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

In the picture, you’re doing a star jump on the beach, and next to you is a girl who must be your sister. It’s a bright sunny day. You look very alike. She’s smaller. The picture has caught you both at the top of your jumps, frozen for ever between sand and sky, your arms and legs wide, laughing, eyes flashing with glee. You’re looking right into the lens. She’s looking at you with a wild and happy look that’s so fierce it hurts me to see it. And beside you on the other side is a short-legged terrier also jumping and looking at your face, mouth wide in a smile or a bark. And just as I sometimes think you look a lot like me, the girl looks familiar too. If I squint and imagine, then she looks like Joy might have been. Maybe that’s why I took the picture. Because of course I have no picture of my once bigger—but now forever little—sister. Maybe I thought it would help me remember when I get older and more memories jostle in and fill the space that used to be just the two of us. Or maybe the slight likeness is just the reason why I’m writing this to you. All I know for sure is that I’ve never seen a picture that made me so happy and so sad at the same time. And even without the girl—which is what the picture looks like when it’s folded to fit in my notebook, it’s you and your dog—like the last happy people at the end of the world, before the afterwards began.

Or maybe I’m writing my life to you because the people I could talk to about things are gone, or can’t talk back to me any more. Dad says I think too much. Says I ask too many questions. Says he thinks the lack of answers always makes me unhappy. Don’t know if that’s true. Do know he hates the asking. As if it takes something away from him, not knowing how to reply. It’s just information I’m after, not responsibility for something that is far too big to be down to him anyway. And why does he spend all the time when he’s not working or playing the fiddle with his head in a book of facts if he’s not looking for answers too?

And that was the other thing I took from the chamber of secrets. The books. Whoever had made the den had a line of books all along one side, and after I’d lain on my back looking at the photographs, I turned sideways and looked at them. I scanned up and down the row of spines several times, and then began picking them out at random, reading the descriptions on the covers. They weren’t practical books, the histories or technical things Dad insisted we read so that important knowledge wasn’t lost, something I later began to call Leibowitzing: they were fiction, made-up things. It took me a couple of minutes to work out what these ones all had in common, but when I did so it gave me another jolt, a kind of shock that was close to excitement, though I don’t know why it should have thrilled me as it did. All the books were about imaginary futures in which your world, the Before, had broken down. They were all stories about my now, the After, written by people with no real knowledge of what it would be like.

I stuffed my rucksack with the book hoard and found another bag in the attic which I filled with the rest. Dad and Ferg tried to make me leave them behind, but they were in a good mood having found two working spare parts from the old windmills, and they also liked the three and a half boxes of old candles that I found under the table. I didn’t tell them about the hidden chamber though, and I slid the box back in place after I came out, so if it was your secret place, it’s secret still. As far as I know.

That autumn I read all those books, some of them twice (that’s when I started calling Dad’s obsession with technical manuals and science books “Leibowitzing”, after one called A Canticle for Leibowitz about monks in a devastated far future trying to reconstruct your whole world from an electrical manual found in the desert). I read the books hoping to find some good ideas, but what I got was nightmares and a kind of sadness that stained my mind for weeks.

I know you can’t be nostalgic for something you never actually knew, but it was that kind of longing the books often woke in me. Dad hated me reading them. Thought they were the most pointless things there could ever be, out-of-date prophecies that had turned out wrong anyway. I liked them. Still do. They may not be accurate about life after the end, but if you sort of look sideways with your mind while you read them, you find they say lots about what things were like before. They’re like answers to questions you didn’t know enough to ask. Though saying something like that to Dad would only make him even angrier. The past’s gone. We only have the now he says, and the only answers that are useful are the ones that will help us survive into the future.

The red-sailed stranger told us his name was Brand.

He had a bag with him. It was heavy enough to pull down a shoulder as he walked up the slope past the drying racks that were thick with fish. There was rain in the air, but it had not yet started to fall, and we paused and took the last of the evening sun on the bench outside the main house. He put the bag carefully at his feet as he gratefully accepted a mug of water from the burn.

Good water, he said. Clean and cold.

He looked at the cod and mackerel on the drying racks.

If you’ve fish to spare, I’ve something to trade with you, he said.

We have everything we need, said Dad.

You don’t have a voltage converter for the windmill, grinned the traveller. But we’ll get to that tomorrow maybe. Your friends in Lewis told me you have been having problems.

Dad looked as if the traveller had already got the better of him in a trade he hadn’t even said he was interested in. But it was true enough. The windmill was eccentric in its performance, and Dad felt it was the converter and had been grumbling for a year or so about making a voyage to try and find another one.

Hmm, he said. Eat with us tonight. Trade tomorrow. We have time.

There are two questions that Dad, in my limited experience, always asks the few travellers who we meet: is there anyone else? And: are they coming? I never know if the questions are about hope or fear, though the fact we never go looking for ourselves makes me think that it might be the latter.

Before I was born, Mum and Dad did go to the mainland, way down the chain of islands and into the river called the Clyde. They went in one boat and came back in four, each piloting their own craft and towing a smaller one, all loaded with many of the things I have grown up with. My own boat in fact was the one my mum had towed. I always thought she had chosen it from the other ones because of the name, the Sweethope . Dad told me later it was because of all the yachts they had cannibalised in the tilted mess of the long abandoned marina it had smelled the least bad when they opened the hatch.

They had made two scavenging trips into the empty city that was once Glasgow, and then never went back. Ferg asked why, once, and Dad just said there was something there that neither could quite explain, but it sapped them and made them very low, so much so that neither could face a third trip, no matter how rich the pickings still were. One of my memories of Mum when she still spoke was her telling me about the huge library she had found there, miles of shelves and doors wide open. They’d slept there for several nights, camped out safely in a fortress of books. She closed the doors to keep the cats and foxes out when they left, and said if there was one thing that might tempt her back it was that. She loved books when she could read, especially stories, and I expect she gave that to me too.

So Dad asked his first questions, and Brand said yes but not many and seemingly less every year, and no, they weren’t coming.