And, sure, out in the forest there was many a tasty bird, a woodlands animal, and if you knew how to start a proper fire (which, FYI, we did), there was wood galore and you could skewer those into some tidy kebabs to barbecue al fresco. But as if Winter would have been okay with munching on a teeny squirrel or a gosh-darn bluebird, and besides, the effort factor was high because the axe was pretty blunt, and I had tried a bunch of things, but I just couldn’t seem to sharpen it. Back then I wouldn’t even have dreamed of unsheathing The Knife. The motor blades on our father’s massive generator had cracked almost as soon as he left, and of course we had no idea about how to fix that kind of thing, so we just packed away the kettle and the fairy lights, and said goodbye to all our appliances. Instead we hung our clothes on the generator to dry when we washed them in the moat with hotel hand soaps, which we seemed to have about a zillion of, and got by on kerosene lamps and sleeping huddled up in winter.
Truth be told, we got seriously loved up on the whole Playing House thing, hauling buckets of water from the river, scrubbing our clothes on stones. We’d read enough Little House on the Prairie for that to seem dreamy, all the baking and foraging and darning and living in semi-rags, dresses made from T-shirts and shoes made from bits of old tyres because our feet were growing fast, and wearing nine jumpers on top of each other for warmth, and tapping sap from weeping trees and taping up twigs to make scratchy brooms and the satisfaction of finishing complicated quilting patterns using cut-up priest dresses, which I want to call tussocks but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. From where I am now I can see that all that homemaking was probably to do with controlling things that felt out of control. Being our own mothers, or something, like, psychological. But at the time it just seemed really nice compared to the last few months of our old life: all those midnight bolts to the door of a waiting black car with tinted windows, rolling into it while it was half taking off to a weird abandoned airstrip where a plane with a sharp little nose would always be waiting, its propeller already ticking like a sped-up heart.
Sure, from time to time, Winter would get all mopey—would ask stupid questions, would open the curtains that we had agreed to keep shut.
‘Why doesn’t Walter come to find us?’ she asked one hot evening. We were lying on our backs in the moat, its surface rippling with echoes of stars, our bodies white whispers below. ‘Why has he never come?’
‘We’ve been a lot of places, Winter. And it’s not like he could just email.’ I trailed my fingers through the water. Together, apart, together, apart. ‘How would he even know we were here?’ I said, not wanting to really get into the whole Walter thing.
‘But if he loved us,’ said Winter, standing up and squeezing out her ponytail, ‘couldn’t he tell?’
‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘He put a tracking device on the back of one of the unicorns we flew here on.’
‘I always knew where Mama was,’ she insisted. ‘I could tell. Even in Tokyo—’
In one motion I flipped myself over and slapped her so hard, the sound made us wince, made us deaf, and my hand burned raw, and I couldn’t catch my breath, my chest was that tight with fury.
Her dog started to bark so loud, it was like a saw in my ear. ‘Shut UP,’ I yelled, and flicked water at him. He stumbled back in shock and whimpered.
Winter didn’t cry. She just sank down and put her face in the water, maybe because some part of her was dripping blood—the corner of an eye, a nostril.
She stayed like that for ages, long after my hand stopped stinging. By the time she lifted her head back up, my collarbones ached with regret. And sure, I’ll bet now you’re thinking, Hoo boy, that Summer is a real psycho. But I wasn’t—not usually. I just loved Winter with everything in me—till sometimes I sprang leaks and it burst out of me.
‘Why does everyone who loves us always leave?’ she asked, and I swear she was asking the stars—that she was no longer talking to me at all.
‘I’m still here,’ I said.
She looked over at me, and even through the gloom I could see that her lip was split and blood was trickling down her chin, down her neck—that when she licked her lips, she would taste it.
‘Just so you know,’ I said coolly as I pulled myself up out of the water and onto the flagstones that bordered the church. ‘Pops told me never to tell you, but Walter died. He was captured. Ages ago.’
It wasn’t even true—well, it might have been by then. Who knew? But it was worth it to see her cry all the tears I never could, her big eyes leaking and gorgeous.
Winter
At first, the boy slept, hot and turning. He glowed like old fire.
Summer said not to go near him. That it might be catching. That it might be a trick. He would crack us in half, mess us up in nasty ways.
She was sure of so many things. Each of them like a pin in a board, trapping me under, a fluttering scrap.
She said we didn’t know what the world out there had become. We had been alone there so long on that tiny island, in that tiny church.
But in the night, I couldn’t bear it.
My chest beat like wings.
I went to him with a wet rag.
His lips were cracked deep. They ran with blood. His tongue was a white sea-sponge in his mouth.
He didn’t say anything—not for days. Until his fever broke, he just looked.
His eyes were all of the world. I wanted to stand on the feeling they gave me, so no one could see it.
They made me want to be alone for the first time ever.
Not alone by myself. But alone without Summer.
Alone with that boy, under the moon.
Stroking his hands.
Forever.
Summer
Sure, after our father left, we probably should have scratched the days into the bedpost in neat stacks of five and counted them up to keep track like they would have in an Enid Blyton novel. But we didn’t really have beds, just piles of communion cushions made into a sort of cosy nest, and who could bring themselves to scratch things into a pew? Well, maybe plenty of people, but not me, and totally, completely, definitely not Winter. And besides, we knew what season it was on account of the weather, and I don’t think we really believed we’d be there that long. Who can imagine forever?
We tried it once. We were down on the edge of the sea, which, kid you not, was a swimming pool’s length away from the church with only that green lawn between. That’s where we were lying, looking up, talking about infinity, and, yes, we were nerds, so it’s lucky we were diving prodigies, or we probably would have been called a lot worse than freaks. But other kids seemed to respect the fact that even when we were standing on our hands ten metres up on a big old plank, we weren’t even the tiniest bit scared to bend our elbows and push off and pike and twist and tuck before cutting the water like neat blades and leaving behind only the tiniest ring of bubbles, like a goldfish makes when it blurps. I don’t mean to be immodest here, but in the minds of everyone who’s anyone in the diving world, we had pretty much won the Olympic gold medals in synchronised diving for the next zillion years with perfect tens in both categories (three and ten metres). To tell you the truth, it was getting a little boring. Like someone giving you a perky round of applause every time you breathe.