Incidentally, Catrin did not die, and nor did Reg. They were both tended to by Eve’s father, sent to hospital, returned from hospital and shoved into their respective homes wherein their unsympathetic parents launched into tirades about why they shouldn’t do such-and-such and why it was ‘dangerous’ and ‘unwise.’ They were lucky to still be able to see each other.

The months passed with no venturing out onto the moor for their own safety, and eventually October came. Only Catrin remained seventeen years of age at this point, and the other three were waiting until she turned eighteen before they travelled anywhere so as not to leave her out. It was only on her birthday that Catrin thought to ask them how they had found her and Reg on the moor. They replied that Alistair had been walking around, and had seen both of them from a considerable distance. He’d told them where to go, and they had been so pre-occupied helping them into the car that they had not thought to tell Reg or Catrin about the encounter.

It was decided that they would remain in Widecombe for a short while and then begin travelling around the country by train, staying wherever they could collectively afford to stay. It was taken as given that they would go to London. There was a zoological park in Somerset Catrin wished to visit, for she had never been to one before. They arrived there one Saturday after a train journey of considerable duration. It was an enormous and reasonably crowded place, owing, perhaps, to the fact they had come on a weekend, and upon entering, Catrin’s eye was caught by something she had never seen before, though she had seen them depicted extensively in art; it was a flock of stationary, vibrant pink flamingos.

Awestruck, she approached their enclosure and stood staring at them. Reg appeared at her side. The birds were beautiful; it occurred to her that, contrary to her expectations, the many paintings in which she had seen them represented had not exaggerated their colour. Rather, they had downplayed it; these creatures were as striking and intensely coloured as anything she had ever seen in her life. She was immediately glad to be there. One of them began doing what Catrin assumed was filter-feeding from an abnormally turquoise variation of what she took to be water.

“What on buggering earth are they?” Reg asked in bewilderment.

“They are flamingos,” mispronounced Catrin.

“They’re not British, are they?”

“God, no. It should say on a sign somewhere.” A combination of her newfound adulthood, the presence of Reg and her friends and the profoundly interesting surroundings was wearing away at Catrin’s considerable social inhibitions that would usually, in public, be rendering her unable to talk or smile unless absolutely necessary.

Her greatest hope was that there might be great apes of some kind at the zoo, and it was a few minutes after leaving the flamingos that she encountered a group of gorillas behind a full-length glass wall. The enclosure was larger than most of the others in the vicinity, and she was struck by how much its interior resembled the English countryside; she had, for whatever reason, expected it to be laid out as a gorilla’s natural habitat might be. There were nine individuals, all but one (an infant, presumably) larger than her.

The one nearest the glass was sitting against the wooden wall of the enclosure, an expression resembling human exhaustion and simultaneous alertness playing upon its leathery features. It was surveying the other creatures in the manner of an alpha male. Catrin did not know enough about gorillas to know whether there was likely to be an alpha male, but if there was, it was most certainly this one.

This she thought until an infant walked over to it and lay against it. The larger gorilla began behaving in a distinctly maternal way, stroking the baby. It was, she realised, a prominent female in the group. It inclined its head in her general direction and looked at her through tired, resigned eyes. In that moment, Catrin felt as connected to the animal as she might have been to another person. The suspicion was that humans shared a recent common ancestor with gorillas, but she had never expected to be able to emotionally interact with it as with an Homo sapiens. Perhaps empathy and nonverbal communication lay somewhere among their mutual genes.

The gorilla, for so rarely was she able to maintain eye contact with anybody from outside the enclosure, was desperate to hang onto it. She had been forced to spend her eighty-four seasons of life in here or a similar cage with a group of people she found generally annoying, even if she did love most of them dearly. This odd, black-and-pink watcher was observing her as no other watcher ever had. There was a real connection. Usually it was small watchers – children, presumably – with whom she had this connection. Their capacity for emotional interaction seemed to fade at a young age.

She often wondered whether they had feelings like gorillas did. She wondered whether they saw the world in the same way. It seemed likely that they did, sometimes, but the larger ones certainly weren’t as empathetic as some of the people in the enclosure. She was working with the model that having a full covering of body hair made you more empathetic than just having hair on the head. Perhaps, then, hair stored emotional intelligence. She supposed there was no way to test it. No ethical way, at any rate. The watcher had wandered off at this point.

Catrin returned to Reg with a far greater appreciation of great apes. Whilst she had been observing the gorilla, however, he had been examining an object that he later told her he had found on the floor. They sat on a bench in the middle of the path (for it had become wider, effectively dividing in two at that point) and studied the aforesaid item. It appeared to be the case for a pair of absent glasses. The exterior was carved from dark wood, the interior with a brass plaque attached above where the glasses should have been. Etched neatly into it were the following words;

If found, return to Mason.

There was also a hallmark, but the logistics of working out what it meant were unthinkable at this time. The nearest library that might contain a relevant book was thirteen miles away. Catrin had counted, for she had longed to visit a decent-sized one, but it had been decided on balance that there was no point in going to this one. The hallmark might constitute an excuse.

“Archie,” Catrin called. He did not appear. She called his name again, prompting him to emerge from behind the meerkat exhibit, proclaiming ‘Bugger all in there’ and sitting on the bench beside her. He read the inscription on the glasses case.

“Must be mine,” he joked of his surname’s presence on the brass. Catrin glanced sideways at him as if to say, ‘Perhaps it is.’ Archie shook his head dismissively and wandered back over to Eve. He called back to her; “Maybe an ancestor’s. They’ve been around here a while, far as I know.”

“How would we know?” she called back. He shrugged. His attention expended, Reg stood up and joined the other two. Catrin, wishing she had a pocket wherein to place the case, stared at the wood of the arm of the bench. The followed the grain with her eyes, wondering how it had come to be that way and whether there was anything in the universe that exactly resembled it.

That night, the four of them entered a pub near their lodgings wherein an unruly-seeming crowd had decided to hold a gathering. There were nine of them occupying four small tables, all wearing barber jackets, all in their mid or late fifties. All men, of course. It was abnormal for women to be seen in a public house, generally speaking. As such, the group drew some bemused looks as they ordered their drinks and took their seats.

“Uncomfortable, these seats,” Eve observed. This was duly disregarded by everyone, as were most comments made that evening that might have provoked the disappointment of the bloke running the bar. It became rather frustrating to Reg that the girls did not understand pub etiquette. Why should they, he supposed. They had likely never been in one before.

“Cold, too, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Catrin, it’s made of stone,” Reg snapped under his breath. Taken slightly aback, she looked him up and down.

“Are you alright, Reg? Only you’ve never been angry before. Not that I can remember, anyway.”

“Calm down, both of you,” Archie muttered. “Best we get out of here, I reckon, it’s only causing trouble.”

“Affeard?” called one of the rowdy gentlemen across the room. “First time down the pub, are it?” His friends laughed boisterously.

“We’re no’ affeard,” called Archie with the striking adamance of somebody who had convinced himself of something that was not true.

“Been boostering my arse down the farm and what I gat is some teen’ars cozing out the pub? Bugger orf, lot of you.” He seemed not to be angry, but rather doing it for his own amusement and that of the gentlemen around him. The group hastily departed.

“Put on an accent?” asked Eve as they stalked through the mist of the night.

“It comes off on me pretty quick,” Archie replied. “Accent, that is. ‘Tis what my dad used to speak like.”

“I don’t know why Widecombe was so sheltered from the accent,” Eve shrugged.

“T’wasn’t. You’re just posh,” offered Reg. This was a point upon which they were all in agreement.

***

It was at a guest house the following night that the group separated for the first time. Eve and Archie disappeared to Lulworth cove whilst Catrin and Reg remained in their room. The room in question was large and oddly furnished; mint green wallpaper lined it, broken only by the occasional vertical floral pattern. There were two main rooms; one was passed through immediately upon entry with two separate beds, the other was larger and contained a double-bed. It had been decided Catrin and Reg would share the former, being as neither was entirely comfortable sleeping with the other.

Presently, Reg was staring out the window. It was about five o’clock, and he had no clue what to do for the next few hours. He hoped he and Catrin could find some interesting common ground, because they had had a surprising lack of success in doing so previously. She entered the room, clearly hoping for the same thing, and sat on Eve and Archie’s bed a few feet away from him. He turned his body to face her.

“…What are we both interested in?” Reg asked.

“Ourselves,” Catrin replied. “You first.”

“What, am I talking about myself?”

“That’s right. Go on.” She smiled.

“You’re smiling like Eve. Eve smiles like that.”

“Does she? When?”

“When she and Archie are exchanging innuendos and she doesn’t think we understand them.”

“Do they do that?” Catrin seemed unironically surprised.

“Yes, Catrin. Anyway, I don’t have a self to talk about. You know me; I was born in Widecombe and I’ll likely die there, won’t ‘im?”

“You’re going dialect-ish again. I don’t like the dialect.”

“Neither do I. I thought you did. Anyway, what of you?”

“…I like London. It’s lovely there. We should go, don’t you think?”

“That’s not you, that’s geography.”

“Well, we’re both bloody monotonous, then, aren’t we? Tell you what, Reg, never write a memoir.”

“Why’s that, then?”

“We’d make awful characters. We never talk anymore. We used to have big long discussions about religion and things. Why don’t we do that anymore?”

“Let’s re-evaluate, then. Have you found any reason to believe?”

“What, in a higher power?”

“Yes. I’ve not.”

“…Actually, I was thinking about this. If there are ghosts, why shouldn’t there be a god?”

Reg seemed struck by this. “…I don’t know,” he replied. “There’s no reason to believe what we don’t have evidence for, is there? We saw ghosts.”

“I didn’t believe in them before that,” Catrin pointed out. “God might be just as real.”

Reg thought about it deeply. He could tell Catrin had been struggling considerably with this for some time. “If there’s a God… well, what do they say about God? He knows all, he sees all, he’s all-powerful? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“Doesn’t make a bollock of sense, that, not one.” Reg seemed as though he was still in the process of formulating this idea. “If he sees all… wait, if he knows all, he must know when things like tidal waves are going to hit, mustn’t he?”

“Yes, supposedly.”

“And if he’s all-powerful, he can stop them if he wants, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Why doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he stop them hitting?”

“It’s the natural order of things. Tidal waves just hit. That’s the way it is. Maybe he can’t interfere in the natural order of things.”

“Not bloody all-powerful, then, is he?” Reg seemed ecstatic at having thought of what he believed to be a quite original argument.

“Well… perhaps he doesn’t want to interfere.”

“Why not? Children, kids, they die in these tidal waves. Get washed away, don’t ’em? Why wouldn’t he save them? Why do they need saving in the first place?”

“…Why would he pit animals against each other?” Catrin asked, her brow lifted as though by a ripple of realisation. “Spider and fly. Whose side is he on? Why would he make two things whose sole purpose is to disadvantage the other? The spider starves if it doesn’t kill the fly, the fly dies if it’s caught by the spider. He’s created this suffering. There must be death.”

“And he has the power to change it,” nodded Reg. “He has the power to stop it. He could just have made the world differently.”

“…Bastard!” Catrin uttered shrilly. Reg chuckled. “Absolute bloody bastard! God! Why did I… no, but it’s hard, though! I… mum and dad, what about them? They’re stuck worshipping a bastard!”

“They say he has a reason for doing things,” Reg countered. “Perhaps it’s for the greater good. There’s no need to… you know…”

“No need to dismiss it out-of-hand yet,” Catrin nodded. After a brief silence, she added; “…It is interesting, though.”

“What?”

“The spider and the fly. Predation. Evolution. It’s as if he made the world for us to be interested in. For us to enjoy and explore.”

“Tell that to the child drowning in the tidal wave,” Reg retorted immediately. His features softened as he realised he had been slightly callous. “…There might be a higher power. He doesn’t have to be the one in the bible. He doesn’t even have to be a he.”

Catrin looked up at this. It was almost a statement of feminism by Reg’s standards. It was more outrageous to suggest that God might be a woman than to suggest he didn’t exist. In this room, at any rate. “I’ve never asked you,” she began. “What exactly is it you believe in? Anything at all?”

After a moment’s thought, Reg replied, “you.”

“Very smooth,” Catrin smiled and glanced at her shoes. She kicked them off immediately upon realising she did not need to be wearing them. Glancing up at Reg, she asked, “How long are Eve and Arch out?”

“Three hours. Five if they decide to go for a walk.”

“Let’s say six,” she replied, laughing slightly at her own joke.

“Why do you ask?” Reg asked. “Not sex?”

“No, no, no, no,” Catrin uttered quickly, worried she’d given him the wrong idea. “No. Sorry. No.”

“I was going to say, I’d rather not…”

“No. I know. I just meant it’s quite a warm evening, and we might… well, we might dispose of social etiquette for a bit. Cool off.”

“What is social etiquette?”

“Convention. What you’re supposed to do in the eyes of… well, of people around you. And there’s nobody around us, is there?”

“What are you getting at?” Reg asked.

“You wouldn’t mind if I took this off, would you?” she indicated her blouse.

“Oh! Oh, bugger, no, ‘course not. I mean, if you want to.”

“…No, well, I mean… it’s the closest to sex we’re going to get, isn’t it?”

“…Yeah, I s’pose. Right. Okay then.” He hesitantly removed his jacket and shirt. He was not a muscular man by any stretch of the imagination. He was, if anything, wiry. Catrin did the same. Suddenly conscious of the folds in her stomach that were a consequence of her slouching posture, she sat upright to draw out her body as much as she could. She removed her brassiere, relatively unconcerned about her breasts, for she could see nothing wrong with them. They sat in their present state of undress for a minute or so before the first comment was made by Catrin.

“…It’s worse than kissing, this, isn’t it?”

“…Yeah. Shall we stop?”

“I reckon we should.”