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

I turned my horse’s head around, with the packhorse following, and headed back across the hogweed field, towards the Homely House.

It started to rain. Either the god I didn’t believe in had a fine sense of fairness and was balancing out the good luck of the gun firing first time, or it had a malicious streak. Or maybe there’s more than one imaginary god and that one liked matching the mood to the weather.

I didn’t bother about keeping myself dry, since I was already soaked from the water at the bottom of the tank, but I pulled the oilskin mac I had intended as a groundsheet over John Dark to keep the rain from her face. As I did that, I had the nastiest thought that I was wrapping her in a shroud, like a corpse, and wondered if she would still be breathing when I next took the cover off her face.

We retraced our tracks back to the Homely House. It seemed to take three times as long as it had coming down. Jip no longer patrolled round us as we went; instead he trotted beside me, looking up every now and then as if to see how I was. I told him I was okay but my voice sounded woolly and trapped inside my head. The trees kept some of the rain off, but not much and as my hearing came back I heard nothing but the trudge of the horses’ hooves and the dripping of the water off the leaves. Then we climbed the final open slope in the full pelt of the rain, and although the horses didn’t slip much on the rain-slick grass, they felt shakier and less surefooted.

I stumbled when I dismounted in front of the door we had left sadly but hopefully that morning, going down hard on one knee. Jip barked worriedly and came and licked me. I got back up and went to see if John Dark had survived.

I pulled back the tarp and saw her eyes were wide open and unblinking. My legs began to go again, but then she blinked.

Okay, I said. It’ll be okay.

She didn’t look at me. She just closed her eyes and turned away.

She must have known I was going to hurt her again. Getting her off the horse was easier than getting her on, but not much. I took the door off one of the tumbledown sheds in the walled garden and propped it at an angle against a table I dragged out of the house, making a kind of ramp. Then I untied her and tried to pull her on to the top of the ramp without jerking her leg too much.

I tried to be as gentle as I could, but again I was manhandling deadweight. She didn’t make much noise in protest at my efforts to start with. And then she didn’t make any at all because I think the pain made her pass out again. Or perhaps it was the hit to the head.

I got her on the door. And then I dragged the door across the ground, up onto the porch and—skinning my knuckles as I just managed to squeeze it through the doorway—into the house, out of the rain.

I used a big padded stool to balance the door on so that she was level with the long deep sofa in front of the fire, and then I slid her off it and onto the cushions. Her eyes flickered as I took off the wet outer clothes as best I could. This revealed more ugly bruises on her body. I think she had broken ribs too. I looked at her nose, mashed sideways. Dad had straightened Bar’s nose when she slipped on a rock and broke it against the gunwales of the Sweethope two summers ago. I knew it had to be done as soon after the break as possible. And half a day had gone, so it was now or never. I think if she hadn’t have been breathing so weirdly I might still have left it, but I thought it might clear her nose enough to stop the snuffing heavy snorts that she was occasionally racked by. So I put my hands on either side of her face, gripped the nose between my thumbs and told myself this was a little thing compared to setting the leg, and that if I was going to do it I should do it once, hard and sharp and decisive. And then I gritted my teeth and twisted it back into the centre of her face. She growled in shock and her eyes snapped open for an instant, but then fluttered closed again. The graunching feeling as I did it made me feel a little sick, but when I took my hands away I was happy that it now looked more or less in the right place and wasn’t so obviously smeared across her cheek. And then when I put blankets over her she seemed to sleep again, though I had no idea of the difference between sleep and a coma.

I wanted to lie down on the other sofa and sleep too, but I got a fire going first, and then I went and took saddles and packs off the horses and left them sheltering under a tree.

I ate some food because I knew I had to keep my energy up. There was no pleasure in it. The pesh just tasted sour, and the smoke-dried rabbit was so tough it hurt my teeth as I tried to chew some of the goodness out of it. And then I put a covered pot with some water and boar meat in the fire to cook away as I slept, and changed out of my dirty wet clothes.

I hadn’t been naked in a long time, not since swimming in the pool behind the house I’d burned. And I hadn’t been naked in front of anyone who was not my family ever. I was tired and wet and cold and exhausted and I thought, in my heart, that John Dark was probably in a coma she wasn’t going to come out of any time soon, if ever. What I really thought, especially after seeing the bruises on her broken ribcage, was that she was dying. I had no idea what internal damage she might have suffered, and certainly no hope at all of healing it, whatever it turned out to be. So bone-tired, wet, cold and sledgehammered by the day’s events, I stood in front of the flames, naked, my hands braced against the high lintel of the mantelpiece and let the fire warm me.

Her eyes were open when I turned to warm my back. She stared at me. I stared back at her, and then I twisted away and pulled a blanket around me. When I looked at her again, her eyes were closed and I don’t know if she saw anything.

She didn’t say anything about it the next morning, or indeed anything for the next two days. She hovered between a dull unhealthy sleep and a waking that was pained and undignified. I fed her when she was awake, pesh and the broth from the boar meat, and between bowls and pans and wet cloths to clean her up with and a tarp under her blankets to lie on, we coped with her need to piss and shit despite being unable to move. It didn’t worry me, but she hated that part of it.

The only good thing was the swelling on her nose got better, and although both her eyes remained yellow and purple and bloodshot, they were on either side of a more or less symmetrical face again.

I think I understood her silence. She was like a terrier that had been hurt. She had just gone into herself to heal. I came back into the room on the first morning, bringing more firewood and Jip had climbed on the sofa and lay against her, giving her his warmth. He looked at me.

I said it was bon .

It all comes down to pissing and shitting in the end. That’s what Dad used to tell us about getting old and ill, or looking after those who were injured. He wasn’t wrong.

Now that things had taken a turn for the worse, I began getting more and more worried that Brand would arrive at his home and then leave before I got there. I resented the time I was losing by nursing John Dark. And I could have left her and gone after him at any time I suppose, but she wasn’t able to move off her bedding to take care of herself, so I would have been condemning her to dying in her own mess. I couldn’t do that.

Days passed in a blur of sameness. Feeding, helping her do what she had to do, cleaning her up when she did it while she was unconscious, again and again, day after day. It was harder because she either couldn’t or wouldn’t talk, and I began to worry she couldn’t see either because sometimes she squinted and sometimes she stared with wide-open eyes that didn’t seem to react to what was happening in front of her.