by Rob Ewing
We come to the first forest, then the sheep-wash, then the village called Breivig.
Where Alex stops and says he needs more water.
‘No – you’ve had enough.’ Calum Ian upends an empty bottle. ‘You had all your share, plus half of mine as well. That’s your bloody lot. No more.’
‘But I feel bones when I do this.’ Alex sucks in his stomach. ‘You can’t be not giving me it.’
‘Bonus Features, you’re only showing your ribs, see? It doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t mean you need more.’
But Alex pushes away his pram. His bag was hung over the handle of it, so when he pushes it, it topples backwards.
‘Not going any further.’
Calum Ian throws away the empty bottle. Now Alex is sitting on the ground in protest.
‘Get up.’
‘I need another drink first.’
‘I said you already had your share. A big greedy share. Get up.’
‘My legs are sore and my arms are sore and my—’
Calum Ian grabs him by the neck of his T-shirt, which rips when he tries to haul Alex up.
‘Look what you did! This was the last T-shirt Mum ever put on me!’
‘Quit your fucking whining – it was old anyway. It stank. You wear it too much, that’s why it ripped.’
Alex, wishing to disobey even more, now lies on the road, holding the torn edges of his T-shirt together.
‘Shoot me then,’ he says. ‘If I’m so slow. Go on, I know you’ve got your stupid petrol gun. I saw it sticking up. Burn me with it – you big bully.’
Calum Ian’s mouth is thin-lined for anger.
‘If you could do it to a dead person, then you could do it to an alive person. On you go, you’re the bad man: it’s you. Go and burn me for being slow.’
Calum Ian looks uncertain. But then sure.
He unclips the top of his rucksack, takes out the plastic bag in which he keeps his water gun.
He unwraps and holds the gun up, then goes to stand five feet from Alex, and points it.
‘Final warning.’
Alex trembles and screws up his eyes and doesn’t move.
‘Go on.’
‘Last warning.’
‘Put a flame on me, you big bully!’
He aims the gun.
Presses.
The spray reaches the cracked end of Alex’s shoe.
Now I pull Alex away, away from the edge of the petrol drops. And Calum Ian shivers: seems to wake up to what he’s just done.
He doesn’t spray more – not even when Alex juts out his chin, calls him bully, coward, bad person.
Calum Ian just looks sad: to be him, to be standing here beside us.
I get myself between them. Now I can’t hold onto all the good that Duncan told me about: it’s forgotten.
‘What would your hero dad say, now? Not a lot of good about you. He wouldn’t like you at all. He would not be proud of you. No sir. He wouldn’t, he’d be sick, sick of the sight. You and your bad bullying.’
Calum Ian waves at me to go away.
‘And he’s not coming back. Because he’s all rotten and dead. Like you said to me. Dead, dead, dead.’
Now he moves. Croak-voiced: ‘Gloic, at least I don’t imagine – like a baby – seeing my mum all over the place.’
‘I don’t do that, not any more. Want to know why? Because I went to the gym. After you said. To check, I saw her. Saw where she was. So now I’m no baby. All right? Now I know she did die – all right?’
This makes Calum Ian’s eyes close, as if I’d sprayed some of his own petrol back into them.
‘You went there? On your own?’
To prove it I tell him about the man in the chair. About the screen walls. About the signs and the flies and the shoes and clothes left in piles.
About Mum’s blue jacket.
He looks at Mairi, then me. Then Alex.
Then he passes his last full bottle of yellow sterilised to Alex.
‘Have it all,’ he says.
Then he gets up and starts to push the pram Alex was pushing: only this time slow enough for us to keep alongside.
‘So this wasn’t a trap?’ I shout after him. ‘You weren’t going to burn us? Or harm us like Elizabeth thought?’
He doesn’t even answer this.
Ard Mhor goes in and out of sun. Birds go scattering, the noise of them tells you where the dogs are.
The ferry waiting room is middle-sized, on the rocky point, wood walls with their paint peeling.
The car park, beside, has about ten cars in it. Their tyres got flat, and all the windscreens are streaked.
Calum Ian walks to the nearest, then around the rest. One of them got burnt, so the tarmac is black in a square beneath.
‘Don’t look inside this one,’ he warns us, pointing to a white car on its own. This car has yellow BIOHAZARD tape swirled all around its doors and windows. Alex hurries past to stop himself from looking by mistake.
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.
&
nbsp; 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.
Back Bay
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.
A house with tins and tins of dog food.
One man dead at his computer.
One of the firemen from the station at home, on his couch, still in his uniform.
Then I found something: alive. I thought it was a dried-out fishtank. But when I looked close I saw there was a lizard inside. I couldn’t believe it.
It had a frilly neck, like there was too much skin. Its eyes were closed. It wasn’t moving.
I put in biscuits. Then I got a stick like you see people doing with snakes. The lizard moved, once.
I used a bag, and lifted it out. It felt cold, but not cold the way dead people are cold.
We went out to the road. I found some long yellow grass. I made sure the dogs didn’t see it, or the cats. Then I found a bit of sunlight, because I knew from school that reptiles recharge their batteries with sun.
I wanted to say hello. But the lizard just moved off into long grass, slow, slow, then gone.
Now I wonder how the lizard is doing. Did he recharge his batteries fully? Is he looking for other lizards?
Does he see them in bits of grass, or old sticks, or even clouds, like the way I see people?
Seven days ago
The sun came up. My blanket got cold on its edges. I can hear the wind going around the walls outside, can see the grass being pushed and pulled by it.
Calum Ian is sitting at the window, alone. I wonder if he’s been outside again. He’s wearing his sleeping bag. I’ve decided that sleeping bags don’t work if it’s too cold.
‘They’ve not moved,’ he says.
His scars look the worst ever. There are two dirty marks going down his cheeks from his eyes.
Mairi’s on the bench at the head of me, curled up so tight she’s nearly gone. There’s just one tuft of her hair. Alex is a bit further up, also buried. The bottle of pink water on the floor beside him is caved-in, finished.
‘You think there’s other people?’ I ask.
Calum Ian keeps looking out of the window, and I almost don’t hear when he answers, ‘Somewhere.’
‘Why haven’t they come?’
‘If they’re getting things fixed. Like the electricity. Like radios. How the fuck would I know?’
I rub cold from my legs, sit up. Outside the sun is making a long yellow waterfall of the sea.
Me: ‘Do you think they’ll be kind?’
‘Kind?’
‘The people. What if they don’t want to look after children who don’t belong? We’ll maybe have to fend for ourselves.’
Calum Ian doesn’t answer. I notice the stink of him: the smell of smoke from his fire-torch.
He’s not looking out at the world now – he’s looking in the way, at us.
‘So I lost my family,’ he says. ‘That should be the worst, but – you—’ He looks away, back. ‘You got an idea why you don’t—? Family. I can’t have my brother. Now you want to talk about fending for ourselves?’
I stare at the dirt worked in under my nails. The dirt on my skin, on the knees of my jeans.
‘He was going to be the best fiddle-player,’ he says. ‘Practised every bloody day. Oh, I gave him a big row – for collecting books for the fiddle, and not food.’
Calum Ian holds the sides of his head like there’s the loudest noise.
He bumps into the bench then kicks it – then keeps kicking until I know it must be hurting his foot.
Then he looks at us and says, ‘Was probably her fault.’
It’s not the sort of talk for saying back to. And I don’t know if he means Elizabeth, or me. Safer not to look at him in case it’s me. He says, ‘It should’ve been me with him on the rib. I’d have kept it close to shore. He’d have survived, would be a certainty. With his brother – for sure, and maybe she would’ve, too … well she’d be here, with you, she’d be all right. Except now he’s – not. I’ve got nobody left in the world.’
‘You have us.’
‘It’s not the same. You’re not my family.’
We just get the wind-noise around the walls. Now-and-then crackle of rain. Alex sniffing.
‘At least you had somebody. Alex – he always knew his mum and dad were gone away. So did Elizabeth. At least you had someone for a while.’
Calum Ian turns to statue. I’m moving the most, Alex maybe second most. Mairi isn’t even as still as Calum Ian.
He comes over, sits beside me.
‘Go back to lying down like you were before,’ he says.
I go back to lying down. Calum Ian has almost a sweet face, or a kind face. Then he puts his hands on my neck. Either side.
He presses, presses. Like he’s trying to choke me.
He lets go, then presses again.
I want to remain calm. Like Elizabeth’s mum said on choking when she came to visit our class – but his hands are too hard. Instead, I try to twist free from one side.
I hear someone crying – Alex.
His hands are bigger, stronger than mine. His eyes don’t look like his eyes – they’re angry and scared, but all at the same time, which is the worst thing.
Then Mairi is there. She’s tugging on his T-shirt. Waving a hand in front of his face.
When he turns and sees her, she waves again.
He lets go. Lets go. Lets go.
He rubs on my neck. ‘Made a red bit,’ he says.
I get away to the window. My legs don’t want to stand me up, they’re shaking too much.
Calum Ian curls himself up in the blanket I just left. His face pressed to the wood of the seat.
The noise he makes isn’t crying – it’s more like a man’s sound, like a man gasping, drowned.