The End of the World Is Bigger than Love

by Davina Bell

  I started running, then—down to the sea, which was all cornflowers that morning, along the beach in one direction so fast I thought I was going to barf, and walked back heaving. But even though my legs were literally shaking, I started sprinting up the steps to the bell tower, all 362 of them, because I got it in my head they were there—that Winter had broken her promise and was showing Edward everything, and I didn’t care that he was a bear—he was poking around places that he shouldn’t. With every step I climbed, I got madder at him for taking Winter away to enjoy for himself. I got madder at Winter for betraying our little family. I got madder at myself for letting it happen, right under my gosh-darn nose. I tried to ask myself, I promise I did: are you sure you’re not just jealous, Summer? Are you just making a big deal out of nothing because you feel like a third wheel on a bicycle built for two?

  And, sure, maybe there was a bit of that, but there was something else about that bear—something that gave me feelings like the heavy air before a storm. So when I reached the top of the bell tower, I threw the door open so loudly it split when it hit the wall and bounced back against me, and my shin was bleeding and I was hopping and the worst part was that it was all for nothing, all 362 steps, because they weren’t there. It was the same as it had been the day Pops got taken away and Winter and I had vowed to protect his secrets with our lives, and wrapped our pinkie fingers together and each kissed them after we’d said it, though in hindsight Lord knows what the kissing was supposed to achieve.

  I knelt at the east arch, which looked out over Our Mountain, and ran my finger along my leg to scoop up the blood and licked it as I contemplated how different things seemed from up here, like in that old movie where the schoolboys stand on a desk to see things from another perspective and are so inspired by the whole caper that they cry out ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ as they jump off, and I think the name has something to do with Dead Guys Who Were Poets.

  But I didn’t want to shout ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, all triumphant and sentimental.

  Suddenly I wanted to cry, because the forest was so dense, and the mountain so sharp and cold and bare-faced, and the whole place loomed harsh and unfriendly—hostile, even—and it suddenly seemed ludicrous that we could hope to survive alone for more than a heartbeat. Winter had been right all along—from the very beginning. We needed to go.

  In that instant I realised I wasn’t angry at the bear anymore. I was angry at our father for leaving us here—no, for taking us here in the first place, away from everything we knew, when we’d already lost so much. And, yes, I get it, the world was getting crazier by the minute, and we might have been dead by now if it wasn’t for Bartleby. But I was starting to wonder quite seriously if it isn’t kinder just to kill a bug with a flyswat rather than letting it suffocate in a jar with no holes in the lid, if you get my drift.

  I had these types of thoughts from time to time, and that was usually when I would read aloud to Winter from Little Women and try to get myself in a more Jo March-ish frame of mind, because the last thing dear old Winter needed was me getting all dark and weepy when I was the strong one who was going to pull us through all this while whistling. But where was Winter now? She had either evaporated into a perfect cloud, or she was with Edward in the forest. She wasn’t here to listen to me do all four March daughters’ voices differently, and to swoon over Teddy, and to long for a Marmee of our own, and without her, what was the point of Little Women, or any of it?

  Thankfully I didn’t have to ponder that too long, because suddenly there was the bear, breaking out through the edge of the forest, and he was carrying Winter in his arms, and of course I immediately thought of Anne of Green Gables falling down the well, and assumed a broken ankle—at the very least twisted—and as I was running down the 362 steps, I was mentally bandaging it, elevating it, and wondering what on earth we could use as a substitute for ice, and then congratulating myself on thinking of the cold, dark, icy moat, and if you think this sounds like a mentally exhausting journey, try living it.

  But when I got down to the bottom and raced outside, Winter was walking on her hands and Edward was holding her ankles, which were very much intact, and they were wheelbarrowing around the fruit trees. She so very much was NOT injured and my first-aid skills were so clearly not required that I couldn’t help but feel a bit put out.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I shouted—loud as I could. ‘You didn’t even leave a NOTE.’

  Edward was so shocked by my yelling that he let go of Winter’s feet, and she fell to the ground heavily, hitting her stomach in that way that knocks out your breath and leaves the top of your belly all tender, while he dropped down to all fours and hid his head between his front paws.

  ‘You scared him,’ she said crossly.

  ‘You frightened me,’ I said more crossly. ‘Where have you even been?’

  Winter went over to that stupid old bear and climbed onto his back and leaned forwards so that her cheek was against the plush spot just behind his ear. ‘We went running in the forest,’ she said. She looked up at me and her face softened and she smiled that twinkly, Winter-y smile that gives me the same feeling as looking very closely at the skin of a perfect peach. ‘Summer, it was beautiful. Next time you have to come with us.’

  ‘There’s not going to be a next time,’ I said swiftly.

  But there was.

  Soon they were always off in that dank, creepy forest, and even when they were here, right in front of me, they were far away, being something I wasn’t, which was perfectly, viciously, so-sweetly in love. And if you think an animal can’t be in love, haven’t you ever had a dog and left it and come back and had it jump at you, as if the floor was sprung, and cover your face with epic amounts of lick-spit while its eyes were like, ‘You are all things in the universe and I would run under an air-conditioning repair truck for you’? Edward had those eyes, and sometimes he’d nuzzle Winter’s knees with his nose as they walked side by side, just saying, Hey, I’m here and I love you, and I can’t put my paw in the back of your jeans pocket, but in another life I would. She would lie for hours with her head in his cross-legged lap as he stroked her hair, and before you get all het up about bears being able to sit with their legs crossed, I’m not kidding when I say Winter taught that bear to do yoga, and his dragon pose was really something to see.

  This is the moment where I could have felt happy for Winter, could have walked alongside her and smiled as she skipped. I should have felt safe, deep in the little chains of love that joined us up in our amniotic fluid and have never since broken or rusted away. This is the moment when I could have thought, I have always been strong, I have always kept her safe, and perhaps now I’ve done such a good job I can brush my palms together and go rub on some coconut oil and bake while sun patterns dance on my eyelids, because she doesn’t Need me (capital N), and that is a good thing.

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop watching the bear now, wondering about those claws: how long had it been since he had killed something large enough to quiet the parts of him that were Beast? Was there something in his eyes—something hungry? Was I wishing it there? I couldn’t sit still with wondering.

  Maybe it had to do with an article I once read about an ambulance officer who, on his days off, would pace the streets, just willing cars to smash into each other and flip over, glass shopping-centre roofs to clatter down, so that he could rush in there, brave and bold, and pull suffocating people from the shards and open up their throats with a pen. That was me, pacing by the stained glass, brooding on the organist’s stool, swinging darkly on the vine ropes, guiding our kite out the hole in the roof, all the while hoping that Winter would run in, melting in tears, her heart broken so badly that only someone who knew every bit of it could ever superglue it back together. And maybe some part of me wanted to do both: the breaking and the sticking back together.

  He’ll be gone, I told myself. Come winter, he’ll be gone, asleep and tucked in a cave somewhere. Because that’s what bears
did, hibernate, and even Winter couldn’t mess with nature and the Way of Things, even though she was technically in love with a forest animal.

  But here’s the thing about love, which I figured out on a night when the moon was cream and round as a compass.

  I’d woken up at some crazy hour craving salty peanuts, and on the way to find them, I tiptoed past the alcove where the stained glass made heart-squeezing kaleidoscopes. There was something tucked in there that from a distance could have been a lumpy sofa but was actually Edward on the floor with his giant arms snug around Winter, like two big old hairy seatbelts crossed over her heart. She was sleeping under those colours and under his chin, and seeing her there, well, it was as if she was walking beside me in the rain and not offering me even a scrap of umbrella, which might not mean a lot to you, but if you knew Winter, you’d know that it was everything.

  And as much as I was starting to really hate that bear, I wanted to wake him and tell him—watch her. Don’t let her give you her shoes—the soles of her feet get raw and she won’t tell you. Don’t let her pull out her eyelashes for you to wish on. Pretend you hate blackberry jam or she’ll rip herself up on those brambles, trying to find enough ripe berries for another batch.

  But do bears even have eyelashes? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to wake her, and so I left them there, the moonlight straining in through the glass, and out by the moat I pondered how much bears love honey and the little pens of anti-bee-sting stuff we’re supposed to stab into our thighs if we’re stung, which we’ve never had to do, and would they even work after all these years, because do things like that expire?

  I skimmed rocks and thought about Winnie the Pooh and Rupert and Corduroy and Paddington Bear and of course they were all boys and we’d loved them forever.

  I thought about Winter’s face when she had hazelnut praline, which she thinks I’m allergic to, which was a lie I told because watching the joy in her face as she eats it is like standing on top of a star. I thought of how I wished sometimes, when her hair was wet and matted, that she’d just duck her head under the gosh-darn umbrella. I thought about wanting when you don’t quite know what you’re wanting, and the things you can’t have, and shouldn’t.

  And I threw a stone that wouldn’t skip and I wished I could dive right in and get it back so I could do it again better, and that’s when I realised that big thing about love that I mentioned before. It’s this right here, and it’s going to sound corny but I’ll say it anyway: love is a place you can’t follow. Maybe the only place, though there’s always Death (capital D), but if Winter had been dying, at least I could have squeezed next to her on the hospital bed and clamped my arms around her shoulders and looked into her face and kissed it.

  Even if I’d put a glass up to the wall of Winter and Edward’s big love and listened, I probably wouldn’t have heard anything anyway—just my big old heartbeat in my ears and maybe the sound of eyes closing happily. And, boy oh boy, I had never felt so very, completely, incredibly alone.

  Winter

  Part of me wanted Summer to know it, the forest.

  As each week passed, I loved it more fiercely.

  The scales of gold light that fell on the ground. The trees spaced just so you could swing round them, like lampposts. The wispy air, cool in your mouth, damp in your nose. How it all hung together, like the stripes of a rainbow.

  But that part of me, the sharing part, got smaller as my lungs got stronger.

  ‘What do you even talk about, anyway?’ she would ask. ‘What do you tell him? Is he trying to get into your pants, Winter? Do we have to have a talk about contraception methods?’

  I laughed. I couldn’t say he was already in my pants because he was already in my soul. Summer would have rolled her eyes but only to cover up the fact that, deep down, she loved all that stuff. It would hurt her to hear it.

  ‘We talk about reading,’ I told her. ‘We go over what I teach him at night. And books. I’m telling him the plots of all the Harry Potters.’

  ‘Jeez,’ said Summer. ‘Scintillating. Wish I was along on that ride. How did he go with the rules of Quidditch?’

  ‘He gets it,’ I said. ‘He gets everything. Come next time. Please? For me?’

  But for the first time, I didn’t mean it. And Summer could tell. I just knew.

  On the back of the toilet door at our last school, there was a quote. In the top right-hand corner. The handwriting had beautiful loops. It said:

  Sometimes a pop song can hurt more than the whole of Cambodia.

  Though she hated graffiti, Summer loved that quote. She wrote it on her art folio in gold pen. She told my father she was going to get it tattooed. ‘Down my backbone, Pops. Or would you prefer it across my knuckles?’

  But I never believed it, that quote. Wherever I went, I could feel Cambodia inside me, pressing, and no pop song came close.

  And then I found Edward. He pulled the world out of me. He pulled me out into the world. It didn’t hurt how I expected.

  Summer

  Flashback! We were in Belarus at Christmas, seven years old, and, boy, was it cold—I’m talking the kind of cold where you touch your cheeks and it feels like your fingertips are patting the big old cushion of a leather sofa, you’re that numb. That’s why we were wearing those ridiculous peach knitted beanies with pompoms so large they were the size of cantaloupes, and Pops had on his brown Russian fur hat, and Winter was wearing the stripy mittens she was so proud of—she hadn’t even taken them off to eat high tea at our ridiculously grand hotel.

  It was the afternoon and already dark, which was blowing our seven-year-old minds, and the streetlights were big round balls of light, the kind that form round fairies in cartoons. All around us, the drifts of snow glowed golden as tiny sand dunes, and flakes floated down, big and flat, like pressed pansies. Gomel, I think the town was called, and we couldn’t get over how heart-crackingly pretty it was—all those old buildings with arched windows, painted mint green and yolk yellow and mauve and peach; fountains and statues and columns and domes. Curly gates, frills on the balconies, and a river, which was where we were walking, arms linked, in a little line, our little family. The iron park benches looked as if they’d been iced with wedding-cake icing, the snow was that thick. A sleigh went past with a powdery swish. ‘See?’ I said to Winter. ‘I was right about wearing gumboots.’

  ‘Such a know-it-all,’ said Pops as we reached a street corner and he put out his arm to stop us from walking out into the traffic, even though we were totally old enough by then to figure that out for ourselves.

  ‘But she does know it all,’ said Winter loyally.

  ‘Ha!’ said Pops. ‘You can cross now.’

  We had been singing rounds of Christmas carols, and I have to admit I was pretty good at the harmonies, and Pops knew half the words in Latin, and I reckon we could have made enough busking to buy the extra-long string of fairy lights that we’d been coveting since the summertime, Winter and I, as part of our room redecoration project.

  ‘Now let’s do “O Come All Ye Faithful”!’ I said.

  Pops and Winter groaned because, yes, we had already done it three times already, but when I belted out the first line, they joined right in, and when we finished, down by the riverbank, people actually clapped through their mittens as I forced Winter to bow, even though she said it made her feel like a giant show-off.

  We kept on walking along the river towards the biggest tree in the square. The one in Gomel was lit up more beautifully than any we’d seen, with a string of lights shaped like icicles threaded all the way through.

  ‘Like those ones, Pops,’ Winter said, pointing. ‘For our room. As long as those, but with the really tiny, tiny globes.’

  Pops grunted. ‘I’ve just agreed to the rabbits. Isn’t that enough for now?’ He strode over to the tree to start reading as Winter reached for my hand before I could cross my arms and sulk.

  The Resistance had set up these trees all over the world—there was one in every t
own. It was usually the widest tree, the one with the lowest hanging branches, and next to it there was always a huge basket of white baubles and a big dish of black texta markers. People would write messages on those baubles, and thoughts, and complaints, and quotes, and dreams, and they’d hang them up for everyone to read, or maybe leave them there for someone specific to find. Those pale little balls would stay there until Sunday night, when the tree would be cleared and the whole thing would start again. People took turns tending and clearing, as if they were word farmers. The trees were sort of like the internet in real life, which was kind of the point—to show it was possible to live entirely offline—and people really grew to love them fast. They were like solid, friendly scarecrows of hope when the world was starting to get really spinny and out of control.

  We followed Pops over, and soon we were lost in that fascinating forest of #content, and we forgot it was cold enough to freeze a homemade blueberry yoghurt popsicle right out in the open. My favourites were the ones describing things that people used to post photos of—they had #pic in front of them.

  #pic a really tall waterfall that catches the sunset and looks like it’s made of cascading fire, running down the crack in a giant cliff.

  #pic a tiny baby bat wearing a tiny nappy, hanging upside down from a guy’s coat.

  #pic a grumpy kid in a pram looking right at the camera and holding a white bauble that says #pic.

  I pointed at one of those white balls of surprise that had a Martin Luther King quote. ‘You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step,’ I read. ‘See? That could apply to your ukulele practice. Just focus on getting the chords first, and the rest will—’