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

This was about seventy years from the Gelding—threescore years and ten. A full lifetime, Bible style. I know that because one of the Busters sprayed it on the wall of the old church on South Uist and the weather hasn’t quite undone it, though every year we pass it and it looks more faded:

THE DAYS OF OUR YEARS ARE THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN; AND IF BY REASON OF STRENGTH THEY BE FOURSCORE YEARS, YET IS THEIR STRENGTH LABOUR AND SORROW; FOR IT IS SOON CUT OFF, AND WE FLY AWAY. PSALMS 90.10.

I think whoever sprayed it was deep in the labour-and-sorrow phase of their life, because the lettering looks both shaky and angry at the same time. Bar says it’s like a howl from the Lastborn generation.

By that time, the world’s population had dropped dramatically. Dad set me the problem as a maths test, so I know the figures. At the Gelding it was about 7.7 billion. Like I said, threescore and ten years out from that it had dwindled to less than ten thousand people. I get vertigo trying to think about such large numbers, and how the size of our species just dropped off a cliff as sheer as the one at the back of our island. In seventy years, we were down to precisely eight and a half thousand in fact. Except of course the mortality rate must have been worse because there was plenty of other stuff going bad.

We know less of those more recent events like the Exchange, or the Convulsion or the Hunger for that matter, than we know about what came long before that, because all the reliable history we know comes from books, and we have no shortage of them. But after the Gelding, the supply of books became scarcer and then petered out, just like the world’s population did, as if people lost the point of writing for the future when there wasn’t going to be one. Or else they were writing on the internet, which was a spiderweb of electric networks that no longer survive. So the real stories of the last years are the ones told by mouth, and though they are closer in time, they seem more like myths and legends than the things that happened before them, because those earlier things were written down as history. This is why when strangers meet, the talk is always about those last days of the Before—the Long Goodbye—as people compare their versions of what they have been told, hoping the newcomer might hold a fresh piece of a jigsaw that in truth will now never be fully completed.

And the stories that come down through our family don’t have a bird’s-eye view of events because of course they only saw the edges of things, or heard of them at a distance, and for some of that time they were kept away from the world anyway, not quite in camps but not quite free, until the Busters decided that there was no use in studying them to reverse the Gelding, or trying to repopulate the world with them because they were so few. That’s when Dad’s parents came here, on the margin of everything, keeping out of the way of the world until it departed. I think they did that as much out of manners as anything, because Dad said he remembered his mother saying how the Busters, who by then were all well north of fifty and heading for the exit door, used to look at them with their youth and unwrinkled skin with something strange in their eyes, something that flickered between grief and jealousy and a usually—but not always—controlled anger.

They opened the gates and let us go, she had said. And though they emphasised we had of course always been free to leave, the fact they took the trouble to say so told us the opposite was true. So we went, and we kept on going until we’d put land and sea between us, and then we sat it out.

Sitting it out on an island isn’t so strange a thing, nor was it crazy, said Dad.

Brand nodded, and of course we all knew the sense of it: travelling by land became less and less reliable and then more and more unsafe in the final throes of the Before.

But the sea is a road everywhere, said Brand. There was a kind of pride in his voice as he said it, as if the seaways were his own particular kingdom. But then he had by his own telling sailed halfway round the world, so maybe he had a right to the pleasure in it.

These islands were not so remote before the land was tamed by the roads, said Dad. Once they were like a great thoroughfare for the really ancient world.

He often told us this. That’s why one of the early Christian god-people came and built his home on what now looks like the most remote place in the world, south of here on an island called Iona that I had heard of but never visited. He didn’t do it to get away from it all: he was planting himself in the middle of a busy waterway. That’s true. That’s history, and I know it not just because it was one of Dad’s favourite stories, but because I read it, not once, but in many of the books we have.

The talk turned to all the strange belief systems and sects and crazes that grew up in the Long Goodbye. First off, Dad said the crazies got crazier, and the ones with the biggest sticks got the most impatient and that led to things like the Exchange. The Exchange meant goodbye to oil from the Middle East, from the hot dry countries that were now hotter and drier. Then there were, maybe later, the Neatfreaks who wanted to leave their affairs in good order in case it could help any that remained. Or any life that happened upon our planet after we were all gone, if that was the way the story ends. They left things like a big seed vault in Svalbard, and various gene safes they called Arks scattered about the world, but they also started collecting things like the car piles.

And they did at least try to make the ageing nuke plants safe, said Brand.

That didn’t go so well, not everywhere, I said, though I did not yet know what that meant in reality. When I was little, and before I read much, when they said “nuclear” I thought they were saying “new clear” and couldn’t understand why they were worried about something that sounded so fresh and clean. Then I learned nuclear meant something old and dirty. Very dirty. And very, very long lived.

Those Neatfreaks were the opposite of the Bingers, from what I heard, said Brand. Damn Bingers just decided to use everything up because who the hell was going to need it when they were gone?

They ate all the pies, said Dad. Which is an old way of saying they were out-of-control greedy.

They’re probably the ones who ate the dogs in the end, said Bar.

That’s a horrible part of the Before story I don’t quite believe, though Ferg swears Mum told him her mother had seen it happening, and that was why dogs were almost as rare as we are. Though it doesn’t explain why bitches are even rarer.

I was told they got poisoned as the cities became emptier and people got scared of them running in packs and turning wild again, said Brand. I don’t know which story is true.

Neither is good, I said.

The talk kept on down this darker path as Dad and Brand compared their families’ versions of the past. What both agreed was that some people took their own lives, gently mostly, often together, to avoid the pain and helplessness when they got too old and there were no able-bodied younger people to care for them.

Or maybe they left early just to avoid the rush? I said, which is a joke I had found in an old book. It wasn’t a joke that quite made sense to me, because I’d never seen a crowd, but I knew from the context how it was meant to be funny, and I suppose I was trying to seem clever to this new addition to my world.

Brand and Dad looked at me and neither smiled. I shrugged at Bar. She rolled her eyes as if I was a child that shouldn’t have been trying to join in the elders’ conversation.

And then others just clung on, tough as limpets, said Brand. Waiting to at least see what Armageddon looked like before going into the long dark.