed in the house since we had last been there. I couldn’t say what it was, and I couldn’t see or smell anything that put me on edge, but there was a difference. Before, it had been like many of the houses we went into, damp and mouldering, full of things you could see as poignant or pointless according to your way of viewing the world. Dad, for example, would turn photographs of people to the wall as he passed through derelict houses. I don’t know why he did that. He said it was to give the spirits rest, but then he doesn’t really believe in spirits, or he says he doesn’t. Bar, my sister, has the habit too, and she says it’s to stop all the dead eyes watching us.

I don’t think she believes that.

I think it’s just to try and scare me, because she does like jokes and teasing when she’s in a good mood. Apart from the books, it’s little collections of things that people used to put on shelves that fascinate me in the empty houses. It’s not just the photographs, a lot of which are faded so badly they just look like water-damaged paper now, unless the rooms are dark, but the little china people and the mugs and jugs and bits of glass and wood and stuff. Ornaments. Trophies. Mementoes. Things that meant something to people once, meant enough that they’d make a space for them and display them, something to see every day. We don’t really have ornaments, or the time for mementoes. Everything we do is about surviving, moving forward, keeping going. No time for relics or souvenirs, Dad says when we go a-viking, only take the useful stuff. Maybe that’s why I decided to write this. A souvenir I can carry in a pocket. Anyway.

The picture of you.

The picture of you was definitely a memento. You meant something to someone, even if it was just yourself. I found you under the snooker table. And the way I found you was strange and secret, and because a photo is a small thing, I took you and no one knew and now you live between the pages of the notebook I write all this in, and until someone reads this, I suppose you’re still a secret.

I’d been in the snooker room before, the last time we were in the house. The room was almost filled by the table, which was covered by a dustsheet that had begun to deteriorate into rags at the corners, where maybe a hundred years of just carrying its own weight had worn holes. We’d taken the cover off and rolled the bright balls around the pale green playing surface, trying to bounce them into the pockets. Once there had been poles to hit the balls with, but now the racks that had held them were empty. I had liked the smooth motion of the balls and the healthy smack and clack as they bounced off each other. Not much runs so true in our day-to-day world, patched together as things are. There was a big wall of books to the left side, and a shuttered window at right angles to it. I’d already been through them, but now I was older I went back to see if the grown me would find books I might not have liked the look of last time.

The shutters were stuck shut, and though I could have wrenched them ajar I didn’t. Light not getting into the room was helping keep the books safe, and I knew I’d break the shutters opening them which would make closing them harder. Hinges rust, and where they don’t screws do, rotting out of old wood that no longer holds them. So I got out my fire steel and lit my oil lantern and used that instead. Then I dropped the fire steel and it rolled under the skirts of the snooker table.

We hadn’t found you the other times we were in the house because of the boxes. Someone had stacked boxes of cork tiles under the table, filling the space. They were the same cork tiles peeling off the floor in the kitchen down the hall. What we’d missed was the fact that the boxes were arranged around the edge of the table, and that the centre of the space beneath was empty, like a square cavern, a room hidden within a room. My fire steel had rolled into the narrow crack between two boxes, and I only discovered the secret when I moved one to get at it.

Fish oil lanterns throw more smell than light, but even by the soft glow mine gave off I could see someone had once used the space as a concealed den. It was the reflection of my flame in the glass jars on the opposite side that caught my eye, jars with candle stubs in them. Old candles burn better than the ones Bar makes, so my first thought was to scavenge the stubs, and see if there were any unburned ones left too. So I crawled in, and that’s how I found the chamber of secrets.

Someone had slept here, what must have been long, long ago. There was an unrolled sleeping bag and blankets and pillows, and there were books and tins and medicine packs lining the inner wall made by the boxes. A string of tiny little lights was taped all round the edge underneath the table-

top, the kind of things you used to put on Christmas trees in old pictures I’ve seen. But of course they weren’t lit and never would be again. It made me think what the hidden space must have looked like when they had been—cosy, cheerful, maybe a bit magical even. On the bottom of the table, which was slate, someone had glued a few of the cork tiles to make a decorated roof to the den, a roof and a pinboard. The board was covered in photographs and drawings.

Maybe it was because of the string of lights that would never be lit again, but I found I wanted to see what the space looked like when it was illuminated by more than my smoky fish oil lamp, which is why I lit some of the candle stubs, and why I lay back on the crinkly sleeping bag. I felt the synthetic filling crumble to dust under my weight, and that’s when I saw you. You were the picture right above the pillows. You must have been the last thing whoever slept here saw before they put out the lights, and you would have been the first thing they saw when they woke in the morning. Or maybe that sleeper was you. Maybe this was your den. Either way, you were important to someone. Loved. Mourned maybe. Or celebrated. Or both.