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

WE ARE HAPPY THERE AS WE WERE HAPPY HERE IN LIFE.

PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME.

FOOD IN THE WALLED GARDEN.

FIREWOOD IN THE SHED BY THE BACK DOOR.

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED. USE WHAT YOU CAN.

STAY AS YOU PLEASE OR GO AS YOU WISH.

BE WELL. BE HAPPY. BE KIND.

I read it twice, and then I cleared my throat and tried to translate it for John Dark. It made me feel strange, reading something directly meant for me, written to me from the past. I mean, I know it wasn’t written for me, Griz, but it was written for anyone who came into the house and found it and that was me.

When I had made it clear what it said, we headed upstairs without needing to agree to do it. It just felt the right thing to do. Paying our respects.

They had gone neatly, making as little mess as they could, and they had gone together. They were just bones now, tangled together in the giant metal bathtub which had feet like a dog’s which lifted it off the ground. Their skulls leaned together, companionably, one bigger than the other. The water had evaporated over time, leaving a flaking, rusty tidemark that was probably not just rust. There was a knife lying on the floor beneath the bath. Looking round the room it was hard not to imagine their final moments. There were saucers everywhere, full of puddled wax that had once been candles, and where there were no candles there had been vases and buckets full of flowers and branches, of which nothing remained but dry stalks and twigs that crumbled to dust when I touched them. There was a green bottle of wine with a foil around the neck, and there were two glasses lying unbroken among the bones. It looked like the big one had held the smaller one lying against him. I supposed they might be a man and a woman, but I do not know what the difference is in skeletons. They had filled the room with candlelight and flowers, and then they had got in the bath together, and drunk the wine and then I think they had gently cut their wrists perhaps in the warm water and I hope that they had just felt they were going to sleep in each other’s arms. It didn’t feel a sad or a creepy room at all. Bones are just bones. And it didn’t feel haunted. Like I say, there are no such things as ghosts. But it felt like we were intruding.

I think John Dark felt the same.

Eels etay day john four , she said. Tray four .

Then she nodded and walked out of the room. She went downstairs to hunt around, and I walked along the corridor looking into the rooms on either side. They had covered everything with sheets, to keep the dust off I think. They had been there so long that they had caught drifts of dust, and I was coughing because I had just moved the sheet aside to look into a tall cupboard to see if there were any good clothes or boots to vike when I heard a noise that sent an immediate spike of fear down my spine.

It was a high-pitched woman’s scream, long and wavering, and it wasn’t John Dark. And then there were suddenly other voices, more voices than I had ever heard in my life.

The sound almost made me pee in shock.

And then I heard John Dark shouting for me.

It wasn’t a woman screaming, and there weren’t other people downstairs. There was just John Dark and a blocky sort of box with a handle on the side. The box was covered in a skin of mottled material that might have once been made to look like leather, but it was worn and frayed and the thin plywood beneath poked out at the edges. Its lid was open, and inside a disc like a big flat black plate was turning around and around despite the fact a sort of tubular metal arm like a goose’s neck appeared to be clamped over it. When I had time to look closer, I saw that in fact it only touched the spinning disc very lightly, with the end of a needle that went along a tiny groove that spiralled from the outer edge to the inner circle. The centre was a round paper label, a dark red and gold thing.

The screaming was singing, as were the other voices. And the noise flowing under them was music. Big music. I had not heard your music before. Not like that. I had heard music, of course, but it was all little music—Ferg’s salvaged guitars or Bar’s tin whistle, and I had been transfixed by the lone sadness of the violin Brand had played in the chapel on Iona. But those were all one, at most two instruments at a time, and I had heard the music as it was being made. It was good but compared to this it was thin. This was music so large and deep that I could not really imagine what the instruments were that made it. It was shocking. And frightening. It was exhilarating and all those things in between because I was touching your reality as you would have experienced it. I wasn’t poking through overgrown ruins and sorting through the cracked and rotting stuff you left behind, trying to patch together your world from the rubbish pile. This was like a time machine: the sound I was hearing was the same sound you would have heard if you had turned the crank on the player. These musicians were long dead, but the sound they made together had outlived them and all the generations following, through the Gelding, through the Baby Bust and right on up to now.

I know you had all sorts of ways to record sound and moving pictures of people. But the devices you used don’t work now. The electrics have not lasted; they’ve corroded and died and your screens, big and small, are only useful to us as glass surfaces if we need something perfectly flat. This machine didn’t work on electricity. I opened it up carefully later and found it ran on a big spring that you wound tension into with the handle. As it unsprung, it turned the plate on which the disc sat, and the needle somehow picked up the sound from the disc and sent it out into the world through what must have been a noise box mounted on the head of the goose neck.

This was older tech, and it had outlasted the electric music machines. It was a magic trick, this disc, catching voices in time and then holding them across much more than a century and then releasing them into our ears at the drop of a needle. The sound was sort of crackly, as if it had been captured next to a fire that spat and popped as they played and sang, but through it you could hear the music loud and clear. I didn’t see the picture of the dog on the label until it stopped spinning. It was sitting looking into a cone attached to another kind of music player. It was a terrier like Jip and Jess, white where they were black. Whoever painted the dog had caught the way they listen when something gets their attention, head cocked to one side. At first I thought the label meant the music was called His Master’s Voice, but when I read it and found the other discs with the same label but different writing I figured out it was the name of the company that made the discs.

We both agreed it was bon .

We kept the music going as we searched the house, going from room to room, taking the note on the hall table seriously. Whenever a disc finished, one of us would go back and put a different one on, sometimes the other side of the one we had just heard, sometimes something completely different. Some music slowed you down and made you want to sit and listen to it again and again; other kinds of music made you want to jump up and move around to it and dance. This all would have meant so much less to you, I think. You wouldn’t have thought it a kind of magic. You probably had hundreds of different bits of music you could listen to. I doubt you were any more amazed at the ability of a machine to capture musicians’ performances and hold them through time for you to enjoy whenever you wanted than you thought there was anything extraordinary about a car that moved, or a plane that flew. What a luxury, to get used to magic like that.