Chapter 12
The last spaceship
And if sometimes I was a killer, other times I was also an astronaut, if my memories are gentle enough to let me be.
In those memories I sit in the pilot seat on top of the mushroom-shaped tower at night and look up at the stars imagining – like I often did – that I’m in a rocket, lost in space and looking for home – or sometimes that I’m the last left-behind, a galactic explorer, searching for the mystery planet where all the other people went.
Anyway. I’m up there looking at the stars, about a week or so after the girls arrived.
I’m worried because Freya has vomited twice in the last twenty-four hours and I know it’s not the food because we all ate the same stuff, and so I’m thinking about the strangers from the sea and wondering if she’s sick with something we might all get and die from.
It’s full moon and a clear sky and it’s definitely better up on the Tower away from the Bunker which has a whole new atmosphere now there are four of us.
I suppose, looking back on it, I’m running away from it all.
Not that that works, because I hear a huff of breath and the scuff of Cat’s footfall behind me as she hoisted herself up on to the roof and carefully walks towards me.
I turn, surprised, because she doesn’t come up here much like I said, because of that one time she came on a windy day and swore the roof rocked a bit.
She doesn’t like it, and neither, it appears, does Digger, who follows me around a lot now, but just sits and whines at the bottom of the Tower when I come up.
I don’t know what the dog’s objection is, but maybe like Cat she thinks it’s unstable.
But it’s made of concrete and has been standing a long time and I don’t think we’re heavy enough to make it fall down just by standing or sitting on it.
Anyway, there she is, striding towards me with a very Cat face on, which means impatient and in a hurry to tell me something.
She’s not sick, she says.
She’s being sick, I say. All over the floor, you saw it. She’s definitely—
She’s got a baby inside her, Cat says.
But… I say.
And then I don’t say anything for a bit. My mind is sort of blank with shock. Then I say:
She’s too young. Isn’t she?
I don’t know why that was my first reaction, but it came out of my mouth without thinking.
I know, Cat says. But I suppose she must be old enough, because she is.
Neither of us seems to have anything to say for a while, so we just look at the stars who don’t have anything to add either.
That’s why she burned the dinosaur, she says. Why she said he was a sick fuck, giving her a present for the baby.
That’s why they spat on him, I say. That’s why they kicked him.
I look sideways at her because she doesn’t answer. I’m shocked to see the moonlight catch the shine of wetness on her face, and then I realise her cheeks are streaked with tears.
Cat, I say.
She shakes her head and looks away. She can’t talk.
So I get out of the seat and do the only thing that ever calms her down when she gets sad like this.
I wrap my arms around her and hug her tightly.
Sometimes she resists a bit at first because she’s fierce and independent, but this time she just tucks her head into my chest and shakes silently, still too proud to cry out loud.
So I just hold her and try to be strong and rooted like an oak tree she can lean on.
That’s what I think when I do this, be like a tree, just stand tall and let her lean on you until the storm blows through.
These are not moments to talk, not the time to tell her everything’s all right.
These are times to just be. So I stand with my chin resting lightly on the top of her head and wait.
After a while I feel her relax, and then after an even longer while she pushes back and deliberately rolls her head from side to side, as if slowly shaking herself back into her body again.
OK, she says. OK.
She’s not pretending? I say.
No, Cat says. Mouse. She’s absolutely got a baby inside her.
I look down at her. She’s looking up at the Milky Way. I know that profile. The one with the set jaw and the chin jutting out. She’s definitely herself again, and that self is angry about this.
She’s too young, I say again. Even if she is pregnant.
Yep, she says.
Can she have a kid? I say. I mean will she actually be able to, you know…
I don’t know, says Cat. Mouse, how could I know any more than you do?
You’re a girl, I say. A woman.
You know how nutty that sounds? she snorts. Given where we are and what we’ve experienced… and by what we’ve experienced, I mean what we haven’t experienced, Mouse.
So what do we do? I say.
She gives the Milky Way another good glare while she thinks about it.
Nothing to do, she says. Not really. Time will take care of all that needs doing, I suppose. We just have to wait and then help her as best we can.
She must be terrified, I say.
Cat nods and carries on looking up at the night.
Explains it, I say. Not just why they spat on the body and kicked it so much. Why they don’t like me.
Why? she says.
Because I’m a man, I say. A man did that to her.
Oh, she says. I suppose. Yes.
I stop looking at the side of her head and join her in staring up at the stars.
They look back down at us, all of them completely indifferent to whatever we’re going through.
In some ways I felt as far away from them as the girls felt to us back then, like we knew the worst that had happened to one of them but at that point I don’t think we even knew anything else about them.
I think that’s the order it happened in.
But like I said, remembering is strange.
Some things stay sharp, other things that I feel are probably just as important as what I do remember from those times seem to have gone fuzzy or to have just fallen out of my head completely.
I don’t know why it works like that. Because some of the things I remember are small and useless, like remembering Cat laughing so much one day when there were still only two of us, laughing so out of control that she couldn’t stop.
We were out picking blackberries. We were sitting under a really old tree, a grandfather of trees really, relaxing in the dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves that were stacked in drifts overhead, making all the shades of green you can imagine, a green so green it was almost like being underwater.
Cat’s tongue was blue with berry-juice as she laughed, because she had easily eaten as many as she had picked.
I remember her blue tongue and berry-stained teeth, but I don’t remember what the laughter was about, which is the real pity of it as Cat didn’t often lose control and let laughter sweep her away like that.
What was she laughing at? That’s a detail that tumbled out of my memory so quietly that I never noticed it leaving until it was gone.
I wish it hadn’t.
I wish I could remember the joke.
On the other hand, I wish I didn’t remember killing the man who hit her with the cuffs.
I wish I could forget the spasming legs and the soles of his boots and his heels grinding into the ground in the rain, pushing his dying body deeper into the nettle patch like he was trying to get away from me, as if he could be killed twice.
I remember the girls spitting on the body.
That’s all big stuff, where our lives took a turn and went somewhere we hadn’t thought they might go. That I do remember.
I know our lives took another turn when Storm started talking to us both properly, right after we discovered Freya was pregnant, but I can’t remember the moment when she began to speak to me as well as Cat.
It must have been a shock or a surprise.
Because I remember days of silence, when the closest Freya especially got to talking to me was her pointing and nodding or shaking her head.
Storm wasn’t much better, and then one day Freya must have started talking to Cat properly, so we found out about the baby on the way, and then though she started off looking at me with different shades of distrust, Storm did begin to talk with me.
But I’ve forgotten the surprise of it, and the first tiny hint we might even become friends.
Maybe it was when we were with the horses, when she was teaching me to ride.
But then maybe it wasn’t. So that’s something big that’s fallen out of my head too.
I do remember Red dumping me on to the ground and realising she’d managed to land me in a pile of horse manure, and Storm laughing and then suddenly losing the smile as I winced and running across to see if I’d hurt myself, then pulling me to my feet and laughing again when I said I was OK.
I didn’t mean to laugh, she said.
I didn’t mean to look funny, I said, brushing the manure off my shirt. Red had other plans.
I do remember sharing that smile and thinking it was suddenly almost normal between us.
It was after that I think that Storm started to tell us the big truth about their lives in bits and pieces, not all at once, so it was like patching together a new coat from scraps of old ones.
And somehow – and maybe it was the way she told it – their story was more like a fairy tale than something that actually happened in real life, though it was a dark one, without a proper happily-ever-after tacked on the end of it.
I also remember Storm told me some of it when she’d got curious and confident enough to climb up the Tower and see what I was doing up there on the nights when I went up to get away and sit in the pilot’s seat under the stars.
And I think she told me some of it even later, when she was bored enough to join me and Digger hunting or checking the traps, when we were teaching each other things, the reading-for-riding deal we made, when we really were almost friends, or I thought we were, which is the same thing really. Until it isn’t.