by Davina Bell
‘WALK,’ I yelled in a voice I would never dream of using on a horse. But I didn’t care that I had basically turned into Stalin. It was Winter who had killed us anyway, because there were only four cans of milk in my backpack and even if she could survive forever and ever on the sugar of her own breath, I couldn’t. My only hope now was that there was something else waiting for us on the top of Our Mountain—something in the spot that my father had marked on the map that could save us. Some buried supplies, perhaps—some Doritos, some peanuts. A two-way radio. Some new books by J. K. Rowling—and not those adult crime-y ones. Another flare. A tiny fold-out plane, just right for two. A gun, loaded, two bullets in its chamber.
As I looked up above us, it was all sheer cliff striped with time, and a few ridges with fir trees perched as if they were stuck there, too scared to jump off, and had we ever seen that scenario play out during our time as International Diving Prodigies. And snow, which was going to be interesting, given the whole lack of shoes.
At first, Winter strode out, pulled against me, and I had to trot a little to keep up. Where she got her energy from, I don’t know, though I wondered if, at some deep level, she wasn’t ablaze with a fury of her own. And maybe it was aimed at herself, that anger, and that’s what was driving her toothpick legs, and for half an hour or so I felt sorry for her again. Perhaps she was starving herself with the shame of all the things she’d done, and it was my job to save her, my chance to be Noble (capital N) and oh so mature.
So the first time we stopped, I held a can of milk up to her, holes punched in the top, tried to tip it down her throat, but she coughed and gagged and turned her head, back and forth, back and forth, and eventually her lip caught against the ragged edge of one of those holes, and oh my hat, there was blood, wriggling down her face like a worm. I gave up then, and it all came tumbling back, my anger. Let her starve, I thought to myself. Fucking traitor. And you might have noticed that I don’t swear all that often, so hopefully you get how riled up I was by the whole thing. I want to say livid but it’s not strong enough—nothing in the thesaurus is.
We kept on and on, the cliff on one side and a zillion-foot drop on the other, and only the occasional burbling sound of the river wafting over as we rounded bends, ever upwards. The path was there in front of us, zigzagging back and forth just as Pops had marked it on the map, smooth and dark and easy again. And in spite of everything, I felt a sudden rush of love for that guy as we strode on in our weird horse-and-cart arrangement, and I pondered for the first time how lonely it must have been to be him, stuck in a cage of his own making and blazing with fury.
I must have been contemplating all this pretty hard, been really deep in love with my own metaphor, because I hardly noticed that the fairy-light reins were slack in my hands, and then dragging on the floor, and then Winter was only the slightest bit ahead of me. And then there I was by her side, our steps matching exactly, as if we were North Korean soldiers, back when there was a North Korea, and, boy, wasn’t that a beautiful story, that elegant people’s revolution that caught everyone by surprise back in the day.
I should have asked Winter if she was okay, should have unravelled her. It wasn’t like her to slow down, not these days—but I didn’t. I just walked ahead of her with my hands behind my back, trailing the reins, until eventually I could feel that I was pulling her along. And I’m sort of embarrassed to write the next bit but I’m trying, really trying, with the whole truth thing, so here goes: I tugged on them, those reins—tugged sharply, and BANG! I heard her trip and smack against the ground, and I was thinking to myself, Good, when the reins jerked out of my hand, catching me by surprise. I stumbled, toppled right over, and by the time I stood up and brushed myself off, Winter was nowhere to be seen.
Winter
On the day my mother died my father came through the front door and looked at me without seeing me. He knelt and held out his arms. But when he closed them around my shoulders, his grip didn’t feel tight enough.
Then he disappeared into his lab. I left food outside the door that he mostly didn’t eat.
Within seventy-two hours of her death, he had done it. With revenge in his heart, he set fire to the future, put his secrets in the sea.
Nothing happened—not for weeks.
I slept a lot. Curled around the packed boxes of my mother’s books, Pete coiled into the crook of my knees. When I was asleep, I didn’t have to remember.
But Summer had nightmares. She couldn’t bear to stay inside. At least in Turkey we’d had the pool.
Eventually, we snuck out. We wore hats. We mooched around parks. We went to the teahouse at Shinjuku Gyoen. Walked in the park, threw stones in the pond. We’d been there last for my mother’s birthday to see the blossoms. That gave us the idea to visit the places in the city that she’d always loved.
At Itoya, that’s where we saw it first. How our mother had loved that big old stationery shop. The rainbow rows of thick patterned paper. The neat rows of inks. The place to try nibs. She would sigh when we left and say, ‘Twelve floors of heaven.’
On the seventh floor, a man fell to the ground. He clutched at his back and started to moan. I ran over to help, stepped back when I saw. His skin was the colour of a pigeon, a kerb. I could feel he was burning.
After that it spread quickly, The Greying. Masks and fear and quarantine. Windows cut into shirts. People led away to die in huge sheds. The whole world sick-panicked, the internet gone. But we didn’t connect how it fitted together. It all seemed so strange, that upside-down time, newly missing my mother.
We watched from our window. Minami. The end.
That was the night that we left in the dark. A drive to an airstrip. A fat wad of notes.
My father was flying. He banked the plane steeply away from the lights.
‘Goodbye,’ I whispered, my head on the window. ‘Goodbye. I love you.’
Summer
You are pretty much just going to assume that I’m lifting the next bit out of The Power of One (and if you haven’t read it, how are you even alive at this juncture?!) but I swear on my new lob that it’s true: Winter found a crystal cave. I’m talking a cavern with a roof so high that we shouldn’t have been able to see it, except we could because it sparkled like a disco ball. The cave smelled like a church that’s been filled with the sea, limey and salty and musty and dark, and if you think dark doesn’t have a smell, you’re crazy in the coconut. As she lay on the ground where I’d tripped her, Winter must have seen the glow of the opening and commando-crawled in and, boy, was it lucky that she was trailing those fairy lights, or I’d never have found her.
‘It’s Doc’s cave,’ Winter said, gazing around at the glittering walls, the columns that shone with sequins of light.
And, oh my hat, I know that just a few seconds before I’d wished that she was being chomped alive by flesh-eating ants, but you can’t actually imagine how good it was to hear her voice. I’m sorry, you just can’t.
Doc was that beautiful old German professor/pianist/genius in The Power of One who teaches a little guy called Peekay how to Look at the World—teaches him about nature and music and compassion and humanity, and if you think that sounds soppy, it’s actually a pretty brutal read on account of all the competitive boxing/South African race relations.
And, as weird as it sounds, I felt Doc there with us, in the crystal cave, his strong but gentle presence, and suddenly I knew, I just knew, that we were going to make it—that in spite of everything, it was going to be okay now. He’d make it so. Whatever was up the top of the mountain was going to save us, and soon enough we’d be under someone’s wing, and after all this time, wasn’t that all that I wanted?
In the story, Doc is so patient, so forgiving, so filled with unwavering love in the most horrible of circumstances—he’s practically Jesus. And under the imaginary gaze of his crinkly blue eyes, I felt my heart bloom.
I forgave Winter. Just like that, I forgave her everything. I maybe even forgave myself a little.
‘It’s so nice to hear you speak,’ I said as I unravelled her from the rope of lights. ‘Boy, Winter, I missed you. I missed you this whole time and I’m not going to go on and on about it, but I just want you to know that. Now let’s never talk about this again. Want to go exploring?’
And she did, and we did, side by side, and it took ages because it was huge, that cave, and one part was a garden of stalagmites that looked like stone cacti, and there was a lake in the middle that reflected the roof, and as we waded in, it felt like we were sloshing our way through a puddle of stars.
‘It feels like Christmas here,’ Winter said, and I knew what she meant: hushed magic, safe and true. As if nothing bad could ever happen. ‘Can we stay forever?’ she asked. ‘Please?’
And part of me wanted to say yes, of course, and so I said, ‘Yes, of course,’ and we laughed for so many reasons, because it actually wasn’t that different to Bartleby, and how could we ever have thought that staying there was a good idea?
Winter
As the world turned grey, our father brought us to Bartleby to fix it. He thought there was a third way to live, a balance that could be found. A world not all online or off it. He muttered to himself about how we could get there. He paced at night. He scribbled things down.
But he didn’t live to see it through.
We had been a year on the island when we found him in the forest. Long enough to carve out soft little lives in this prison of his guilt.
Pete had run ahead, threading through the trees. By the time he caught up, he was dancing around my father’s feet as they dangled down. Jumped up to paw his shoes. He thought it was a game, that dog. He grabbed the laces, yanked down hard.
As my father’s body swayed, I screamed.
When I stopped, he was still swaying, the dog still jumping. The rope creaked like the chain of a swing in the park.
My chest beat like wings.
His tongue.
I thought Summer was running away to be sick. But she came back. She had The Knife.
We cut my father down.
He crumpled.
There was a crack that was one kneecap breaking, and then another that was the other.
The top of the rope was still tied to the tree.
We started to dig a hole for my father. But it was cold, and the earth was so hard. After two days we’d hardly dug deep enough to cover our ankles.
‘Screw this,’ said Summer. ‘Let’s cast him out to sea, like a brave old sailor.’
‘Won’t he be eaten by sharks?’ I whispered.
‘He’ll probably end up in the belly of a wise old whale. Spend eternity cruising the sea in style. Boy, do those guys live a long time.’
‘I don’t think whales eat people,’ I said. ‘I think they eat krill. I think they suck it in through their baleen.’
‘Well, what do you think the krill are eating?’
I knew the answer—microorganisms—but I didn’t want to say. Summer was trying so hard to be brave.
‘Will he sink?’ I asked.
Summer thought for a minute. ‘We can put rocks in his pockets—special ones. We can write messages on them.’
‘What kind of messages?’
‘Goodbye, I Love You. That sort of thing. Does that sound okay?’
And now that we had covered his face, that we knew we could carry him between us—Summer with her fingers jammed into his armpits, me wrapped round his broken knees—it sounded okay.
‘Summer?’ I whispered when she came back with a pen. ‘We are orphans.’
‘And who doesn’t love a story about orphans?’ she replied. ‘The Secret Garden, Oliver Twist, The Outsiders…they all end well. Trust me on this one.’
I sat with the pen for ages, the lid off. The words wouldn’t come. Eventually I looked up. Summer was watching me closely.
‘Winter?’ she said gently. ‘He…he wasn’t all bad. Pops, I mean. He was just a person doing his best. Promise you’ll try to remember that. There were good times, too. When all this is over, I bet they’ll come back.’
Summer
‘Why do you think we never used it earlier? The flare, I mean,’ I asked as we were walking to the far end of the cave through darkness as thick as a milkshake. ‘Why didn’t we just get ourselves rescued after Pops was taken away? Isn’t that what a normal person would have done? Are we not normal people?’
And beside me Winter tensed, just as she did whenever we talked about our father, and she didn’t have to say anything after that. Pops was an arsehole, no two ways about it (aren’t all geniuses?) and we had lived in fear of his moods so long that even when he was gone, we were frightened to disobey him. And to top that all off, after he left, life felt delicious—so free and easy and uncomplicated—that we were happy. In the weeks and months that followed, I felt a new kind of empathy for Maeve, our old class guinea pig, who used to escape all the time and just run, eyes half-closed in bliss, to the furthest corner of wherever she was, and eventually nobody wanted to take her home on the weekend because it took hours to catch her, particularly if you’d walked her down to the local park, and nobody’s parents had the time.
‘Yeah,’ I said eventually. ‘You’re right. Stupid question.’
‘I’m the stupid one,’ said Winter. ‘Look where we are because of me. I always have been,’ she added.
‘As if,’ I said as we reached the back of the cave, where a hole high up in the ceiling haloed down light.
I looked up and made one of those breathy ‘wow’ noises and believe me, you would have too—this wall was something. Once Pops came back from a business trip with a chunk of stone, like half a big egg, and inside was amethyst, all glittering crystal shards of violet, and, boy, did we swoon. And even though we weren’t eight anymore, that’s how I felt looking up at this wall, which, now my eyes had adjusted some, I could see was the same kind of deep violet. Pops was confusing that way: he wasn’t all good and he wasn’t all evil, and just as you got to thinking one of those was true, he’d go and do something like bring home a gosh-darn piece of gemstone heaven just for you, and upset your apple cart of certainties.
‘Remember that big chunk of amethyst?’ I reached out to grasp Winter’s hand and she flinched. But she didn’t move it away. I felt so hungry for her. ‘Lie down, Winter,’ I said. ‘Please? Lie down here with me.’
We lay side by side looking up at all the Beauty of that star-studded roof, and we didn’t say a single thing, not for ages, and eventually our breathing synced so perfectly that I couldn’t tell which exhalation was mine. And even though Winter was all bones now, as if her skeleton was on the outside, I still scooched up next to her and laid my big old head on the nook of her collarbone, and I tried not to think about crushing her, tried to pretend it was all just how it had been before.
‘Can you tell me how it feels to be in love?’ I asked, eventually. ‘Was it like you thought—like Amy and Teddy in Little Women—sort of steely pure? Or more like Jo and Teddy—brotherly and smouldering? Or was it more Harry Potter and Cho Chang—sort of just epic crushing? Or Gatsby love—throwing silk shirts around the room, all silly?’
‘Do you really want to know?’ said Winter. ‘You won’t think it’s dumb?’
I clicked my tongue. ‘I asked, didn’t I?’
‘It was like…’ She looked up at the ceiling, her face as tender and love-filled as if she were looking up at a fresco of labrador puppies. ‘Like my whole body was nervous but without the fear. Everything felt electric. But I was safe.’
Without thinking, Winter was running her not-broken fingers over my hair. It was so long since anyone had touched me, and I got what she meant by electric.
‘There was a fuzzy outline all around me. A sort of force field. Of happiness. And I could do anything—be anyone. Because who I really was—the parts I never showed—they were safe in someone’s pocket, and someone thought they were worth keeping there.’
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that was hard to
hear, because hadn’t I been keeping Winter safe in my pocket the whole time? And what were these parts she never showed, exactly? But I let that go, because this was the most she’d talked since she’d come back to me, and I didn’t want to discourage this Opening Up when I had so many other important questions.
‘What about the kissing? Was it better than kissing me? Did you like it?’
Winter laughed again. ‘Well, at first I didn’t like it that much. I kept stopping to breathe in really fast because I wasn’t used to touching and it made me, sort of…’
‘Gasp?’ I asked, loving this Girl Talk moment, which was like something from a magazine—something we’d missed out on all these years, and definitely an area I would have been exceptionally good at if circumstances had allowed.
‘Yes, I guess, and that made me embarrassed.’
‘I bet you blushed. You always blush.’
‘So much blushing. But eventually I got used to it. And he liked it, the…the way I breathed.’
‘The gasping,’ I said eagerly.
‘Yes. Because the thing was…The things about me I hated, some of those—lots of those—were the bits he liked best,’ said Winter.
‘Your appendix scar?’ I asked.
I could feel Winter duck her head in happy-shyness. ‘He kissed it so many times, I thought he was going to—Sorry, is that too much information?’
It was, but only because my heart was hungry in the way that I guess every teenage girl’s heart is at some time, and it felt good to acknowledge that sweet, hollow pain.
I said, ‘Nope, not at all. Tell me anything. Tell me everything.’
‘Well, he…’ Winter paused. She sighed, as if she were suddenly remembering something that had been so freeing to forget. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘You were right all along. He wasn’t who I thought he was.’