Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  Hawk was very surprised by her pregnancy, of course, because he didn’t know about her coming off the pill and she told him it must have stopped working because she was sick that one time. She hoped the baby would make Hawk stay. Clip his wings. Although she knew it wouldn’t.

  She was glad it was a girl because she hadn’t had much success with a boy. She could buy pretty clothes for a girl and plait her hair with ribbons. And she could call her a nice, old-fashioned, middle-class name like Sarah or Emma or Hannah. A girl would like dolls and ice-skating and ballet lessons. A girl would read novels and stories, not old encyclopedias from rubbish skips. A girl would want to learn French knitting and the recorder and how to make a cake (that bit might be difficult). In fact, a girl would want the childhood that June had once had, the one she had despised so much when she became a teenager. Would her daughter grow up and treat her the way June treated her own mother? That would be ironic, wouldn’t it, like punishment fitting the crime. The baby gave her a double punch, right uppercut, left hook. Perhaps it wouldn’t be the kind of girl that June imagined. That would serve her right too.

  She conceived Eddie on holiday. Things had never been the same for June after she terminated that fetus. She’d been top of her class at Watson’s before but afterwards she lost interest in academic achievement. She’d limped on to the end of school and gone on holiday to Greece with a group of friends from her class. To Crete, although she’d never been sure where that was on the map. Eddie knew where it was on the map because he’d asked her, straight out, “Where was I conceived?” She’d caught him reading one of her baby books (she wished she could get Hawk to read one). It seemed unnatural for a boy of his age to be interested in things like that. June wondered if it was a sign that he was gay. She wouldn’t mind if he was, it was neither here nor there, she was all for gays—the more the better in fact—as long as it didn’t make his life more difficult than it already was.

  Eddie had been reading June’s baby books. He thought it was odd that women had to read books to know how to be a mother, although he could see that his own mother needed a bit of a hand. He was looking forward to helping with the baby. If he helped with her she would love him even more. And he’d be a big brother, a hero to her. He liked the idea of being a hero.

  He supposed she had been conceived in his mother’s big, never-made bed. He knew the mechanics of it and he could hear them at it all the time. It had obviously never struck his mother that if she could say “Eddie, come in here” from her bedroom without raising her voice and he could hear her in his own bedroom (although he usually pretended he couldn’t), then it was more than likely that he was also going to hear her when she was yelling her head off in there going “Ohgod, ohgod, ohgod.” It wasn’t clever and it wasn’t funny, as Mrs. McFarlane, his English teacher, would have said.

  Eddie, on the other hand, had been conceived on the island of Crete, which was Greek and in the Mediterranean and to which he hoped to sail one day on a fast wooden boat with a white sail like a wing. He had a book called an Ancient Greek Primer which he’d found in a jumble sale, but if he’d thought Latin was difficult then Greek took the biscuit, as his grandmother would have said. But it was beautiful to look at. They had done “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in English, which had proved a bit too advanced for them, as Mrs. McFarlane herself had admitted, but not before breaking down in tears, although that was probably because of her divorce rather than the Grecian urn, but he had remembered the thing about beauty and truth because it seemed profound, which was his word of the week.

  Tammy lay on her back with her legs in the air while he tickled her huge stomach. She looked as if she was going to burst any minute. He’d had to get a book out of the library on dogs because it didn’t look as if either Hawk or his mother was going to make an effort to find out about whatever the word for dogs was. Puppybirth. Ha ha ha.

  Another parents’ evening. Surely one a year was enough. June found schools oppressive, all those female teachers looking at her, wondering how old she was when she had Eddie, judging her. It was such a schemie school. She wished she could afford to live somewhere better, send Eddie to a good school. His life would be different (his future would be different) if he went somewhere like Watson’s, the teachers would take more interest in him, care about him more. At least a few more of the teachers knew who Eddie was now. “Eddie’s developing quite a personality,” his science teacher said. What did that mean? “Eddie,” his maths teacher ruminated, “he’s quite the comedian, isn’t he?” (It was never good when they said that.) “Eddie never seems to be quite with us,” the French teacher said, “but he’s pleasant enough.”

  “Are you all right?” his English teacher asked her. She made a sympathetic face at June, cocking her head on one side and smiling at her. “I can get you a cup of tea, if you want?” she offered. “I remember how tiring it is when you’re carrying such a weight around.” It took June a second to realize she meant the baby. June had left her contacts out and she squinted to see the English teacher’s name on the handwritten sign in front of her. “No thanks, Mrs…. McFarlane.” June felt about six years old. “Oh, call me Pam,” the English teacher said cheerfully, “everyone else does,” and June felt glad that “Pam” was one of Eddie’s teachers because she seemed the caring sort, but then she saw that little frown pinching her round maternal features as she said, “Eddie…” and June could see that she couldn’t remember which one he was.

  Despite her plump, mumsy look, she had a neurotic air about her—exactly the kind of woman June had always dreaded turning into. “One minute they’re a bump,” Mrs. McFarlane laughed, “and the next minute they’re huge teenagers. And then they’re gone.” She leaned across the table in a conspiratorial way. June shrank back. “Make the most of every day,” “Pam” said. “Every day is precious.”

  “Yeah, right,” June said.

  June couldn’t imagine Eddie leaving home. He was days away from his twelfth birthday. Every time Eddie had a birthday June tried—and usually failed—to disguise the fact that he had hardly any relatives and no friends at all. In order to increase his pathetic tally of cards, even June’s mother sent him two birthday cards, one from herself and one, written with her left hand, from an anonymous, mysterious admirer, the same one who sent him a valentine every year.

  June was sure that Eddie would never win a fistfight, never have a good job, and never receive a valentine from anyone other than his grandmother. And it would all be her fault somehow. She imagined him when she was dead—a solitary middle-aged man (“pleasant enough”) living in a stained and soiled flat, obsessively collecting newspapers and cereal packets.

  The American-Flag Fish—Jordanella floridae. A good name for a girl, Eddie thought. “Oh yes, and may I introduce my girlfriend, Miss Jordanella Floridae?” He chortled. His nearly adolescent antennae sensed his mother watching disapprovingly from the doorway and he deliberately picked his nose to annoy her. He was looking forward to having a girlfriend, he knew he’d end up with a geeky one but he didn’t mind. They’d be pals, the way he was going to be pals with his invisible sister.

  June regarded Eddie with despair. He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the carpet, bent almost double over an old book and cackling manically to himself. The new baby fluttered inside her, elbowing more room for itself. June wanted to tell Eddie that she loved him but instead she said, “Don’t pick your nose, Eddie.”

  “Do I look like my father?” he asked when she had already left the room. “I can’t remember what he looked like,” she shouted from the hallway. Which was more or less true. He didn’t often ask but when he did she always said his father was “some guy she met on holiday.” Which was also more or less true.

  “What do you want to do for your birthday, squirt?” Hawk asked. Hawk was staring at the table in front of him on which the innards of a barometer, acquired at a garage sale, were laid out in a way that suggested they would never go back together again.

  “Deep
Sea World,” Eddie replied instantly.

  “Again?”

  “Again.”

  “OH, NOT AGAIN.” June sighed as they headed out across the Forth Road Bridge in Hawk’s tinny old van. She was doing her best, but she felt sick. “It’s the fourth time this year, Eddie.”

  “It’s my birthday, I get to choose,” Eddie said cheerfully.

  “We could have gone to Butterfly World,” June said, more to herself than anyone. The baby would like Butterfly World. A girl who would like butterflies. Hawk’s van smelled of wet dog as they drove across the Forth Road Bridge, the water gray beneath their wheels.

  June didn’t like the sea. She had at one time but not after Crete. It had been her first holiday abroad—her parents had never been comfortable with the idea of foreign holidays, they contained too many potential hazards. There were four of them—two boys, Andy and Mark, herself, and a girl called Joanna, who was a midwife now (June had seen her at the antenatal clinic), which you would never have thought would be her fate if you’d met her then.

  They had taken a little boat out onto that vast expanse of azure as different from the Firth of Forth as was possible and when they were a long way from shore they all decided to go swimming off the boat. They’d been drinking retsina and smoking dope after a big lunch of oily moussaka and green beans (her father would have said they were going out of their way to die) but they were all reckless, or maybe they all thought they were immortal. June wasn’t sure that she thought at all at that age.

  June was a strong swimmer—her parents had made sure she could swim, as drowning was always high on their list of likely ways to die—and she had loved the feeling of kicking out in all that warm water with the sun like a bronze mirror in the sky, beating down on her back. They had seen flying silverfish and a school of dolphins before they dived in the water and June was hoping that one of the dolphins would come back and find her. She had seen a mosaic once, in some Roman villa on one of the sunless British holidays her parents took her on, and in the mosaic a boy was riding on a dolphin’s back, and June thought if she could do that, if she could ride on a dolphin, she would be happy. And if she could actually turn into a dolphin, then she might be happy forever.

  At first she thought that maybe it was a dolphin that took her down because, without any warning, she found herself being dragged abruptly to the bottom of the Mediterranean. Straight down, not the floundering, bubbling chaos of cramp or tiredness, but a speeding, rushing drop as if an anchor had been tied to her feet. And the odd thing was, when she arrived on the seabed, stepping lightly off the rock she had landed on as if getting off a bus, she could still breathe.

  She could remember seeing shells and fish, squid and crabs, she could remember the sunlight on the surface, a long way above her head. She could even remember how it felt to glide as effortlessly as a water nymph through the sea, but after that everything was confused in her memory and what happened next was so very rich and strange that she thought that someone must have given her acid. Certainly dropping acid was the only logical explanation she could come up with afterwards for the underwater kingdom—the massive throne of green marble decorated with gold and red coral and mother-of-pearl and cushioned with sealskin, the sea beasts that swam around like lapdogs, the massive white horses whose manes were huge waves endlessly breaking around their heads as they pawed the sand, impatient to be harnessed to his chariot. And only some serious psychotropic drug could have accounted for his colossal, roaring presence of which she seemed only to catch fragments—the disgusting smell of fish and whale fat, the fronds of seaweed entangled in his great beard, his seed like pearls, gushing into the blue water—

  “You all right?” Hawk asked her.

  “Fine,” June said.

  “What shall we call the baby?” Eddie asked from the back of the van and June’s heart gave a little flap at the word “we.” June and Eddie. June and Eddie and the baby. A family. She wanted to squash Eddie to her breast. Instead she said, “Close your mouth, Eddie. If the wind changes you’ll stay like that.”

  June knew that Eddie liked everything in Deep Sea World but that the thing he liked most was the Underwater Safari—the moving walkway in the huge acrylic-that-looked-like-glass tunnel that took you down, down, right into the kingdom of fishes, from the forests of sunlit kelp where the little fish darted, to the sandy flats where the skate hid on the bottom, to the depths of the abyss where the scary conger eels lurked, to the open ocean with its shimmering silverfish. June was convinced that the weight of the water would break the tunnel and they would all be swept away on a North Sea tsunami of cod and salmon and sea bass. She reminded herself to think happy thoughts for the sake of the baby.

  Someone called Jamie had a birthday today. Eddie knew that because there was a handwritten sign stuck up in the tunnel amongst the seaweed fronds, a sign that said HAPPY SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, JAMIE. Eddie didn’t suppose anyone had done the same for him but that didn’t stop him hoping.

  “Shite,” June said when she saw the happy birthday sign. “Shite, shite, shite.” Why didn’t she know you could do that? Because she was a crap mother, obviously. She imagined how happy Eddie would have been if he’d had a sign. She felt sick again.

  Afterwards, they ate in the cafeteria, an indifferent meal of chips and baked beans because it seemed wrong to eat fish. It was wet and windy outside and so cold that for once Hawk’s van felt warm. June wanted a cigarette. Surely the baby wouldn’t mind just one cigarette?

  Going home, they got stuck halfway across the bridge in a rush-hour traffic jam. Hawk drummed a tuneless tune on the steering wheel. The water beneath was a wretched steel color with a curdled froth on the wind-whipped waves. June wondered how long they would survive in the water if the suspension cables snapped.

  Eddie had his nose pressed to the back window of the van. The rain had cleared behind them, bathing Fife in a watery gold sun. Down in the water Eddie could see mermaids leaping out of the river like salmon, their goldfish tails catching the sun. Nereids sunbathed on Inchcolm Island while a huge shoal of silverfish whirled the Forth into a vortex in obeisance to their secret god—Eddie, King of the Fish. ‘Thank you, loyal subjects,” Eddie said, giving a regal wave to the inhabitants of his watery realm.

  “Don’t talk to yourself, Eddie,” June said. “It’s the first sign of madness.”

  June wondered if Hawk would hang around long enough to see the baby born. She wished he would leave now instead of putting her through the misery of waiting for him to go. Hawk himself was thinking that he fancied joining a tepee community. The baby inside June wasn’t thinking at all, it was leaping for the joy of leaping.

  Eddie laughed to himself because he, and only he, knew what the great blue-and-white marbled carp had said to him that day in the Botanics.

  Eddie leaned forward and put his small, hot, dirty hand into June’s hand and said, “Everything’s going to be OK, Mum. Trust me.”

  III

  TRANSPARENT

  FICTION

  Exultation is the going

  Of an inland soul to sea,

  Past the houses, past the headlands,

  Into deep eternity.

  EMILY DICKINSON

  MEREDITH ZANE, TWENTY-FIVE-year-old pharmacology postgrad from California, was working her way round Europe between finishing her doctorate and taking up a junior teaching post at MIT. Meredith was a goal-oriented sort of girl who thrived on purposes and objectives. She always had a just-washed look about her and was a preppy, patriotic dresser—Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein mainly, a little Hilfiger. She never wore black clothes or red lipstick. Her hair was pulled neatly back in a ponytail and she had traveled through her life so far in sensible flats and sneakers. She had been using both contraception and recreational drugs since she was sixteen but had never let either sex or mind-altering substances interfere with her progress. Untroubled by death or history or love, Meredith was, in short, an all-American girl.

  These latter omissions—lo
ve, history, death—would, she presumed, be rectified during the course of her Grand Tour of Europe. She prepared herself in the travel section of Borders, curled up on an overstuffed, overused sofa, surrounded by maps and guidebooks, plotting an itinerary that would take her to places the very names of which swooned with decadence—Paris, Venice, Lisbon, Seville, Naples, Siena, Vienna. Meredith’s emigrant blood was stirred by the idea of regaining entrance to the museum of Europe and raking over its musty contents in cathedrals and chateaus, temples and amphitheaters, where the air would be thick with the fine dust of the dead.

  Four months later and she was still in England, or London, to be more precise. The only other part of England she had seen was Middlesbrough, a godforsaken, Blade Runner kind of place, to which she had traveled with Fletcher for his grandmother’s funeral.

  Meredith had moved in with Fletcher three days after landing at Heathrow, more as a matter of convenience than commitment—Fletcher wasn’t the kind of guy to base any sort of life decision on. For one, he was English, and for two, he had an insecure streak as wide as a six-lane blacktop. Meredith was fond of Fletcher but in much the same way she’d been fond of Chip, a golden retriever that had been her childhood’s constant companion.

  Meredith had gone through life borrowing other people’s personalities rather than going to the trouble of developing her own. She found it was a good way of avoiding the anguished introspection that most people seemed prey to. Meredith’s own family provided a vast assortment of personae from which she could pick and mix. For example, if she had to lead a tricky seminar, she adopted the calm, authoritative personality of her own mother, Anna, a renowned pediatrician. For an altercation, in a store, say, over substandard goods, Meredith looked to her cousin Wilson, who was in such a permanent bad mood that it seemed as if she was allergic to life.