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dear mum, its been raining for two weeks now
breathe
Let me tell you about longing.
Slumped on an old mattress, the springs coiled up into my back like the pressing roots of dead trees, I could tell you so many stories about longing. I can smell old air, spiced with a sharp rot, the rot of wood I think, and I bury my face in the itching pillow below me. The walls are blue but the paint has turned grey and is chipping away. I can still see the scrawls of marker pen I did over summer, old quotes and doodles of cats with speech bubbles twisting from their mouths. They’re talking about rats and Hamlet and there’s a picture of me in a sailor costume from years ago taped below a broken lamp.
The whole room is decaying. The coffee cups I left behind are dusty and growing life and the floor is littered with fading photographs and letters turning yellow. There are no curtains, Charlie stripped the house bare when the snow came.
The mirror is coated in dust and the post-it notes and draped beads are muted when the sunlight hits them. I can see the note my best friend had flicked at me sell-o-taped to it, spelling out ‘stupid’ in thick blue felt-tip, from all those years ago.
She’s gone, now.
Let me tell you about forgetting and remembering.
There’s a whale in my bones, I think, it grows with each deep breath and ends up in my lungs, coated in dust and cigarette smoke. I chock in this room, its so small and everything is shedding dust, dust, dust and embers and old papers. I shiver and wrap my arms around my shoulders and clamp my jaw shut. Its so cold now winter has come and the heating has stopped. So, so cold we take to sleeping downstairs by the fire, huddled in all we could find.
Downstairs, Charlie is shuffling through the kitchen draws.
Let me tell you about the end of the world.
The sky is really blue today. The trees are stripped to their naked bones and spill like ink-blots against the world. Charlie is thumping around the sink, I can hear the walls groan and mumble as he moves, old and stooped from being left so long. Its probably unsafe, this house, but its all we’ve got.
I need a cigarette.
sigh
Where in the world do you want to go, now the world exists just for us?
I opt for my mother’s house.
The drive is long and tiring. I bite my fingernails and watch Charlie swear and carefully steer our stolen car through the dollops of wreckage left over, mangled metal and uprooted trees and, occasionally, vehicles left like beetle husks in the sun. The smoke has mostly cleared, from nights of rain when we were crouched like shivering rabbits in the tube tunnels, winding like arteries through the city.
We stop at empty shops, all the way through the Midlands, eating up gas and packet-food. Charlie grabs apples and I grab cigarettes and magazines and read them as the grey sky unfurls ahead of us. Three times I’ve read the same spin on some Hollywood actress adopting a baby from China. Six times I’ve read how to get the Beach Body. Countless times I’ve read the latest (and last) Eastenders review. It makes me sick. That the last strings of humanity dwindles down to us and some trashy magazines talking about cellulite and the pros and cons of botox.
I tell Charlie this and he smiles grimly and curves neatly around a burnt out car, the airbag full and bloated, the driver nowhere to be seen.
“The age of discontent, that’s what we are,” He says wisely. “We ain’t got a war and we ain’t got a revolution. We’re just the suspended children, Generation Ignore. We don’t mean anything by way of history.”
“We do now,” I sigh. “Now we’re Generation End.”
gasp
I met Charlie at the library, hovering about the Paranormal section like a fluffy insect, his eyes narrow and red from smoking too much pot. He was thumbing lazily through a tomb on the Bermuda Triangle, face drawn and twisted in concentration. I liked that his shirt had creases and he was wearing those chunky, silver rings you get in shops with names like Moonshine and Eco-Earth. I liked that his fingernails were stained black with ink and his hair had threads of silver paint clinging to clumps. I liked that on his belt buckle he’d attached string with a teddy key-chain that looked like it had been through a war. I liked him.
“Its supposed to be about magnetic fields, right?” I said, leaning against the book-shelf and jerking awkwardly as it rattled.
“So they say.” He smiled. “Could just be bollocks, like.”
lingering breath
My mother was the kind of woman you either hate or love completely.
She coiled her hair in neat buns and her fingers were always covered in flour or stained pink with the cold as she dug up her roots and carrots to put in the pot. As I child she told me stories, whispering things that echoed through my brain like a lost pigeon rattling about the attic. Stories of lions and tigers that talked, stories about rabbits that could jump over the earth, of little girls that sounded suspiciously like me going on long, dangerous adventures across the world.
I remember the smell of my mum. Of rhubarb pie and ice-cream, vanilla cold, of baked goods and stew and vegetables swimming in a buttery sea.
My mother, the struggling woman who would bite like a wildcat for me. The other women gossiped because there was no man in her life, just Miss Min-ah, the Korean woman across the road who used to come over every Sunday for dinner and weekend television.
She told me stories and injected the wonder of the world, left me thinking about the countries outside my own. She whispered the secrets and the knowledge and because of her I wanted. Wanted more than the nowhere town in the Midlands, average and boring and grey and listless.
inhale - exhale
“Its been eight weeks, Charlie.” I moan, burying my head into his stomach. I open my jaw just enough to catch the skin between my teeth, the slight sliver of fat folding up and if I were to apply just that much pressure I could sink clean in. I want to be closer, I think, I want to absorb his bones so we’re never apart, never alone. I let my fingers flitter to his side and curl them against his hip instead.
We don’t talk about how we seem to be endlessly attached to each other, even when we don’t need to be. Sitting on my mother’s old couch listening to old records we stole from a shop down town and I end up curled around him, knees over his, arms tucked around his waist. We’re supposed to have separate bedrooms but the one time we tried it I woke up sweating and clawing and desperate, scared he had disappeared like everyone else. I like the way our hips align when we meet in the kitchen, him holding a steaming cup of tea, eyes groggy and small. I like his smell, warm and dusty and human.
“I know.” He whispers, fingers tightening just a little against my hip.
“I’m going mad. Certifiably insane.”
“Yeah.”
I can hear him through his skin. He’s a waterway of life, veins humming like wires, blood pulsing and surging, stomach mumbling wetly. His voice resonates through his bones like moaning ships creaking with the voices of its sailors and I can feel it in the shell of my ear. My hand rolls up to his ribcage and I feel for his heart, thumping a little too fast. “You need to stop touching me like that,” He says, voice chocked.
I lift my head up just a bit and look at his face, flushed and tight, eyes black as they peer down at me.
“Oh.” I say, warm all over.
Oh, oh, oh. I roll away from him.
cry
I’m covered in dust and crying when my phone rings.
“’Lo?”
“Fuck, shit!”
Its Charlie.
“Oh. You’re alive.”
“You’re the first one to answer.” He says and it sounds like he’s been screaming.
“Everyone’s dead.”
“Stay where you are, I’ll come get you.”
“I’m on the tube. Fuck, Charlie, its dark.”
“Which one?”
I tell him and from the silence that follows I judge him to be on the other side of the city. “I’m coming, just stay put.”
sob
The train creaks and moans against the tracks.
I try to peer into the darkness but there’s nothing. Nothing. Just endless, endless black and besides me I can feel the cold of steel and, and -
“Ohshit!” I shriek, jerking wildly away. The smoothness of skin mixed with ice-white cold. Unnatural cold. Dead. Dead, everyone’s dead dead,dead,dead. There’s no light, no light at all because I’m underground stuck in a metal tube surrounded by the dead.
I’m crying, pressed against the side of the train, pressed where the window was. When the lights were on I could see the thick, dark walls covered in soot and grime and now all I can see is endless dark.
I can’t breathe, surrounded by the dead. I hate the air on the tube, thin and warm and laced heavy with dust, so that when you pull it into your lungs you never quite catch your breath. In the dark, in the warm pressing air, knowing what’s just a hand brush away, I can’t - I can’t.
The fumble for the button, emergency stop, I think, it must open, it must, it must, it must. My palm presses against hair and I sob louder, and everything is silent except for my cries and I can’t see. My heart is beating wildly, my lung compressed, tight like packaged meat against my ribs and I can feel my blood thumping like the resounding beat of footsteps and I’m alone, I’m alone, oh god, I’m all alone. “Fucking, please!” I swallow and scrabble madly at the door pressing and tugging at anything I can grasp. I start pounding on it, listening to the rattle of windows and the slow swing of the lights outside, brushed by some old, decaying breeze.
I’m alone and I can’t see.
The door slips open, I tumble into the pressing dark and -
snarl
The end of the world isn’t as bad as you’d think.
There’s no television but you can go to the local shopping centre and pick up anything you want, you’ll never run out of things to do, to read, to listen to. You can steal cars, if you like, and drive listlessly about the country, watching the trees idly hum against the sky, or look at the sea lapping gracefully at an earth now abandoned. The internet survived for about 3 hours after it happened, and Charlie tried in chatrooms and blogs to see if anyone has posted a message since after it happened.
“Its all over the world.” He says, fingers clacking listlessly against the keyboard. “Everything’s just… stopped.”
“That’s impossible,” I snap, kicking a chair and watching all the coffee cups rattle with their stale contents. We stopped by a café with internet access, saw an open laptop and ate cake before it went stale. “This is impossible.”
“Yeah,” He stands up, looks around the shop and frowns.
There’s a tinge in the air, the feeling of dread that creeps up slowly like some stalking wildcat, gripping your wrists and throat and slowly suffocating you. I can feel it run up my spine, a lingering feeling that settles in the back of my brain, waiting. “What’s bothering me is…” Charlie begins slowly, eyes dark as he glances at me. “Is, well. When I found you the… other people in the train… they were still there.”
I remember, vividly, and swallow back nausea. “Where is everyone?” His voice is slow and the jolt of fear that spurts in my guts almost winds me.
“What?”
“We know everyone’s dead. We saw it. I saw it… then, when we came back up, everyone had disappeared.”
“Stop it,” I chock, “Shut up.”
“We’ve got to think about this. We’ve got to know what’s going on.”
“I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about where my mother is, where my best friend is… I can’t.”
He looks at me and I can feel his resolve slip like hot butter, his mouth tipping into a small frown and I know he’s thinking about someone he loves too. A lover, a best friend, his mother and his father, his siblings, his boss, the girl he gets the bus with in the morning - all these people, all these wonderful, beautiful people, lost and gone and we’re the only ones left.
Us. Two fuck ups with nicotine-stained fingertips and spines curved from reading stooped over. We’re the last people in all the world and we’re nobodies.
scream
Let me tell you about emptiness.
The car slows to a stop and we’re frozen like taxidermy animals at the sight of a stooped man, shoulders hunched against us, spine arching like the doorway to hell, hands cradling his lolling head. So many thoughts flicker behind my eyes - thank fuck there’s someone else, oh god, oh god, a stranger in our wide world, we’ll have to keep him with us no matter who or what he is, fuck, fuck what if he’s a zombie, all horror films start off like this. Jesus, fuck.
“Careful.” I whisper, my hand looping down to thread my fingers over Charlie’s white-hard knuckles. “Just… careful.”
“Stay here.” He gets out of the car and creeps slowly towards the figure. He’s got his back on us, this stranger, stooped forwards like he’s crying towards the sun, begging. I watch Charlie pad softly forwards and my gut churns at the thought, the thought that if anything happens to him, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t.
If anything happened to him I’d follow him wherever he went.
When he reaches him, he skirts around him, leaving a space between them, then bends forwards and peers into the stranger’s face. He doesn’t look long, just a moment before he jerks away and turns violently to the side, opening his jaw. I know by the way his shoulders shake and his back twitches that he’s being sick and my curiosity it picked enough for me to start unbuckling my seatbelt.
Charlie’s darting back though, stumbling on fawn-legs. He gets back into the car, face ash-pale, the smell of vomit clinging to his mouth as he takes deep, steady breaths. He stares grimly forwards, puts the car back in gear and starts reversing.
I look back at the figure, arched forwards. He hasn’t moved at all.
I don’t ask about it but when we’re far enough away on a completely different road, Charlie pulls over and crawls into my arms, head on my lap, shivering. I lace my fingers through his hair and wonder what he saw.
whisper
Winter comes quite soon after we make it back to my mother’s house.
Its not like British winters normally are, but by now I am not surprised by anything. The wind arcs and twists around the house and we watch it rip the trees to shreds and batter at old fences and I’m glad, for once, that I’m not in London. I spent years of childhood longing for adventurous places like India and Africa and all of my teenage years desperate for a different, more human type of adventure. London, I had told myself, was the centre of the world. As soon as I turned eighteen I moved to the big city from the small town I grew up in and I never looked back.
Soon after it happened rain had come, putting out fires that no one had started and dimming the smoke that cloyed the air and as we were driving down the endless motorway up the country it had slathered the car until we had to pull over and sleep the rain away. I had liked the thrum of it, the steady beat of hundreds of drops falling against the window-shield as it lulled me softly.
After the wind and rain the heating stops functioning and the house turns horrifically cold. Its early November and Charlie moves all over the house, gathering blankets and pillows and anything he can find to pad the floor and throw over us as we make our camp in my mother’s room. Heat rises so we curl up in bed, limbs pressed tightly together, breathing in each other’s scent until sleep comes.
A couple days after the heating goes it begins to snow.
Thick sheets of it, up to my hips and we stare out of the window sadly, the radio Charlie found clicking and whizzing with static and empty stations. We haven't heard anything from it in, not even a whisper.
“We won’t be able to leave.” He says softly. “Its like Russia, or something.”
“We’ve got enough food to last us a couple nights.” I murmur, pressing myself against his side like a content cat, stealing his warmth. “We've got the record player. And I grabbed a bunch of books whilst you were looking for water.”
“Its not enough.” His voice is sad and I don’t understand what he means for a moment. “Is this what its going to be like forever?”
“I doubt it’ll snow forever.”
“No, I mean, is this it?” His voice is thick with warmth and fever and I lean back to look at him, flushed with anger and frustration and the sadness of a man who has seen his life on a video tape and realised it amounts to nothing. “We gonna spend the rest of our fucking lives reading every book in existence until we’re old and completely mad, living in your mother’s house in some fucking nowhere town.”
“We don’t have to.” I say calmly, pressing my fingertips to the pulse of his wrist, feeling the beats jolt like some thumping soundtrack. “We can go to the coast. Find a boat, go over to Europe. We can travel the world, just you and me, yeah?”
He shakes his head and turns away from the window.
“We don’t know what’s out there.” I crawl forwards, press my hip against his sharply so I can hear his intake of breath. My blood rises softly, fluttering through veins narrow and battered from adrenalin and I press my face into his shoulder and breathe in the smell of heat and dust and soap and all things familiar.
“Better to die exploring than waste away waiting.”
He says nothing and we go back to watching the snow fall.
hiss
And with the snow comes all my worst fears.
We slowly run out of fresh food and cabin fever runs slick and hot up my spine, so much so that I twitch and jerk and grit my teeth and tear things apart in boredom. We open the window every now and again, popping our heads out so the fresh air can coil like a whisper in the back of our throats. Its not enough. Its not enough to sooth restless bones and stop fingers fluttering against every surface and its not enough to ease addled minds.
We’re the last two people on earth, we’ve a whole world to ourselves and I’m so bored.
“We’ve got soup left,” Charlie says, voice cracking. He has been hit worse with the self-imprisonment in my mother’s home, I can tell. Charlie, Charlie, he who knows the streets of London like he knows the path of his ribs. He who lived on top of a dry cleaners so his house smelt like industrial soap and memories imprinted in fabric. Poor Charlie, stuck in some crooked house in the middle of nowhere town with only me for company.
“I feel like I haven’t eaten anything solid in months.” I snap, irritated already by his pitiful face. Poor fucking Charlie, well, poor fucking us. Last two people on earth and trapped in a house, so close we’re touching all the time, all the time, but nothing ever comes of it except cabin fever and itchy bones. Drives me mad.
“Well, what do you want me to do then?” I can hear the inflection in his voice, the gentle rise that sends a thrill though my guts. He’s getting angry too. Charlie angry is quite different from me. Whereas I’m all hisses and snarls he’s gentle, softly treads you into the unknown, with a low voice that gradually gets higher and higher and leaves you feeling lost and stupid.
“Go get some food.” I challenge, grinning just a little.
“Fuck you,” He sighs, standing up and shrugging on his coat. I bumble about getting his scarf and gloves and hat and there’s a flicker of worry inside me but I put it out with frustration. “What do you want?”
“Surprise me.” I watch him leave and there’s that jolt again - the sickening feeling that something is desperately, horrifically wrong. I’ve had it since this started, this whole thing, because the world has gone wrong and I’m not a scientist, I’m not a world leader, I’m just a girl and I have no idea how to make things right again.
hitch
I remember the last time I had sex.
It was with some man I met in the pub, long and lithe with an air of subtle mystery about him. I liked that he ordered a Black Russian instead of a beer and I liked the way his fingers felt against the crook of my elbow as he leaned in closer to whisper in my ear, breath hot and damaged. He wasn’t my usual type, I suppose, he was funny and kind and didn’t have the natural disdain for the world like that of broken artists and musicians. He liked science, he said, smile bright and teetering on his lips, he was studying physics and loving it.
I took him home and we had sex on my living room sofa, his tapering fingers hot and coiled against my hip. After, we watched old episodes of Monty Python, laughing until our bellies hitched and dipped wildly and fell asleep naked with the curtains open. In the morning I made tea and he made breakfast and it was nice. Very nice. I know that if the end of the world didn’t happen then I would’ve taken it further. We’d have made a relationship, it wouldn’t have worked because he would be awkward with my friends, friends like Charlie, and I would hate going along to museum lectures with him. But it would’ve been good, for a while, to enjoy each other’s company and bodies and have a new warmth in my home.
I wonder about him. Wonder if he disappeared, wonder what would’ve happened if he had survived. If he’d survived and found me instead of Charlie. He’d know what had happened, he’d know how to set things right. He’d sit on the living room floor, covers all around us, and pour over papers and equations until he understood.
Charlie hates Monty Python.
I wonder, if things had been different, would this be more bearable?
No, I think, I can’t imagine a life without Charlie anymore. It hurts.
mewl
He’s been gone for two hours.
The snow hasn’t lessened, just as deep as ever, fluffy and cold and if it wasn’t as high as it is I’d go out and make snowmen and throw snowballs at my neighbour’s window, like I did as a little girl. Instead, I’m sat on the couch, wrapped in layers and layers of blankets, cup of tea between my aching fingers, staring harshly out of the window, waiting for him to come back.
Might just be stretching his legs, I reason, might just be catching up on being by himself.
Charlie isn’t like me. He needs space and I need warmth and I cling and, bless his heart for putting up with it, gritting his teeth when he’s annoyed but putting an arm around me anyway. Bless his fucking heart for knowing just how much it means to me, to feel his warmth and skin, to know that there is someone other than me on this lonely crust of land. I chock back a desperate sort of want, deeper than any hunger I’ve felt, the need to have him here with me now.
Can’t take this loneliness.
Maybe he can’t take me anymore, maybe he’s gone for adventure without the clingy girl with too many memories in the house of dead mothers to let it go.
If he’s gone, I tell myself, if he’s gone I’ll die. I’ll waste, I’ll decay and rot until I’m gone forever too. Alone on this huge planet is the worst kind of hell.
Maybe he’s dead.
I hurry putting my coat on and forget my gloves and scarf and make it only a moment trying to skip through the path Charlie carved out in the snow before I have to go back for them, shivering and desperately cold. A cold you could never imagine, only in the deepest, loneliest places in the world. Not so much Russia anymore as Alaska. It can’t be that cold, I tell myself, pressing my head down and diving forwards into blinding-white blankets, if it were that cold we’d be dead.
The town is unrecognisable.
It glitters, a wonderland you imagine as a child, a wonderland you long for as an adult, something to hide the filth and grime of human existence. The abandoned houses stand like terracotta guards, empty on the inside and slowly falling away, chip by chip, useless without their people-guts. The street is a river of cold, one small, thin artery flowing down towards the shop where Charlie must have battled his way through. The sky is so grey, endless grey, something you could fall into if you raised your arms and let go of the earth. I look up, hat jammed over my head, into the expanse of nothingness I will never get to experience, trapped forever on this forgotten world.
The shop would be a five minute walk if it weren’t for the snow and I can remember the women that worked there so clearly it aches. Brown, aging hair with crow-feet wrinkles as they smiled and chatted. They remembered me as a child, sticky with sweets and bright-eyed, they remembered me when I once tried to steal a lollipop and felt so guilty after I had to return it along with the 10p it cost. They remembered me as a teenager, awkward and chubby and unsure of the world, tentatively peering at the rows of alcohol bottles and wondering what it would be like to, just once, be a normal teenage girl. They remembered me when I returned home for the holidays, barely grown, puppy fat lost to walking the streets of London, clothes new and odd, with a quirk to my lips they had never seen before.
Those women had children. Grandchildren.
I make it to the shop, eventually, shivering, the snow sinking through my trousers, wetting my thighs and rubbing in that horrible, raw way. The door is wide open and snow litters the floor and some of the shelves have been knocked to the floor. A growing dread settles in the pit of my stomach and I peer around corners, half expecting to see Charlie, blood splattered and empty-eyed, with some great, lumbering monster crouching over him and chewing grotesquely on his flesh.
There’s nothing, though.
I step over cans of mushy peas and rotten lumps of fruit and bread, kicking them away. Half of me wants to be sick, at the thought that if those wonderful old ladies, in their polyester-aprons and their tender smiles, could see their faithful old shop now, ruined. The were there through the hard times, when money was short, and they slipped extra slices of bacon in free of charge when they could see my mum counting out the pennies from her battered looking purse. When the supermarket opened down the road, where the old council stood, lazily dragging away old customers with their bargain prices and easy-to-reach amenities, they still stood and they still chattered happily - how’s school, how’s your mam, got a boyfriend yet and oh, did you see them storms last night, weren’t they awful?
I find him curled up in the back room, breath coming out in haggard gasps of mist, eyes squeezed shut, shivering. His fingers are clutching something, something I can’t see because its pressed so tight to his chest he’s almost absorbing it, taking it into his blood and dissolving it into the marrow of his bones. I watch him for a moment, frozen, the sound of my heart thumping so loudly it feels like the world has ended all over again.
He’s crying.
“Charlie.” I murmur, kneeling next to him. There’s a pile of food next to him, packaged biscuits - my breath hitches - my favourite, tinned pineapple and peaches, sweets, bottles of alcohol, pasta and noodles you can make with hot water, cigarettes and, oh, party food. Cheer up food. My heart breaks. “Charlie,” I sob, pressing my face to his neck - its so cold, so cold - and breathing harshly against him, pressing small-fire kisses all over his face, taking tears away with me. “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.”
He’s holding a newspaper, from the last day, the last day of everything. Its only a local one, the paper for nowhere town, but he’s clutching it so hard, like its his life-blood. I chock back sobs and kiss his hands and press them, cold, to my face. My poor Charlie.
We lie together on the floor, letting the cold creep idle fingers across our ribs and spine, frosting our skin and our tears. We lie forever, it seems, holding onto our pasts because we’ve got no future, just an endless stretch of forever. Its too hard to let go, I think, and I’m not a scientist, I’m not important, just a person. I don’t know how to make things right again.
echo
- and fall against nothing.
Fall to sharp ground, cold ground, swallowed up by a darkness that you couldn’t imagine. This must be death, I think wildly, crawling blindly across harsh gravel and metal, cutting up my hands. I must be dead, like the others, and this is the abyss that you don’t dare to think about, the void you hang suspended in forever. Except I can feel the floor, feel hot blood smear over my palms and knees, so this can’t be death, because death is nothing.
How do I know? I don’t know about death, I don’t know about anything, I’m just, just -
I curl into a ball, just outside the train, and think about my mother.
I want her here, I think, I want her to be the one who finds me in the deep, dark underbelly of this huge city. Want her warm hands to press against my cheeks and say, hey honey, oh darling, my poor sweetie, stand up lets get you home, lets get you warm, lets clean up those awful scratches and make you a nice cup of tea.
I sob into the gravel, don’t know how long I’m there, curled tight and shivering, waiting for my mum to come get me. Big strong girl, I am, left home at eighteen intent to thrill and seek out adventure, yet at the first sniff of danger I’m curled in a ball and sobbing and wishing for mama. Pathetic, I think hysterically, pathetic and weak and empty and so, so fucking human.
I sleep, maybe, because you can hardly call forcing yourself into unconsciousness to chase away the dark and emptiness sleep.
When I wake up, there’s a light brighter than the heavens, small and pin-point on my face, blinding me, and I recoil into myself and squeeze the burn from my retinas. There are hands on my cheeks, wiping away blood and grime and tears and I feel myself being lifted and carried, my arms wrapped around a neck, my face buried in a neck.
The next time I wake Charlie has me between his knees, my head resting on his chest, his hands pressed against my belly. I cough and splutter and everything burns and aches and the light is so bright I can hardly see.
We’re in an underground station, a platform without people. I can hear the steady trundle of the escalators behind us, rising steadily towards the world and dropping back into the gloom. Charlie’s eyes, dark and wonderful, stare down at me, crinkled in worry, red from pot or crying, I don’t know.
I’ve never been so fucking happy to see someone in my life.
voice
When we get home the snow has almost stopped and slush sinks through my trainers. Should of stolen boots, I think bitterly, remembering how gleefully I had gone into the shop and taken every type of wonderful thing I could. Took dresses and heels, make-up and jackets that were so expensive I wouldn’t have looked twice normally. Took things that didn’t really matter anymore, like handbags and sexy underwear and tights and cute little pots of nail varnish. It was greed that spurned me on, a creature I kept locked inside me because if I let it out my hard earned wages spent on rent and food would’ve been blown out of the water for things that I didn’t need, but wanted so badly.
It doesn’t matter, I had thought, who cares anymore? No one is missing out.
Still, I gorged on greed and I consumed like a python, slumped in the jungle and slowly digesting a creature far too big, so big I had to unhook my jaw to get it inside.
I remember Charlie’s face, watching me behind guarded eyes, small confused smile wrapped over his lips. He didn’t have a clue about this desperate, sudden madness that struck. He just took a jacket, nicely fitting and warm, and a few extra boxer shorts and socks. He didn’t understand the greed.
I take him, shivering wildly, into the living room and get every blanket I can find to wrap around him. I had grabbed the food on the way out of the shop, in a battered old environmentally-safe bag that the women had started stocking up on, just to counter the consumer-friendly folk at the supermarket. I open the tins of fruit and press them to his lips so he has to open his mouth, childlike and empty-eyed, until they disappear. He chews on them, slowly, blinking dimly as if he doesn’t know where he is.
I feed him a whole tin of pineapple then strip him of his wet clothes and start the fire going. In the kitchen I fill the kettle ready for heating. We use the kettle for everything now, heating the water for baths, cups of tea, filling old hot water bottles to slip between our limbs when the cold gets particularly vicious. It takes forever to heat water, but it is worth it in the end.
Once the water boils I make him tea and press it into his shaking hands before crawling behind him to wrap myself up so tight against him that our bones seem to slot together like a jigsaw puzzle.
“Charlie.” I mumble, pressing my lips at the top of his spine. His skin is warm and soft, tasting of air and cold and dust. “Oh, Charlie.”
He mumbles and sips at his tea and stares into the fire like its telling a story. For once we don’t have the record player on, don‘t have familiar voices and background noise to ease the hurt and loneliness. It is hard to imagine how people survived without the quicker-than-thought process of human living. The snap-your-fingers-and-it-comes consumer lifestyle we crafted and shaped to fit the holes of our life. Without it we’re just people again, not these giants of the world, stronger even than any god. Now things take time and care and there's nothing to distract you from life.
“Is this forever?” He croaks, fingers sliding to my palm, slowly stroking. I relish the warmth of him, the touch and shiver that only another human can provide.
“Can be,” I say slowly, thinking of all we’ve been through.
We’ve been through the end of the world together, we’ve seen the edge of all existence and we’ve watched it disappear, together. I can understand his need to run, to move on, because here he has no memories, not like me. All he has is the vivid reminder of how much time he has as a human being, how easily it can all slip away without having experienced anything at all. I can understand this desperation, this need to validate who he is.“It doesn’t matter where we go, really.”
We’re nobodies, Charlie and I. Two fuck-ups from different ends of the country, thrown together by circumstance and chance. We met, we became friends, then we became the last two people on earth, it seems. I’m glad its him, I think, I’m glad it is Charlie and not the man from the pub, the last man I slept with, or my best friend, or the women from the shop. Even mum, my blessed mother who took care of me for eighteen years. I miss her, and so many others, so much, but I can’t imagine this ending without Charlie wrapped up with me.
He doesn’t say anything but the tension eases from his shoulders.
laugh
My fingers are roots now, settled deep in moist soil. They are green instead of nicotine-yellow (we both gave up cigarettes when the we smoked through the last of our favourites and were left with the disgusting brands that scorched like hot tar) and the dirt cakes the thin lines of my palms as I pull out carrots and parsnips and rhubarb.
Our house is crooked and the sun glitters wildly, a lion in the sky, against the roof. Inside I can hear music, loud and echoing, something from the eighties. I smile widely down at my garden, a coiled spring of plant-life and food. It looks something professional now, I think gleefully, looks like something my mother would’ve made. A couple weeks after the world started to thaw and we could see glimpses of ground again I found packets of seeds in the kitchen and decided to start planning for the future. I’m not a doctor, but even I know that living out of tins and packets isn’t good for you. I dusted down mum’s old cookbooks and set to work making meals we could actually taste.
I’m not a scientist, I don’t know how to make things right. I don’t know what happened, all that time ago. Charlie suspects its something to do with gravitational pulls, maybe, and when we’re in flippant, ignorant moods we joke and whisper about it being aliens, happy purple aliens, who took everyone to a new, cleaner world, and left us behind because Charlie was high in his bedroom listening to David Bowie and I was daydreaming on the tube.
We are not happy. Sometimes he wanders off and I stay up fretting, wringing my hands against my stomach, aching and shivering and wanting to rip the arteries from my body just to do something with my fingers. I think too much about before, before everything happened. Mostly I think about my mother, my best friend, my old friends and their charming smiles and vicious conversations. I think about Miss Min-ah and her pursed mouth and kind eyes and I think about the old man who used to take me fishing when I was small. He’d tell me all about the fish I caught in my little pink net that my mum had bought for me from the local garden centre and I would hold them in my hands and feel their slippery bodies jerk and writhe as their mouths gasp for air. I remember asking him why they did that and he looked down at the little fish and said he’s dying and I chucked it back, horrified.
We are not happy. Of course we aren’t, but we’re making do with what we have. Which is each other and this old house that sings with the memories of my mother and my childhood.
I sigh and look up at the sky. Its so blue today, so blue and the trees seem to hold it suspended above my head, their leafy fingers grasping at smooth-as-silk corners and holding it like a flag. I hear the door open behind me and Charlie shuffles out, eyes watery and sleepy, nose running with hay fever. I laugh.
“Shut up.” He barks, but there’s no bite there. “I got the heating thing working again. You can have your bath whenever you like.” He rubs his nose and peers thinly at the sky.
“Thanks.”
There’s a content silence. Its been almost a year since it happened and I’m finally alright with the space between us. I don’t need to cling, desperate and needy, anymore. The warmth of the sun keeps me happy and just his presence is enough now to remind me that I am not alone on this abandoned planet.
We long, still, we long and need and shake with frustration and cabin-fever all the time but it isn’t that bad.
This isn’t forever, I’ve decided. I haven’t told Charlie yet, but I think its time to move on. Memories are only as solid as you make them and the smell of my mother has started to fade, replaced by the smell of Charlie’s skin.
We’re nobodies, in nowhere town, the last two people on earth, we’re no scientists, we don’t know how to make things right again. We have to be content to move on, to go forwards and survive as nature intended. I catch Charlie’s hand and sigh and listen to the beat of my heart and the gentle swirl of wind as it presses the trees between its fingers. I could tell you stories about longing, about the end of the world, about forgetting and remembering and the dark that swallows you up during grief, but I can’t.
Busy, busy, busy, I’ve got dinner to prep and a bath to take and a book to read and a whole attic to clean. Life moves on, slowly yes, but forwards always.
END.
a.n
oh wow, i wrote this a couple of months ago when i was getting really jittery about running off again. so i wrote this and went crazy and got drunk. Life, kids! I'm moving for uni soon so it should be ok for a while :) i was gonna post this then, but it is just so completely flawed with technical stuff that i didn't bother. its basically a massive cop-out of science. just pretend its like an ep of doctor who where they don't really bother explaining everything. it'll probably annoy the shit out of those of you who know about science and end-of-the-world stuff but you know. i don't have a clue :)
IFLU GUYS.
