A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C.A. Fletcher

The world—the human part of it—had been gelded or maybe turned barren—perhaps both—and people just stopped having kids. That’s all it took. The Lastborn generation—the Baby Bust as they called themselves, proving that irony was one of the last things to perish—they just carried on getting older and older until they died like people always had done. And when they were all gone, that was it. No bang, no whimper even. More of a tired sigh.

We never found her body. And with her gone, so was my childhood, though I was eight at the time and she only a year more. Two birthdays later, by then a year older than she would ever be, I was in my mind what I now am: fully grown. Although even now, many years after that, Bar and Ferg still call me a kid. But they are six and seven years older than us. So Joy and I were always the babies. Our mother called us that to distinguish us from the other two.

Dad, for example, would turn photographs of people to the wall as he passed through derelict houses. I don’t know why he did that. He said it was to give the spirits rest, but then he doesn’t really believe in spirits, or he says he doesn’t. Bar, my sister, has the habit too, and she says it’s to stop all the dead eyes watching us. I don’t think she believes that. I think it’s just to try and scare me, because she does like jokes and teasing when she’s in a good mood.

You wanted to know what a hot country’s like? he said to Bar. I can show you. He reached into the bag again, and this time didn’t have to rummage too much. He came out with a squat glass jar of something as tawny and red as his hair. I could see it was a jelly and not another liquid, like the Akvavit, because as he tilted it the darker strips of whatever was suspended in it didn’t move. It reminded me of the single amber bead Mum has round her neck, the one with a bit of insect trapped in it. Backlit by the flames in the grate, it looked like someone had reached into the sky and taken a lump out of a setting sun and bottled it. Is it jam? said Bar. Sort of—but not, he said. It’s marmalade. Like the cat? said Bar, looking at me. Like the one in the book? Bar used to read us a picture book about a marmalade cat. It was Joy’s favourite when we were small—that and a book called D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths—and it was so loved it fell to bits and had to be held together by an old bulldog clip. I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe someone hid it so as not to be reminded of Joy. I hadn’t thought about it for years. The memory of it tugged something inside me and made my eyes sting.

Except in my dreams the village was not just full of strangers, but Bar and Ferg and Dad and even Mum was there, laughing and handing out food, and there was a small girl with a kite running round and round the fire until she saw me and dropped the kite and sprinted towards me with her arms wide open and then I woke up. At least that’s what I think I dreamed. Remembering dreams is like picking up small jellyfish—they slip through your fingers—and you never know if it’s a dream you had or if you added to the dream in the remembering. Sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re remembering a dream at all, or just a dream about remembering a dream. And if that doesn’t make sense, well, neither do dreams.

I wonder if it would be sad for you to think that the wild is well on the way to winning back the world you and your ancestors took and tamed. I can imagine it might be, especially when I see the amazing stuff you all built. I have seen things I could not have imagined, not even from the pictures I used to pore over in the old faded books back home. I have walked in the shells of buildings that I cannot believe were possible to build. I don’t know how someone could have got so much stone up into the air and left it so well made that it stayed there. And it’s not just the buildings—it’s the bridges and the tunnels. I am still awed by the power and the cleverness that went into building them, power and cleverness that must have been an everyday thing to you. But buildings are no different to trees really. Or people. Eventually they fall over and die.

Railways fill with trees faster than roadways, perhaps because the rails were laid on loose stones, instead of the hard skin of a tarmac road. What I have found is that if you try and follow a railway on an old map, you make better time walking beside it in the clearer fields than you do trying to wind your way through the undergrowth that has enthusiastically recolonised the tracks. They’re more like greenways than railways now.

You had an internet. You lived in a web that linked you with all the answers that ever were, and you carried them everywhere with you in a glass and metal rectangle that was pocket-sized but could talk to satellites. You never needed to be stupid, or not know things about everything. We’re out here on the wrong side of a dying world trying to piece together the story of what’s happened from torn fragments that we can only snatch at as they flutter past us in the wind. Like with the army tank with the doll’s head in the gun-barrel under the fallen petrol station canopy, I will never know why everything happened. Or what it meant. I will never see the big story.

I never really told you why Brand and I stopped talking, before the book was stolen by Joy, and now there is no room. That’s fine. It was maybe not such an important reason as I thought at the time. As either of us thought. I don’t know.