Chapter 8 #3
She now pantomimes a smiling face and puts her thumb up.
Putting your thumb up is what people in the before time used to do, to say everything is good, without using words.
Cat says that the last time she saw my mum was when she turned and looked back as she was carrying me away from the strangers and the coughing, and my mum was just standing in the yard watching us go.
She gave Cat a thumbs up then and waved her on.
And that was the last Cat saw of her, because that’s when she turned and went back into the building.
I don’t think the pale girls know about the thumbs up.
The hurt one has retreated into herself, and the idea comes to me that the pain of the dislocated shoulder was pinning her in our world, but that now it’s gone she’s escaped and gone away.
She doesn’t register us at all. The other one just stares at Cat like she’s a bit mad.
Or frightening. Or annoying. All of which are things Cat can definitely be.
And then we all get shakily back to our feet and look awkward.
Cat picks up her bow and bag, and I collect the ropes and quickly wind them back up. The girls are now both watching the woods behind us, eyes darting around, looking for someone else.
I try to swallow that bubble in my throat. This is the bit I don’t want to think about, the admitting what I’ve done to the person they’re clearly looking for.
I don’t know how to do this next bit, I say to Cat. They’re wondering where he is.
We just do it, says Cat. There’s no point putting it off.
That was pure Cat. It’s not that she didn’t like thinking about things.
It’s just that she thought by doing. Me, I think by watching, mainly.
Watching and daydreaming, Cat always said daydreaming’s a waste of useful time.
I say daydreaming is often more useful than a twitchy, busy person imagines it is.
What do you think they’ll do? I say quietly.
Don’t know, says Cat. I mean, it’s probably good that they’re still cuffed together, but I don’t think they’ll attack us or anything. They’ll be really sad. But there’s no point putting it off.
Wish there was, I say.
There isn’t, she says. Come on. Easier to deal with an “is” than a “what”
At first, the girls are reluctant to walk back through the wood towards their campsite, or at least the unhurt one is, shaking her head while the other just turns her head and tries to pull in the opposite direction, until the pain in her ankle makes her stop and sit down suddenly.
Cat keeps telling them it’s OK. And I think that if the one in the yellow hadn’t hurt her foot, we’d still be there trying to persuade them even now.
In the end, the unhurt, defiant one gives in, but only after pantomiming emphatically that we should go very, very quietly.
She hauls her sister to her feet and helps her move forwards, acting as a crutch.
And I see there’s a double thing happening in her face too – she’s helping, but somehow she looks really angry about it.
I can carry her, I say. Look, I can—
As I reach for the injured girl they both shy away and the angry one bares her teeth in a fierce hiss, like an animal that wants to rip my throat out. The intensity of it makes me step back.
They’re really scared, Cat says. And tired. And hurt. They don’t know what else might be in these woods. It’s strange for them.
It’s strange for us too, I say. I was just trying to help. Maybe they’ll be better when they’ve had some hot food.
Cat nods, but in truth what I was really thinking was that all the hot soup ever made in the long history of mankind was not going to be enough to soothe them or make them feel better about what we were going to show them.
I never knew my father, but I still know that losing one is one of the worst things in the world.
The dog is almost as strange as the girls.
It’s not as threatening as a wolf, which is the animal it most resembles.
We’ve been prowled by wolves a few times though we’ve never been attacked.
But we have seen what a pack can do to a deer, or once, a pig.
And I don’t mean it’s strange just because it’s an actual dog and the first one that I’ve seen.
It’s strange because it doesn’t behave like any other animal I’ve ever come across: it isn’t scared of us.
It doesn’t run away. The only other living thing that it reminds me of, in the way that it seemed quite unbothered by our closeness, is the robin who nests close to the tank.
But I never got the sense that the friendly bird was trying to communicate the way the dog had been when it barked at us to go after the girls.
Cat might be nervous of it, but to me the dog seems friendly, always almost like it’s right on the edge of talking to us.
Plenty of dogs appeared in books I’ve read or photos I’d seen, from the before times when there were lots of them and every family seemed to have one: I think I now understand why people had kept them closer in with them than they did with other animals.
The horses are a completely different thing. I don’t understand them at all, and neither does Cat. When we finally get to the campsite the girls hang back while we stand and look at the big animals looming over us.
What do we do with them? I say
They’ve got plenty of grass they can reach, Cat says, and pointed at the puddles the rain was forming all around them. There’s water. We can leave them until later.
We’re going to keep them? I ask.
Or eat them, she says. You can eat horse meat, I think.
Do you want to kill them? I say, thinking I don’t want to kill anything ever again, not after today, not even fish or insects. I don’t.
Me neither, says Cat. Not really. I was just thinking that’s a lot of smoked meat we could put by for the winter.
The injured girl is sitting on the ground looking at her feet. The other one doesn’t take her eyes off us. She looks a little less angry, I think. The horses stare at us calmly with their big dark brown eyes, unaware we were talking about eating them.
We don’t starve, I say. There’s just us, and killing something so trusting would be a bad thing.
Well, says Cat. I don’t know where we’d keep them. Or how to use them. Maybe they’d be useful…
Maybe we just let them go if we don’t want them, I say. Take off the ropes and straps and let them go wild.
I don’t think there are any wild horses left, Cat said. I think the wolves got them all.
Maybe the wild horses just moved away from the places we know, I say. Maybe there’s somewhere less woody. I think they like lots of grass and not so many trees…
It’s so much more comfortable talking about the horses, I think, so much better than the other talking that lies ahead of us.
The two girls are looking agitated, shivering almost uncontrollably in the cold rain sleeting down through the overhead patchwork canopy of vines.
The horses are OK for now, Cat says. We can decide about them later. We all need to get dry and warm round a fire or we’ll get sick.
I feel sick already, I say.