The End of the World Is Bigger than Love

by Davina Bell

  ‘Dumb,’ I said.

  ‘To the outside world. Yes,’ said the whale. ‘It is so easy for us to judge. But to be in it, to be aware of the risks and wade in anyway—that is life, dear Summer. Your glass-bottomed boat may crack. But to have sailed it and seen into the soul of another realm. Isn’t the wonder worth it?’

  I didn’t like where this was going one bit, and frankly he seemed a bit in love with his own poetic stylings, and I was now regretting sharing any of my sweetened condensed milk with this guy. It’s embarrassing to admit it now, but I started to get a real pout on.

  ‘Come now,’ said the whale. ‘Don’t be like that. You may not have been aware, but your love for Winter was a risk, too. A deep dive of courage. At any point you could have ended up here, on the sand, hurting. And yet here you are and you’re still alive. With a longer future ahead of you than I have, filled with the chance to yet love and be loved. Over and over. That’s a privilege.’

  And, as I looked out to the shimmer in the distance that was the promise of a future sea, did I ever ponder that.

  Winter

  I couldn’t find Edward anywhere.

  I called and called.

  He couldn’t have chased after Summer. He didn’t know yet she was gone. I was coming to tell him.

  I opened the piano lid. Circled the moat. His blankets. Her food store.

  As I checked her nook, so bare now, I saw it. My father’s knife on her bed. It was unsheathed, naked, shiny. Sharp. It had been cleaned.

  I wanted to think that she couldn’t—would never. That she loved me too much.

  But wasn’t that the problem?

  I sprinted to the bell tower—ran every step. I was fast. From up high, I would be able to see further. I would be able to spot a body. Perhaps the forest. Perhaps the sea.

  As I ran, I said to myself, ‘Peter Pan, Peter Pan, Peter Pan.’ Three times.

  Summer

  ‘There’s something I haven’t told you,’ I said to Mikie quietly. ‘It’s not…It’s not something that’s easy to talk about. But I guess it might give you a little more context for the whole situation with Winter and me.’

  ‘Is it a sexually transmitted disease?’ asked Mikie. ‘Because everyone gets one sometime, kid. No shame.’

  ‘Urgh, no!’ I said, completely disgusted. ‘Where would I even have got that? I’m not old enough for that stuff.’ Truth be told, though, by then I probably was.

  ‘Only takes one time without—’

  ‘La la la la la la la,’ I sang, my hands over my ears.

  ‘Prude,’ said Mikie, a smile in his voice.

  ‘I was trying to tell you something serious,’ I said crossly, ‘but I don’t even think I’ll bother now.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Mikie. ‘Your loss. I’ve been told I’m an excellent listener.’

  And dagnabbit, he was right, and that’s why I told him anyway, even though it meant going back and correcting some untruths, like unravelling knitting.

  ‘It’s about our parents,’ I said. ‘Our dad.’

  ‘Unsurprising,’ said Mikie. ‘Show me a girl who doesn’t have daddy issues.’

  ‘Really? Even under the sea?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Mikie. ‘Mermaids—they’re just singing with ’em. Literally. Why do you think they’re off luring ships? Sea captains are total father figures and mermaids are just gagging for someone to project their issues onto.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said, thinking of Winter and the tall, manly bear, his muscly chest, his swagger that wasn’t so different from a sailor’s, and what I was about to say next, which seemed kind of heavy compared to the ground we’d just covered.

  ‘Spit it out, kid,’ Mikie said with a yawn. ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘How do you guys hear? Is it that echolocation jazz?’

  ‘You’re just changing the subject now.’

  And I was, because I hadn’t told this to anyone—never said the words out loud. I had kept it shut away so I wouldn’t hurt Winter, which is kind of ironic, given how much she’d just hurt me.

  ‘There is a place,’ I said slowly. ‘There is a place—there was a place. In America, when it used to be America. I think there were lots of them, but I only heard about this particular one on a podcast once. We listened to a lot of podcasts.’

  ‘I was more of a Netflix man myself,’ said Mikie unnecessarily.

  ‘It was a house where kids go when their parents have died, and they can play out all their grief, know what I mean? They can, like, hit things with rubber mallets and roll around on foam blocks, pretending they’re being shot out of a volcano. They can scream really loud. No one cares. It’s the whole point. I think it’s called the Sharing House—something warm and fuzzy like that.’

  ‘You went there?’ Mikie asked, more gently now. ‘Your mother…?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Anyway, there was a special support group there for children whose parents had…you know.’ I waited, hoping I wouldn’t have to say.

  ‘Ah, but I don’t,’ said Mikie. ‘Give me the specifics, kid.’

  ‘Whose parents had killed themselves,’ I whispered, and then I cleared my throat and gave a small cough and kept going, louder. ‘And they went there to understand—understand what it is. Suicide. They went there till they could say, “My dad shot himself in the head with a gun because he didn’t want to be alive anymore”. That was the aim. They went there to learn that it didn’t mean he was a bad person, their dad—or whoever it was. Their sister. Whoever. And that despite what anyone said, it wasn’t their fault—I mean, the kid’s fault.’

  I didn’t say anything for a while. Mikie didn’t say anything either.

  ‘One little girl,’ I whispered eventually, ‘kids at her school said her dad had gone to hell because he’d killed himself. But the people at this house—they told her that wasn’t true. She knows that now. Because of the special house. She had such a sweet voice, that girl. And when we heard it, Winter cried so much—wanted to find her and hug her. “How could he leave her behind?” she kept asking. “Didn’t he love her even a bit?” And I didn’t know what to say,’ I whispered. ‘My throat just closed. I said nothing and I think about it so often, that moment when I could have made it better.’ Eventually I asked, ‘What should I have said, Mikie?’

  And as Mikie thought and blinked, thought and blinked, I got that ache that you get when you can’t fix the ache in people you love—when you can’t scalpel the hurt out of them and bandage it up so it can heal.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Mikie slowly, ‘for some people, the end of the world is bigger than love. It’s too much to live through, their suffering. And that’s so hard for us to understand from the outside.’

  ‘But I’m suffering, too,’ I said angrily. ‘No one remembers that.’

  ‘Kid,’ said Mikie slowly, ‘I don’t know what you’re saying and you’re scaring me a little. Is this about your mother dying?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Or are you having those thoughts yourself? Because it’s okay if you are—everyone gets them sometimes. Doesn’t mean you have to do anything about them, though. You can just stay right here with me till they pass, like a bunch of clouds on their way to another sky. You can stay right here with me.’

  I wanted so much to tell him, to be able to say it out loud: how the rope turned on itself in the breeze, first one way, then the other, like some trinket hung up on a porch to catch the twist of the wind.

  How the noose knot was neat, precise, scientific.

  Our dog jumping up on his hind legs to paw at my father’s shoes, barking like it was a game.

  His glasses, which had slipped to the ground but hadn’t cracked, so small and familiar in such a big and horrifying moment.

  How the death thoughts had slipped into his mind and captured him, like ninjas.

  How I wanted to take Winter to the Sharing House so she could throw herself against the foam, over and over, and not be hurt.

  You’re pr
obably expecting that it was me, all nosy, who was the sleuth. But it was Winter who started to ask, and wonder, and then doubt till our father had explained it all. But not before he smashed Winter’s face in.

  And, sure, maybe it wasn’t her whole face, maybe it was just her nose, but with all the blood that poured out of her, I’m talking the kind of gush that you get from a chocolate fondue fountain, I wasn’t really expecting her to have much of a face left, and for a few weeks she didn’t—she was just two eyes blinking out of a giant plum, and you can imagine how well I coped with that.

  ‘Do they smile?’ Winter had asked Pops one evening when we were in the place that could have been Turkey or Greece.

  ‘Whales?’ Pops asked, not even looking up from his notebook. We had been Moby-Dick-crazy for weeks, and though we’d moved on now, Pops was always a bit behind.

  ‘No, axolotls,’ said Winter. ‘Do they smile when they’re happy?’

  ‘That’s an ignorant question,’ Pops said in a voice that I’m sure was much colder and brusquer than he meant it to be.

  ‘But how would I know? I’ve never seen one,’ Winter said, and I could feel my father freeze and whatever he’d been reading, he wasn’t anymore, just staring at the paper so intensely that I expected the page to burn up.

  ‘There weren’t ever any axolotls in the rivers we visited,’ Winter said, and I could hear the realisation in her voice, as if a sun had just popped up in her brain. ‘We never found any. Anywhere.’

  And she was right: we hadn’t actually seen any hauled in nets, or pickled in jars on the shelves of his study, all pink and transparent, like the raccoon foetuses we’d stared at for ages in the Natural History Museum. No diagrams, articles, books—nothing at all—and as we looked at each other, Winter and I, we were wondering why the hoop it had never occurred to us to ask about this before, though I have to admit that my dad wasn’t exactly the most approachable guy. Seeing him glowering, his brow all scrunched, for some reason Voldemort popped into my mind. I sent Winter my most urgent twin telepathy: No no no! Cease and desist! This isn’t going to end well!

  But Winter and my dad, it was sort of a thing—a clash of minds or something—and looking back, I can see that her stubborn streak was basically just an extension of his, and though she’d never have dreamed of sticking pins into Edward, when it came to my father she really knew how to poke a bear.

  ‘You were never actually studying axolotls, were you?’ Winter asked slowly. She thought for a minute, her eyes bright with so many types of fire. ‘It’s not just a coincidence. None of it is a coincidence—the people following us. Our new names. Those people who took Mama. You’re doing something else. Is it something bad?’

  ‘No!’ said my father, and I think this is the right place to use the word ‘vehemently’, but I’m not 100 per cent on that, so don’t quote me.

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘This is none of your fucking business,’ said Pops.

  ‘Why won’t you say?’ asked Winter. ‘Are you ashamed?’

  And if he wasn’t then, well, he sure was two seconds later—you could see on his face that he regretted jumping up from his seat and striking her, the full force of his fist on her nose, the sound it made when the cartilage broke, like the pop of a bottle top opening. I already knew it would leave a scar.

  Winter

  From up here, you could see the whole island. I’d avoided the bell tower so long that I’d almost forgotten. Now the view from each arch was a map of our love. To the south was a bend in a path where Edward had knelt to tie my shoelace; to the north, a curve in the sand dunes where he had swung me up to lie on his chest. Even the sky felt marked, as if we had carved our initials in it.

  And there he was at the top of the stairs. Pete by his side. My smile was so big it shone out through my chest.

  In his hands was my father’s notebook. Black, just as I’d told him.

  On the ground was the box and the other box. Pulled out from the wall. The open lock. Harper Lee’s birthday backwards. The secret block of stone, just like I’d described.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I whispered.

  He barely glanced up from the notebook. His eyes were hungry. ‘Interesting stuff, this,’ he said as he chomped the core and the seeds in one. ‘It truly is.’

  ‘But…But you can’t read,’ I said. ‘We’ve been forgetting to practise. Besides, it’s in code. Isn’t it?’

  I walked over and reached out my hand.

  But he held the notebook to his chest. ‘You’ve got to be kidding. The last eight months I’ve been waiting for this.’

  Summer

  ‘And then?’ asked Mikie, as I paused to sip some more condensed milk, though truth be told I was stalling a little. The next part of the story wasn’t pretty. Winter and I, we never spoke about it. If I’m being really honest, I never let her.

  ‘Well, we went back to Tokyo, some stuff happened, yadda yadda yadda, and, long story short, we ended up on this island.’

  Mikie raised an eyebrow at me and I sighed. ‘Just go with it for now,’ I pleaded. ‘Not long after we got here…my father shot a guy.’

  I explained how we were in the moat, Winter and I. This dude wandered out of the forest and BAM! Pops was suddenly there with a rifle. Shot him right in the head. And because Mikie didn’t seem like a squeamish guy, I added, ‘Blew it clean off his neck.’ I swallowed and skimmed past the part where I’d grabbed Winter’s hair, shoved her under the water so she didn’t have to see. How she’d flailed against me but I’d held her down.

  ‘And the kickback of the gun,’ I continued, ‘it did something to Pops’s collarbone. Chipped a piece out of it, something like that.’

  That night, after he and I had dragged the body into the forest, he slumped on the altar, sipping whiskey for the pain while Winter sat beside me on a pew in the first row, not reading the book in her lap, shivering.

  ‘Who was that guy?’ I asked him.

  ‘Nobody,’ Pops said. ‘A nobody.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Winter asked, her voice a bit shaky. ‘You didn’t even ask him.’

  ‘Nobody you need to know,’ said Pops, slurring a little.

  ‘But he didn’t get the chance to say anything,’ Winter insisted. ‘You just—you—’

  ‘SHUT UP!’ roared Pops, so loudly that even I shrank back a little. ‘SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.’

  Winter cowered, as if he had hit her again. Our father saw her flinch. He groaned. He held his head in his hands and rocked.

  And then, I kid you not, he actually started sobbing. It felt as if we’d been standing on a trapdoor that had opened up; we were Alice in Wonderland falling down into another realm. We looked at each other, Winter and I, not quite sure how scared we should be. But ultimately, I can’t ever give up the chance to be a hero, so I grabbed the bottom of my shirt and I ripped—ripped as hard as I possibly could. I tore off a strip and I swallowed and I stood up and held it out to Pops to use as a hanky, and I said, ‘You know what? I reckon you owe us an explanation. What are we doing here, Pops? Start at the gosh-darn start.’

  He looked at me and then slowly he nodded. And through his tears, he explained it all. About the internet in the coffee cups—his dream for it, his vision. How he was a hero and all that jazz. But then came the parts we weren’t so across. Because even though we were smart (have I mentioned the International Maths Olympiad?) and we’d been trained for some very specific scenarios, we were kind of oblivious in that way kids are. More into redecorating our room with a tiki beach vibe than the whole geopolitical situation that swirled around us.

  Pops told us how things went swiftly downhill after Operation Freedom was launched. Once there was internet everywhere all the time, people quickly became Obsessed (capital O) on a whole new level. Local councils started padding poles, trees, parking meters, because people could not tear their eyes away from those little backlit rectangles. But all the fractures, the facial bruising, that was actually the least of anyone’s
worries.

  Hate groups popped up like mushrooms after autumnal rains. They came from many places—the deep folds of the internet, the cold insides of mountain caves, the slums that didn’t get put on a map, crowded camps, hot with desperation, air-conditioned basements. After a couple of years in isolation, they quickly formed chains across the globe, those groups. Some of them fused together in clumps. They started to do things—horrible things. They started to figure out how to make people watch those things against their will. Then hate groups formed against those hate groups, which were equally hateful in different ways.

  ‘But surely someone tried to stop them?’ Mikie asked. ‘I’m hazy on the specifics of human conflict, but it’s my understanding that there’s usually someone fighting back.’

  I nodded. ‘The Resistance. I’m getting to that. But first, do you guys know about climate change?’ I asked. ‘Global warming? All that stuff? Because that’s why it really got hairy.’

  ‘Mate,’ said Mikie with emphasis. ‘If there’s anyone who knows about environmental catastrophe, it’s me.’

  I felt stupid, then, because of course he did. Duh! That’s what killed the blue whales in the first place. Well, except this hunk. And I felt guilty, because you could probably draw a pretty straight line between our dad putting wi-fi in the water and Mikie losing 100 per cent of his family, his pals. At least, it seemed like a pretty straight line to me, but once the internet truly got up and running again, nothing was ever that simple. Facts and truth and lies became all sticky and tangled. ‘Like a real web,’ I told Mikie. ‘You get it? Like the world wide web?’

  Mikie just looked at me steadily. I got the message and sped the whole story up.

  Winter

  I threw myself onto the ground, then. Onto the box. My heartbeat slammed against it as I ducked my head, steeling myself against what came next.