‘Poor Mary,’ she’d say, her eyes full of everything. ‘They all make fun of her. But she’s still a person. I wish I could tell her.’
‘Don’t be a feather,’ I would say. ‘She probably went off with her big old brain and cured cancer and laughed all the way to Baby Dior, where she bought a zillion-dollar cape for the little girl she had with a handsome professor.’
‘She’d never have believed a professor could love her,’ Winter insisted. ‘I know.’
Pops started working all day and all night and we were alone most of the time, left to wander and Self-Educate. All the normal things in life fell away like those big old rocks, the Twelve Apostles, which crumple into the sea one by one at random moments—suddenly there and then not. I wonder if any more of them have done that lately, because of course I wouldn’t know. We didn’t have the internet (don’t get me started) and we couldn’t duck out to get a newspaper on account of there being no newspapers by then. No shops, no buildings, no civilisation—just us in that big old church.
Autumn came, and then winter, and then the apple trees were smug with fruit, and it was summer again. Gradually the days just seemed to smudge into each other, because it’s not like Pops took weekends off from his homemade laboratory, which was really just the part up above the church at the back where the choir would have sung—I don’t know the exact word for it and Winter isn’t here to ask, and I want to say vestibule but I know it’s wrong.
Even though it was all kinds of crumbly, Bartleby was so beautiful that some days, with the sky peeking in and the ivy vines climbing up the inside walls, my throat would close up. I haven’t even got to the stained-glass windows or the baby grand piano with the honeysuckle growing out the top or the cool moat around the edge that somehow always left our hair soft after swimming in it. The church was so big that even though Winter and I were basically jocks, we couldn’t have thrown a football from the back to the altar, and the roof was so high that, at the start, it felt like someone was sitting up there in the rafters, watching us mooch around and reading the thoughts floating up from my skull. And, sure, we’d been in churches before, but at first camping there seemed kind of wrong and, like, unholy, if you get what I mean? Eventually, though, I made my peace with whoever might have been peeping down at me, and once we strung up some golden fairy lights and hooked them to the generator and made little nooks for sleeping and reading and a sort of ping-pong table, and we figured out how to fly a kite out through the (very large) hole in the roof, it felt cosy, like one of those self-sufficient caravans that the Famous Five used to get around in on their summer hols. From up in the bell tower, with its four stone arches, you could look out in every direction, like you were in the crow’s nest of a tall ship.
When the ninjas came and ransacked that church—turned over every tin, ran up and down the bell tower, flicked through each page of my mother’s books till they were satisfied there was nothing to steal but our dad—Winter wanted to go with them. Of course she did. Winter would walk into a fire for anyone, and, boy, she’s lucky it was just us, that we didn’t have some evil older brother who liked pulling legs off insects, because her whole daisy-picking-earth-child thing would have got her completely pummelled. It was bad enough to see her climb out of the piano that day in her lemon-and-white-striped dress, no shoes, and hold out her hands, twisted politely together so they could snap the cuffs straight onto them and Pops wouldn’t have to leave alone.
Weird thing was, they didn’t want her, those guys, so I’ve never felt too bad that I didn’t come out from where I was hiding under the ivy, all gallant and feisty, to hold her back. I just stayed where I was, my feet tucked up, hanging from strands that were as thick as old sailing ropes, and watched them wave her away, barely looking at her, even though she was beautiful. I know that’s a big-headed thing to say given that we’re identical, split from the same zygote and all, right? And get this: there wasn’t a freckle or a birthmark or a knobbled bone or a narrow, forceps-squished face that set us apart—physically, at least. Nothing except for the wisp of a scar on the bridge of her nose, which I secretly wished I had too. We used to push our palms and the soles of our feet together just to see, and even the white specks in our nails grew out at identical rates, and our eyelashes fell out on the same days, and you’re thinking, As if, and believe me, I KNOW. It wasn’t normal, whatever that is. And that’s not even the weirdest part of this story, which takes a lot of twists, let me tell you.
But, yes, even with her home haircut, Winter was time-stoppingly beautiful, and maybe never more than when they led Pops out through the big arch that must once have been home to a huge church door, and she was just standing there, her wrists still twined together, her head tilted to the side like a dog’s when it hears a strange noise. I knew we would never see him again; he would die with his secrets sealed up in his mind—except the ones he’d left with us.
I could say that I’d never loved Winter more than at that moment, too, but that would be another lie because the day I loved her most was the last day I ever saw her. The day we came down from the top of Our Mountain. And I guess this is the story of how we got up there, and why, when all I wanted after Pops left was for everything to stand still. For it just to be us forever and always, with Winter safe and close enough to loop my thoughts around her like a lasso made of light.
And this probably isn’t a Spoiler Alert but, FYI, everything changes, and by everything, I guess I mean everyone, and by everyone, well, I guess you get who I mean, and maybe that’s why only one of us really survived.
Winter
He arrived late in our second spring on the island. By then we were alone. He walked out of the forest, and slowly.
He never said where he came from. I didn’t ask. I think I knew.
He was a boy, mostly.
He was wild, but not wolf-wild or fox-wild.
I made him a nook. I fetched water in a cup.
His hair stuck up. His skin glowed brown. He was shaking. He was tall. He needed something. Maybe me.
Summer
You might be trying to figure out what we ate on that island, or perhaps you’re just thinking that it was soylent, which was that liquid food/sludge that most of the world was surviving on by then, but you’d be wrong and here’s why. Out the back of the church was a hall so crumbled and cave-like, I wouldn’t have been surprised if we’d walked in one day and knocked ourselves out on a low-hanging stalactite. That’s where Pops had built a Great Wall of Canned Food, and that sounds sort of gross, but it was good stuff, which wouldn’t have surprised you if you’d met our dad, who liked fancy things. There was a stack of some kind of French chestnut cream in posh jars, and there were sliced Mexican chillies, like floating green wheels with spokes, and these tartan tins of Scottish Christmas shortbread in the shape of highland terriers, which is what we’d eat as a treat if we were up to date with our reading, which mostly we were. I know you’re thinking we were pretty tame, but you try being wild when you’re in the wild—it seems pretty stupid.
It was actually kind of spooky out the back of that Emporium, so big and echoey, all flickering shadows, so we didn’t go too often. When we did, we just grabbed things blind and stuffed them in a huge sack in that way you do when you actually just want to get the hell away, which was maybe why we became so good at adjusting to unusual flavour combinations that we could have seriously killed on one of those cooking show competitions they had before everything on TV was just calming shots of tropical island scenery on a loop, and warbly panpipe music.