Chapter 11 #2
Cat had opened the tin I’d handed her. I watched her face and saw her eyes sort of stutter.
The dog reached its head up and tried to sniff the box, obviously interested in what was inside, and Cat raised it out of its reach and closed it again with a hard decisive snap.
When I asked her what it was, she shook her head, holding the tin with her fingertips as if it was dirty, swallowed then bent and stuffed it back inside his clothes like it was a relief to do so.
What? I said.
You don’t need to know, she said. Let’s just get him out of here.
She wouldn’t tell me, not then, and maybe because I was so used to her protecting me I let that pass, trusting her as I always did, despite really wanting to open the tin and see for myself.
Did you get the rope? I said.
The rain was getting stronger and a wind was getting up, beginning to send it slantwise into our faces.
No, she said. Just do up his coat and we’ll drag him by the hood. Let’s get this done.
So that’s what we did. We put the pistol and the magazines and the knife under the tank with the long gun, and then we buttoned him up, all the while trying not to look at his face which was waxy and still stuck in that wide-eyed snarl of surprise as we each took a grip on the hood of the coat and pulled him down the slope towards the culvert under the M-way.
The dog trotted ahead of us, quartering left and right sampling what were obviously a lot of interesting new smells, though it kept looking back to make sure it was going where we were going.
In any other circumstances it would have been companionable.
Later it was, even more than the girls were really.
Then, a dog was just one more novelty in a day full of them.
The long-hooded coat worked well enough as a kind of sledge, and the fact that the ground was slick with rain helped us pull him along more easily.
I tried not to look back as we went, but I did once or twice, and the sight of his boots bobbling along behind him reminded me of the death-dance they’d done backheeling him deeper into the nettle-bed, which made me feel even worse about all the things I was trying not to focus on, so I tried to concentrate on what was ahead of us and avoid any obstacles or sharp snags that might tear the coat that was now part sledge, part shroud.
The downslope was easy enough but once we emerged from the culvert that had by then become a choked and gurgling stream, the terrain flattened out and even began to slope uphill.
As we approached the edge of the Miserable Wood we began to feel the dead-weight of him become harder and harder to pull, and as the gloomy trees loomed over us we stopped for a rest, breathing hard.
I noticed neither of us looked back at him.
Instead, Cat’s eyes raked along the wood’s edge, looking at the tangled rampart of brambles and fallen roots.
It’s going to be a tough old pull to get him to the quarry, she said. Take a long time and I think we should get back to those girls.
I nodded. She nodded towards a semi-circular rampart of roots and earth newly thrown up where an old tree on the edge of the wood had toppled in the last winds, a couple of hundred yards down the wood-edge.
The outliers always went down when the wind was strong and came out of the north-west, because the other trees didn’t give them any protection.
We could tuck him in over there, she said. Lot closer than dragging him up to the quarry.
And it’s downhill, I said.
It was a good plan. I hadn’t much liked the one where we were going to toss him into the quarry, because there was no guarantee the body wouldn’t hang up on the cliff face and just stay there rotting slowly away in plain sight, like an accusation.
So we went left and didn’t say anything, just listened to the rain and the sliding noise he made as we dragged him through the tussocky grass and bracken.
We rolled him into the half-bowl shaped hole the falling tree had made as its shallow root system tore out of the earth, and he tumbled and thudded to a splashy stop in the deep puddle at the bottom of the slope, his face turned to the root wall as if he was ashamed of himself for what I’d done to him.
We should have brought the shovel, said Cat.
The earth’s soft enough, I said. With all this rain.
It wasn’t really, not at all, but we tore at the side of the hole and tossed handful after miserable handful of dirt down onto his hunched back until we could no longer see his coat or his twisted legs or the puddle that he was already half submerged in.
It felt more like we were drowning him than burying him.
The dog joined in, as if it thought we were trying to excavate the side of the hole, not fill its bottom. It panted with exertion as it did so, and I got the strangest sensation that it was happy.
It’s playing, I said. Like it thinks it’s a game.
Cat looked up, muddy handed and out of breath.
Certainly likes digging, she said.
The sense of happiness coming off the dog was the one light thing in a very dark day. I watched it, and it turned and paused to look back at me, head cocked, one ear up, as if to ask why I was stopping.
We could maybe come back with the shovel and do more later, Cat said, stopping and looking down into the gloomy bowl of wet mud in the shadow of the ripped-out root plate, breathing hard with the effort we’d put into hiding the day’s handiwork.
Yeah, I said, feeling like all I wanted to do was sleep and forget all that had happened. Maybe tomorrow.
I think we both knew that though tomorrow would come, maybe we wouldn’t.
That “maybe” made it OK to turn and walk away.
I could say that our footsteps were easier as we did so, but that’d be a lie.
Even though we’d left him under the earth I felt no lighter as we trudged back through the rain, heading towards a home that was now not going to feel anything like familiar, not with the two girls up there waiting for us.
Cat looked down at the dog who was trotting between us, muddy, wet and somehow happy enough to tease the ghost of a smile from her drawn face.
Digger, she said. We could call it Digger—
Seems to trust us, I said.
Yeah, she said. More than they do, anyway.
I still don’t know if they ever trusted us, not fully.
I think what they had experienced before we came across each other made it impossible for them ever to trust anybody other than each other again.
I can understand that. Especially now. It’s what I felt about Cat, what I’ll always feel.
Though until we met them and the man with the gun I hadn’t had any experience of other people.
Obviously. But even if I had, she would always have been what she was – the person I would for ever trust. Cat.
My only-one, even in a crowd – if I ever saw such an unlikely thing.
And they were each other’s only-ones, even when they argued or fought.
Perhaps, looking back, especially when they fought, because they did it in a secret language of intense looks and whispered jabs that only they understood.
To begin with, they tolerated us. Maybe that was because they had no choice.
The one called Freya couldn’t walk properly, wouldn’t scarcely talk except in terse whispers to her sister, and seemed really tired all the time.
Unlike her sister, Storm, who lived up to her name by always being angry instead.
If they’d have begun to cough, we’d have moved out and gone to Plan B until the coughing took them I suppose, but the tiredness didn’t, in the end, seem to be because of a disease.
It was just how Freya was. Storm, on the other hand, seemed to fizz with pent-up energy that fuelled her fury.
In some ways that fizziness was like Cat’s itchy-twitchiness, though that only occurs to me now, looking back at us as we all were then.
At first Cat thought Freya’s tiredness might be due to some injury to her insides, or maybe because she’d eaten something bad, but in the end we found out it was both – just how she was, the tired and needy one and, in a way, the result of an injury.
That first night was uncomfortable and strange for all of us.
Once we had buried the man – sort of – all I wanted to do was sleep.
Not because I also felt tired, though deep in my bones I did, but because I hoped if I was asleep I wouldn’t have to keep endlessly churning over the day, rolling the cycle of events round and round in my head which did nothing but let them cut a deeper and deeper groove that I didn’t seem to be able to get out of.
I was pretty certain that I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep and lose myself in either blank sleep or soft, happy dreams because that spinning mind was only going to be able slow itself down by grinding against the hardest of nightmares.
This eventually turned out to be true but before that Cat and I, without talking about it, both decided that the thing to do was keep busy and try and behave normally.
Which in this case was of course futile, because normal was a million miles away from the reality of two people who have been alone for ever suddenly playing host to two other scared and injured strangers.