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

Then her mask came back down and she nudged her horse forward towards a gap in the overgrown ruins ahead of us. She knew where she was going, and my horse just followed her lead. A brick-built building had given up trying to keep standing tall at some time in the recent past and had slumped across the narrow alley, filling the space with an untidy jumble of bricks and glass. John Dark sucked her teeth in disapproval and turned her horse to the side, finding a narrower alley to go down. I don’t think she wanted to risk the horses cutting themselves or stumbling on the new rubble. One thing I had noticed by then was the way you could easily tell what ruin was new and what had fallen down a long time ago by the way the vegetation overgrew it. New rubble shifted under your feet, but as soon as moss and grass and the roots of plants had taken hold, it quickly became stable as the plants and the dirt bound it together.

We emerged from the alley and pushed our way through an area of scrubby bushes that were all about as high as the horses’ shoulders. This had been an open area in the middle of the city, and once there had been light poles to illuminate it. They were corroded into sharp stubs, or had tilted and fallen, pulled down by the weight of the creepers that had overgrown them, but they were regularly spaced, which made it easy to spot them once you had seen the pattern. There were also trees that had grown randomly among them, and after I had ducked beneath one as we passed, imitating John Dark just ahead of me, I straightened up to see the three men standing in front of me.

They had their backs to us, and the one in the middle had his hand raised in greeting so that I instinctively looked beyond him trying to see who might be waving back at them. But there was no one there, not even them really: they were just statues facing a great tangle of wreckage where one end of a huge stadium had collapsed a long time ago, making a hill of massive concrete slabs and twisted metal pipes, all now well bound together by the encroaching plant life. The statues were men and all wore short trousers and had their arms around each other, like brothers. One of them was bald and had a football held against his hip. When I guided my horse around the front of them, I could see they all had expressions that weren’t quite smiles, but more like they were expecting something. Whatever it was, it had either come and gone, or perhaps just had never arrived. All they had to look at was a ruin now. Not that they seemed upset about it. Brambles had grown around the block of stone they stood on, but I could still see one word carved in it. It said “BEST”. So I expect these were the best players in the team. I was looking into their faces, wondering what they had looked like in real life, when John Dark whistled at me.

E. C. , she said, and stopped her horse.

She grimaced as she got off, and had to catch hold of the saddle to stop herself stumbling to her knees. She didn’t like that I’d seen the weakness, and made a great show of teaching me how to hang the horse’s reins over its head so they dragged on the ground in front of it so that it wouldn’t walk off, and then took things from her saddlebags and beckoned me to follow her up the hill of debris.

I left my horse and did so. There was broken glass beneath the moss, so we both trod carefully, but the building had been down long enough for nature to have bound it back into the earth and made it stable. And then, following her footsteps, I found myself at the top of the greenish hill the rubble was now turning into, looking down into what had once been a football field. It was now a hidden oasis of deeper green, with a stand of what I now knew were oak trees at one end, and a thicket of flowering hawthorn in the middle. Rabbits darted among the long grass around the trees, turning tails as white as the May blossom when they ran away at the sight of us. Jip immediately set off like an arrow, his mindset on serious business as he plunged into the undergrowth.

The other three sides of the stadium were in better shape than the one we were standing on, but on two of them the jutting roof that had once sheltered watchers from the rain or sun had dipped and collapsed in on the endless rows of faded pink plastic seats below. Trying to imagine the number of people this arena must have held, what that looked like, what that must have sounded like, made my head hurt. Does absence have a weight? I think it does, because I stood there feeling crushed by something I couldn’t see. It was a much stronger feeling than the one I had when looking at a landscape full of empty streets. Perhaps it was because so many people had once chosen to come and squeeze in close to each other in this single space. Again, there are no such things as ghosts. It didn’t feel haunted. But it did feel like something. Like it had once been peopled—and very densely peopled—and now it just wasn’t. It was unpeopled, in the same way something can’t be undone unless it has first been done. This was the atmosphere I had been trying to understand ever since I stepped on to the mainland, and it was a very different feeling to just being empty. It was more like loneliness, not mine from finding myself alone in this world, but this world’s loneliness without you. It had known you, and now you’re gone—and maybe this is just for a while, perhaps until the signs of you having been here are worn away and your houses and roads and bridges and football stadiums have been swallowed back into nature—it will miss you.

Or maybe I’m going a bit mad thinking like this and then taking the trouble to write my crazy thoughts down so that a long - dead boy who will never read them will know what my theories are about a world he can never visit. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend so long on your own, like I do now. Maybe I’m just talking to myself.

Anyway, the rest of the afternoon was a very good day. Until it wasn’t.

Once she had got moving, John Dark seemed happier about the pain from her wound and walked much less stiffly. She led me into the middle of what had been the field and closed her eyes, holding her finger to her lips. I listened. And then I heard it, just as she opened them again and looked a question at me.

It was a low humming noise, a gentle sound that filled the background and seemed to stroke the ears. Bees were thriving in the huge walled garden that the stadium had become, and there were a lot of them.

There were two fallen trees that had begun to rot from the middle out, and beside them was a strange kind of wooden shed on wheels. Maybe someone had, at the end of things, decided to come and live here behind the protection of the stadium walls. Maybe she kept the bees. Her shed on wheels had become a kind of huge beehive, and there were bees in the fallen trees too. It was a very protected space, and the meadow that the field had become must have been a ready supply of bee food.

John Dark pointed at a recent campfire and pointed at herself. I understood she had been here not long ago. This was how she knew about the bees. She then pointed to one of the fallen trees and grinned. We were going to get the honey from inside the trunk.

We worked together more or less in silence, and she was able to show me with deliberate movements what we were going to do. I don’t know if the silence was in order not to stir up the bees, or just because in doing something physical it was easier to mime, but it was a strangely calm and intimate way to spend time with another person.

I felt closer to her in those few hours than I had to anyone outside my family, now I look back on it. Even when working with the Lewismen, there was always a distance. Perhaps because we were two tribes—working together but supported by the others in our own family who also shared our difference to them. With one person, all those barriers went away, and we just talked with our hands and eyes.