Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  For no obvious reason that Vincent could discern, Nanci suggested they get married, which they did with absolutely no fuss in a register office. Nanci wore a dirndl skirt, a denim shirt, and a crocheted waistcoat and braided her brown hair in two thick Saxon plaits. For her bouquet she carried a bunch of daffodils, and was congratulated by a horde of friends, all of whom she had accumulated with consummate ease in six months of living in London. Nanci herself was the only friend of Vincent’s at the wedding.

  Vincent had absolutely no idea what Nanci saw in him but presuming it must be something to do with his Englishness (he was no longer recognizable as a Scot), he tried to play to his strengths—buying tweedy jackets with elbow patches, wearing spectacles he didn’t really need, and riding an old 1950s bicycle to and from Goldsmiths, where he was now a junior lecturer.

  Vincent and his new bride planned to abandon their damp English abode at the end of the academic year and take a trip to California from which Vincent hoped very much that they wouldn’t return. Nanci’s family couldn’t wait to meet Vincent, apparently. The orthodontist had seven daughters who all, from photographic evidence, looked just like Nanci, who was the youngest. Vincent thought of them as the Zane Sisters, like septuplets or a singing troupe. Or the Pleiades. The whole family, even a couple of aunts, wrote letters to Vincent, welcoming him into their “tribe.” Nanci’s mother signed herself “Mom.” Vincent couldn’t wait to be absorbed into their miraculous, mysterious midst. He wondered if he could change his name to theirs—“Vince Zane” sounded so much more interesting (a cowboy or a gangster perhaps) than Vincent Petrie. His surname was the only thing that remained of his father now. “And you,” Nanci said. “You’re his legacy too, honey.”

  Nanci had a rogue wisdom tooth that was the subject of endless professional-sounding conversations on the phone with her father in California, during which they debated whether she should wait for him to fix it or put herself in the hands of a dentist to whom she was a stranger. Nanci was the favorite child of “Dad” and consulted him about most things, tooth-related or not. In the end, the tooth became so painful that Nanci opted to have it done by an NHS dentist. Her father recommended full anesthesia although the NHS dentist took some persuading, accustomed as he was to inflicting pain.

  Vincent was giving a tutorial when the police arrived, a male and a female constable, who hovered politely on the threshold of the room as if they couldn’t bring themselves to interrupt his ramblings on Henry Vaughan. They came with supportive expressions already fixed on their faces. Vincent had a surge of guilt at the sight of them although the last illegal thing he had done was to try—and fail—to smoke a joint in 1973.

  They explained everything very carefully to him in the car on the way to the hospital, but try as he might Vincent couldn’t understand what they were saying. Even in the mortuary where he identified Nanci’s body, he still couldn’t understand why she lay insensible and waxy with a large hospital sheet pulled up to her chin. “Just like a corpse,” he said to the policewoman, who frowned and stared at the floor. Vincent was expecting Nanci to fling the sheet off and jump off the hospital trolley. But she didn’t because she’d had a massive reaction to the anesthetic in the dentist’s chair and her heart had stopped and could not be persuaded to start again.

  Nanci’s family asked Vincent if he would mind if her body was shipped back to Sacramento and, seeing as there were so many more of them than there was of him, he felt it would be churlish to refuse. The day Nanci was flown away in the cargo hold of an America-bound Boeing, he spent his last minutes with her alone in the Cooperative Funeral Home. He had considered snipping off one of her plaits as a keepsake, the bright hair about the bone and so on, but in the end had decided it might look too obvious and anyway he wanted something more essential, something coralline or chalky—the bedrock of Nanci-with-an-i. To this end he came armed with bolt cutters, purchased as furtively as a murder weapon from a local ironmonger. “Sorry about this,” Vincent whispered to a silently decaying Nanci as he snipped off her little finger, wrapped it in a paper napkin, and slipped it in his pocket.

  He stood on the observation deck at Manchester Airport and silently saluted his cold, slightly incomplete wife as she rose into the sky. He clutched her finger in his hand. It wasn’t the whole Nanci, but it was something. He hoped that at the moment of death she had found herself in the middle of a truly great workout and that it had given her the answers to all the questions she hadn’t had time to ask.

  “A relative?” a woman on the observation deck asked him as he gazed like an augur at the skies.

  “My wife,” Vincent affirmed.

  “She’ll be back soon,” the woman said, sensing the quiver in Vincent’s voice.

  Vincent doubted that very much but he didn’t say so.

  IF THE ZANES noticed that a bit of Nanci was missing they never said so. They kept in touch with Vincent over the years. The sisters sent him photographs of weddings and christenings and family celebrations. He garnered formal portraits of various combinations of Zanes as well as less formal snaps of younger Zanes—in Little League livery, in Halloween rig, in gowns and mortarboards. They had strange American names (Bradley, Meredith, Jeri) and all looked alike. Vincent had no idea who any of them were. “Mom” sent him Christmas cards, although a couple of years down the line she changed into “Ellen,” as if she had realized how absurd it was to call herself mother to a man she had never met. “Dad” never wrote because he killed himself with a shotgun right after Nanci’s death.

  Vincent had thought about killing himself too but he was in thrall to such a numbing inertia that he found it difficult to do anything so decisive. For months afterwards he slept with the finger beneath his pillow and tried to dream about Nanci, but she never came. At first he had allowed the finger to mummify on the mantelpiece but it had arrived at such a disagreeable state, hard and wrinkled and so unlike Nanci’s living digit, that he had rendered it—stewing it for hours in an old aluminium saucepan. This was not an act undertaken lightly and Vincent retched violently several times during the course of his unholy cuisine. He was satisfied with the result he achieved, however—the clean, white bone that was freighted with a kind of magic. Of lesser things have saints been made, Vincent thought.

  Vincent carried the finger bone in his pocket as other men might have carried a lucky coin or talismanic charm. Vincent hoped that if there was a Judgment Day—something he thought unlikely in the extreme—that on the world’s last night Nanci’s soul wouldn’t come looking for her body and discover it needed her stolen finger in order to be fully resurrected.

  When Vincent himself died the finger bone was found and discarded by his wife as part of the meaningless jetsam of her husband’s life.

  Vincent’s life carried on. He returned to his long-forgotten native city and took a job teaching in a private school. He tried to live as quietly as possible and not attract the wrath of the gods. He died too young, everyone agreed, but in the end it was a peaceful “crossing over” (his wife’s preferred term). A virulent cancer had started in his lymph nodes and quickly metastasized first into his liver and then into his bones. At the end he was wreathed in morphine but right up until the last day was still able to recognize his wife and sons—two headstrong angry teenagers quite cowed by his illness. He wanted to tell them that everything was all right, but he couldn’t speak and besides he had no logical evidence on which to base that belief.

  When Vincent entered into the world of light he was in the company of Georgie, exquisitely real and vivid in a way she never had been for him before. He was holding her hand and they were watching a flock of birds flying overhead. Starlings, Vincent noted, a species of bird he hadn’t previously realized he liked so much.

  Georgie herself, since you ask, was spinning round on the waltzer when her soul took flight, forever sixteen and all her life ahead of her.

  X

  TEMPORAL ANOMALY

  The hardest thing in this world is to live
in it. Be brave. Live. For me.

  BUFFY SUMMERS, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER

  MARIANNE WAS THINKING about lemons when she died. More specifically, she was thinking about the lemons she had brought back from the Amalfi coast many weeks ago and which were now quietly decaying at the bottom of her fridge. It was raining, hard Scottish rain, and everyone was driving too fast, including Marianne, because no one wanted to be on the M9 in the rain, in the gloaming light.

  Marianne wondered if the lemons were still good enough to cook with. Perhaps she could make a lemon meringue pie. She’d never made one but that didn’t mean she couldn’t. Marianne imagined how surprised her husband and son would be if she presented them with a lemon meringue pie for supper. She imagined herself walking into the dining room, bearing the pie aloft like a smiling, old-fashioned wife, like her own mother.

  She had bought the lemons from a stall by the side of the road, when they were driving back to their hotel in Ravello. That was the day they had taken the boat trip to Capri. It had been very hot and all three of them had been irritable because Capri had turned out not to be what they had expected. It was full of expensive designer boutiques and rude Italians and all the cafes were busy. When Marianne saw the stall with the lemons she made Robert stop the car and he cursed her because he said it was too dangerous to stop and she said he was too cautious and he said that she was irresponsible and she said that was unfair and all the time Liam had played Donkey Kong on his GameBoy in the back of their rented Fiat Brava and said nothing.

  The old woman in charge of the stall filled a plastic carrier bag with the lemons without saying a word and gave Marianne a scornful look as if she had nothing but contempt for tourists, especially the ones who wanted her lemons.

  Marianne took the plastic bag on the plane home as hand-luggage, stuffing the lemons into the overhead locker on their scheduled flight out of Naples, and when she opened the locker again on the runway at Edinburgh Airport she was hit by their lemony fragrance—sharp and sweet at the same time—which reminded her of the lemon soaps she used to get in her Christmas stocking. When Robert saw the plastic bag he said, “You’ll never do anything with them,” and he had been right. But now she could surprise him, and it would remind him of the sunshine, like a gift. Or, of course, it might remind him of the road between Positano and Ravello and the heat and her crankiness and the arguments which hadn’t gone away but were only waiting for the right time to resurface.

  The car was buffeted by wind and the weather report on Forth FM said that the road bridge was closed to high-sided vehicles. Marianne wondered if she had a recipe for lemon meringue pie. She could phone her mother and ask her to read one out to her from one of her many cookery books. She fumbled for her mobile in her handbag on the backseat of her car—Robert always yelled at her if he saw her do that—and speed-dialed her mother’s number. Her mother sounded distracted when she answered, as if she’d already put Marianne out of her thoughts even though it was less than an hour since they’d kissed good-bye.

  “Have you got a good recipe for lemon meringue pie?” Marianne asked but then she never caught her mother’s answer because a darkness, like a great pair of black wings, covered her car and she could no longer hear her mother or the car engine or the rain or Forth FM on the radio, only the deafening sound of Hades’ chariot wheels as he overtook her on the inside lane, so close that she could smell the rank sweat on the flanks of his horses and the stench of his breath like rotten mushrooms. And then Hades leaned out of his chariot and punched a hole in the windscreen of her Audi and Marianne thought, “This is really going to hurt.”

  Marianne could see a fire engine making its way along the hard shoulder of the motorway, its blue lights sparkling in the dark. She had never noticed before that the blue lights on emergency vehicles were the color of sapphires. Good Indian sapphires. Her father had been a jeweler and when she visited his shop he would take out the little drawers from the mahogany cabinet in which he kept his cut gems, graded and sorted by size and type, and show her the jewels, like tiny stars, resting on velvet cushions that were blacker than the night. Blacker than Hades’ horses.

  The traffic was tailed back on the eastbound carriageway for as far as Marianne could see—which was quite a long way, because she was suspended some twenty feet in the air. The Audi was slewed across the road, surrounded by more flashing sapphire lights. Broken glass glistened around it like carelessly scattered diamonds. An ambulance was parked with its doors open while the paramedics knelt on the road, treating the accident victim. A traffic-police car and two big police Honda 1100s formed a barricade around the paramedics. The police themselves stood around, looking on, like a reluctant audience. The fluorescent yellow of their jackets, slick with rain, was brighter than a million lemons in the darkness.

  A gust of wind caught Marianne and she drifted closer to the accident. She wasn’t surprised to see herself down there, broken and crazed with blood, as the paramedics stuck tubes and needles into her and spoke in low professional tones to one another. Marianne supposed she was hovering (literally, it seemed) between life and death, her soul waiting to fly away while her body clung to the earth. You heard about it all the time. Near-death experiences. One of the paramedics was attaching defibrillator pads to Marianne’s chest. She wondered if she would feel it when they shocked her. She wished she could tell the paramedics and the police how grateful she was for what they were doing for her, how kind they were. Especially as she looked like such a hopeless case from up here.

  There was no sign, she noticed, of a tunnel or of a white light, no glimpse of the elysian fields. Her father didn’t appear to be waiting for her on the other side, nor was Buster, the little Westie she had loved so much as a child. Marianne thought that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad leaving this life behind if she could have Buster back in the next.

  On the opposite carriageway of the M9, the cars crawled past, their brake lights forming a slow-moving chain of glittering rubies. Marianne could see the pale faces staring out from the windows of the cars, their expressions sober with a momentary horror that would be forgotten by the time they reached the warmth and shelter of their houses.

  The really stupid thing was that she had been nearly home herself, almost at the turnoff for the bypass, when death stopped for her. Marianne would have given anything to be at home right now, to walk through her front door just one more time and see the smile on her son’s face when she came into the room. Why did people understand how precious each day was only once the doors to the grave had opened and they had looked inside? What was the point of that?

  Marianne was on the M9 because she was driving back from visiting her mother in Bridge of Allan. Liam had decided at the last moment that he wanted to stay and play with his friends rather than see his grandmother. And Marianne had let him because at ten years old she didn’t think he should be forced into doing things against his will. He had all his life ahead of him for that. Her heart hurt with relief that Liam hadn’t been in the car, wasn’t down there in the rain, his fragile body scored and raked by tarmac and grit, surrounded in his last moments on earth by strangers, however kind.

  What would he do without her? She could imagine only too well how distraught he was going to be when he found out she was gone, not for a week, or a month or a year, but forever. The thought of Liam’s pain and grief produced an odd sensation, a sudden gravitational pull that made her feel nauseous, and then without warning there was a dreadful whooshing noise in her ears and she was hurtling through space, growing smaller and denser as she fell, like a heavenly body plunging to earth. Then she understood—she was being pulled back into her own body. Marianne had heard about this too, the way that the thought of those closest to you was enough to weight the balance, the tug of love that brought you back to life, back to your own life, the one you weren’t ready to leave yet. She moved faster and faster, until she could no longer hear or see or feel anything but the rush. And then darkness.

  This didn�
�t seem right. Shouldn’t she be in the back of the ambulance? There was no sign of the ambulance or of any of the emergency vehicles. Every last tiny diamond chip of glass had been swept up. Marianne was no longer floating in the air but sitting on the kerb, frozen to the bone, soaked with rain and being battered by the wind. Perhaps the ambulance doors had accidentally flung open and no one had noticed when she had been flung back onto the road? Stranger things happened every day but it seemed ridiculous that they should have gone to all that trouble to bring her back to life only to lose her so carelessly.

  The traffic was no longer heavy and it felt much later now, although her watch still said ten past five. Marianne was sure that every single last cell in her body was bruised. A petrol tanker sped by, oblivious to her, followed by the M9 Express bus. She wondered if she should try to flag a vehicle down, or would it cause another accident? One was surely enough for a lifetime. A huge articulated lorry with “Tesco” written on the side caused a wake of diesel-scented air that made her feel sick. Marianne wondered if it was on its way to the Tesco in Colinton where she did her shopping. She had always hated shopping, but now she would have very much liked to be wandering along the brightly lit aisles, choosing between iceberg and cos, Persil Non-Bio and Fairy.