It was one summer while we were a-viking ourselves that I found you. When Ferg began to tease me for wanting to write things down because who in the whole empty world was going to read it, Dad said that it was a natural result of reading so much. He said if you read a lot you start to think like a writer, the same way as if you grow up with a fiddle player in the house you start whistling and learning the tunes without thinking, like Ferg had. I read a lot. I’ll get to that. Dad plays the fiddle. I told him Ferg maybe had a bit of a point, since I didn’t know who I would be writing for as everyone I knew already knew my story because they’re a part of it. But I wanted to maybe keep a diary sort of thing, and so he said then just write like you talk, don’t be fancy, and I said but when you talk you do talk to someone, at least most of the time, and he said then just use your imagination: he said imagine a someone and keep them in mind as you write and I thought of you, the boy with my face.
So. You.
You’re in a photograph I found in a house up in North Uist one summer. This time we were looking for parts to scavenge for the windmill that gives us electricity, and Dad knew there were windmills of the same type up near where North Uist is joined to Berneray by the old causeway. We’d sailed the lugger up there and he and Ferg were gutting the turbine off an old fallen mill while I went on the scrounge through the big house on the skyline. We’d decided to camp in the house overnight. It was somewhere we had visited before, solid, stone-built with a roof that still held out most of the weather. Better than that, it had a lot of full bookshelves in it, and a thing called a snooker table.
It was one of the old buildings, a large farmhouse that had been added to over the years, so it sprawled expansively when compared with the other island houses. The walls had once been whitewashed but now little of that remained, so it was a grey house with a dark slate roof and intact glass windows that seemed to watch me approach up the old drive. A car had rotted to the axles and stood amid the long grass by the back door as if waiting to pounce. The door was not as easy to open as it had been when we visited three years before, but I was bigger now and managed to kick it open carefully enough that it would sort of close after us when we left. I left it open as I waited for the dogs to scramble ahead of me and put any waiting rats to flight.
Jip and Jess tore into the house, feet scrabbling on cracked plastic flooring as they went, whining and barking as they always did when excited, but there was no sound of rat murder close or distant, and they soon stopped their noise and trotted back to meet me, looking disappointed and a little bit hurt as is their way, as if I had promised them fun which had not quite materialised.
Something had changed in the house since we had last been there. I couldn’t say what it was, and I couldn’t see or smell anything that put me on edge, but there was a difference. Before, it had been like many of the houses we went into, damp and mouldering, full of things you could see as poignant or pointless according to your way of viewing the world. 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. Apart from the books, it’s little collections of things that people used to put on shelves that fascinate me in the empty houses. It’s not just the photographs, a lot of which are faded so badly they just look like water-damaged paper now, unless the rooms are dark, but the little china people and the mugs and jugs and bits of glass and wood and stuff. Ornaments. Trophies. Mementoes. Things that meant something to people once, meant enough that they’d make a space for them and display them, something to see every day. We don’t really have ornaments, or the time for mementoes. Everything we do is about surviving, moving forward, keeping going. No time for relics or souvenirs, Dad says when we go a-viking, only take the useful stuff. Maybe that’s why I decided to write this. A souvenir I can carry in a pocket. Anyway.
The picture of you.
The picture of you was definitely a memento. You meant something to someone, even if it was just yourself. I found you under the snooker table. And the way I found you was strange and secret, and because a photo is a small thing, I took you and no one knew and now you live between the pages of the notebook I write all this in, and until someone reads this, I suppose you’re still a secret.
I’d been in the snooker room before, the last time we were in the house. The room was almost filled by the table, which was covered by a dustsheet that had begun to deteriorate into rags at the corners, where maybe a hundred years of just carrying its own weight had worn holes. We’d taken the cover off and rolled the bright balls around the pale green playing surface, trying to bounce them into the pockets. Once there had been poles to hit the balls with, but now the racks that had held them were empty. I had liked the smooth motion of the balls and the healthy smack and clack as they bounced off each other. Not much runs so true in our day-to-day world, patched together as things are. There was a big wall of books to the left side, and a shuttered window at right angles to it. I’d already been through them, but now I was older I went back to see if the grown me would find books I might not have liked the look of last time.
The shutters were stuck shut, and though I could have wrenched them ajar I didn’t. Light not getting into the room was helping keep the books safe, and I knew I’d break the shutters opening them which would make closing them harder. Hinges rust, and where they don’t screws do, rotting out of old wood that no longer holds them. So I got out my fire steel and lit my oil lantern and used that instead. Then I dropped the fire steel and it rolled under the skirts of the snooker table.
We hadn’t found you the other times we were in the house because of the boxes. Someone had stacked boxes of cork tiles under the table, filling the space. They were the same cork tiles peeling off the floor in the kitchen down the hall. What we’d missed was the fact that the boxes were arranged around the edge of the table, and that the centre of the space beneath was empty, like a square cavern, a room hidden within a room. My fire steel had rolled into the narrow crack between two boxes, and I only discovered the secret when I moved one to get at it.
Fish oil lanterns throw more smell than light, but even by the soft glow mine gave off I could see someone had once used the space as a concealed den. It was the reflection of my flame in the glass jars on the opposite side that caught my eye, jars with candle stubs in them. Old candles burn better than the ones Bar makes, so my first thought was to scavenge the stubs, and see if there were any unburned ones left too. So I crawled in, and that’s how I found the chamber of secrets.
Someone had slept here, what must have been long, long ago. There was an unrolled sleeping bag and blankets and pillows, and there were books and tins and medicine packs lining the inner wall made by the boxes. A string of tiny little lights was taped all round the edge underneath the table-
top, the kind of things you used to put on Christmas trees in old pictures I’ve seen. But of course they weren’t lit and never would be again. It made me think what the hidden space must have looked like when they had been—cosy, cheerful, maybe a bit magical even. On the bottom of the table, which was slate, someone had glued a few of the cork tiles to make a decorated roof to the den, a roof and a pinboard. The board was covered in photographs and drawings.
Maybe it was because of the string of lights that would never be lit again, but I found I wanted to see what the space looked like when it was illuminated by more than my smoky fish oil lamp, which is why I lit some of the candle stubs, and why I lay back on the crinkly sleeping bag. I felt the synthetic filling crumble to dust under my weight, and that’s when I saw you. You were the picture right above the pillows. You must have been the last thing whoever slept here saw before they put out the lights, and you would have been the first thing they saw when they woke in the morning. Or maybe that sleeper was you. Maybe this was your den. Either way, you were important to someone. Loved. Mourned maybe. Or celebrated. Or both.
In the picture, you’re doing a star jump on the beach, and next to you is a girl who must be your sister. It’s a bright sunny day. You look very alike. She’s smaller. The picture has caught you both at the top of your jumps, frozen for ever between sand and sky, your arms and legs wide, laughing, eyes flashing with glee. You’re looking right into the lens. She’s looking at you with a wild and happy look that’s so fierce it hurts me to see it. And beside you on the other side is a short-legged terrier also jumping and looking at your face, mouth wide in a smile or a bark. And just as I sometimes think you look a lot like me, the girl looks familiar too. If I squint and imagine, then she looks like Joy might have been. Maybe that’s why I took the picture. Because of course I have no picture of my once bigger—but now forever little—sister. Maybe I thought it would help me remember when I get older and more memories jostle in and fill the space that used to be just the two of us. Or maybe the slight likeness is just the reason why I’m writing this to you. All I know for sure is that I’ve never seen a picture that made me so happy and so sad at the same time. And even without the girl—which is what the picture looks like when it’s folded to fit in my notebook, it’s you and your dog—like the last happy people at the end of the world, before the afterwards began.
Or maybe I’m writing my life to you because the people I could talk to about things are gone, or can’t talk back to me any more. Dad says I think too much. Says I ask too many questions. Says he thinks the lack of answers always makes me unhappy. Don’t know if that’s true. Do know he hates the asking. As if it takes something away from him, not knowing how to reply. It’s just information I’m after, not responsibility for something that is far too big to be down to him anyway. And why does he spend all the time when he’s not working or playing the fiddle with his head in a book of facts if he’s not looking for answers too?
And that was the other thing I took from the chamber of secrets. The books. Whoever had made the den had a line of books all along one side, and after I’d lain on my back looking at the photographs, I turned sideways and looked at them. I scanned up and down the row of spines several times, and then began picking them out at random, reading the descriptions on the covers. They weren’t practical books, the histories or technical things Dad insisted we read so that important knowledge wasn’t lost, something I later began to call Leibowitzing: they were fiction, made-up things. It took me a couple of minutes to work out what these ones all had in common, but when I did so it gave me another jolt, a kind of shock that was close to excitement, though I don’t know why it should have thrilled me as it did. All the books were about imaginary futures in which your world, the Before, had broken down. They were all stories about my now, the After, written by people with no real knowledge of what it would be like.
I stuffed my rucksack with the book hoard and found another bag in the attic which I filled with the rest. Dad and Ferg tried to make me leave them behind, but they were in a good mood having found two working spare parts from the old windmills, and they also liked the three and a half boxes of old candles that I found under the table. I didn’t tell them about the hidden chamber though, and I slid the box back in place after I came out, so if it was your secret place, it’s secret still. As far as I know.
That autumn I read all those books, some of them twice (that’s when I started calling Dad’s obsession with technical manuals and science books “Leibowitzing”, after one called A Canticle for Leibowitz about monks in a devastated far future trying to reconstruct your whole world from an electrical manual found in the desert). I read the books hoping to find some good ideas, but what I got was nightmares and a kind of sadness that stained my mind for weeks.
I know you can’t be nostalgic for something you never actually knew, but it was that kind of longing the books often woke in me. Dad hated me reading them. Thought they were the most pointless things there could ever be, out-of-date prophecies that had turned out wrong anyway. I liked them. Still do. They may not be accurate about life after the end, but if you sort of look sideways with your mind while you read them, you find they say lots about what things were like before. They’re like answers to questions you didn’t know enough to ask. Though saying something like that to Dad would only make him even angrier. The past’s gone. We only have the now he says, and the only answers that are useful are the ones that will help us survive into the future.