The Quiet at the End of the World

by Lauren James

  “Spiky humans might have survived a bit longer than we seem to be doing,” he agrees. “What about you? What time period would you go to, if you could?”

  “I dunno. Until this started, I quite liked living right now, actually. We’ve got such a unique perspective on life. If we’d been born ninety years ago, there’s no way we’d be discussing things like Cardassian —”

  “Cambrian.”

  “Cambrian explosions, or the future of intelligent octopuses. I love learning about that stuff, even if it is tragic. I just wish we had – had more time.” The words crack as they come out.

  When I imagined us going extinct, it wasn’t now, while I was still a teenager. I always thought I’d be an old lady. How can this be happening?

  Shen looks at me with wide, dark eyes. I see his throat bob as he swallows.

  I clear my throat and look away, embarrassed.

  He wraps me in a tight hug, pressing a kiss to my temple. I tuck my head into his shoulder, breathing in deeply, and I immediately feel safer. Shen always feels like home.

  “I’m OK,” I say, and this time I mean it.

  He pulls back a little, and suddenly his face is close to mine and he’s staring at me, pupils wide. For a second I’m convinced he’s going to lean in and kiss me. But he doesn’t move and we just stare at each other, his arms hooked around my shoulders. His chest expands against mine as he takes a slow, deep breath.

  And because I’m a coward, I pull back, casually tugging my hair out of its ponytail as though that’s the reason I’m moving. “Well, I’m not going to sleep any time soon.” I force my voice to be light and steady. “Shall we move this party to the pool?”

  CHAPTER 17

  “ALIENS,” Shen declares some time later, leaning over the edge of the hot tub to unsteadily pour us both another drink. Alcohol pools on the marble, shining silver against the dove grey. “They definitely caught a disease from aliens.”

  We’ve been sharing increasingly unlikely explanations for the seizures over the course of the night, both of us steadily getting more and more useless as we get drunker.

  “YOU ALWAYS THINK IT’S ALIENS!” I yell, loud enough to make Mitch lift his head from where he is draped on a sun lounger. He stares at us in disapproval. “You’d lose your shoes and think that aliens had taken them!”

  “THEY DID, LOWRIE.”

  I throw my head back, groaning in disgust. I’m pretty sure Shen would marry an alien, if one came along.

  I help myself to some of Mr Flocks’ stilton, surreptitiously stolen from the kitchen on a midnight snack raid without the bots noticing, as Shen pours me a glass of wine: cool and crisp and golden yellow. I drink it in two gulps, then gesture for more, while filling my mouth with cheese.

  “If this is being caused by aliens…” I say, seriously, as Shen sits upright, looking over at me. “But the aliens said you had to marry one of them before they would —”

  “Yes,” Shen replies instantly and without hesitation.

  “I didn’t even tell you what they were offering!”

  He shrugs. “I mean, I would marry an alien anyway. Regardless of the scientific advances they offered humanity.”

  I wince. “Even if it was a gross sticky green one? Or, like, a butterfly?”

  “Stop kink-shaming me, Lowrie.”

  I snort. Despite everything, I’m surprised to find that I’m enjoying myself. It’s such a relief to have a distraction. “I would too, I guess. I mean, maybe.”

  “Kink-same,” Shen says, beyond delighted.

  I push his shoulder in disgust, sending him splashing into the water. “This hot tub is a pun-free zone. You’ve seen the sign. No singing, no swearing, no puns.” The sign is another one of mine and Feng’s creations. Feng is very against puns.

  Shen nudges me back, slipping on the tiles. For a moment our sides are pressed together, until he corrects his balance. Then, as I take another sip of wine, he asks out of nowhere: “Does it feel different? Having a crush on a girl, compared to a boy?”

  “What, like the hot blonde from Loch & Ness?” I ask, pretending to swoon.

  He shrugs. “Sure.”

  I consider it. I want to say that girls are soft and smooth and warm, and make me want to be gentle and soft in return. Boys make me feel delicate, protected, confident. They make me want to go out late and party and roam the streets, whereas girls make me want to curl inside under a blanket and watch TV. Hypothetically and theoretically, anyway.

  That all feels too revealing, so instead I say, “It’s like comparing your favourite foods, or sweet and savoury. They both taste delicious, but for completely different reasons.”

  Shen nods. “Makes sense. It’s like fancying a blonde compared to a redhead. Totally different.”

  I snort. Shen is totally, unbelievably, impossibly straight.

  “What about you?” I ask. “What are you…? Well, what does it feel like when you like someone? An actor, or something?”

  “It makes me want things. Nothing sexual, not really. Just … intimacy, you know? Brushing hands, catching their eye and knowing what they’re thinking. Simple, quiet things. Someone to lean against, wrap my arms around, for no reason but because I want to be close to them.” The tips of Shen’s ears have gone a little pink.

  My mouth is dry. How can I reply to something like that when it’s so obvious that I give him that and I have for as long as I can remember?

  I clear my throat. We’re just friends. I have to keep things the way they’ve always been.

  “Kink-same?” I say, weakly, and giggle.

  He rolls his eyes. “I’m cutting you off. You’re hysterical.” He pulls the glass out of my hand.

  “I am not! Can we go treasure-hunting? I want to go treasure-hunting.”

  “It’s three a.m. and we’re drunk! We are not leaving the grounds.”

  I roll my eyes. Even drunk, Shen is sensible and mature. “We can look for treasure here,” I say. “Let’s explore the attics. There’s always stuff up there.”

  Shen stares at the sky, then heaves himself up. “Yeah, OK.”

  Sometimes if it’s raining we go up to the attics and do a kind of lazy version of mudlarking. The attics stretch along the full length of the building and contain several generations’ worth of accumulated junk. The winding series of rooms and crawl spaces are packed with old portraits, collapsing antique furniture and stacks and stacks of records, household accounts, broadsides, manuscripts, maps and correspondence dating back to the eighteenth century. More recently, the rooms have been filled with a hundred years’ worth of broken phones, tablets and laptops.

  There’s even a ghost – the legendary Marchioness of Lansdowne, who Mum swears she saw when she was a teenager. I have my doubts.

  Bats flutter away when we clamber over boxes and sofas, shushing each other when we make too much noise, giggling all the while. Mum and Dad would not appreciate being woken up this late.

  Mitch follows us as we poke through the crates of silk scarves and linen suits, look through stacks of Tatler and The Lady, and try on helmets from suits of armour.

  “I love it up here,” Shen says, trailing a finger through the dust.

  I find myself eyeing his forearms, yet again.

  I thought I could ignore my feelings for Shen, but it’s becoming obvious that I can’t, and that however hard I try to make them go away, it’s not going to work. I’ve always said that I just know him far too well to see him as anything other than the little boy who always had food crusted around his mouth after lunch, because he couldn’t use chopsticks properly yet – or the grumpy teenager with spots and a fury to rival Hades’ if he thought someone was making fun of him. But that isn’t true.

  I like him. I like the way he laughs with his whole body, head tilted back and teeth flashing, and I like the solid warmth of his hands when he touches my arm. And I love that when we hug, it presses our whole bodies together, from head to toe.

  But what can I do about it? I can�
��t start anything with Shen, not when it might end with me losing him completely.

  Feeling hot and overwhelmed all of a sudden, I wipe the dusty glass of an oval skylight with the flesh of my palm so I can peer out of it. Between the branches of a five-hundred-year-old yew tree tapping on the window, I can make out the bones of the old abbey in the lawn below. The stone walls loom out of the darkness, their crumbling buttresses disappearing into hollow dips just below the grass.

  A single pane of stained glass remains in the lower right corner of a vaulted window. I can’t make it out in the darkness, but I can picture from memory the image etched on to the yellow glass of a snail fighting a medieval knight.

  “Ahh!” Shen shouts, and I turn to see him standing on top of an old tapestry footstool, stitched with the family crest. He’s rubbing a hand through his hair sheepishly. “Mouse,” he explains.

  At that Mitch jumps forward, pouncing like a cat. There’s a scurry of tiny feet and a flourish of dust, but the robot returns from underneath a four-poster bed empty-handed.

  “Good effort, Mitch,” I say.

  The roaming household bots have been engaged in a decades-long war with the mouse populations of our home. Each spring, the bots win a minor battle and clear them all out. Then every winter, the mice flood back in, and the war starts up again.

  We move on to the next room, where half of the roof has collapsed, covering cupboards in tiles, plaster, rafters and dirt, and blocking the doorway into the next room completely. It must have happened months ago and gone unnoticed. It’s a mess of rotting and thoroughly damp wood.

  “Noooo!” Shen cries. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to get through there!”

  I grin. “Don’t give up so fast.”

  “Tools?”

  “Tools! You do know the way to a girl’s heart,” I say.

  “Why do you think I get you screwdrivers for Christmas every year?”

  “Really?” I ask. He wants to get into my heart? “I didn’t… I mean…”

  We stare at each other for a moment. Maybe Shen and me together is not such a scary idea after all. Maybe we could work…

  Then he giggles and says, “Maybe tools aren’t a good idea right now. You’re very drunk.” And he’s just Shen again.

  “Yeah. Maybe not. We should probably call it a night,” I say, sighing and trying not to feel disappointed. I’m not ready for this night to end, so I make one last attempt to search for interesting stuff by pulling open the doors of a bureau.

  A few books slide off the shelves on to the floor. I try to grab them and get a splinter in my arm from the wooden panelling. I bite at it with my teeth, trying to pull it free, but it sinks more deeply under the skin. I’m still poking at it when Shen pulls something pale out of the cabinet.

  It’s a doll about the size of a small baby. Its eyes open and close and its joints move. It would be cute, if it wasn’t for the completely blank features – white eyeballs with no irises, a flat space where the nose should be, and a mouth with no lips.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “I have no idea. Is it creepy or what?”

  He passes it to me, and I flip it over, so I don’t have to stare into its blank eyes. At the base of the back there’s an embossed seal in the latex, saying, MADE IN CHINA © PATENT PENDING.

  Shen shakes its hand. “It looks like a fake body an alien would use to blend in with humans.”

  I squint at it and then at him. “Why would an alien want to pretend to be a human baby?”

  He shrugs. “Assimilation into the local population? Guaranteed protection from human parents? If they are from a small and weak alien species, they wouldn’t want to risk being killed as soon as they made themselves known.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you’re an alien,” I tell him solemnly.

  He beams. “Thanks.”

  “I wonder who it belonged to,” I say, gesturing at the doll.

  “Your grandmother, maybe?”

  “Maybe.” I never met her, so I don’t know anything about her, really.

  It’s strange to think of a child walking around my home, cradling this doll in their arms. I’ve never seen a child in real life, just in recordings.

  When we go downstairs, I bring the doll with me, still manipulating the joints and inspecting the features. It feels a little sad that it was forgotten about and dumped it in a cupboard up here.

  In the hallway, we bump into Mum going for a midnight wee.

  She jumps, raising a hand to her chest. “Lowrie, Shen – you gave me a heart attack. What are you doing creeping about?”

  I keep silent and let Shen answer, knowing that I’m not going to be able to hide my tipsiness.

  “We couldn’t sleep,” he says, running a hand through his hair.

  Mum smiles sympathetically. “No, me neither.” She hesitates and says, “There have been more seizures. Jia rang. Mr Flocks passed out a few hours ago.”

  I draw in a breath. “Is Mrs Bolton any better?”

  “There’s been no… What is that?” She stares at the doll in my hands, a look of dawning horror crossing her face.

  “We, er – we found it in the loft,” I say.

  Mum takes it off me. Her hands are shaking a little.

  “Should I not have taken it?” I ask, unsure why she’s so upset. She usually has no problem with me playing with anything, even the oldest, most priceless of the heirlooms, like the emerald tiara that is kept in a cabinet in the smoking room. She let me wear that to go trick-or-treating a few years ago. Why would this doll be any different?

  “It’s fine,” she says tightly. “It just took me by surprise, that’s all.” She pulls off her cardigan and folds the doll up in the fabric, then stares down at the bundle. I’ve never seen her so shaken.

  “Who did it belong to?” Shen asks. “Do you know?”

  The corner of her eye twitches. “Get to sleep, both of you. You’ve had a really long day. You need your rest.” Then she marches back down the corridor, holding the doll out in front of her like it’s on fire.

  Shen and I stare at each other, baffled.

  “Do you think it belonged to her?” I ask.

  “Maybe. But that doesn’t explain why she’d be so weird about it.”

  Shen and I watch her retreating back in silence.

  CHAPTER 18

  The next morning, I wake up with an awful headache. My last memory is of yelling to Shen through the bathroom door to get me a new loo-roll, angry at him for not replacing the old one. I wince as I sit up and stabbing pains ripple through my head.

  Shen is sleeping in my armchair, head tilted back, snoring. I stumble out of bed, untangling myself from the four fluffy blankets that Drunk Lowrie cocooned herself in. I tiptoe to the bathroom, where I spend an hour napping in the bath.

  When I surface, I notice that my toes are messily painted a pastel purple. I have a vague memory of demanding that Shen paint them for me while we were watching a film, after our attic exploration. We’d started having an argument about something dumb. He’d pulled my toes into his lap while we bickered, attempting to carefully apply the varnish, despite his drunkenness and the heat of our debate. I’m amazed that he managed to paint them at all, although the varnish has dripped all over the skin of my feet.

  When I emerge from the bath, Shen has gone and there’s a message on my tablet: GONE TO FIND BACON.

  I turn on the newsfeed and immediately feel guilty that we were getting drunk while people might be dying. I try not to let myself hope that the seizures have stopped and were due to something as simple as fungi-contaminated flour. I’ve heard stories about those kind of things happening in small settlements in the past.

  The presenter – it’s Ms Fikry today – says, “I’m afraid that after the terrible incident with Mrs Bolton yesterday, we’ve had another four people fall ill during the night. Prisha – sorry, Doctor Ahmed – has asked that everyone stay at home and not use any heavy equipment until this has all been sorted o
ut. I’d like to extend my best wishes to everyone who’s caught this awful bug, and hope you all get well soon.”

  I slump on my bed. The panic hits me again like a tidal wave. I can’t believe how dangerous such a small thing has become. Life becomes so fragile when the population is small. A single disease like this might wipe humanity out for good within a single day.

  Shen is sitting by the window when I come into the morning room. He’s listening to something with one earphone and staring out over the garden, where drizzle is coating Dad’s plants in a silver sheen of water. Early morning light plays on his face.

  He takes a sip of green tea from a bone china teacup, holding it in his mouth for a long moment before he swallows.

  I touch his arm, and he jumps and pulls out his earbud. “Did you say something?” he asks.

  “Morning.”

  Shen nods hello.

  “Are you hungover?” I ask.

  “Not yet. I took a tablet.” He passes one to me, and says, “I’m listening to this thing about global warming. It says that as climate change melted the permafrost back in the twenty-fifties, it released dormant bacteria, which have been extinct for thousands of years, into the soil. They got into the water table and then people or animals caught the diseases. There were outbreaks of anthrax and the black plague. Maybe these seizures are —”

  I draw in a tight breath. There’s an uneasy prickle of panic threatening to blossom in the back of my mind. “Shen, can we not discuss it? I’m trying my best not to think about it too much. It freaks me out.”

  He looks contrite. “Sorry, Shadow. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Coffee, please.”

  I stir cream into my coffee and take a sip, wincing. It’s always too bitter for me, but I’m hoping that if I keep trying it, I’ll develop a taste for it eventually. “Is Jia back yet?” I twist my rose-gold stud earring back and forth in my lobe. My brain feels slow and gloopy.

  “No.” His voice is tight, foot tapping repetitively against the wooden floor with a soft clicking noise. “Your mum’s gone with Baba to take a few more people who had seizures this morning to the hospital.”