Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  “Do you?”

  You’ve got to help me, Mum.

  “Are you eating, Simon?”

  Eating? Of course, I’m fucking eating.

  “Calm down, Simon. You have to approach an essay logically. Get the books, make the notes, do spider diagrams, a rough draft—we’ve been through all this. A hundred times.”

  You did tape Buffy, didn’t you?

  “And use the library, Simon.”

  The library?

  Pam wondered if she’d actually been at her own wedding. She’d had some kind of flu bug and they’d had no photographer to record the event. It all seemed such a blur now. Register office, close family, no cake, no presents to speak of, and lunch in the Doric with both sets of parents. As if there’d been nothing really to celebrate. She was sure she’d worn brown. She must have been making some kind of statement, but what and to whom? Now there were girls (or their mothers probably) spending thousands and thousands of pounds on their weddings and not just the cake and reception and clothes but the personalized glasses and wine-bottle labels (Mark and Rachel, 23rd June, 2002), personalized everything it seemed—balloons, matchbooks, coasters, “luxury” cake bags, wax seal kits (for the wedding invitation envelopes, for heaven’s sake), silver-plated marriage-certificate holders, and many other apparently vital accessories such as the “pageboy’s teddy bear,” confetti purses, “pew bows,” and freeze-dried rose petals. And let’s not forget the little good-luck charms made of twisted and plaited raffia and tied with Black Watch tartan ribbon that some poor sod had to stay up past midnight to make and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t spent half the evening writing an essay on “Is There a Morally Significant Difference Between Killing and Letting Die?” for Simon’s philosophy course (“Acts and omissions, Simon, do you understand?”) as well as outlining the plot of Wuthering Heights via Instant Messaging (Yo, Mum) for an English seminar he had in the morning. “It’s about passion,” she typed. (Passion! What a ridiculous idea that was.) “An impossible love.”

  Like Angel and Buffy?

  “Yes.”

  Had she felt passionate about Alistair once? Or Hawk? (What a stupid name.) Or Brian? Forty-eight years old and she’d had sex with only three men. It wasn’t a very impressive tally. She took Renan’s The Life of Jesus up to bed with her. Simon had a book report to write on it by the end of the week. It was hard to believe that they could make them write about anything so boring. That wasn’t the way to get them interested in education.

  “Everyone has free stuff.” Maggie fretted. “Why didn’t we think of free stuff?”

  “What kind of free stuff?” Pam looked around at the other stalls at the wedding fair. From here, she could see a wedding-dress company (Sposa Eleganza), a photographer, a wedding-cake company (Cakes Are Us), Tiara-boom-de-ay (headdresses), Head over Heels (shoes), two hotels, another wedding-favor company—Bits ‘n’ Bobs—and something called Flutterbies. “Oh, it’s lovely,” Maggie said. “They release butterflies when you come out of church. Sort of instead of confetti.”

  “Butterflies? Don’t they die of the cold?”

  “You’re just not a romantic, are you, Pam?” Maggie laughed. Pam wondered if she could get a job supply teaching. They always wanted supply teachers. Or a little job in a café or a chemist. Or a doctor’s receptionist. Maybe she could clean for other people? She was good at cleaning. She quite liked cleaning. Anything but this.

  “Chocolates,” Maggie was saying, “they all have chocolates. Can you hold the fort—I’m going to check out the opposition.”

  “I doubt I’ll be run off my feet.” They had been here three hours and nobody had shown much interest in their “wares” (as Maggie insisted on calling them, as if they were eighteenth-century peddlers) beyond glancing at their table of favors, usually with puzzled expressions on their faces, and, in one case, downright amusement. Even from here she could see the Bits ‘n’ Bobs favors looked keenly professional compared with their own. Heather ‘n’ Lace’s bomboniere looked as if they’d been assembled by nursery-school children. She hadn’t seen so many mothers and daughters together since going to see Erin Brock-ovich. A woman picked up a heather-filled minitrug and asked Pam if it was made of Play-Doh. The woman’s daughter laughed and said, “It’s quaint. What is it?”

  “A minitrug,” Pam said. “We can use a burnt-poker technique to put your names and the date of your wedding on the side of it.” And it will be crap, she added silently. She was so glad Rebecca couldn’t see her doing this. “When is your wedding?” Pam asked politely. She didn’t think more than a handful of people here were actually getting married. Most of them were just here out of curiosity, yet they seemed to feel it was necessary to pretend they were on the point of tying the nuptial knot and lighting the fires of Hymen. Still, role-playing was what everyone did, wasn’t it, even when there was no one else there to see them? What had she been role-playing all her life? Nice person? Kind mother? Good wife (Alistair and Pamela, 16th October, 1978)? Would Rebecca get married? (Please God, not to Hamish.) Would she want to look at wedding dresses and discuss cakes with her? She wished she would.

  Maggie came back with a bagful of chocolates and pieces of wedding cake, balancing two plastic tumblers of sparkling wine. “Lunch!” She laughed. A skirl of pipes announced the fashion show was about to begin and several lanky models skipped onto the Assembly Room’s stage to music from Moulin Rouge. Six girls and two boys in kilts. They all looked like dancers, the kind that don’t get much work outside of panto season.

  After a while, all the dresses began to look the same. Well, they were all the same, really, weren’t they? What was the point of buying a hugely expensive dress that you were only going to wear once in your life? Maybe that was the statement she’d been trying to make when she wore brown at her own wedding.

  And right at this very moment Alistair and Jenny were exchanging vows, not a church wedding (did they do church weddings for divorced people these days? For adulterous, divorced people with illegitimate children?), but nonetheless a wedding with all the trimmings. Including her own children. Shouldn’t they have more loyalty to her? What had their father ever done for them in the way of parenting? But at least it meant that Simon was in town and was going to spend the rest of the weekend with her. She was looking forward to it the way she used to look forward to high days and holidays when she was a child. How long was it since the children had both been under the same roof with her? What happened when you’d plotted the whole course of your life by your children and then they weren’t there anymore?

  It was the difference between winter and summer, even if you didn’t get on with them, even if they didn’t like you, even if you weren’t very sure that you liked them. When they were there, everything was in blossom, everything fruitful, and when they were gone, the world was a cold dreich place, a place like the far north country where there were no trees or flowers and the winds howled like ghosts across the frozen tundra.

  “All right, Pammy?” Maggie asked, cramming a handful of chocolate hearts into her mouth. “Are you doing anything tonight? We could get a bottle of wine, watch a video—Captain Corelli, Bridget Jones?”

  “Simon’s here, he’s staying with me tonight.”

  “You can never get rid of them, can you?”

  Buffy’s friends brought her back from the dead. And she had to get a job and pay bills and take care of her younger sister because their mother was dead, but unlike Buffy she wasn’t coming back. If Pam died would Rebecca look after Simon? She couldn’t imagine it. Would they care if she died? Would they grieve for her as much as Buffy grieved for her mother? They probably would, but in their own hopelessly dysfunctional way. They didn’t want a relationship with her, they just wanted her to exist somewhere in the background (I haven’t got any clean clothes). If she died would her soul migrate? Into an insect, a tadpole, a bean?

  “How was the wedding then?”

  OK. S’pose.

  “Are you still at the reception?�
��

  Yeah.

  “Well, do you want me to call you a taxi?”

  Nab, I’m going to stay at Dad’s tonight.

  “Oh?”

  Yeah, Rebecca’s staying as well.

  Buffy was attracted to Spike, why couldn’t she admit it? Just because he was a vampire? She’d rather Rebecca went out with a vampire than Hamish. She unpicked the ribbons on a bomboniera (lilac zigzag net, lilac ribbon, and purple artificial heather) and ate the sugared almonds (white) while she watched the television. The thing was, you were always waiting for them to walk back in—not as themselves, not as they were now, no—what you expected (what you dreamed of) was that they were going to walk through the door and be three years old.

  Pam wasn’t sure that she liked sugared almonds but she ate them anyway. She wondered how long it would take for the happiness to start working.

  XII

  PLEASURELAND

  Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis

  nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas.

  cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius

  ius habet, incert spatium mihi finiat aevi:

  parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis

  astra ferar, nomenque erit indelibile nostrum.

  OVID, METAMORPHOSES, BOOK XV, 871–6

  For Donald Barthelme, 1931–89.

  Gone but living on in the words.

  WE COULD PLAY Scrabble,” Trudi offered.

  “We played that yesterday,” Charlene said. “And the day before yesterday, and the day before that and the day before that and the day before that and the day before that. In fact, I can’t remember a day when we didn’t play Scrabble.”

  “Monopoly then?”

  “Ditto.”

  “Is that a game or an answer?”

  “What I would really like is a cup of coffee,” Charlene said. “A double espresso made with Sumatran Mandheling beans or a cafetière of Brazilian Bourbon Santos. Or perhaps a glass of Viennese coffee made from Ethiopian Longberry Harrar and chocolate from Dalloyau in Paris, with cinnamon from the Seychelles and thick yellow cream from caramel-colored cows with big brown eyes, cows that have grazed all summer long on the sweet green grass of Alpine pastures where the only sounds that disturb the peaceful air are the buzzing of the bees and the ringing of the cowbells.”

  “And the occasional yodel.”

  “No. No yodeling.”

  “Would you like your Viennese coffee in Vienna?”

  “Yes, Viennese coffee in Vienna—that’s a very good idea. In the Café Central perhaps, and accompanied by a slice of warm apfelstrudel.”

  “Or the Café Landtmann? Which is where Freud took his morning coffee, not that that’s a recommendation.”

  “Or in the Hotel Sacher, with a slice of Sacher torte, obviously. And a string quartet playing Mozart in the background would be lovely.”

  “Playing in a melancholy way? Or jauntily?”

  “Poignantly.”

  “How about Cluedo?”

  “No.”

  Taps that had once flowed with water had slowed, first to a halfhearted rusty trickle, and then stopped altogether as the reservoirs finally ran dry. Thanks to some aggressive stockpiling on the part of the bourgeoisie, it had been a long time since there had been any bottled water in the shops. It had been a long time since there had been any shops. Trudi and Charlene collected rainwater from the roof of Trudi’s attic flat in the Sevres bowl that Charlene had stolen from the museum. The rainwater wasn’t good rainwater. Charlene imagined what it would look like under a microscope. It would be full of microbes and small wormy things wriggling their way across the glass slide, bumping blindly into dubious lumps of organic matter. But it was better than nothing. Anything was better than nothing. Everything was better than nothing.

  “I always think vodka is a clean-tasting drink,” Trudi said. “Lemon, ice, tonic—what more could you ask for?”

  “You could ask for a Pimm’s. With cucumber and mint and slices of orange and lime. A maraschino cherry or perhaps a fresh strawberry. And a little Chinese paper parasol. Or possibly a dry Manzanilla sherry with a dish of roasted, salted Spanish almonds.”

  “Champagne cocktails—Ambrosia, Mimosa, Morning Glory—on the deck of a large oceangoing passenger liner sailing across the Pacific in, let’s say, 1910.”

  “A gin sling on the veranda of Raffles in 1931,” Charlene said.

  “A Tom Collins in Harry’s Bar in Paris in 1922.”

  “A Manhattan in the Monkey Bar in New York, a Gibson in the Double Dragon Lounge overlooking Hong Kong harbor. A Mai Tai in Honolulu, a Blue Margarita in Barcelona.”

  “A Jägermeister. A tequila followed by an Aftershock. A Brain Hemorrhage,” Trudi said.

  “Is that a drink or a consequence?”

  “It’s peach schnapps, Bailey’s, and a shot of grenadine.”

  “A grappa. A Gaslight or a Sazerac.”

  “Lethal.”

  “Absinthe,” Charlene said dreamily.

  “Mmm.”

  “And opium.”

  “Oh, yes, lots of opium.”

  Charlene had been living with Trudi for some time now. She came for an evening and never got home again. If Charlene had realized that she wasn’t going to get home she would have brought some clothes with her. Now she was forced to borrow Trudi’s clothes. Trudi was much shorter than Charlene and had what Charlene considered to be an eccentric dress sense. Charlene was grateful that Trudi was the only person who could see her now, especially as there was no water and no soap and Charlene couldn’t remember when either of them had last washed her hair. Trudi had taken to wearing a scarf around her head, turban-style, but Charlene didn’t think it was a good look for her.

  They spent a soothing day re-creating the layout and contents of Space. NK, using only their imaginations. Another afternoon passed in reconstructing Jo Malone on Sloane Street. Boots and Superdrug took longer. The perfume floor of the Galeries Lafayette was a considerable challenge. They discovered that if they tried very hard, their olfactory memories could recall many of the great classic scents—Joy by Patou, Chanel No. 5, Guerlain’s Shalimar. Others they had to conjure out of nothing.

  “Number 127 created by Floris for the Russian grand duke Orloff,” Charlene offered.

  “Eau de Cologne Impériale, created for the empress Eugénie by Guerlain.”

  “Hungary Water, created in 1370 for the empress Elizabeth of Hungary. Rose water, first distilled by an Arab physician in the tenth century.”

  “The perfumes of Roman courtesans, Egyptian mummies, Babylonian whores.”

  “Mostly myrrh and animal fat, I imagine.”

  There was a very bad smell in Trudi’s flat. It was the kind of smell that came from dead things decaying in water cisterns or moldering behind walls. Cholera was rife in the city but nobody talked about it much; they were too busy talking about the plague. Charlene and Trudi didn’t know what people talked about in the city anymore. Before the battery ran out they might spend all evening tuning Trudi’s radio to try to find voices other than their own. Sometimes they would catch a fragment from somewhere far away in a language they couldn’t understand. There was no music anymore.

  “One of my many regrets,” Trudi said, “apart from the obvious—the dog I never owned, the child I never had, the ballroom dances I never learned—is that I never studied a musical instrument. This is exactly the kind of situation in which it would have proved useful. I could be entertaining us now with simple songs on an acoustic guitar. Or we could be sitting together on a piano stool at a pretty cottage piano—inlaid walnut and with candelabra attached—and we could be singing German lieder or English folk songs—‘My Bonny Lies over the Ocean,’ for example. But sadly I never even learned the recorder.”

  “Cribbage, rummy, bezique? German whist, kings and queens, casino?” Charlene offered, to console Trudi. “Indian poker?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Charlene an
d Trudi had been trapped in the flat ever since the night that Charlene came to visit without a change of clothes. Charlene had been getting ready to leave so she would be home before the curfew when they heard a dreadful hammering on the front door. When Trudi went to investigate she found that the door was stuck fast and wouldn’t open, no matter what she did. Charlene and Trudi shouted down to passersby in the street below and the passersby told them the front doors of all the flats in the building had been nailed shut with planks of wood and had large red crosses painted on them. The passersby did not linger, for everyone knew the red cross was the sign of the plague.

  Charlene and Trudi were fairly sure they didn’t actually have the plague. Trudi had an old copy of Bailère’s Nurses’ Dictionary that had belonged to her sister Heidi and they checked themselves for symptoms every day. They seemed to have a lot of other diseases, but not the plague. In case they were thinking of escaping from their internment, they were deterred by the soldiers patrolling the street armed with Russian PP-93 submachine guns.

  “Botticelli? Charades? Adverbs?” Trudi offered. “We could play the latter elegantly or disdainfully or blissfully. Or pensively, stealthily, or even whimsically.”

  “Or unwillingly.”

  The cat came in the attic window one morning—a rangy, mangy, tiger-gray tom with hungry bones poking out from its dull fur. It walked across the rooftops and stepped inside. They had no food to give him but he fended for himself, bringing in dead mice and rats and ragged, famished birds. Occasionally, they speculated about robbing the cat of his prey before he had a chance to eat it, but the rodents looked diseased and neither Charlene nor Trudi knew how to pluck a pigeon and they didn’t think they could ever bring themselves to eat a robin redbreast or a wren.