Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  Gwen came over and put an arm around Nina. All the little snakes on her head hissed at Fielding as she led Nina away. “Fucking hell, Fielding,” Gwen said over her shoulder. “What did you do to her?”

  Fielding contemplated his reflection in the mirror in the men’s room. His cheek was branded with a livid red handprint that looked as if it would never fade. Perhaps he’d be marked forever as a punishment for whatever it was he’d done. Was there a rogue Fielding out there, playing havoc with his life? What was the last thing he could remember? Fielding frowned at his mirrored self. He remembered going home. He had a vague memory of looking through his wardrobe, deciding what to wear for his date with Nina and then—nothing. Total amnesia. Was that a Schwarzenegger film? Maybe he was concussed. Or brainwashed.

  Joshua came into the men’s room. “Blimey, Fielding,” he said, “what happened to you?” Fielding hadn’t thought there was anyone left who still said “blimey.” “What did you do—join the Red Hand Gang?” Joshua laughed—rather a lot—at his joke.

  “You missed the fracas then?” Fielding sighed.

  “Fracas? What fracas? Have you been up to your tricks again, Fielding?”

  Fielding peered closely into the mirror. He looked perfectly normal—his eyes a little more bloodshot than usual perhaps, his skin a little pale, but on the whole he looked like himself. “Josh?”

  “Joshua,” Joshua corrected pleasantly.

  “Can you think of a reason why someone would forget hours and hours of their life? Forget what they’d been doing in that time?”

  “Like sleepwalking, you mean?”

  “Sleepingwalking, of course!” Fielding said. How reasonable that sounded. “Brilliant, Josh, thanks.” Fielding left the men’s room, feeling suddenly jaunty. Which was a Josh kind of word, he thought.

  “It’s Joshua,” Joshua said quietly to the mirror.

  Fielding was ravenous. He couldn’t remember a time now when he hadn’t been hungry. He thought he must have some kind of metabolic disease, perhaps one of its side effects was loss of memory. Fielding took a tuna melt as well as a ham and cheese ploughman’s into the viewing room and settled down with a Green Acres tape. The Green Acres weeklong special involved a petrol-tanker crash, a wedding in which the bride of Digby Craddock, the shepherd, turned out to be a transvestite, and a subplot in which Veronica Steer, the village postmistress, suspected a young thug of sheep rustling. Green Acres wouldn’t be Green Acres without an underlying narrative device about sheep. Fielding made a note of that sentence; it would make a good opening line for his review. He wondered if Joshua had interviewed any sheep when he was in the sticks doing his Green Acres special. Was it sticks, or was it Styx? Was the Styx the river that made you forget everything? Or was that Lethe?

  “Are you all right?” A tall girl was frowning at him. Fielding racked his brains—a journalism student, on a work placement, frighteningly clever. Sarah? Hannah?

  “It says DO NOT DISTURB on the door,” Fielding said to her, through a mouthful of cheese and pickle.

  “It always says that.”

  “Maybe it always means it. Did you want something? Sarah?”

  “Emma. I just wanted to say thank you to you actually.”

  Fielding groaned and slapped his forehead with his palm. “Oh God, I didn’t have sex with you, did I?”

  Emma looked at him in horror. “Is that some kind of joke?”

  “Yes,” Fielding said quickly, “and a very bad one. Sorry. What was it that I actually helped you with?” Fielding tried to sound offhand but not remembering produced a physical pain in his head. His stomach gave out a huge groaning rumble. How could he be hungry at the same time as he was eating?

  Emma frowned at him in the same primary-school–teacher way that Gwen did. Where did they breed these scary girls? Some kind of Amazonian boarding school in the Home Counties?

  “The piece on Buffy,” Emma said. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without your unbelievable knowledge…”

  Fielding preened a little.

  “… of trivia,” Emma concluded.

  “And you’re sure it was me who helped you?” Fielding asked, although without too much hope. It seemed unlikely anyone else in the office, even Joshua, could match Fielding in the Buffy stakes.

  “Yes, I am sure it was you, Fielding. Mind you, I have to say,” Emma added thoughtfully, “you did seem different yesterday.”

  “Different? How?”

  “I don’t know. Smarter. Less of an airhead. All that stuff about Kant’s theories of the noumenal and phenomenal self and how it relates to the Slayer. Quite impressive.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Shame you’re such a prick.”

  “Thanks.”

  Fielding had imagined that it might be difficult to fall asleep with the voyeuristic eye of the camera on him but within minutes of setting up the CCTV system lent to him by Greg, Fielding was dead to the world and only woke up when the alarm shrilled in his ear. Armed with strong coffee, he settled down to watch the tape, eager for any evidence of somnambulation. Even on fast-forward, Fielding’s night was remarkably boring, almost worse than watching Jemima Bates, which, he remembered with a twitch of guilt, aired tomorrow and he still hadn’t written a review for it. Fielding was surprised to see what a restless sleeper he was—tossing and turning all night long as if plagued by demons. But he never left the bed, not once.

  He phoned Joshua. “Josh, did you see me last night, did we go out?”

  Josh laughed. “We certainly did, we went—”

  “Thanks.” Fielding put the phone down. So, now he knew that the “other Fielding,” as he thought of him, was not his sleeping self. Fielding racked his brains for an explanation that was within the bounds of reason. Identical twins? Fielding had once dated an identical twin but had found the whole concept freakish. He didn’t see that there was much difference between having an identical twin and having a doppelgänger. He phoned his mother. He knew she would already be breakfasted, groomed, and coiffed and sitting in her cashmere and pearls wondering what to do for the rest of the day.

  “Fielding,” she said when she picked up the phone. “You’re up early.”

  Fielding tried to sound as if he was asking an everyday kind of question. “I didn’t have an identical twin that you had adopted at birth, did I?”

  There was a surprised clink of ice cubes on the other end of the phone. Did his mother really start on the gin this early in the morning? For a giddy moment Fielding thought his mother was going to answer in the affirmative but then heard her take a discreet swig before saying, rather cautiously, “I don’t think so, Fielding.”

  Fielding skirted warily round the edge of the office trying to keep as far away as possible from Nina, Gwen, Emma, or Flavia. (When exactly was it decided that the world was going to be run by women? Fielding had obviously missed that meeting.) He settled himself at his desk and industriously opened e-mails, drinking three lattes one after the other while eating his way through a bag of Starbucks muffins.

  “Hungry?” Joshua laughed.

  “Always,” Fielding said.

  “So, Fielding—last night was a bit of a blur was it? How did you get on?” Joshua asked, with what looked suspiciously like a smirk.

  “Slept like a baby,” Fielding said, keeping his eyes on the screen to discourage Joshua’s relentless bonhomie.

  “Really?” Joshua sounded astonished. “I would have thought that stripper would have kept you up all night.”

  “Stripper?”

  “Well, OK,” Joshua said, “lap dancer, but same difference really, isn’t it?”

  “Stripper?”

  “The one you went home with. From Bottoms Up. The show bar.”

  Fielding leaped up from his desk and grabbed Joshua by the arm. He steered him into the viewing room and pushed him into the chair.

  “Josh—”

  “Joshua.”

  “Listen carefully. I was not in a show bar with you last nig
ht.”

  “Oh, I see.” Joshua laughed. “It’s OK, your secret’s safe with me.”

  “No, no, no. Listen.” Fielding spoke slowly as if to an idiot. “I wasn’t there.”

  “I’m not surprised you can’t remember. I’ve never seen anyone knock back White Russians like that.”

  “I don’t drink White Russians.”

  “You did last night.”

  “No—it was someone else, someone who looks like me. I, me, Fielding Carter, was not in that club with you last night.”

  “Where were you then?”

  “Asleep in my bed.” Fielding took the CCTV tape and thrust it into the video. “Watch,” he said to Josh.

  Joshua watched in silence for a few seconds. “You video yourself sleeping, Fielding?” he said, puzzled.

  “Not usually.”

  “Is this some kind of reality TV?”

  “No, it is reality, Josh,” Fielding said, “real reality. See the date on it, see the time on it? I’m sleeping at the same time as I’m in the show bar. Watch while I fast-forward.”

  “OK, OK. But you could have falsified the date on the tape.”

  “What possible reason could I have for wanting to doctor this tape?”

  “So, what are you saying, Fielding?” Joshua frowned. “You think you have a double?”

  “What other explanation is there?” an agitated Fielding demanded. “How else could I be in two places at once?”

  “Identical twins separated at birth?” Joshua hazarded.

  “No, my mother doesn’t think so.”

  “She’s not sure?”

  “Never mind,” Fielding said dismissively. “Any other reasons?”

  “There’s a parallel universe with another Fielding in it,” Joshua offered. “Another Joshua. Another Flavia. Another Gwen. Another Russell—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get the idea,” Fielding said impatiently.

  “Temporal anomaly—they happen in Voyager all the time.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A clone?”

  “Doubtful,” Fielding said.

  “Oh, I know,” Joshua said eagerly, “it’s like that Hans Christian Andersen story where the guy’s shadow takes over his life and then has him killed.”

  “Likely or not?”

  “Not,” Joshua admitted. “You’re insane?”

  “Possible,” Fielding conceded. “But I don’t feel insane, although of course I don’t know what insane feels like. Maybe it feels like normal?”

  “Paranoid and delusional?”

  “Almost certainly. It doesn’t alter the fact that there’s someone out there who looks just like me and is living my life, only apparently with more success.”

  “That’s like in Buffy,” Joshua said enthusiastically, “when Xander had a double, which was played by his real-life identical twin, of course—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know and it turned out Xander was split in two and the two halves couldn’t live without each other. I really don’t think that’s what’s happened.”

  “There only seems to be one answer then,” Joshua said. “You have a doppelgänger. It happens all the time.”

  “It does?”

  The viewing room was becoming increasingly claustrophobic. Fielding opened the door and started walking towards his desk, Joshua at his heels like an enthusiastic sheepdog.

  “I mean there are endless metaphorical implications,” Joshua rambled on. “The two sides of the self, good and evil, and so on. It’s the whole basis of Buffy—evil Willow, robot Buffy, when Buffy and Faith change places, all the stuff with Ben and Glory—”

  “Josh!” Fielding was surprised to hear himself yelling. People in the office stopped working and looked at him. Fielding took a deep breath to calm himself. “Josh, I never thought I would ever say this but—Buffy isn’t real.”

  Joshua laughed and looked around the Features department. “And you think this is real, Fielding?” He loped off, still laughing.

  “Ah, Mr. Fielding,” Crawford said, suddenly appearing at Fielding’s side, “look at it.”

  “Look at what?”

  Crawford swept a hand around in the air in a grand gesture that encompassed the entire room. “The Plain of Judgment and the Vale of Mourning.”

  “Crawford?”

  “Yes?”

  “Piss off, would you?”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Fielding!”

  “Christ, Flavia, you’ll give someone a heart attack sneaking up like that.”

  Flavia looked at him with distaste. “Have you written that Jemima Bates review yet?”

  “Almost finished.”

  “You look like hell, Fielding.”

  “I haven’t been myself recently.”

  Fielding took the Jemima Bates tape into the viewing room. He had lost count of how many times he had started to watch it and fallen asleep. It was like some dreadful Sisyphean task he had been set. Fielding wondered what the other Fielding was doing. Undoubtedly having more fun than this Fielding was. Was it possible for only one of them to be active at any one time? Perhaps it was like matter and antimatter and the two Fieldings (strangely, Fielding had begun to think of his double as an equal) couldn’t exist at the same time. What was his doppelgänger up to, Fielding wondered? Was its goal to get rid of the original and take his place? Or simply to destroy his life? Whom the gods punish they first make mad, wasn’t that what they said?

  Fielding woke up in the dark. The last thing he remembered was Jemima Bates scurrying through the back alleys of Victorian London, looking for the perpetrator of some dastardly crime while being pursued by a shadowy figure. Fielding wondered what time it was. The familiar illuminated dial of his bedside clock was dark. Perhaps there had been a power cut. Fielding was incredibly cold and uncomfortable. He looked around him. He was lying in an alley.

  Fielding lay very still for a while, hoping that he was hallucinating, and only moved when forced to by the appearance of a mangy feral dog sniffing around his head. For an awful moment Fielding thought it had three heads. He’d occasionally seen double after a rough night, but never triple. Thankfully, the three heads resolved into one.

  Fielding ached all over. Apart from his usual raging hunger and thirst, his head was pounding with the worst kind of hangover headache. A pool of vomit—possibly his own—proved attractive to the dog. Fielding stumbled to his feet. His mouth tasted of brass and a fur of nicotine had coated his tongue. He was no longer in possession of his wallet or his keys so he supposed he must have been mugged or robbed while lying in a stupor in the street. A tramp lurched past and shouted something at Fielding. For good measure he tried to kick the dog, which cowered and snarled without conviction. “Coin,” the tramp said, holding out a filthy hand. He smelled of something decomposing, potatoes or possibly mushrooms.

  Fielding showed his empty pockets to the tramp, who seemed to find this hysterically funny. “No boat trip for you, sonny,” the tramp laughed, and then shambled off uttering more incomprehensible oaths and curses.

  A chilly dawn broke over London as Fielding staggered through its streets. How could he have fallen so low? He reached the door of his flat and felt for the spare key he kept hidden above the door frame.

  His flat felt like heaven after his night alfresco. It was warm and, although not particularly clean or tidy, wasn’t spotted with vomit and dog excrement. A tantalizing smell of fresh coffee wafted from the kitchen. Fielding padded through his own flat like a cat burglar. In the kitchen, dirty cups and plates encrusted with croissant flakes attested to breakfast—two plates and two cups, Fielding noticed. In the bathroom someone must have just stepped out of the shower. The room was still gloriously warm and steamy and Fielding had to resist the urge to peel off his filthy clothes and scrub off the experiences of the previous night (whatever they were). Instead he investigated the living room, where empty wine bottles and an overflowing ashtray were evidence enough of someone else’s occupation during his absence. More
alarmingly, the stale air bore a trace of a familiar noxious perfume and, coming from the direction of the bedroom, Fielding caught the sound of two voices, one male and one female. He crept up behind the closed door and listened to the odd noises coming from within—whoops and yelps and the occasional harsh little scream that could belong to no one but Flavia and which suggested that some kind of mating ritual was in progress.

  Proceeding with caution, Fielding opened the door to the bedroom. Flavia, unattractively flushed with exertion, was lighting up a cigarette. She gave a little scream of horror when she caught sight of Fielding. Her partner lay next to her, equally postcoital. Every aspect of his figure was familiar. Fielding tried closing his eyes and breathing deeply for ten seconds but when he opened his eyes again, nothing had changed. “You’re me,” he said weakly.

  “On the contrary,” the other Fielding said with a superior smile, “you’re me.”

  Fielding shut the bedroom door and went into the living room. He switched on the television and watched cartoons. If he was lucky he would wake up soon and find it was all a bad dream. If he was very lucky.

  VIII

  THE CAT LOVER

  For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger

  CHRISTOPHER SMART, “JUBILATE AGNO”

  For Ali and Sarah

  IT WAS A wild night. An urban squall dislodged slates and chimney pots while an ill-tempered tempest uprooted trees in the parks and swayed suspension bridges as if they were skipping ropes. Aeolus, the keeper of the winds, set free Boreas and he flapped his dusky wings, sending great gusts of wind across London and the Home Counties. Old ladies were swept up and whirled around in the air, like dried-up autumn leaves. The little birds were stripped from the branches and batted like shuttlecocks across Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Cows were blown over in the fields and pigs flew in Berkshire. All the dogs of Buckinghamshire went mad trying to catch their tails.