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

And I only have her word, I suppose, that it was a key anyway. It didn’t look like any key I’d ever seen. And she was less interested in the fact it was a key than in how I’d got it and who from. I tried to explain I had found it on the top of the tower, but my answer seemed to make her even more angry. She didn’t believe me. She kept asking where the man was. Her finger kept stabbing the words “where man?” And whatever I managed to communicate to her was just wrong—no man—what man?—found key—found key on tower—not know—all the answers seemed to rub salt in some wound I couldn’t see.

She shook me angrily and looked deep in my eyes.

Ay voo ? she said. Voo, Griz. Key ay voo?

All I could do was shrug, still bewildered.

I don’t know what you want, I said. But I’m not an enemy.

She tied my hands behind me with more wire, and then she loosened the noose around my neck. It was while she was tying me to the flaking metal holding the seats to the stadium steps that Jip came back, looking suddenly confused as he dropped a rabbit at my feet and then looked at us both, sensing something was wrong. She straightened up and spat some words at me, and then went away, towards the horses.

Jip looked at her and then at me and whined, confused by the fact I hadn’t picked up the rabbit or ruffled the fur between his ears.

We’re in trouble, boy, I said. I pulled against the wire binding my wrists but stopped as it bit into my skin.

Jip saw me wince. He trotted up the steps and looked at my hands, pinioned behind my back. He whined, unsure of what was happening.

It’s okay, I said. It’ll be okay.

He licked my wrists. I scratched his neck with my fingertips. As best I could. Then he moved away and barked.

It’ll be fine, I said. She’ll calm down.

She didn’t. She came back, leading the horses and set them to graze on the overgrown pitch. Then she carried my bag up the steps, past me, and into a doorway where the steps disappeared inside the stadium. The landing made a square concrete-lined cave in the slope of the arena. She made her camp there, lighting a fire and unrolling her bedroll. If I scrunched round, I could sort of see what she was doing.

She was talking to herself, low and angry. She undid my pack and tipped all my possessions on the floor in front of her. Then she painstakingly spread them out and sorted through them. I don’t know what she was looking for, but she didn’t find it. That made her even more angry and she squatted on her haunches and looked at me as if everything in the world was my fault. Her silence and the flintiness of her stare was unnerving. There was no trace of the younger version of herself, the one that she had let out earlier in the day before the light began to fail.

As it got darker, the concrete roof and walls of the landing in which she had set her campfire made a warm square in the surrounding darkness, but all that did was make me feel the chill of the evening coming in. It was colder than it had been, and you didn’t have to have a dog’s nose to smell the rain in the air. Jip walked up the steps and looked at her. She ignored him. He sat down and barked at her. She might as well have been deaf for all the attention she paid him.

She gave me no food, no water and just left me sitting against the seat frames. I tried sawing the wire against the old metal stanchions, but it was too painful and, from what I could feel with my fingers, all I was doing was cleaning the corrosion off them, taking it back to the smooth metal beneath. The wire seemed no closer to breaking and I stopped. If anything was going to get sawed through, it was my wrists. I had no choice but to sit it out. Literally sit, because she didn’t bring me my bedroll or allow me to lie down. I’ve spent uncomfortable nights in strange places, and can sleep almost anywhere if I’m tired enough, but that started out as the worst night of all. Then things went downhill. And then—with the visitors—they fell off a cliff.

To begin with there was the physical discomfort. The longer I sat, the less of me there seemed to be to provide some kind of padding between the cold concrete and my bones. Then there was the awkwardness of sitting with my hands behind me. It made my shoulders and my neck ache, and it made my arms numb. I kept wiggling my fingers to make sure I wasn’t losing circulation. The least uncomfortable position was to let my head lean back until it rested on the plastic seat bottom, which left me staring up into the night sky, but did rest my neck a little.

It didn’t rest my brain though, and it was that as much as the physical discomfort that kept me awake. I tried to keep it calm, but I had no luck with that. It raced away, whirling furiously round and round like a windmill in a high wind. I kept replaying everything that had happened since I encountered John Dark. I had thought we had a sort of trust between us. She had certainly helped me—rescued me even—and I in turn had helped her with her wound. I had imagined we had also found a way to understand each other with our miming and pointing at words in the dictionary.

It had seemed a bit of a cruel joke to meet one of the very few people left in this wide and empty world only to discover we couldn’t talk because we spoke different languages, but we had made the best of it. And the worst of it was that I had liked her. As I have said before, I did not have a lot of other people to compare her with, but she did not seem untrustworthy. She just seemed like herself. She had never tried to make me like or trust her. I had taken her to be what she appeared to be: gruff, tough, definitely rough-edged, but straight. Brand, in retrospect, had been too much of a storyteller for anyone more experienced in the ways of other people than I was to trust. He was putting on a show. I rescued a book once called Modern Coin Magic by J. B. Bobo, and I spent one long winter practising the tricks inside. One of the things that made them work—apart from having nimble fingers—was making the people watching you look at the wrong hand at the right time, and so miss what you were actually doing. That’s what Brand did: his smile and his stories were all showmanship making you look over there while his other hand was picking your pocket over here. John Dark was not like that. And this was the uncomfortable thing that kept whirling around my head. How had I got her so wrong? Had I misunderstood something vital in our halting communications? Why did she seem to suddenly mistrust me as deeply as I mistrusted Brand? The looks she had given me and the way she had spat her words after she had discovered the key round my neck definitely seemed like she felt fooled or betrayed. But by what? What did the key have to do with this Kel Kun Demal? Or had I been wrong from the very beginning, and had she always been dangerous to me? It didn’t feel right, the thought that she’d been baiting a trap for me ever since we met, but maybe she had? Maybe she had just needed a separate pair of hands to sew her up. But that didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. All of it churned round and round in an endless loop in my head, wiping out any chance of sleep or rest.

I’d smelled the rain coming, but I didn’t see it when it finally did arrive because the overhanging cloud had blocked out the stars and the moon. Instead I felt it, full on my upturned face as the first fat drops fell heavily out of the darkness overhead. I blinked and squeezed the unexpected wetness out of my eyes, and then instinctively bowed my head as the rest of the following downpour hammered down after them. In seconds I was half drowned, rain hitting the concrete around me so hard the drops seemed to bounce back up to have a second go at soaking any bits of me they might have missed on the way down.