Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

Whether I am the last of the island kind, or last of the world kind, it’s the same for safety.

FEAR

Fear of heights keeps you safe. Use it.

Fear of the dark is because there used to be wolves. Dogs should be safer.

Monsters: remember you were scared of a monster in the plughole? Never existed. So the new monsters don’t exist, either.

Fear of being alone is

I can’t find more inspiration. Asking the blank page never works, so I put my jotter away.

There’s only a short memory, today. I get to the bottom of the sleeping bag to find it: deep down, back beside the biscuit crumbs and empty wrappers.

To the time when we definitely began to know that the world would for ever be different.

We’re at the supermarket. And the big strangeness is that everyone’s wearing a mask: all the shoppers, the lady on the till, even the man minding the door, letting one person in at a time, for one going out.

And the lights are off – apart from the light in one bit of the freezer section. There’s the sound and the stink of a generator – set up in the car park, with cables coming in just to keep that one freezer working.

I want to go to the playpark by the store and play with the other kids, but Mum tells me to stick close by her.

When it’s our turn to go in I hear Mum swear: ‘Fuck; they emptied the place.’

There is one long queue of people, going from the fridges, past the freezers, back to us.

The man on the till is only letting shoppers buy ten pounds’ worth. The people keep arguing with him for more, but he won’t allow it.

But it might not matter for us, because the shelves of the store are nearly all empty anyway.

Mum jangles her keys. She keeps looking around at the door, then the people taking food in front of us.

For shopping the rules have changed: you’re only allowed to take when you reach twenty places from the front of the queue. And that’s miles.

It’s strange how dirty shelves are when you see the back of them. I want to go and play there, in behind, but Mum holds my hand tight like I got a row.

Suddenly in front, someone shouts. Another person at the front – an old lady – has tripped over. Or did she fall? She kneels then starts to shake. This part is frightening and strange: but stranger still is what the adults do.

They begin to shout, scream. They hold their masks tight to their faces. And rather than helping, they move away from the woman, leaving her alone on the floor.

‘Out, out of here,’ Mum says.

She pulls me back to the car, even though I saw things we could’ve bought, even though we queued for ages.

We drive around to the other stores, but the queues are just the same, so we head home.

It’s on the west road that we see the ambulance, parked up in a sandy lay-by.

There’s white tape flapping in the wind, tied around spikes to make a square you can’t go into: just like when they found that rare orchid two summers ago.

But there’s no orchid this time.

Just a man lying flat.

Mum drives slow. She goes to roll her window down: but the ambulance-man waves her past, waving like he got furious at us for being nosy.

I come back up for air. So it was no use as a memory. It didn’t help – and now I’m thinking of what happened anyway. Not then, but nine days ago: in the hours after we found Mairi.

‘The Lord giveth; the Lord taketh away.’ Father Boyd, the visiting priest, said that once, when he came to talk to us in the school about the meaning of Easter.

Except I think that the Lord shouldn’t take people when they’re only trying to help: that isn’t fair.

He should give first, then afterwards not be greedy or cruel with what he takes away.

My eyes get used to seeing Mairi, which makes me remember bits of who she was. She was a flower at the Easter concert: growing big when the teacher fed her sunbeams from a torch. She was fidgety and busy at dancing. I saw her once shouting on her brother.

Now she has this new life; the same life as us. Where it’s being alive that counts, and where nobody makes concerts or holds classes for learning to dance.

And where it’s more normal to have scars on your face than not.

We wait on Elizabeth, to see what she’ll do, but she doesn’t act clever. She tries all types of knowing how a person might be safe: using her books, talking out the problem, asking the sky. Asking us.

It’s Alex who comes up with the idea of asking about her brother, so Elizabeth does that.

Mairi rubs the dirt on the palms of her hands into black strings, then wipes it free. After this she reaches in her pocket and takes out a crumpled drawstring purse.

She empties it on our barrier line of stones.

There’s five shells, some glass beads. Another key fob. Feathers. Plus a picture of her brother.

The colour in it got faded, the picture criss-crossed where she folded it too many times.

‘That’s from before,’ Elizabeth says. ‘Mairi, it’s great you’ve got a picture from before. But we need to know what he looked like after.’

Mairi doesn’t make a sign of hearing: instead just puts the collection back in her purse, all except the feather, which she watches for the way the wind ruffles it.

Me: ‘We could dig her brother out.’

‘ Sure. We dig him out, look at the skin on his face. Because it’s easy to spot the scars on the rotten bony skeletons we see in houses. Great idea! The best yet. Well you can be the one to do that.’

Her voice goes hard, much harder than true kindness. I pretend not to notice. But anyway, Elizabeth is looking instead to see if Mairi heard, or got sad by hearing her brother called a skeleton, but she didn’t seem to.

‘The right thing is sometimes the wrong thing,’ Elizabeth says. ‘Like when you wanted to be near someone at the end. That was wrong, even though your heart said right.’

When she says this I wonder: will we be leaving Mairi behind? But then she shows another idea.

She takes out a ball of string from her rucksack and begins to unroll it. Then she walks on so that it trails and dangles behind her.

When it reaches the length of about five kids she beckons Mairi.

‘Stay that far away,’ she says. ‘Until we know better.’

We follow the shore road. We have to be strict with the string – though Elizabeth has now turned slowcoach, she’s walking funny, and Mairi keeps nearly bumping into the back of us.

‘Why are you walking so slow?’ I ask Elizabeth. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘Forget about it,’ she says.

A long road, the North Bay ahead. One abandoned lorry, one dead sheep stuck in a fence.

Then we see the MacNeil brothers. But they’re not going away – instead they’re running towards us fast, so fast that Elizabeth stands in the road with her body in defence, ready for an argument. Then we hear Calum Ian shout—

‘Our dad’s here!’

We heard him the first time, but still: nobody can truly take this in. His whole body’s shaking and when he says again his voice goes as high as Alex’s, still higher when we make him say once more to be sure.

‘Your dad ?’

‘You’ve got to come and see!’

For now the string-length gets forgotten. We follow him: to the church, to the community hall. There’s Our Lady – the statue of Mary – on its island in the bay. Another wind turbine, a broken or switched-off one this time.

The tide sitting slack. There’s a boat stabbed in mud on its keel. Another, on its side, half-broken, fallen onto the pier wall.

I see now that we imagined too much, or he got us ready for too much.

It is his dad’s boat. But just not his dad.