Chapter 2 #2
The rule is simple: if either of us say there’s a reason to hide, we hide.
We don’t argue. If someone’s wrong, it doesn’t matter.
Not in the long run. And that’s what we’re in it for, Cat says: the long run.
If someone gets it wrong – so what? All we did was hide.
But if they’re right, then we saved ourselves.
And if we argued about it and strangers were coming – like they did for the others, with smiles and presents – then we’d be wasting time when we should be getting into cover.
And wasting time can get you killed, Cat says.
Move first, think later. Mum and Dad wasted time helping the strangers and everyone except Cat and I died.
So, if she says someone’s coming so we should hide, we hide.
That’s Rule Two, and you have to obey it because the only other rule is Rule One, and Rule One is we stay together.
We never, ever leave the other to go it alone.
Because if you had to go it alone, what’s the point? Where are you going to go? And why?
Cat was six when she picked me up and walked us through the night, away from the house full of coughing, stumbling through the rain and thunder to safety.
She couldn’t pick me up now, so I always take care not to hurt myself.
One day I might have to rescue her right back.
I can pick her up easily. I have carried her across rivers and boosted her up over lots of walls.
And other stuff. She’s light as a bird really.
In a funny way she’s not as big as she looks, not that she looks anything but small really – small, wiry, sometimes twitchy – but always tough.
So I do what she says. We’ve got plenty of food in the Bunker even if it’s not hot rabbit stew with wild garlic and potatoes which is my favourite, and there’s enough light in the sky to read for a good long time before it gets dark.
Reading. Cat taught me that too. She’d only just learned how to do it herself when the strangers came with their coughs and their smiles.
Just think, she said one night, long before we settled in the Bunker.
If they’d come the year before, I wouldn’t have learned to read, and then we’d have been stupid, Mouse.
We wouldn’t have really known what the world was like before everyone died off and left it to us.
We’d have been dumb as the rabbits. We wouldn’t have known about foxes and wolves until they came for us. And then it would be too late.
I don’t think Cat would ever have been stupid, even if she hadn’t learned to read.
And I bet lots of stupid people could read in the time before, when the M-way was full of cars and trucks speeding about their business.
Cat’s just too smart for something like not knowing how to read to have ever slowed her down.
Her mind is fast, and even if that sometimes makes her so itchytwitchy you want to sit on her until she quiets down, she understands things I don’t.
And her cleverness is not just thinking-clever: she’s hand-clever too.
She can make things, and she can unbreak things as well, so that stuff that hasn’t worked in lifetimes does work again.
Like the Bunker. It was just a metal door in a slope of concrete so overgrown with bindweed and bittercress that we nearly missed it.
It wouldn’t open. And it was just one of thousands of doors we’d walked past in our lives.
Too many doors to go in all of them. But Cat saw it and she knew it was something different and so she put her mind and her hands to opening it.
This was about ten years or so after the strangers came.
We’d lived in lots of other places in the meantime while I grew and she looked after me.
We always stayed away from the sea and moved inland because Cat believed more than anything else that the sea was dangerous, being where the coughing strangers came from.
We were always looking for an even safer place, even though we’d been on our own ever since.
She took her tools – because by then she’d started carrying tools every time we moved – and she figured out how to make the stuck door open, using two of the Belzer spanners braced against each other to break the shackle.
She loved her Belzers because they were her dad’s.
Still shiny chrome steel after all this time.
Tough as guts, she said.
And that’s how we found the Bunker behind the Tower, and the airfield beyond it, and that’s where we decided to live happily ever after, though we hid the door even more and encouraged the bramble patch in front of it so only we and the robin who watched us knew the winding path through it.
Nobody, said Cat, if there is actually anybody out there, is ever going to find it by accident. And even if they look for it – they’ll miss it.
Of course we have a back-door too, just in case she’s wrong. I don’t think we’ll ever need to use it like that. I think we’re alone now.
And that’s OK. There’s me and there’s Cat and even though she’s really annoying sometimes, she is my only-one, and I’m hers. So we’ll never be alone. She promised and I promised back, so that’s how it will be for as much of forever after as we get to see.
The long night starts with no prospect of rabbit stew as Cat closes us in, and now there’s only light from the big window at the other end of the Bunker that’s blocked by the spring foliage outside, and also from the overhead bottle skylights she made.
The day’s closed. Cat does this every now and then, maybe ten times a year.
It’s like she gets extra twitchy on a regular timetable, like the moon waxing and waning.
She didn’t used to be like this when we were younger.
The twitchiness is worse in the spring and summer when the trees leaf-up and we can’t see nearly as far as we can in winter.
But there’s deer hams hanging in the kitchen and mealy biscuits, and there’s wild garlic paste and lots of hazelnuts so we can eat well even if it’s not a hot rabbit stew.
It’s a shame because it looks like it’s going to be a cloudless night, and I had plans to go up to the Tower roof when it got full dark.
That’s another thing I liked to do, even though Cat was always making noises about it maybe not being so safe any more.
My pilot seat sits on top of the mushroom tower.
Someone must have dragged it there all the way down from the airfield and up all the steps.
There’s no sense to it unless it was for a game, because the room below it, below the roof on which I like to sit, was once a restaurant and there’re still some chairs stacked there that they could have used, but no, whoever used to sit up here wanted a pilot seat.
Maybe it was kids, playing, young kids like I used to be.
Maybe they made the Tower their last spaceship too.
Maybe when they did it, when they stripped it out of one of the fighter plane carcasses in one of the other bunkers that lined the airfield the buckles and straps hadn’t corroded.
Maybe they strapped in and set off on different voyages through the night skies of their imaginations.
My own flights of fancy are fuelled by the books I’ve read about expeditions to the stars, stories about the extraordinary things people imagined mankind might achieve out there, in our solar system and beyond.
Cat thinks that – of all the books we could read – ones about imagined futures are definitely the most useless: all those fantasy tomorrows, she snorts, all that science fiction instantly invalidated by the science fact of the Gelding, and the actual reality that we barely got off the earth, let alone set a human foot on our nearest planet.
She finds these stories irritating and pointless, speculating about a future that never arrived.
I like them, and I don’t know exactly why but sitting up there on the roof and dreaming about what it would be like to be lost in those star-fields spattered across the darkness overhead is a part of it.
I can sit up there, tilted back in the old pilot seat on any cloudless night and see the great star trail of the Milky Way smeared like a thick band across an infinite background of other galaxies.
And because mankind spent thousands of years looking up at this unpolluted night sky I also feel I’m part of that long chain of dead sky-watchers trailing away behind me, the ones who looked up into the unimaginably vast depths of space and gave names to the brighter lights that wheeled slowly across the great gulf of lesser stars overhead.
Feeling the same awe, the same sense of my smallness against all that, makes me feel like I’m with them somehow. And so, less alone.
I said all this to Cat once and she just snorted and said it didn’t make sense. Later she apologised and said she should have said it didn’t make that kind of sense to her. But she was glad it made sense for me and let me feel something good.
But tonight, no sky-watching and no rabbit stew. Tonight is closed too.
Did you really see something? I say later, after we’ve eaten.