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

As he stroked the dogs, Brand told us he had spent thirteen years on his travels, looking for people and seeing the world. He had sailed the Baltic and up into the fjords of Scandinavia, and he had then hugged the deserted coast of Europe all the long way down to Gibraltar and then the Atlantic coast of Africa. He had not entered the Mediterranean, though he had gone quite far up some of the navigable rivers that penetrated the mainland. We all leaned forward as he spoke of what he had seen and what he had not, like the three families living together in a big ancient house in the Stockholm Archipelago, a scrabble of tiny islands around the old capital of Sweden.

When I first spotted them I thought they were ghosts, he said. They were like copies of each other—pale-eyed and pale-skinned with flyaway white-blond hair like bog cotton.

He said the women were very beautiful, but he had found them unnerving, and not just because of the strong physical resemblance that now spread across three families. He said they smiled just a little too much and left it at that. He had not minded leaving them, or that all he had taken from them were strange memories and their habit of saying skol when they toasted.

He told us of an eerie sailing ship suddenly seen on a windless, murky day on the North Sea that had sheered away as soon as he hailed it and then disappeared into a fog bank and never been seen again, something that had happened so fast he almost put it down to hallucination until minutes later when his becalmed boat had been rocked by the bow wave of the mysterious craft which seemed—even more mysteriously—to have been moving silently under its own power since there was no wind for the sails to catch.

He had sailed down into the Channel and then gone down the Seine where he found not only burnt Paris but before that, on the estuary, the nearest thing to a village he had ever seen, five or six families living like us, fishermen and farmers.

I liked them a lot, he said. I thought one day, when I’d travelled enough, I would go back and learn their language and live with them.

Only when he sailed back two years later, coming north from his great voyage to Spain and then Africa, they were gone.

Not a sign of them, he said. And their fields were so overgrown they might never have been there at all. They might as well have been something I dreamed.

And for a moment, as he spoke, his eyes seemed to be seeing something a great deal further away than the fire he was looking at.

Africa, said Bar. Was it hot?

All the time, he said.

I’d love to travel, said Bar, ignoring the look Dad threw her. Just to know what somewhere else was like.

And then Brand stood and said he must go outside for a piss, and I stumbled over the things laid on the floor as I hurried to show him the shed where the earth closet was. In truth I was just trying to stop him exiting first, in case he surprised Ferg who I knew had been leaning close to the open door so he could hear what was being said.

I saw him slip out of sight as I paused in the door and pretended to sneeze to buy him time, and then I stepped into the fading light of the evening and pointed to the outside toilet. The squall had passed and the rain had stopped spitting.

There, I said.

Brand looked at the tall upright shack. Of course it stood out like a sore thumb when compared with the other low-built stone outbuildings.

Well, he grinned. Good job you came to show me. I’d never have found it on my own.

I wondered if I’d made him suspicious, but his smile took the edge off his words. I watched him walk over the low heather to the toilet, and noticed how his eyes never stopped scanning the island as he went. At the time I thought he knew he was being watched.

After what happened, the way it happened, I’m not so sure. But the end result was just as bad.

The stew smelled good and the talking around the table was better, and the excitement of having someone new to talk to gave the whole meal a holiday air. We still have holidays, because Dad says you need to mark the passing of time and the seasons, so we have birthdays and Midsummer and Christmas Feast, though we don’t have a religion to go with it. I felt bad for Ferg, outside, hidden and on guard. I kept looking at Dad, expecting him to relent and announce his other son was due back any minute, which would be the signal for Ferg to wait a while and then come in, all innocence, and join the five of us round the fire. But he didn’t.

I saw Bar also looking the question at Dad and saw him give the smallest shake of his head. A few minutes later, she got up and went behind Brand to get the pot, saying she hadn’t got enough cod in her helping, only potato. I was deep in conversation with him, but I saw her open the small window in the wall beside the fire and slip a bowl out into the darkness.

Sorry, she said as Brand turned, feeling the cool draught on his neck. It gets a little fuggy in here.

Nothing wrong with clean air and a breeze at your back, he said. I’ve been at sea so long I get a fit of the get-me-outs if I’m stuck inside a house too long. I can’t sleep ashore at all now. I need the sea to rock me until I drop off.

Dad sat next to Mum and fed her alternate spoonfuls, one for her then one for him, as he always did. Bar sat on the other side and wiped Mum’s chin whenever she dribbled. It was a routine so normal to me that I hadn’t until then thought others might find it strange or uncomfortable to watch. Though I had of course spent very little of my life wondering what strangers might think of us and our way of living, there being so few of them.

Brand, though, seemed uncomfortable with the sight of a grown woman being fed like a child. He looked away and saw a pile of books against the wall. He caught me watching him and asked what they were for, and then we began talking about them as a way to allow him to give Mum a kind of privacy he clearly felt she needed. When I told him they were my books and just stories, not anything anyone else thought was useful, he began to quiz me about what I liked and why. It was a new sensation to have someone ask me about myself, and I suppose that was why I opened up and told him.

I said I especially like the ones about apocalypses and dystopias because it’s always interesting to see what the Before thought the After would be like. He said he didn’t know what the word dystopia meant and I told him. Then he asked me what the worst one was, and without having to think about it I told him about this one called The Road about a dad and his son travelling across what I think is America. From the very beginning, I knew it wasn’t going to end well and it didn’t. I told him about it and he nodded as if I’d said something very wise instead of just given a quick outline about a story I’d read.

Maybe that’s what happened in America, at the very end, he said. Maybe after the Exchange there were enough vigorous old bastards to bother to make that kind of horror happen.

I hope not, I said. And I meant it because that was a future no one should have to live in. Even people crazy enough to be part of the Limited Exchange.

Talk of the Exchange brought Dad back into the conversation, and because of that and the fact Mum had had enough to eat, the talk widened across the table as Brand asked what stories had been handed down to us about all that. Dad said no one knew who began it and that everyone involved, the ones that survived said it was the other lot. That was when the world was still talking to itself, about the last time nations worried about what other nations thought about them, before they all turned inward. Five to ten years later he said they just stopped talking. Brand nodded. That was very much like what he had been told by his father and mother.