A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  Sorry, boy, sorry, I said and hugged him to me.

  I allowed myself to bury my face in his fur while he licked away at my neck for a long moment. I think we both needed the physical contact with something familiar, something that loved us.

  Then the boat lurched and I pushed him away and ducked into the cabin. I really needed to see if we were taking on water. A quick check seemed to show the hull was intact. The floor was dry all the way to the bow compartment. That was good news. But the grinding noise was worse below deck, where it had an added resonance that came through the soles of my boots. This close to, there was an ominous creaking undertone below it, like something was bending under the boat. I thought it was the keel and that it might be jammed in a crack in the rocks. It seemed to me there was every chance it might snap off or rip straight out of the bottom of the boat. Jip was standing in the hatchway looking at me, panting.

  I grabbed the old saucepan we used as bailer and dog bowl and filled it from the canteen. He scrabbled down the steps and lapped the clean water greedily. I told him I’d feed him later and stepped up into the cockpit, ducking below the boom and looking over the side opposite the tide, trying to see exactly what we were stuck on.

  It wasn’t rocks. I think if it had been rocks then maybe the waves would have smashed the Sweethope more than they did. What the boat was stuck on was a moveable object, itself drifting with the tide. At first I thought it was a boat, half sunk and drifting below the surface, but its sides and angles were all flat and right-angled. Then I realised it was a big metal shipping box, the size of a small house. There was one of them on Eriskay, mostly rusted out, on a wheeled trailer by the causeway. The majority of the paint on this one had gone and it had a thick beard of barnacles and seaweed dangling off its wrapping, which was a tangle of nylon fishing net. I crossed to the other side of the cockpit and saw the net was snarled round a second metal box floating end-on, nose down in the water. The first box must have had air trapped in it, making it more buoyant. It seemed like the keel of the boat was wedged in the gap between them. Because the boat was above water, the wind was trying to make it move faster than the current that was moving the boxes below, and that was what was twisting the keel.

  I was going to have to cut the netting. And there was a lot of it. And the wind was getting up. So I was actually going to have to get it done before the keel snapped off. If the keel went, the bottom could rip out of the boat, or the boat could just capsize.

  With the boathook and my knife, I set to work. I hooked the tangle of netting and pulled it to the surface and just started sawing at it. I didn’t have a plan of attack to begin with, but as I worked the twist of the current and the movement of the boat kept it taut and I was able to cut down the same row, strand after strand. The plastic your people made was strong stuff. We find so much of it now—I wonder if it will outlast us entirely. The netting bit back as I cut it. Sharp strands parted suddenly and scratched at the back of my hands as I worked the knife, and the palm of my right hand got blisters which then burst and stung in the salt water.

  I don’t remember much from that afternoon, because it was gruelling, repetitive work and my side hurt from lying on the deck and leaning out over the water, and my back hurt from being bent over the gunwale all the time. I do remember stopping for water and making a lanyard for the knife because my grip was so painful I was worried about dropping it into the sea, and I do remember doing exactly that several times as the light began to dim all around, each time yanking it back up out of the depths and carrying on sawing away at the hard plastic strands. I also remember how the net suddenly untwisted at one point, slashing the side of my arm with a garland of sharp-edged shellfish that had colonised it. I’ve still got those two scars. And then—maybe because the part of the net that had been closest to the sunlight had rotted more than the strands I had started on—the thing suddenly came apart, and the heavier, nose-down cargo box dropped into the depths. Because it was already underwater, there was no noise and it was a strangely final but undramatic moment as it disappeared. The other one was more lively—freed of the counterweight, the air trapped in it bounced it higher in the water and though I moved fast, it still took skin off the back of my forearm as the rough tidemark of barnacles rasped across it. I swore and pulled back onto the boat.

  The floating container rolled slowly on the surface like a lazy whale showing its belly to the sky, and then began to drift away as if it had never meant us any harm at all.

  Cut loose, the Sweethope immediately felt different under my back. It bucked more in the chop—suddenly frisky—as if it really wanted to get moving again. And though I wanted to lie there and sleep for a while, I knew the boat was right and I had to get sails up and find somewhere to moor for the night.

  Again, I have little memory of the rest of the afternoon, except I know I got the sails up and caught the wind and that Jip reminded me to feed him. And I know that the boat steered a bit differently to the way it always had, but I put that to the back of my mind. And most of all I remember that though I had the strongest heart-tug to turn her north and head home, I headed south-east, for the mainland. At the time I thought it was because it was close now, and so provided the best chance of a safe anchorage. Now I think I always knew I wasn’t going to give up on getting Jess back. And then again, I had never once set foot on the mainland itself. Curiosity, you see. It doesn’t just kill cats.

  Chapter 11

  Tilting at giants

  I didn’t find a great place to moor, but the thin scrape of cove I did find was protected enough for a mild night. It was just luck that I still had Ferg’s anchor on board that I’d spent the day rescuing before Brand sailed into our lives, because without it I’d have been in trouble, the others still being on the sea bed to the west of Iona. I took that as a good omen and felt a little better as I made sure of my knots and dropped it over the side and waited anxiously until I was sure it had bitten into the bottom and was holding us steady. Then I went below and lit the lamp and did the two things I had been wanting to do all day. I ate some of the oatcakes and wind-dried mutton I’d grabbed from the kitchen at home, and I reached into my jerkin and took out the map I’d stolen from Brand’s boat and spread it out on the table.

  Jip jumped up on the bench next to me and curled up with his chin on my thigh as I examined it. When he did that back at home, Jess would often take up a similar position on my other side, so that I was bookended by my dogs as I read. As I scratched his ears, my other hand automatically reached for hers before my brain told it she wasn’t there. It gave me a bit of a lurch, and so I concentrated on what was in front of me instead: it was a map of the mainland. It was printed on both sides, the top half on one, the bottom on the other. The land bits were crowded with place names and printed lines showing roads in different colours. The clear sea around it was covered in handwritten notes and numbers, none of which made much sense to me. What I only noticed when I flipped it over was that the lamplight winked through lots of tiny holes pricked all over it. The holes seemed to be random until I flipped the map back over and saw the pattern that made sense of it: the pinpricks matched places on the coast on each side, which of course meant that half of them appeared to be scattered randomly across dry land if you looked at them on the wrong side of the paper. I thought of the sharp set of dividers I’d jagged myself with in the dark. This was a map of where he’d been or where he was going—or both.

  Most interesting of all, there was a multiple speckling of holes in one specific area. It was in the middle of the sea on one side of the map, but on the other it nestled right above what I had as a child—when I thought the mainland looked a bit like someone sitting down, seen from the side—thought of as the country’s bottom. There was nowhere else with that concentration of holes, and nowhere else with so many different coloured pencil lines radiating from it. When I looked closer and read the word Norfolk printed across the land next to it I felt a little jump of excitement. He had said he’d been
raised on the Norfolk Broads.

  I remembered his words when he was trying to apologise for saying he was going to cut out my tongue. He’d said when you tell a lie it’s always better to put a grain of truth in it to make it stick. I decided he’d salted the lie of his life story with a grain of truth. And Norfolk was that grain. The lie was about having left it and never gone back there. Maybe I wanted to believe something to make sense of trying to find him, maybe I needed that excuse to go exploring. I’ve had time to wonder about that, and I think that’s true. But then I just knew—again maybe because I had to know something to stop me drifting off anchorless and rudderless—that those holes were his home. The place where he was taking my dog.

  I fell asleep on the bench with Jip at my side, and I slept well despite everything. My body was exhausted but my mind—having made a decision—was calm enough to let me sleep long and deep.

  The nearest hole in the map—the first a pencil line went to—was a city a long way south of where I was. Blackpool. When I woke, I again had that tug to go home, but the wind was from the north and Jip was on the prow with his back to it, as if he knew where Jess was going, and so we followed.

  That journey is a blur to me now. I knew little of navigating by a map, because all my life I had sailed a small chain of islands by sight, never venturing beyond a seascape I knew. But I could read a compass and knew where the sun rose and set and with the map now pinned to the table in the cabin I thought I could feel my way down the coast, and feel is what I did, in more ways than one.

  I still hadn’t set foot on the mainland, remember, but the further I got from home the more it crowded in on my left shoulder, like a presence that was watching us, waiting for me to look squarely at it and notice how irresistibly it was beckoning me. It was like the dark pull of a magnet, always there. Always invisible. Impossible to ignore.

  If I’d had sea charts and not a map of the roads criss-crossing the once crowded land, I probably would have kept my bearings better. Two days of fast running slipped past. I spent a night at the tip of a wide firth that cut back north around a big island and led beyond that, I think, to the river that Mum and Dad had gone up a lifetime ago to collect the Sweethope, the one where they had slept in the library and closed up the doors as they left to save the books. Again, I felt a tug to go and see that, and I nearly did but Jip was on the bow looking south again and so we followed his nose instead.

  Passing houses and small villages on the shore was odder than doing the same thing on the familiar islands. There I knew every house was empty. I found myself less sure of it the more houses I saw. Some of the buildings still had unbroken glass in the windows, even after all these years of neglect, and they would wink the thin sunlight back at us as we passed. Every time that happened, I had the strangest feeling that they were trying to get my attention. I could often feel the hairs going up on the back of my neck as we went on, as if they were doing something behind me. Like laughing. Like they knew I was making a big mistake.

  On your own it’s easy to let unsettling thoughts like that get under your skin. Did you—in your crowded world—have those kind of quiet moments where your own mind had room enough to stalk you and play games? Or were there too many other people to let you hear the songs it wanted to sing to you—the bad ones as well as the good ones? I still had no idea how full of others your world was at this stage, not having begun to walk the remains of it, but I felt the loneliness it now radiated sharply enough to take the picture of you out of my rucksack—where it lived as a bookmark in whatever book went with me—and pinned it to the map, maybe so I had some company other than Jip. I had no pictures of my family, so you had to do the job for them, I suppose. Just having another human face to look at helped.

  Because some of the sailing was monotonous and the mind likes to drift, I found myself jolting out of a daydream on more than one occasion convinced that I’d dropped my guard and that the feeling of being watched was more than real, that it was some sixth sense telling me that Brand was out there. He was hidden against the dark land mass, stalking me, instead of the other way around. When that happened, I’d scan wildly about me, raking the sea and the mainland shore for a sign of him. But he was never really there, not where I could see him. He was only in my mind.

  Jip’s day was always the same. Wake, stand on the bow until we got underway, then sit in the cockpit by me, with breaks for eating and shitting and pissing. He was suitably embarrassed about these last two things, which he normally disliked doing while anyone was watching, but we made a deal where I pretended not to notice while he was doing it and then he pretended he couldn’t see me sluicing the piss away with seawater or flipping the turds over the side with the rusty trowel I kept on the boat for just such embarrassing moments. I went over the side, taking care to keep the wind behind me, pissing or crapping, and Jip studiously ignored my contortions in his turn.

  The cuts and scrapes on my arm from the shellfish weren’t healing as fast as I would have liked, which I put down to the salt in the seawater and the constant spray off the waves. When I covered them with sleeves it was worse, so I kept them bare and hoped the air would eventually dry them out and let them scab over. I thought the clean seawater would at least stop them getting infected. It certainly stung like it was doing something.

  Halfway between a big island that I thought might be the Isle of Man and the mainland, I found a strange sight. There was a tilted forest of broken windmills like the ones on the islands back home, except these ones were in the middle of the sea. When I first saw them I couldn’t think what they were. I remembered that story about the old Spanish man who thought he was a knight in armour and that windmills were giants and went off to fight them on an equally old and bony horse. Except these weather-bleached windmills looked more like the bony horse. Maybe like giants’ skeletons—with the occasional unbroken propeller blade jutting into the air like a sword.

  I sailed close to this forest of metal tubes and slackened sail so I could drift past it and look up at them towering above me. It was a strange, quiet moment as the sun bounced off them while we passed through the tiger-stripe shadows they cast across the sea all around us.

  Jip barked at some of them. They didn’t seem to mind.

  Whatever they might have been defending, if they really had been the giants of my imagination, was long gone, but in my mind now they still stand as gatekeepers, because after I had passed them a whole new world of wonders began to unfold.

  When I turned away from them to look at the mainland, I saw something that made me tighten the sails and tack towards it. A huge tower jutted above the biggest scrabble of houses and buildings I had ever seen. A city, I thought. This is what a city looks like.

  As I got closer, the sun was already dipping low in the west and the light did that thing of reddening everything it fell on, giving the world a golden glow. The tower was made of metal and looked a bit like the one I’d seen pictures of in Paris. But the one in Paris did not rise out of the roof of a brick palace like this one did. As soon as I saw it, I knew I was going to climb it, just to see what the world looked like from up there. Just to see what a bird sees.

  You probably wouldn’t have been so excited by a tower. You had aeroplanes after all. And helicopters. For me, it was the closest I would ever get to flying. You also would have known that this wasn’t a city either. Just a town.

  It was high tide. A long metal fence stretched away in front of the buildings sticking out of the water, and lamp posts and flagpoles jagged into the air all the way along behind it, their feet in the water too, some of them leaning drunkenly like the windmills behind me, but most of them more or less upright.

  A big jetty stuck out into the sea and I thought I would sail there and tie up to it. When I got closer in, I realised it had once had buildings on top and a deck that had all been gutted by a fire. There was some kind of giant metal wheel that hung bent and melted off the side of the jetty half underwater. I took real care drifting in beside
it in case there was debris just below the surface, but there wasn’t, and I tied off to a stanchion that seemed to have enough metal in it beneath the flakes of rust to hold.

  And then, after all my excitement about finally putting my feet on the mysterious mainland—I didn’t.

  I sat on the side of the boat with Jip and looked at it all and tried to make sense of it.

  The sea lapped the front of the buildings behind the sunken fence rails. That wasn’t too surprising. I knew the sea level had been rising for years. Maybe if the Gelding hadn’t happened they’d have built a wall to protect the city, I thought. Now the buildings on the front were themselves that wall. I let my eyes travel along it, wondering what it had looked like when those doors let in all sorts of different people instead of just the sea. Some of the frontages had had letters on them, but they were mostly gone or illegible, and those that remained made up nonsense sentences—_ALLROOM _UNHOUSE! COM_DY __USE_EN__! _OAT _RIPS _AS_NO __ACH _OURS I__ _REAM _INGO! _ROUPS WE_COME.

  I read them out loud to Jip. He didn’t seem to be able to make sense of them either.

  About half a mile down the front was another crazily melted assembly of criss-crossed metal that seemed a bit like the giant wheel beside me. It ran round the perimeter of a group of other structures that I could make no sense of, dipping and swooping and loop-the-looping as it went. It wasn’t as high as the tower, but it was very tall at the top. I wondered what kind of thing needed a giant fence like that. The wind that always comes off the sea as the sun dips whickered at my neck. I pulled the sheepskin tighter around me. Away in the distance something screeched. It might have been a bird.