Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

The land sticks out, meaning the sea is all around. We see oystercatchers on the black rocks. There’s so much rubbish and junk along the shore that the birds have to hop up and down to get past it.

‘We got here first,’ Calum Ian says, checking his watch, then looking out to sea. I notice his voice going up at the end, though I can’t work out if the sound of this is surprise.

‘Guess that means we’re the winners.’

We follow him to where the road goes to the sea – then to the slip, then to the jetty, where he takes out and uncaps his binoculars.

‘The bad news is their boat might be very slow,’ Alex says. ‘But we’ve got lots of time for journeys.’

Nobody agrees. We just keep watching.

Big clouds come, with red and gold edges for getting on to night. Alex says they’re as high as mountains, but I know clouds go higher.

He keeps drinking, going to the toilet, drinking. It gets annoying but I’m not allowed to tell him.

Instead we get out Duncan’s violin from his trove and try to play it, even though we sound rubbish. In fact I am the worst – so bad that it makes a sheep in the field nearby run for the hills, after dropping its shit first.

Calum Ian doesn’t get the fun of this. He looks and looks at the water, then serves us cold beans and pineapple juice in faded cartons. The juice tastes sour and fizzy.

‘Never thought my tastebuds would miss the food of adults,’ Alex says. ‘Now they do.’

To make the beans taste better Calum Ian adds two small packets of sugar: but not to Alex’s, who moans so much that in the end he gives him some after all.

I lose the moment when Calum Ian understands.

We had just started making a den for Mairi out of blankets, and the pram, when he shouts: ‘You don’t get it, do you?’

It’s confusing – because we weren’t even talking to him, not a word, not about anything.

‘I want to go up that hill,’ he says determined, throwing our jackets at us to put on right away. ‘We need to look. No arguments about it – now . Come on.’

Alex grumbles, but the look that Calum Ian gives us tells him that going up the hill is not optional.

Halfway up, Alex lies down, and I think he’s protesting again – but instead he says his legs are too heavy.

Calum Ian lifts him up on his back, which means I’m the winner, I get there first.

Me: ‘I see the orange boat!’

Calum Ian drops Alex at once.

He runs to me, I never knew he was so desperate. He even pushes me back, though there’s lots of room on the hill for hundreds of kids.

His binoculars take a while to find the orange thing on the sea. Then he wants to steady them – so we follow orders and find a forked stick to rest them on.

He stops looking.

The binoculars are not being used: they’re just hanging loose around his neck.

Without thinking of anyone else’s turn he drops down on the grass.

‘Me, give me a shot,’ says Alex.

But Calum Ian isn’t even hearing.

When I get the binoculars I can’t use them. Then I see that the glass windows got dirty, because Calum Ian dropped them on the ground – which was careless of him – so I have to clean them hard with my sleeve first.

When I finally get to see the boat – it looks wrong.

It takes a lot of looking to know why.

At first it seems far away: but the wrongness of that is that the boat is actually quite near. It’s just too small, gone flat in the water. And there’s nobody inside it, not even lying down.

Alex knows the answer. He doesn’t need to take his turn to understand.

‘The boat got filled with water,’ he says.

It gets too cold for us on the hill, so we go back to the ferry waiting room.

Inside, Calum Ian makes up four beds on the wooden benches. There’s a toilet, though it lost its water and smells as bad as a shut fridge.

‘Wait here,’ he says, with a dead voice.

‘But they had lifejackets,’ Alex says, over and over. ‘You can’t hurt yourself if you’re wearing a lifejacket, sure you can’t?’

When he begins to cry I have to turn away, because to cry would make the bad become real.

We lie still while Calum Ian goes out to the car park.

After a long time he comes back with a red mouth and a plastic tub half-full of petrol. Alex asks why he went to suck petrol, but he doesn’t reply.

At first we don’t know what he’s doing: then he begins to tear one of his old vests into strips, and winds the strips around and around a stick.

Finally, he dips the end of the stick into the petrol tub and I realise he’s making a torch.

He goes back outside to walk the shore.

The torch burns big at first, then yellow, then blue.

After this we see him dip it again: and the bigness and the bright colours start over.

For hours we hear him shouting – and shining up and along, up and along, like a lighthouse that hasn’t ever found its boat.

But he does find them. We don’t want to look. He kneels beside what must be Duncan. Pokes him with a stick, shakes his shoulders to see if that will be enough to wake him up.

We don’t see Elizabeth’s body until the sky begins to brighten. It’s on the far away beach, around the point.

The tide has gone out, leaving her face down, sand in her hair and in her mouth.

I can’t think too much about Elizabeth or Duncan. If I do then all I want is the world to stop. But the only way to stop the world is to stop myself. And if I do that, I might as well stop caring about finding the others.

It’s dark. The dark feels damp on my skin. There was orange in the sky when the sun went down. I couldn’t stop looking at the colour of it.

It’s the same with buoys, or orange pens, or oilskins, or straws. Everything: reminding me of that last smudge of orange we saw at sea.

The same colour as Mum’s jacket.

Since they died I’ve been searching my memory for all the last things. Did we say the right stuff? Did we say please, and keep good manners? Did I tell them how much strength they had, or praise their bravery? Tell how much I was hoping we’d stay friends?

Most of the time I can’t remember. Sometimes I remember real bits, and it seems we were in a hurry.

Yesterday I had a memory where everyone took time to tell each other their good points: that one was false.

Earlier on I went shopping. Not Old: but New Shopping. And I did it all on my own.

I discovered that having a bad memory, having the worst memory, stops the worst fear.

Even so, I’m not sure this is a good strength to have.

There was a sign at the coastguard’s office which said: Who’s afraid of getting their feet wet? Not us!

I found a message written in dust on the silver ledge of a window at the pub: John Anne-Marie.

I found words written on a dirty van: ALSO AVAILABLE IN WHITE . Then underneath: If only my wife was as dirty as this.

I found a pair of slippers, waiting.

I found a house with four people all fallen over each other, beside a note saying who they loved.

I found lots of Bibles in people’s hands. I found some on the floor beside their hands.

I found a mess of things I didn’t understand, beside a dead cat. Then a mess of fur and bones.

On a school jotter someone had written: I’m going to draw you a map with no pictures on it.

I found a game called ‘Beat the Parents’. I stomped on it until the box was broken.

One house had all its furniture covered in sheets, like ghosts. It took me ages to realise it was a holiday home.