The End of the Day

by Claire North

  “Me? Shopping, mostly. Mostly: shopping.”

  After, Robinson and Charlie stood by the waterside, the lights of the battleship cold against the night sky, the traffic roaring over the bridge high overhead, strings of bulbs slung between the iron lamp posts. A horse and cart clopped away through the town’s tourist streets; fresh ice cream dripped from the cone clutched by a pair of giggling children onto the floor.

  At last, Robinson said: “She’s leaving it all to charity, huh?”

  Charlie nodded.

  Silence a while.

  Then Robinson began to laugh, and after a little while, Charlie joined in.

  Chapter 91

  The long road, going north.

  In the mist-soaked mountains of Virginia, down a dirt track framed by aluminium silos, a hot-water bottle to a woman with faded yellow hair.

  She took it, and cried silently, and didn’t say why.

  Beneath the rustling trees of the mountains, a box of different-flavoured jams for an old man who had once walked the Appalachian Trail, and who knew which berries were good and which were bad, and whose little house was about to be demolished to make way for a 7-Eleven, and who said, as they drove away, “A man can lose himself on the path, if he wants to. Sometimes losing yourself is the only way to find out who you are.”

  On the track through the mountains, an offering of incense before a face carved into stone, no humans in sight, no words to be spoken, but it seemed for a moment that the wind was still and the animals were silent, and the light moved strangely upon the water.

  A one-way system into the city.

  “Fucking Beltway!” roared Robinson, slapping both hands, open-palmed, against the wheel. “Fucking Beltway with its fucking signs in the fucking …”

  In the end, they ended up being sucked into a car park outside the Pentagon, before finally crawling their way across the Potomac river.

  A hotel full of men come to Washington for conferences.

  Three different kinds of walk along the National Mall, Charlie observed.

  Natives—jogging and plotting on Bluetooth earpieces, or marching at brisk high speed, next meeting to get to, faster to walk than grab a taxi.

  Strangers come for work—tired, eyes popping and red, too flustered to stop and look at the sights of the city, but still drawn upwards, proud of themselves for having arrived here, awed at the place where now they stand, worried that they won’t make the three p.m. session on Intra-Committee Communication Strategies Pt.2.

  Tourists.

  They queue around the Washington Monument, stare down at the sculptures of raincoated men who died fighting in Korea. They circle the great sweeps of stone raised in honour of the men who died in the Second World War, they stare upwards, upwards, through the great halls of the Smithsonian.

  “See?” Robinson declared, as they gazed into the still waters of the pool. “America fights for democracy.”

  Charlie bit his lip, and Robinson glared. “What? What is it?”

  Did America fight for democracy?

  (Once upon a time, War stood on Omaha Beach as the bullets flew, put his hands on his hips and laughed as the men fell, the water turning red with blood. “Shit!” he exclaimed, as the last parachute opened over northern France and the tanks rolled over the limbs of the brave and the fearful who had died in the sand. “Just listen to the music now!”)

  The Museum of the American Indian.

  Charlie gives a small carved statue to a woman who waits outside. It is shaped like a sea lion. She holds it tight to her chest, and through wide, horrified eyes whispers, “You go inside, and it’s like my people never died.”

  A beggar, shooed away from the centre of the city by the Washington police; can’t have such people sullying their streets. He holds tight to the cup of tea that Charlie has provided, as if he’ll never let go.

  “I tried the VA,” he whispers. “But they said they were all full up.”

  Charlie bought the tea because the man was cold, and the tea was hot. He is not in the appointments list.

  A Congressional aide, jogging along the river. She stops so Charlie can give her an audiobook, to play on her next run. She takes it as jet fighters roar overhead, patrolling the skies, then leans in and whispers, “It was me. I authorised it. I gave the command.” And doesn’t explain, puts her headphones back in, and keeps on running.

  Tacos, on a floating platform in a marina. The plate, when it comes, is nearly a foot high. Charlie and Robinson plough through as much of it as they can—chips and avocado, sausage and meatballs, onion, melted plastic cheese and tomato—before yielding and letting a group of American football players, come to celebrate with their girlfriends, finish off the rest. As they leave, Charlie looks up and thinks he sees someone familiar, getting out of a car with two women and a man. Dark straight hair, carefully cut suit …

  He thinks about going to say hi, but Patrick doesn’t seem to see him, and looks busy, and he has no scruples about walking on by.

  “Oh my God, you’re in Washington, I’m in Washington, we should have …”

  The Harbinger of War carefully laid her goods down—three beers in high frosted glasses—smiled her brilliant, white-toothed smile and said, “Bombing, of course. Americans are such pussys these days when it comes to putting boots on the ground, they think some of their people might get shot so they just bomb from above, neater, safer—unless you’re on the ground!—but you know how these things are, bombs bombs bombs, just a few map co-ordinates, a grainy target and boom! Job done. Fucking senior management.”

  She slurped her beer, grinned, enjoying the white moustache that formed around her top lip, then turned to Robinson.

  “So you’re travelling with Charlie?”

  “Yes. To New York.”

  “Seen Death yet?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You will. Charlie doesn’t just give lifts to people—although maybe he does—but if he was told to give you a lift, then Death told him to do it, and Death’s following behind. He’ll come for you when the time is right, don’t you worry.”

  “I’m not worried, ma’am.”

  “Good! That’s the spirit! Why fear the inevitable? Salut, all, salut!”

  They drained their glasses down.

  Afterwards, sitting by the river, a strange quiet after all the roads, Robinson said, “I’m sorry I called you out, when you said you were just the messenger. I’m sorry I said … what I said. About it being crap.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “This job of yours. This fucking job. I think I get it. I think I get that thing you said, about life. I think it’s … I dunno, there was the KKK guy and there’s kids and there’s old women crying and there’s the road, this long fucking road and I don’t even know if I know where it’s going any more and I just think … sorry, man, I gotta say it how I find it … I just think what kind of guy could put up with this shit?”

  Charlie was silent for a long while. Planes landed and took off on the other side of the water; a couple rollerbladed by; an old man leant against the statue of a high court judge, and wondered if he’d left his keys at home.

  Finally Charlie said, “I went to Mexico …” And stopped. Then started again. “Can I tell you this? Discretion, I mean … can I tell you?”

  Sure, Robinson replied. Tell me. I wanna understand. I wanna know what it means.

  I don’t know if I can answer that. These questions, what is Death, people always seem to ask … but for me, for myself … Once I was sent to Mexico.

  Chapter 92

  Once …

  … it’s important to be delicate about these things, like a doctor, you don’t want to go discussing intimate personal details, but as you ask …

  Once the Harbinger of Death was sent to Tijuana, to give a bottle of maple syrup to a journalist working the crime desk. This was many months ago, before Nigeria, before the rats and the humans and the craters in the dust, but after the ice. A long time after the
ice, Christ, that felt a long time ago, was that even Charlie who beheld a pale figure against an endless sky? He doesn’t think so. Not Charlie at all.

  But look, anyway, the point of all this is …

  Charlie gave a bottle of maple syrup to this journalist, yes, and she stared in horror at first him, then the bottle, when he laid it down on her desk, before blurting, “Already? But there’s so much I had to do!”

  He muttered his usual generic comfort for these times—sometimes a warning, sometimes a courtesy, blah blah blah …

  But she stopped him, mid-flow, grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him to the longest wall in the office. There, framed in cheap plastic polished to metallic brightness, were hundreds of headline pages from the newspaper, selected for the significance or the horror of the story, stretching back over three years of labour. On the front page of every one, two recurring themes—a picture of a woman, huge round breasts thrust to the camera and a tag line inviting you to meet [cheeky/flirty/luscious/lovely/celestial/bashful/timid/fiery/sensational] [Maria/Juana/Margarita/Gabriela/Rosa/Alicia/Yolanda/etc.]

  and above this, a full-page spread of corpses.

  Corpses in the back of trucks, their still-open eyes staring at the camera. Corpses thrown three-deep into open pits, lit up garish white by the photographer’s flashlight. Corpses carried by policemen in blue shirts; corpses in the morgue; corpses left on the side of the road; corpses on the floor of a shop; corpses with their limbs cut off, their bleeding torsos printed in full colour for all to see.

  “You think you are a warning?” snapped the journalist. “My whole life is a warning, my every waking breath is a warning! Do you know how many times I have seen Death?”

  (Five is the answer, but Charlie does not know this. Once on the edge of a mass grave after eleven teachers vanished; once outside the police station. Once Death sat at the back of a small huddle of migrants, starving and weary as they prepared for the desert crossing to the north; once Death helped her mother walk to church, the day the stroke happened; and once Death paraded with the street boys and the men of violence, swaggering down the middle of the street while the coppers looked on, silent and afraid, and she took Death’s picture, incredulous at the arrogance of all these men who knew they owned the city and paraded with the Lady of the Night in their ranks—but the photo came out blurry, and she wondered if only she had met the eternal one’s milky eye.)

  Now she berated the Harbinger of Death, shouted at him like a schoolteacher, demanded to know what he was thinking and how he could be so crass, and Charlie stood, head bowed and toes pointed together, and let her shout, because he’d learnt that as the Harbinger there wasn’t much point arguing back, and that it was all part of the process to let people get these things off their chests. He wasn’t there to make her story about him. He knew this now. He revelled in it. It was a freedom, of a sort.

  She shouted for nearly five minutes, and on the sixth minute stopped as suddenly as she had begun, aware that the whole room was staring at her and that the object of her wrath hadn’t said a word, hadn’t argued or tried to justify his being there, but was merely waiting patiently for more.

  Instead, she grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him from the office, and took him straight to the nearest bar and bought a bottle of tequila and said, as they got catastrophically drunk together, “I will never leave this city. I will never give up. I will never betray my country or my people. There is a fight here—a fight that must be won, and no matter what, I will win it!”

  Charlie, looking up through a haze of cheap alcohol, had exclaimed, “You … are an inspiration … to your people!” He frowned; something about these words on his slurred tongue hadn’t seemed quite right, but she was nodding forcefully along, and it did seem to him at that moment that she was truly magnificent, a goddess of truth and justice, swathed in light.

  “When people go across the border,” she exclaimed, “it is because they do not think things here can be made better. The schools, the medicine, the police, the corruption, always the corruption. But this is a beautiful country, there is so much promise here, we have risen up before, we the people, we will do it again, we will find our voice, we will tear down the old walls, we will build Jerusalem.”

  “I think …” Charlie murmured, pushing his empty glass across the bar towards the near-empty bottle, “that might be one of the best things anyone has ever said.”

  And when she finally staggered home that night, someone had killed her cat and left its corpse in her bed, and the next day her boss was stabbed to death, fifty-two times the knife went in, and the killer, as they marched him off to jail, chuckled and chatted merrily with the cops who took him down, not a care in the world, and was bailed fifteen hours later, and vanished without a trace.

  Twelve hours after that, the journalist left Mexico, hiding in the boot of an American friend’s car as it crawled across the border, trusting to all the gods that he, being a journalist too and a holder of U.S. citizenship, would not be searched.

  And as the car cleared customs, a chauffeured car drove the other way, the passenger obscure in the back. She did not know it, but the passenger knew her, scrutinising the hot trunk where even now she cowered—and this once, having sent the Harbinger before as fair warning, Death passed her by.

  She’s working as a cleaner now in a New York hotel, and sometimes she is given leftover pancake after breakfast by the chef, with maple syrup on top—her favourite—but you won’t find her name on the books; in fact, it’s a miracle how much these big chains achieve with so few employees. She shares a flat with five others, all illegals, and the landlord accepts payment in cash, and a little bit more for keeping quiet, and on Sundays she helps do the garden for a rich lady across the river in Hoboken, who always makes her coffee and cupcakes, and who believes that immigrants bring crime—drugs and crime—to her beloved country.

  One day, she will go home.

  One day, she will build Jerusalem.

  Not that Charlie knew this. He had delivered his message, and caught a late flight down to Mexico City to deliver good wishes and a bottle of scented oil to a former Cuban executioner, now dying in a hospital ward. “Ah,” murmured the man, as Charlie sat by his bedside and listened to the whir-click of machines. “It is good that your boss remembers his own.”

  Then Charlie had sat and listened, temples pounding with an almighty hangover, mind lulled and hypnotised by the steady beating of the hospital equipment, as the executioner had talked of men he’d killed and things he’d seen, of the stories told in the prison yards and the crimes committed. He’d spoken softly of the dictators who had preceded Castro in Cuba, of what treachery meant, of what reason was, of the good men who’d died for their beliefs, and the bad men who’d died with just the same conviction for theirs, and of the courtesy he had always striven to uphold, courtesy, courtesy for the soon-to-be deceased, for he was the taker of lives, and after he had done his work there was no hope of redemption, no chance to be converted or see the light, but only darkness. It is not the dead who lose hope when a death sentence is passed, he breathed. No no—it is the living.

  Then, on that trip to Mexico, Charlie had loved his work, for it seemed that he was a confessor to these men and women, a stranger come without judgement or agenda, to warn and to inform, a courteous listener to the stories of lives lived, lives coming to an end. Sometimes the confessional was a raging, shouting, alcohol-soaked affair; sometimes it was a quiet murmuring by a hospital bed, but always, he listened, and found in it a kind of wonder. If he had been Charlie, perhaps he would have wept, but he was not. He was the Harbinger of Death. He stood between this life and the next, and he was honoured, so honoured, that the living spoke to him at their end.

  Then he left the hospital, the last person to go as visiting hours ended, and as he stood outside drawing breath, a blue van pulled up at terrific speed, and three men in white vests and bright shorts leapt out and put a knife to his throat and screamed, “Move, move!!”
and threw him into the back of the truck with a bag over his head.

  Chapter 93

  Not afraid.

  Funny, that.

  Lying in the back of a truck in Mexico City, bag smelling of tomatoes on his head, a boot in his back, kidnapped by who knows for God knows what, Charlie wasn’t frightened. He thought about being held prisoner, chained to a wall, and found the idea strangely harmless, a kind of quiet for a little while, a chance to think without the disturbance of the next flight, the hotel maid coming to clean his room, the normality of life. Sure, if it went on too long he’d probably go mad, but that was okay too, wasn’t it? He thought about being ransomed, and decided that Milton Keynes would probably pay, and hoped they had insurance in place to cover the cost, and the excess wasn’t too high. He thought about being killed, a bullet to the back of the head, and decided that if it came, he wouldn’t look. He hoped he would live, and it seemed then that the idea he might die was so remote, so ridiculous a thing as to be strangely alien, a ghost glimpsed in the mirror, a ghost with his face, a thing he watched and that watched him back, and that was all there was to it. The living watching the dead, the dead watching the living, and he looked his ghost in the eye, and he was not afraid.

  The truck jolted hard, stuck in traffic; he could hear the buzz of angry engines through the rattle of the wheels, smell the fumes coming up through the floor. Then it moved again; then it stopped, the harsh bump-bump of the endless commuter roads of the city. Someone in the middle of the road outside offered to clean the windows and the driver screamed in Spanish, “Fuck off, fuck off or I’ll fucking kill you!” and the woman with the bucket and sponge snarled something about the driver’s mother and a donkey, and moved on.

  When the truck cleared the traffic, the driver revved the engine for all he was worth, honking and swerving along the faster roads, the centre of gravity lurching from side to side. None of the men in the back spoke, except for one, who asked once if they knew where Serge was, and the others didn’t, and that was the end of the conversation.