Chapter 40
Strangers from the sea
I didn’t think it would end that way.
It wasn’t that I had never believed Cat’s stories about how we came to be so alone in the world, it was more that I always hoped her imaginary fears were bigger than the real threat, in the way that small things throw huge shadows if the sun is low in the sky behind them.
Maybe I thought it would end differently because I mistrusted myself, because I secretly knew there was a kind of weakness in hoping that actual life would be closer to the books I liked, the ones where despite everything seeming hopeless and beyond help, there was always a happy ending that you couldn’t see coming because it only made sense when you got to it.
Cat was made of tougher stuff than me, I think.
So I was not prepared, however well I thought I had done by getting us all to Glasgow and the library in one piece.
The horse was happy enough in the park that was now its paddock, and the goats went where they wanted, something that didn’t worry me now they wore their bells again, and because I had Digger and she was good at hunting them out if they wandered too far into the burned-out end of the city.
They perversely had a preference for the charred chaos of fallen facades and weed-choked rubble piles to the east of the M-way, rather than the more intact western end that stretched away behind the library, but with their bells and hobbles they never roamed so deeply into the scorched maze of ruins that we couldn’t find them, however hard Devil tried to lead them astray.
Getting over the journey was stretching into a long enough time that the decision about go north or stay was beginning to look like it would answer itself through a kind of inertia I suppose.
I’d even begun to explore empty houses when they looked safe, and Cat didn’t scold me for it too much.
I don’t know exactly how long we’d been there, but it was long enough for both the sense of a season turning to have crept up on us, and for me to have decided on a provisional Five Things I liked about a city.
In fact, I was telling Cat and the babies about it as we walked through it on the day it happened.
I told them that I like imagining what it must have sounded like when we stand in the middle of what was once a tarmac road but is now a long strip of grasses and brambles and small trees stretching away between canyons of tall buildings pressing in on each side.
I imagine all the people in those buildings, all their talking at once, all their feet tapping past on paving stones now deadened with moss and leaf-mould.
I don’t know what cars and buses sounded like, but I bet they were noisy.
It must have sounded harsh and busy all the time.
Now it’s quieter than the open country somehow.
As if the buildings deaden sound, swallowing it maybe.
I like watching birds flying in and out of the holes that used to be glassed-in windows.
Sometimes they’ve been burned-out, sometimes the glass has just fallen out, or broken.
But all these cliff faces of buildings that once used to be glazed and shut up against the weather have lost that fight.
And now birds fly out of the light and disappear into the shadows within, just treating the abandoned inner spaces like caverns they can nest in.
Gutted houses with fallen roofs are slowly becoming landscape again, and the birds are inhabiting them and filling that new landscape with life.
They don’t worry about what those empty shells sounded like when they weren’t empty.
I like the writing on the buildings where you can still see some of them, faded, rusted, peeling but still readable, the names of the shops written big, but also the little labels on the doorways of the stone houses behind the museum, the ones with all the names on them.
Some are carved in brass. It’s a bit like the names in a graveyard, but there aren’t dead bodies behind those doors.
Not many anyway, and those remains that I have found are more like clues that there once were bodies there, now rotted away to something quite clean and natural, just dry bones and hair and scraps of clothing, all meat and skin long gone. No rotting to smell any more.
I like exploring different neighbourhoods and imagining why they are different, what it says about who lived there and why.
In some streets the big houses are divided into lots of little homes, like a rabbit warren, each with its own front door inside the house.
whereas others are all one house. Obviously where the richer people lived.
What was that like, having different levels of humans?
Did the rich ones feel guilty for having all the space, or did the poorer ones not mind that they lived all crammed together?
Maybe they liked being closer to other people.
Maybe the rich ones got lonely in their big spaces.
I like the foxes and the squirrels. The foxes seem really happy to have taken over ownership of the city from mankind.
I see more of them here than I’ve seen in the open country.
They share ownership of these empty buildings with the birds.
They also seem quite calm about us as we walk by, Digger and I.
There’s no sense of threat to them, not like their bigger cousins, the wolves.
Instead, there’s a kind of interest: They watch alertly, taking on everything we do, missing nothing, just in case they have to run.
They also have an extra redness to them at sunset, just like the trunk of the old Scots pine at the airfield we used to live on. The same thing goes for the squirrels.
Until I came north, all the squirrels I’d ever seen were pale and dirty brownish-grey.
Here they are smaller than the grey ones and redder than the foxes.
The trees in the park beyond the library are full of them.
I enjoy sitting still and quiet and watching for them.
They’re smaller than the greys, but just as lithe and acrobatic.
One evening I was sitting in the park with the babies sleeping in my lap, my face to the sky as I tried to get the last bit of warmth from the setting sun.
Digger was away hunting something in the street behind the buildings beside me, and I became aware I was being watched.
I slid my eyes to my left and there were three foxes stretched out on a first-floor balcony to my right, also sunbathing.
They looked back at me, calmly alert, the white fur on their cheeks and inside their ears in stark contrast to the red of their fur.
And then another streak of red fur flew between us as a squirrel raced past along an ivy swagged phone line and we all turned to watch the squirrel, and then when it leaped from the tilted telegraph pole to the seemingly too-distant tree beyond and landed squarely on it before disappearing round the trunk, we turned back and caught each other’s eyes, the foxes and I, and it was as if we shared a thought and nodded, admiring the speed and athleticism of the squirrel.
Then we went back to sunbathing. I think that moment of connection could only have happened in a city, where the foxes just seemed less on edge than the ones I was used to.
I was telling Cat all this as we pushed south down one of the roads that fed on to the bridge.
I had taken the big red handcart and now used it to bring everyone along on my foraging walks through the city.
I kick myself for it now, but I’d got used to the squeak of the right-hand wheel as we went along, and though I’d meant to take it apart and fix whatever was making the noise before it wore the axle out, I somehow never had it high enough on my list of priorities at the end of the day to have the energy to actually do it.
It seemed unimportant. Not something as critical as it turned out to be.
Anyway, I was still trying to decide if we should stay in the library through the coming winter, or if we should head north with our new maps and try and find the right place on the mainland to light my signal fire and try to get the attention of Bear Shirt and friends on the island.
If they were there. I think I’d told myself that if we stayed, I’d definitely fix the wheel, and if we went, it’d be a waste of effort.
Excuses trip you up just as much as unseen obstacles.
Cat didn’t seem to have her Five Things about a city figured out enough to share them, so the game fizzled out and talk turned to the big decision we had to make as we walked on over the river, the babies awake but quiet in the cart that squeaked along in front of us as we went.
Cat never liked me crossing that broad stretch of water on the wide road bridge.
I think it was because the breadth of it meant it was too close to opening out into the sea, but I liked coming here at sunset and looking downriver, watching the sky change from simple daylight to all the complicated colours of dusk.
This far north there seemed to be more reds and oranges and purples and mauves in the sunsets, but maybe it’s just something that happens close to the sea.
Anyway, I liked watching them over the darkening silhouette of the great arc that soared across the next bridge along, like a giant’s bow braced from bank to bank.
Maybe I made too much about the library, I said. Maybe I was wrong thinking it was a place they would go. Or a place that others, like the one they talked about, would come to. It’s certainly not somewhere they stayed for long even if they did come by, is it?
Perhaps, Cat said. Perhaps not.