Chapter 39
No more love songs, no more happy endings
The Girl is out of time. Not in the sense that her span on earth has run out, at least not quite yet, but in that she doesn’t feel a part of normal time any more.
She doesn’t mark the hours or care too much for the contrast between day and night.
She will often spend whole sunlit days cloistered inside her shuttered room, sometimes reading, sometimes listening to the record player or the increasingly crackly radio or just staring at nothing and listening to the bearing slowly wearing out on the wind turbine outside, but almost never sketching any more.
Much too often the daylight hours are spent just drifting through shallow scrapes of sleep, and then she mechanically works off the faint guilt of inactivity by walking the seashore at night, dead to even the silvered charm of the moonlight on the water.
Increasingly affectless, she drifts untethered through days she scarcely notices passing, samey days that grow into formless weeks that metastasise into months.
Living unmoored from time like this, she has become both almost feral in her habits, and uncomfortably numb.
That discomfort at her own insensibility to the world is in fact perhaps the last strand in the fraying hawser keeping her tethered to her better self: Somewhere inside it is her old voice telling her this is no way to be, that she should not only care but also be ashamed for breaking under the pressure and listening to the other siren voices that come from the darker recesses of her mind, the ones that tell her nothing matters because no one has or will ever now come.
There are moments when the jolt of that hawser holding against the grim tides that pull at her is enough to make her snap back into herself and she rallies and tries to get a grip.
She goes and harvests food from her adopted vegetable patches, indulging in periods of manic activity like storing bags and boxes and buckets of unwashed potatoes in the dark kitchen larder, unconcerned with the soil that she scatters into the house with them, or the fact the larder and the kitchen now smell earthy as a new dug grave.
She gathers peat from other crofters’ peat stacks in what was once a sacrilegious and forbidden act and even, on the best days, fishes off the old pierhead or goes crabbing along the ferry ramp by the causeway.
These manic bursts of her normal resolution become less and less frequent as the erosion of her remaining hope re-establishes the inexorable pull of those inner voices still selling her the bleak merits of oblivion.
The long darknesses of the last winter almost take her down before the spring comes.
She now lives largely on potatoes and, very occasionally, fish.
She runs out of the last of her sauerkraut several weeks after the turn of a year she has not really noted and fleetingly wonders about how to keep her vitamin C intake going, until she loses the energy to think about it and forgets.
Instead, she becomes more and more worried about strangers moving around the outside of the house at night.
She nails extra wood across the shutters in the billiard room and sleeps with the shotgun close at hand.
More and more she finds herself talking to herself.
This worries her to start with, and then it becomes so familiar that it doesn’t any more.
Then she begins to lose track of the conversations, and that worries her at a deeper level.
The old inner voice tells her to hold on.
These endless nights will shorten, the heat return, the storms will pass.
They don’t, and by the time spring does blow in she not only feels out of time, she feels out of humanity.
Fate has scraped and purged her of almost everything that tells her who and what she is.
She feels like the island itself, buffeted and scoured by wind and weather that is unrelenting and comes from somewhere so out of her control that she no longer has or cares to have any defence against it.
The old hawser voice tells her not to go mad.
The darker voices snigger and tell her that that particular boat has sailed – unlike the hoped-for one bringing him home across the troubled seas to redeem his promise and ensure that whatever else is happening to the world, they at least will save each other. That’s not going to happen,
She hates herself for listening to the radio, which is chronicling the stories of a world fast beginning to collapse in on itself with what she begins to feel is an increasingly macabre glee.
Each news item seems to provide more irrefutable reasons as to why he has not and will not now come, given how widespread the disruption to the world is getting.
The eventual terminal ruptures had been predicted, but they seem to be happening earlier and in unimagined ways, as unforeseen consequences tumble domino-like into cascading runs of cause-and-effect that themselves branch and daisy-chain into ever more unexpected results.
It all highlights the folly of ever believing that a technically highly interconnected but mutually competitive world was also a resilient one.
Whatever the tech-bros tried to tell the world in the past as they fought to own the commanding heights of the digital realm and the societal control that came with them, there are no effective firewalls to the spread of entropy. Only accelerant.
Ends come sooner than you think, said the dark voices. See?
She wakes one cold morning to find the fire out and the radio smashed against the shutters.
She doesn’t remember throwing it. But she did.
The paint on the shutters directly above the scattered shards of wrecked electronics is chipped from the strength of the impact.
All the evidence is there: She threw it, and she threw it with intent.
That scares her more than anything thus far.
Then the record player breaks of its own accord a week or so later.
One minute she’s sitting listlessly feeding her melancholy with a soaring arrangement of Annie Lennox resigning herself to the fact there are no more I love yous, the next minute the turntable just dies and her pure voice gravels down into a slow bass drawl and then slurs to a stop, as if the machine has suffered a stroke.
It feels like the universe is punishing her for assaulting the radio, and now not only are there no more I love yous, but there is no more music at all to accompany her through the day.
“No more love songs,” she says to herself as she unplugs the turntable. “And no more happy endings.”
It shouldn’t matter as much as it does, but both the silence and the sounds of the natural world become unbearable to her. And when the hawser does part, and she loses the lifeline that finally sets her fully adrift and unmoored, it doesn’t happen with a jolt or an insurmountable surge of darkness.
It comes gentle with the sun.
She’s been feverish and fractious for a week. She has scarcely left the shelter she’s built for herself beneath the billiard table other than to shamble lifelessly to the lavatory and back, sometimes remembering to drink water to stay hydrated and help with the headache, but usually not.
She can’t remember when or what she last ate when she opens her eyes and sees a narrow slash of sun lancing in from the window.
She lies there and watches the dust motes slowly dancing in the golden ray of light.
They seem so beautiful and calm that she remains transfixed by them for an hour or so, rolling out from under the table to track the sunbeam’s progress across the carpet as it moves across the sky outside.
Eventually the thought occurs that if the sun can come in, her light must have been visible outside when its dark.
She gets up and examines the telltale chink in the shutter.
It’s right where she threw the radio, a small chip that split the thin wood panel beneath.
She doesn’t rush to nail another piece of wood over it. She’s enough herself to be surprised at this, and interested to find she doesn’t care.
Instead, she goes into the kitchen and makes herself a bowl of hot porridge with the last of her carefully gleaned and processed oatmeal.
She sits watching the birds beyond the kitchen window as they go about their business on a morning as bright and clear as any she has ever seen, the spring sunlight as joyous as a trumpet blast, the sky high and so heartbreakingly blue that she knows it would take her breath away if she allowed herself to dwell on it.
She washes the bowl and the spoon and puts them carefully away.
Somehow this action allows herself to see the neglected mess and disarray of the whole kitchen.
She opens the windows and the doors and sets about cleaning.
An hour later she is done in the kitchen and is now in the billiard room with a hammer, prising the loose the boards she nailed over the shutters to reinforce them.
She pulls them open and lets the sun in to witness the carelessness and chaos she has reduced herself to living in.