Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  For her current job—working in a Knightsbridge department store on a floor that sold accessories—Meredith adopted the serene yet worldly personality of her mother’s sister Jenna. Jenna ran an interior design company in Los Angeles where she worked almost entirely from a palette of neutral colors. She had once, famously, painted a movie star’s house in ten shades of white, only five of which were discernible to the naked eye. The client loved it. In this spirit, Meredith urged Fendi baguettes and Georgina von Etzdorf scarves onto customers who felt strangely flattered by the seriousness of her attentions.

  For her relationship with Fletcher, Meredith usually looked to the perky, cheerleading qualities of her cousin Baxter. Baxter, a beauty-pageant veteran by the age of seven, had, in turn, based her own character on that of her Air Stewardess Barbie. Fletcher responded well to this purloined personality. Meredith knew that most men would rather have Air Stewardess Barbie in bed with them than a girl with a doctoral thesis entitled “The Conservation of Telomere Length in the Human Myocardium: The Role of Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase.”

  Fletcher was a writer on the television soap Green Acres, a long-running, low-expectations kind of show. Meredith had never understood the attraction of soaps. Her cousin Tyler, an aficionado of daytime television, had often tried, to no effect, to tutor Meredith in the kitsch value of Melrose Place or The Bold and the Beautiful, but then Tyler was a performance artist in New York and therefore, by definition, completely flaky (which was, Meredith had discovered late one night returning from a party, a good personality to adopt if you wanted to avoid a ticket from a speed cop). Not that Green Acres bore any relation to its transatlantic colleagues—on Green Acres it was big news if a sheep crossed the road. Fletcher said he was waiting for something better to come up. Meanwhile, he put in a couple of days a week on Green Acres and spent the rest of the time watching Buffy on video, playing Gran Turismo on his PlayStation, or listening to alternative country songs about roadkill and suicide.

  If she’d been back in the States, Meredith wouldn’t have given Fletcher the time of day. But she wasn’t back in the States, she was in Europe—even if it was only England—and therefore she accepted, even embraced, a certain lowering of her standards.

  Meredith thought of herself as a tourist in Fletcher’s life. Tourism was in the blood of the Zanes. They had been inclined to nomadic behavior as long as anyone could remember. The first Zane had come to America from Poland way back when the Zanes were still Zanowskis. The Zanowskis were peddlers back then—ribbons and fabric and trimmings—working their way west with the frontier. The Zanes spread out across the newfound land like bison on the prairie. When they reached Chicago the Zanowskis transformed themselves into the less unwieldy Zanes and opened a five-floor department store. Other Zanes continued to roll the frontier back, pushing it all the way to the Pacific, where Meredith’s mother, Anna Zane, was born in Sacramento. Anna and her six younger sisters—Jenna, Tania, Vari, Debbi, Cara, and Nanci, all born after the war to an orthodontist and a housewife—were turned out on a domestic assembly line that could have rivaled Ford. The Zane sisters, as they were known in those American dream days, were the very best their country could produce. Their dairy-enriched bones were strong, their meatloaf-and-spinachfed muscles were supple, and their vitamin-nourished brains got them all into the top ten percentiles of their school classes—all except for Debbi, who was more of the homecoming-queen type and who married—disastrously—her high-school sweetheart (Baxter, the beauty-pageant princess, was her eldest).

  The Zane sisters’ dental work was carried out by their father, the orthodontist, so they all had great teeth and could smile for America, all except for Vari, who had a jumbled mouthful of molars that just wouldn’t straighten out—something that mystified her father right up to the day he shot himself.

  After the frontier fell into the sea, there was nowhere else for the more pioneering of the Zanes to go except back from where they came—to the cold Old World. This journey was not always a matter of choice. Henry Zane, for instance (one of the Idaho Zanes), went to Belgium in 1918 as a reluctant infantryman and never came back, dying in the influenza pandemic. Nor did Wesley (a Minneapolis Zane) return to the New World. He just managed to put a foot on French soil in 1944—or, more correctly, French sand—before being blown up on Omaha Beach. Before Henry and Wesley, the trail had been blazed by a considerably more willing Adelaide Zane, heiress to the Chicago department store fortune. Adelaide met and married a penniless Italian count while she was on the Grand Tour. Adelaide died in childbirth at the end of her first year of marriage and the Italian count inherited her fortune and disappeared into history. There was a tendency amongst some Zanes to think of Adelaide as a doomed, romantic figure, but in truth, she was a plain girl with a fondness for small dogs and licorice and her count was no Gilbert Osmond. Adelaide and her baby, the first Zane to be born in the Old World since 1801, were buried together in a churchyard in Florence.

  One of the European tasks that Meredith had given herself before leaving California was to discover the graves of all these mortally expatriate Zanes, and yet now the energy for that, or indeed for any other task, seemed to have all but disappeared. From almost the moment her American Airlines plane had touched down on English tarmac, Meredith had succumbed to an odd malaise, a mysterious kind of inertia that lay on her like a fog. She suspected she was suffering from an overabundance of history, something she’d never had to deal with in California. Or perhaps it was just the stale and sickly air that circulated and recirculated above the streets of London, leaving her lungs feeling like wrung-out cloths so that sometimes at night she would be woken by the sensation that a heavy weight, like a very large cat, had made itself comfortable on her chest while she was asleep and pressed all the air out of her. She would wake with a start, gasping like a newly caught fish, and lie awake for the rest of the night, lost in a strange miasma of doubt and dispiritedness. She worried that this might be her true character.

  Her cousin Tyler, the performance artist, was the only person Meredith had bothered to tell about Fletcher. It was such a temporary liaison that there seemed no point in worrying her mother and her aunts back home with it. They believed that any Zane who went to Europe was pretty much doomed, but marrying a foreigner more or less sealed your fate. The youngest of the Zane sisters, Nanci, had been the last Zane to succumb to the European curse. Nanci had undertaken her own Grand Tour in the seventies. England was her last port of call, in all senses of the word. She married an English guy whose name Meredith had forgotten and died under anesthetic in a dentist’s surgery in London. Nanci was just twenty-five when she died—the same age as Meredith was now.

  Meredith didn’t need to worry about tracking down Nanci’s grave. Nanci had moldered in a drier climate back in Sacramento—the Zanes flew her body home after her sudden checkout and she was buried next to her father, who had blown his brains out when he heard his baby had died at the hands of another dentist. Family legend had it that Nanci was missing a finger when she arrived back in California.

  Those Zane sisters were now the Zane aunts, and all of them, apart from the dead Nanci, had produced children. Even Jenna, who was gay, had improved the Zane gene pool by going to a sperm-donor center and buying the milt of a Boston neurosurgeon to make three daughters. An impoverished Korean concert pianist had provided the anonymous means for a fourth after Jenna grew bored with her progressively scientific spawn.

  Fletcher was not the first male to be puzzled by the extraordinary preponderance of female Zanes, made more baffling by the fact that all of Meredith’s generation seemed to have boys’ names. Meredith, Baxter, and Wilson—which sounded like a firm of lawyers—were all girls, as were the endlessly confusing Taylor, Tyler, Skyler, and Sky. Sydney and Jeri were sisters. Sky had sisters Storm and Summer (all three were offspring of Vari, who had taken an alternative path in the sixties). For a long time, Fletcher presumed that Meredith’s brother Bradley must be a girl. “Well, he almos
t is,” Meredith said. Apparently, Bradley had also used Baxter’s Air Stewardess Barbie as a role model.

  None of the Zanes were Christian (apart from Debbi, who was born again—twice) and they were certainly not Catholic, yet they seemed to go in for unfashionably large families. Fletcher wondered if they were trying to upset the gender balance by breeding nothing but girls. Men seemed dispensable to the Zane women. Fletcher suspected that their true goal was probably autogenesis—replicating themselves endlessly like a fractal, a Zane fractal. According to Meredith, her cousins were all either lesbians (Wilson, Taylor), virgins (Baxter, Sky), or—a considerably longer list—promiscuous (Tyler, Skyler, Sydney, Storm, Summer, Jeri, and Meredith herself).

  “But you’re not promiscuous,” Fletcher said to Meredith, more in optimism than in protest.

  “Not right this minute,” Meredith agreed (an unsatisfactory answer at best).

  Nor was Fletcher the first man to fall prey to an obsession with the Zane girls, a kind of Zaneitis, like an infection of the brain, so that he often found himself wondering what Sky was doing, who Jeri was with, what Tyler was wearing. He had never met any of these Zane cousins, of course, he’d never even seen a photograph, he just presumed they all looked exactly like Meredith. In his more paranoid moments, usually when he’d smoked too much dope, Fletcher found himself considering the possibility that the Zanes might actually be some form of extraterrestrial invasion. This would explain why they had such large families—broadcasting their alien seed so that eventually everyone on the planet would be Zane clones, all blond and blue-eyed like the children in Village of the Damned.

  “Would it help allay your insane fears if I told you that Sky and Storm were redheads and that Harry was fat?” Meredith offered.

  “No,” Fletcher said, “it wouldn’t.”

  MEREDITH WOKE WITH a start, unable to breathe, her heart stopped for a beat. When it started again, it was wild and fluttering like a small bird that had just escaped great danger. The clock on the bedside table said 3:30. That was when most people died, she knew. By the negative light of the moon, Fletcher looked as pale as a sleeping vampire by her side.

  Meredith wondered what would happen to her if she remained in London. Would the low level of oxygen affect her longevity? Stop her heart forever, before she’d had time to live her life, like poor Nanci and Adelaide before her? What if she too was a mere side shoot of the Zane family tree? Meredith experienced a small, unaccustomed thrill of fear at this thought. What if she were to succumb to the curse the Old World had laid on the Zanes, what if she were to fly home from her Grand Tour in the cargo bay of a 747, possibly minus a finger? Or worse.

  Meredith thought about the cells in her body slowly, invisibly dying, life never to be replaced. Meredith knew what mortality was, it was her speciality. No, not mortality, she silently corrected herself, her subject was immortality. Sometimes she tried to talk to Fletcher about her research. “Telomeres,” she would explain hopefully, “the physical ends of our chromosomes, nucleoprotein complexes that help to protect and reproduce chromosomes. The longer our telomeres, the longer we live.” But he would frown in the way he did when he was forced to do mental arithmetic. “Think of it,” she persisted, trying to find an analogy simple enough for him, “like the caps on the ends of sneaker laces, that stop them from fraying.”

  Meredith couldn’t sleep. She thought about her telomeres shortening each time a cell divided, like little doomsday clocks, counting out her cells’ days, shorter and shorter, counting out her body’s life, heartbeat by heartbeat, and was still awake when Selene drove her exhausted horses, gleaming with silvery sweat, the last few paces of the night.

  Meredith planned to sneak away, to slip out of the door in the middle of the night while Fletcher was asleep. She bought her tickets, handed in her notice at the department store, collected her dry cleaning, and studied her maps. She shot a whole roll of film of Fletcher so that when she went home she’d be able to show people the guy she lived with in London. She could imagine herself saying, “Yeah, he was a writer,” and her friends saying, “Cool.”

  Meredith was due to fly to Paris on Saturday morning. On the Friday she discovered the key to eternal life. This was how it happened. Meredith came home from her last day working in the department store, her head still full of pashminas and tiny jeweled bags, and found Fletcher staring wild-eyed at his computer screen. His desk was littered with empty yogurt cartons and overflowing ashtrays and on the stereo a country band was singing about the back roads of Texas in a way that made Meredith want to shoot out the speakers.

  “I’m trying to get this finished,” Fletcher said, typing with one hand while lighting a cigarette with the other, “so I can take it with me tonight to show Fiddy Ross.”

  “Fiddy Ross?” Meredith repeated vaguely.

  “Yes, Fiddy Ross.” Fletcher frowned impatiently at her. “The television producer? The television producer who has invited us round to her house for dinner tonight. A dinner party,” he added unnecessarily, enunciating as if speaking to a foreigner. Which he was, Meredith supposed.

  “OK,” she said, acquiescing in an easy Baxterish kind of way out of respect for the fact that this was the man she was planning to abandon without a backward glance the following day.

  Fletcher jabbed a nicotine-stained finger at the computer screen. “It’s the treatment for a TV screenplay,” he said, “a kind of historical-medical-detective thing, sort of Silent Witness meets The House of Eliott. I’m going to give it to Fiddy Ross tonight.”

  “Is that wise?” Meredith asked.

  “Wise?” Fletcher repeated as if the word was slightly beyond his reach.

  “Well, it’s just a social occasion.”

  “They’re television people,” Fletcher said, “nothing’s ‘just’ a social occasion for them.”

  Meredith and Fletcher had arrived late and breathless at Fiddy Ross’s front door after being stuck on the tube. It was an unpleasantly humid night, sullen thunder grumbling and rolling around the sky above Primrose Hill. The front door was opened by a gloomy girl who greeted them suspiciously. “The guests are all here,” she said truculently when Fletcher mentioned his name. Indifference finally got the better of her and she let them in.

  It wasn’t what Meredith would have called a dinner party. A dinner party was something her mother used to throw, before her father left, of course, before her father left to live on a boat in Florida with a Cuban lap dancer. Before her divorce, which she had handled very badly, Anna Zane had done everything well throughout her life, including dinner parties, using recipes from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which impressed even the relatively sophisticated palates of the Sacramento professionals who were the guests at her table. Fiddy Ross’s idea of a dinner party, on the other hand, was a much more ad hoc affair, a buffet which had clearly been purchased in Marks and Spencer’s food hall and laid out in the kitchen, a space too small for all the people crowded into it. The food was already congealing unattractively in the overheated atmosphere. People were eating and talking simultaneously, like overly conversational vultures, the food sometimes falling out of their mouths in their eagerness to talk.

  Fletcher and Meredith stood awkwardly in the doorway like shy creatures arriving late at a waterhole. Fiddy, for Meredith presumed it must be her, suddenly spotted them and rushed over as if they were masked intruders, her features fixed in an interrogative spasm.

  “Fletcher,” Fletcher said, “Fletcher Smith. We met at the Queer Street screening. You invited me tonight. You did,” he added helpfully as Fiddy twisted her neck and turned her face up like a thoughtful flamingo in order to access her memory. Fiddy had strange hair, dyed a kind of magenta color and cropped in a spiky, close cut that belonged on a much younger woman.

  “Yes!” she said so suddenly that Meredith flinched, “yes, of course, I’m so sorry, really the most appalling memory. Everyone,” she clapped her hands like a primary-school teacher, “this is Fletc
her and…?” Fiddy seemed to see Meredith for the first time.

  “Meredith,” Meredith said. “Meredith Zane.” None of Fiddy’s guests paid any attention to this introduction, except for one, a man standing near them, shaped like a bowling ball. “Zane,” he boomed in an American accent. “Did you say ‘Zane’? No relation to Monty Zane, used to be with Paramount? From Atlanta originally, I believe.”

  “The Georgia Zanes.” Meredith shrugged. “There were a lot of them.”

  The bowling-ball guy was smoking a cigar after the fashion of a cartoon tycoon. He stuck out his surprisingly small, square hand. “Lester,” he said. “Lester Goldman.” Meredith shook the hand, aware of a strange choking noise coming from Fletcher by her side. “The Lester Goldman?” he managed to say. Whereas others might have modestly demurred that there were surely other Lester Goldmans in the world, this Lester Goldman merely said, “Yeah, the Lester Goldman.”

  “The biggest film producer in the world,” Fletcher murmured, almost faint with happiness, like a man who had just been shown the small, secret, side door through which he might gain entrance to heaven. Meredith left him to it.

  Ignoring the increasingly unattractive food, she poured herself a glass of wine and attempted to mingle with the other guests. No easy task as even before she had introduced herself their eyes were roaming round the room looking for someone more interesting.

  The number of people in the kitchen seemed to have doubled. Although most of them appeared to be media people of one kind or another, they nearly all seemed to have problems communicating. A very tall, very black girl who looked like a model was refusing to talk to anyone, not just Meredith. Fiddy’s PA, a Spanish woman called Paula, was speaking incomprehensible English, apparently giving out orders to people, and growing increasingly angry when no one obeyed. A producer called Will, a boyish lazy-looking sort, was having a furious, sotto voce argument with his girlfriend, Masha, the gloomy girl (even gloomier now) who had opened the door to them. Fiddy herself moved amongst her guests like a queen while people cooed ridiculously flattering things at her. “You are clever, Fiddy, all this lovely food. Just like Nigella.”