Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  “What kind of animals?” Trudi asked, as everything from taffeta to winceyette suddenly went up in flames.

  “Goats,” Charlene said decisively. “We’ll keep goats. We’ll tend goats on the green hillside and milk them and make goat cheese and at night we’ll light bonfires and guard the goats against the wolves. And we’ll buy a spinning wheel and spin the goats’ wool and knit jumpers and every week we’ll take our goat jumpers and our goat cheeses to market and people will buy them and that’s how we’ll live.”

  There was a flashover in Ladies’ Fashions.

  “I knew I should have taken that rhinestone belt,” Trudi said regretfully.

  THE RADIO STATION was off the air. The television station had been destroyed a long time ago. The city ran out of diesel and gin. People burned musty old paperbacks on bonfires and drank rum. There was a festive atmosphere generated by communal terror.

  There was no food for the animals in the zoo. The animal freedom militia unlocked their cages so that now there were bears rooting in dustbins and penguins swimming in the river and at night the tigers roaming the streets roared so loudly that no one could sleep. Trudi lay awake listening to the tigers roaring and the bears growling and the wolves howling and the dragons breathing fire over the blacked-out, rain-sodden streets of the city. A family of small green lizards took up residence in her apartment.

  There was a rumor that the rare wolfkin had been sighted in the botanical gardens in the west of the city. All the trees in the botanical gardens were now officially dead. And all the panes of glass in the hothouses were broken so that the rain came in and drenched the plants in the desert house, causing them to bloom extravagantly and then die, even more extravagantly. An unseasonal microclimate in the palm house resulted in a typhoon snapping the great palms that had been alive longer than anyone on the planet. A polar bear made its home on the island in the middle of the lake in the botanical gardens and a flock of parrots flitted in and out of the pagoda.

  The museums were no longer policed and people wandered in and took the artifacts and used them to improve their interior decor.

  Charlene came to dinner and brought Trudi the golden death mask of a long-dead king and also a large Sevres bowl that had taken her fancy. “Thief,” Trudi said, but hoarsely, as they were both still suffering from the aftereffects of smoke inhalation during the department-store fire.

  All Trudi had in the house to eat was roasted buckwheat and celery. They served the buckwheat and the celery in the Sevres bowl.

  “Presentation is everything,” Charlene said. Afterwards, they drank the only thing they could find, which was a bottle of emerald-green Midori, and listened to a Mozart string quartet on a foreign radio station. Charlene stayed the night, lying on the sofa, watching the lizards run across the ceiling. In the skylight above her head she could see a few drops of the Milky Way, which she knew was the milk from Hera’s breasts splashed across the heavens.

  Charlene was pinned down by sniper fire in the north of the city on her way back from visiting a wedding fair. She still had a selection of wedding samples in her coat pocket—metallic confetti in the form of the names Mark and Rachel, a place card in the shape of a top hat, a little silver favor basket of red jelly hearts and a bonbonnière containing sugared almonds in pastel colors. She took shelter in the doorway of a bank and phoned Trudi on her Samsung A400.

  “A bonbonnière?” Trudi said doubtfully.

  “Or bomboniera if you prefer the Italian. In pink shadow crystal net with red roses.”

  “Why?”

  “A bonbonnière makes a wonderful way of saying ‘Thank you’ for sharing the joy of your day. Each bonbonnière contains five top-quality sugared almonds, five being a prime number that cannot be divided, just like the bride and groom—”

  “OK.”

  “They signify happiness, health, wealth, fertility, and long life—”

  “Enough.”

  “When I get married,” Charlene said, “I want white satin wedding shoes, silver horseshoes with white heather, lucky black cats, and a bouquet of lilacs dripping with rain. Oh, and a sprung wooden floor to dance on and a father to give me away and a mother to cry and a sister to be bridesmaid—but I have none of these, neither father nor mother nor sister.”

  “Nor bridegroom,” Trudi reminded her.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll give you away,” Trudi offered, “and I’ll cry and I’ll be your bridesmaid.”

  “Thank you.”

  The ATM in the wall exploded and banknotes fluttered like distressed birds into the dirty sky. Charlene tried to remember the tenets of Pythagorean philosophy to keep her mind off the rain and the sniper and the flying money.

  “When you rise from the bedclothes, roll them together and smooth out the impress of the body.

  “The visible world is false and illusive.

  “Abstain from beans.”

  “Beans?”

  “In case they contain the soul of an ancestor.”

  “Of course.”

  “Men and women are equal and property held in common.

  “All things are numbers.

  “Everything is infinitely divisible and even the smallest portion of matter contains some of each element.”

  “And the transmigration of the soul,” Trudi whispered, “don’t forget that. When you get home, call me.” A cashier ran out of the bank waving a Colt Defender and was freeze-framed. Charlene wondered about Mark and Rachel. Did they exist or had the people who made the wedding favors (for which occupation there seemed to be no word) invented them, as an ideal couple?

  Lying awake in the dark, Charlene wished she had a lamp to wish on.

  “See the moon? See Selene’s silver beams?” she whispered to Trudi although she knew Trudi couldn’t hear her because the telephone exchange was burning and melting and the mobile-phone masts were toppled and anyway Trudi was asleep on the other side of town behind the barricades of wires and running shoes and dead dogs, mostly mongrels.

  “I would like to be on the moon,” Charlene murmured, “but with oxygen, or better still an atmosphere. And food. Or perhaps I would like a planet all of my own. But you could live there too, Trudi. We could call it Pleasureland. And we would be gods. We would be the gods of Pleasureland. And live there forever.

  “Or perhaps there’s another world—except it’s just like this one—where we buy French wine and sourdough bread and Moroccan oranges and spools of thread and packets of Drum Mountain White Cloud tea and sleep in our beds at night to the peaceful sounds of traffic and barking dogs and midnight arguments between husbands and wives called Mark and Rachel. That would be a good world to live in.”

  CHARLENE AND TRUDI were drinking tall lattes and eating sunrise muffins in a coffee shop.

  “So what did you get your mother for her birthday?” Trudi asked.

  “Guess.”

  “A Glock 17 semiautomatic?”

  “No.”

  “A mirrored-glass globe in which nothing but the sky is reflected?”

  “No.”

  “A carp? A harp? A sharp silver knife? A sliver of melon or a slice of yellow moon? A Spanish greyhound? A cat as big as a man, a man as big as a cat? As small as a baby? A manikin?”

  “Gloves,” Charlene said.

  “Gloves?”

  “Yes,” Charlene said. “Wolfkin gloves.”

  II

  TUNNEL OF FISH

  Joy and Woe are woven fine,

  A Clothing for the Soul divine

  Under every grief and pine

  Runs a joy with silken twine.

  WILLIAM BLAKE, AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE

  IF EDDIE COULD have chosen, he would have been a fish. A large fish without enemies, free to spend all day swimming lazily amongst the reeds and rushes in clear, blood-cold water. His mother, June, said not to worry, he was halfway there already, with his mouth hanging open all the time like a particularly dull-witted amphibian, not to mention the thick lenses of his
spectacles that made his eyes bulge like a haddock’s.

  Afterwards, of course, June had regretted saying that, but sometimes Eddie was so infuriatingly gormless that she couldn’t help herself. June had hoped that the removal of his adenoids when he was eight would make Eddie look more intelligent. It hadn’t. She had had the same expectations at nine for his spectacles. Most people she knew looked brainier with glasses, yet somehow Eddie contrived to look even more dopey. June thought that the grommets in his ears at ten would raise him from the undersea world of the deaf, and theoretically they had done, according to his ENT consultant, yet Eddie still behaved as if he couldn’t hear a word June said. Which was just as well, June thought, seeing as half the time the things she said to him were not very nice.

  For reasons best known to himself, Eddie had recently become an obsessive cataloger of fish. He had already worked his way through shells, coins, stamps, and flags. June wondered, not for the first time, if Eddie was mildly autistic. She hoped his eccentricities were genetic and had nothing to do with her haphazard mothering.

  It was a year now since Eddie had started secondary school and every day June expected a policeman at the door, telling her that her son had been beaten to a pulp in a corner of the playground or thrown himself in boyish despair from the top of the science block. (June was a pessimist by nature.) Eddie, June knew, was exactly the sort of boy whom even kind children were exasperated into bullying and normally decent teachers were driven to persecute. In some ways it was a relief when, at the school’s first parents’ evening, June discovered that none of Eddie’s teachers had any idea who he was.

  June was carrying Hawk’s child. She liked that phrase, “carrying a child.” “Pregnant” made her think of animals—cows and sows and dogs, and the hamster (“Hammy”), which was the only pet her parents would let her have when she was a child because both of them were ridden with allergies. She had felt sorry for Hammy’s solitary existence, mirroring her own, and had let him play with her friend’s hamster, Jock, and “play” turned out to be a euphemism and “him” turned out to be a “her” and the outcome was that June ended up with a litter of tiny naked rodents that looked like miniature piglets and which gave her the creeps. “Oh, June,” her mother sighed when she saw them. That was what she always said—“Oh, June”—so much disappointment packed into two such small words.

  June didn’t inherit her parents’ allergies, although that didn’t stop them from expecting her to drop dead at any moment, if not from an out-of-the-blue asthma attack then from choking on a sweet or being run over by a car (or a bike or a train, not to mention being decapitated by a low-flying plane, as if such things were common in Edinburgh). Her father was a risk assessor from Standard Life and said that he came across too many accidents, bizarre or otherwise, to ignore the danger that lurked around every corner. The worst thing was that having spent her childhood and adolescence shrugging off their pathetic fears, she was completely prey to them herself now.

  June blamed her parents. June blamed her parents for everything, although it seemed a bit of a shame to blame her father, who had died in his bed, not from an accident but “worn out” according to June’s mother. “By what?” June asked. “By his life,” her mother said. His standard life. That was the one thing that June had been terrified of having—a standard life, an ordinary life, a life like her parents’—living in a pink sandstone semidetached villa in the suburbs with a neat garden and an en suite master bedroom with fitted wardrobes. Now she would rather like it. In their flat they didn’t even have a bath, just a shower and a toilet. And a wardrobe, fitted or otherwise, would have been a great improvement on the overloaded garment rail on which they all kept their clothes.

  And also June could see that once you were thirty—which she was three weeks ago—it was probably time to stop holding your parents responsible for all the things that had gone wrong in your life, especially since if she had taken their advice she would now have a degree and a job and a decent house and probably even a husband instead of living in a crappy tenement with Eddie and Hawk, and Hawk only living with them anyway because he didn’t have anywhere else to live.

  There was the dog as well, which didn’t help. Tammy was an overenthusiastic terrier cross that she’d got from the dogs’ home at Seafield so that Eddie wouldn’t have to spend his childhood without a pet the way she had, but then of course it turned out that the allergies had only skipped a generation and Eddie snuffled and sneezed and wheezed every time the dog got near him, which was all the time because the flat was so small. And the dog was pregnant. Carrying puppies.

  June was just eighteen when she had Eddie (what a big, sorrowful “Oh, June” that was) whereas her mother was forty-two when she had June. June fully expected to be dead by the time she was forty-two. Her parents were old, really old. That was why they’d given her such an old-fashioned name. June, because she was born in June. If she’d been born in November would they have called her November? June was a name for women in sitcoms and soap operas, the name of women who knit with synthetic wool and follow recipes that use cornflakes, not the name of a thirty-year-old with a ring in her nose (“Oh, June”).

  At least she knew she was pregnant this time—for the first five months of Eddie’s unfledged existence she had just thought she was getting disgustingly fat. Of course, June had never really wanted Eddie and in her heart she was sure that had she wanted him he would have turned out a different child—a loud, rude, shouting boy who ran around football pitches and had no fear and no defects. June knew that Hawk’s baby was her second chance, the only way she could redeem herself for the mess she had made the first time round.

  Eddie wanted to scramble back down the evolutionary ladder. He wanted gills instead of a clogged-up nose. And scales of silver and pearl instead of his own pale-and-prone-to-dermatitis skin. Eddie wondered if there was such a word as “unevolving.” He had a list of Latin prefixes in the ancient Latin grammar that Hawk had found in a rubbish skip and he had been trying to teach himself the language ever since. Eddie didn’t go to the kind of school where Latin had ever featured on the curriculum. There was a mystical power to Latin names. When he incanted the gorgeously impenetrable names of fish—Pomacanthus imperator (the Emperor Angelfish), Zanclus cornutus (the Moorish Idol!)—Eddie felt like a sorcerer.

  In-volve, re-volve, de-volve. Eddie pored over the grammar and stroked an imaginary beard. “ ‘Retro-volve,’ perhaps, professor,” he said out loud to himself in a silly voice. Most of Eddie’s conversations were with himself. His mother thought he was being bullied at school but Eddie knew he wasn’t important enough in the school hierarchy to be bullied. He was part of the ranks of the invisible, but it was OK, there were quite a lot of invisible boys, they formed an unofficial, invisible club. They made feeble jokes to themselves about themselves—the Ancient Geeks, Geek Gods—and they all secretly believed that the geeks would inherit the earth.

  A few months ago, Hawk had found an old fish tank and a goldfish to put in it but the fish had never thrived and had acquired all kinds of strange lumps and fungal growths until it was a relief when it went bleached and belly-up and put Eddie out of his misery. That was pretty much when Eddie had lost faith in Hawk. He knew how to get things but he didn’t know how to keep them.

  Hawk’s real name was Alan, which didn’t have the same heroic ring to it. Hawk was English, from Cheshire, a place that was a mystery to both June and Eddie, who could think only of cheese and cats. His raptorial sobriquet was the result of a night in a sweat lodge in the Highlands when his true self—the hawk-headed sun god Ra—was revealed to him. “Kind of like a totem,” he explained to Eddie. Eddie didn’t tell Hawk that he also knew his own true identity—revealed to him by a huge, solid carp, patterned like blue-and-white marble, that lived in a pond in the hothouses in the Botanics. Eddie knew it was his totem because it had spoken to him.

  Eddie often thought about the baby inside June. He had been charting its embryonic progress with an
old medical encyclopedia from the same rubbish-skip haul as his Latin grammar. From tiny tadpole to gilled fish to froggy fetus, he had wondered about his unborn sibling. Brother or sister, he hadn’t really minded, he just thought that it would be nice to have someone else in his family. Now it seemed it was going to be a girl, which Eddie thought would probably be better for his mother. He kept the ultrasound photograph of his soon-to-be sister by the side of his bed.

  June rubbed baby oil onto her stomach. The skin on her belly was like a drum. The drum was being beaten from the inside in an irregular tom-tom and she wondered if the baby was kicking or punching. The baby was a girl. The technician doing the ultrasound had asked her did she want to know the sex or did she want to be surprised. June hated surprises. She had been surprised enough when she found out she was pregnant with Eddie. She wasn’t surprised this time because she had stopped taking the pill and she pretty much only had to look at a man and, hey presto, she was pregnant. Carrying.

  Sometimes June wondered if she attracted fertility. In the olden days she would probably have been burned as a sacrifice or something to help the crops.

  Eddie wasn’t her first. There was the sexless embryo that had had to be disposed of when she was fifteen (“Oh, June”). Her mother had tried to persuade her to keep it but June was having none of it. Now she thought about it a lot. A “fetus,” she’d taught herself to say over the years, but now it had become a baby again in her mind. Not that she was against abortions in any way. Terminated. It always made her think of Arnold Schwarzenegger. She was the terminator. It would have been fourteen and it wouldn’t be an it, it would be a boy or a girl, an older brother or sister for Eddie, someone to guide him and be a friend (and, God knows, he could do with one). Maybe that was why she was having this baby. To make up. To atone.