End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

The lawns were cut by a boy who came in on Wednesdays. A woman came in from the village to clean the house on Mondays and Fridays. Dr. Porteus tried to drop by on Tuesdays and, if possible, on Thursdays as well. Mary used to come down some weekends. The police drove by a couple of times a week to check that everything was okay and the farmer who owned the fields next door kept half a dozen Charolais cattle in Pat’s paddock, and was around every other day.

  “So you can see,” Pat said, as he stopped by the stump of the cherry. “You’re lucky to find me alone.” He nodded at a battered oak bench, indicating that Kit should sit. “There are a couple of questions I’d like to ask you.”

  “You can ask,” said Kit.

  “The first,” said Pat, “is why you hung up on me in Tokyo.”

  “I was busy being sick,” said Kit, which was close enough to the truth to do. He’d have hung up anyway, probably.

  “But you’d already been told that Mary was dead.”

  “Yes,” Kit said. “But not when it happened.”

  Pale blue eyes hooked into his. Watery and old, framed by lower lids that drooped and brows so low they must limit what Pat Robbe-Duras could actually see. It wasn’t a cold or even angry gaze, more curious, as if the man had moved beyond extremes, despite his earlier threats of anger.

  “The date matters?”

  “Mary wrote,” said Kit. “She sent me a postcard.”

  “When?” Such a simple word.

  Kit took a deep breath. “The week before she killed herself.”

  “Are you going to tell me what it said?”

  “No,” said Kit, shaking his head. “But I promise you one thing. It didn’t mention suicide or give a reason for doing what she did.”

  “Assuming she did.”

  “I thought you were the one who…?”

  Pat leaned back on his bench and stared at a twist of silver river. A willow draped its branches into the water and a flotilla of baby coots were chirping their way around rushes on the far bank. It looked idyllic, if you liked that sort of thing. When Pat finally spoke his voice was flat, stripped of all emotion.

  “Mary’s dead,” he said. “I’m just not sure it was suicide…That’s what I wanted to see you about. Let me be honest…I never expected Katie to find you. But telling her to keep looking beat having her disturb the police with mad theories about what was really going on in Mary’s life.”

  “Which was…?”

  “What you’ll find out for me,” said Pat, reaching for Kit’s wrist.

  Kit unpeeled the old man’s fingers. “People can do things without reason,” he said.

  Standing up, Pat said, “You’re wrong. Everything has its own logic. If Mary killed herself I want to know why. Which brings us to my final question. Why would someone like Katie, who believes you ruined her daughter’s life, ask Kit Newton for help?”

  “Because,” said Kit, “she’s desperate.”

  “Thank God,” the old man said. “At least you understand that much.”

  They ate cold chicken in a small dining room with oak boards and a granite overmantel carved in a flat, almost stark style. A huge gilded mirror had been fixed to the wall with its base resting on two wooden blocks that, in turn, rested on the mantel below.

  “Too heavy to hang properly,” said Pat. “But the room needs the light.”

  A couple of early Victorian oil landscapes adorned one wall, above a silver jug which was tarnished with lack of cleaning. The table had wooden pegs in place of screws and a Persian rug covering the floor had a hole in one corner. Kit found it impossible to know if he was looking at discreet poverty or a priceless collection of antiques he was too ignorant to recognise.

  “You know,” said Pat, “I’m grateful you came. I wasn’t even sure Katie would pass on my message.”

  “It was a close run thing,” admitted Kit. “She almost forgot.”

  Pat snorted. “Katie has a memory like an elephant,” he said, reaching for his white wine. “She never forgets and rarely forgives. If you only understand one thing about Katie O’Mally, understand that. She believes Mary is alive, I don’t…I do, however, want to know why my daughter killed herself.”

  “Suppose I find out,” said Kit. “Are you really sure you want the answer?”

  “Let’s face that when we get to it.”

  By the time a taxi arrived to take Kit to the railway station he knew everything Pat knew about his daughter’s recent life; which was either surprisingly little or Patrick Robbe-Duras was being less than honest.

  Kit knew she’d had a handful of lovers, none of them serious. Apparently, Katie had hated the lot.

  “And you?” asked Kit. “How did you feel?”

  Pat’s smile was sour. “I’m a pragmatist,” he said. “After you, anything was an improvement.”

  Kit tried to remember how Major Yamota had framed his questions. The way the Japanese detective had approached each fact from a dozen different angles, like a swordsman looking for the perfect strike. It was hard to know if such skill was an art or science. Whichever, Kit lacked the experience to interview deftly and he stumbled instead through what might have been wrong with Mary’s life.

  By the end of the afternoon Kit knew that Mary’s gallery was breaking even, which was more than could be said for most galleries in central London. She seemed happy on the occasions Pat saw her, which was less often than he would have liked.

  Her flat had been a belated eighteenth birthday present, Mary having returned home shortly after her actual birthday. She’d been in Amsterdam and Dublin, then gone to Madrid, travelling. At least that was how Mary explained her two year absence.

  Mary owned the flat in Hogarth Mews outright, without mortgage. She had an allowance from Kate. Most of what Pat owned was already held in trust for her. She worked the hours she worked because she wanted to…

  Nothing Kit discovered came close to suggesting a reason for suicide. Which either meant Pat was keeping silent about something or knew less about Mary than he wanted to believe. Maybe that was true of every family.

  As the cab from a local firm pulled into Pat’s little drive, crunching gravel in front of his ivy-covered front door, Kit turned back to ask the only question that mattered.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Pat’s answer was unexpected. It was also grubby and friable from having been read too many times and had muddy fingerprints across the flap. Kit’s name was scrawled across the front of an envelope in ink that had faded with age.

  “Take it,” said Pat. “Better late than never.”

  Kit, hi…

  Reading in the back of the cab made Kit feel sick. So he slipped Mary’s letter into its tatty envelope and saved it for the twenty-five minutes he had to wait for a train on a windy platform in the middle of nowhere.

  The letter had been given to him without apology.

  “You found this after she died?”

  “No,” said Pat. “I’ve always had it. Mary posted it through your letter box.”

  “So how did you get it?”

  “Your father. He recognised Mary’s writing and kept it. For safety, he said.”

  The words inside were simple. Grief, anger, and guilt had stripped away any pretence of literary style. Her other notes to him, few as they were, had been clever or witty, carefully worded and designed to impress. All of that was missing. Mary wanted to know what he’d said to Josh the morning before Josh died. She wanted explanations.

  “When did he give it to you?”

  “After he heard Mary was missing. We’d reported it to the police.”

  Yeah, Kit knew all about that. Somehow he’d ended up at the top of their suspect list. It said so in the newspapers.

  “Katie was convinced you’d killed her.” It seemed Kit had been saved by a single line on a card posted in Dublin. Even Kate O’Mally had accepted Mary was unlikely to be writing from beyond the grave.

  “Did my father say why he kept it?”

  “He thought you
were a bad influence on Mary.”

  “And you,” asked Kit, feeling emptiness in his stomach. “What did you think?”

  Pat smiled sadly. “Me,” he said, “I always thought it was the other way round.”

  CHAPTER 30 — Saturday, 23 June

  Three hours and two changes of train took Kit to London. And by the time he reached the head of a taxi queue at Waterloo station, he’d added another twenty minutes to this. The sky above the Houses of Parliament was already turning pink as a black cab carried him over the flat greyness of Waterloo bridge. The flood lights on the Savoy Hotel were lit and the river level was low.

  It was colder than Tokyo, less humid. But it was still hotter than Kit remembered. What little energy he had after the flight and his meeting with Mary’s father had been leached away by reading her letter. He was nine hours behind where his body believed it was and fifteen years removed from the boy to whom that letter had been addressed.

  Reading it still hurt.

  At first the city was as he remembered; grand buildings gone slightly to seed, a jumble of Victorian hotels and theatres cheek by jowl with office blocks, too much traffic and too little road planning. It was only when he looked back at the National Theatre with its neon lifts rising to the roof gardens that Kit began to accept that London had changed. The police checkpoint near Holborn confirmed his view.

  Kit took a taxi because he was too tired to find the flat on his own. In his pocket he had a Japanese video phone, as useless in London as its English equivalent was in Tokyo. Also in his pocket was a passport, a leather wallet containing £500 in small notes, and the keys Kate O’Mally had given him to Mary’s old flat.

  Whatever Mary had said in her note about the flat being his, Hogarth Mews was only on loan until Mary wanted the place back, Kate was very clear about that. It had seemed best to nod.

  “Okay,” said the taxi driver. “I’d better drop you here…No room to turn,” he added, while Kit fumbled with the door. This was true. Even if the driver moved the bins waiting at the entrance for next day’s rubbish collection, turning inside the mews was still impossible. A silver Porsche took up too much of the available space under the arch. Vivaldi played from a half-open window on the left and someone had watered their flower boxes, so that water dripped like rain onto the car. Money, said the Porsche. Arsehole, said its parking.

  “She’s upstairs.”

  Turning, Kit found himself facing a blonde woman with tied-back hair, in a white shirt splattered with paint, a Gauloise hung from her mouth. Just in case Kit had missed the fact she was artistic, she was holding a fat brush and a multi-hued palette.

  Maybe he was being unfair.

  “I gave her Mary’s spare key.” The woman hovered on the edge of saying something else. “I’m Sophie,” she added, though this was obviously a prelude to what she really wanted to say.

  Shaking hands, Kit found his own fingers sticky with paint. “Who’s upstairs…?” He began to ask, but Sophie had already moved on.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You know…about Mary. Must have been a real shock. I was away and…” Sophie stopped. “I’m just sorry, all right? Really sorry.” She sounded almost cross to find herself explaining things.

  “Who’s upstairs?” Kit asked.

  “The kid…Apparently the electricity to Mary’s flat is off, so I’ve lent the kid my lighter and a couple of Diptyque candles.”

  Which kid?

  The obvious question answered itself in a crash of feet on winding stairs and a head suddenly appearing round the corner. Neku had been waiting and listening. She looked defiant rather than nervous.

  “Fuck,” said Kit. “What are you doing here?” Then he took another look at the Japanese girl and blinked. “And what the hell happened to your hair?”

  Sophie snorted. “I’ll leave you to it,” she said.

  After Neku’s third attempt to explain why she was in London, Kit decided it could wait. He decided this because every attempt to explain reduced Neku to tears which seemed to be of anger. She felt the answer should be obvious. “Who else knows you’re here?” he demanded, settling his back against the railings of the flat’s little roof garden.

  “No Neck,” said Neku.

  Kit was shocked.

  “And Mrs. Oniji…I gave her Yoshi’s bowl,” Neku added, seeing Kit’s look. “Someone has to look after it. You were in hospital and I was frightened it might, you know…” She looked sick at the mere thought. “That would be a disaster.”

  “What would?” Kit wanted to know.

  “If the bowl broke.”

  He took a deep breath. “Why should it break?”

  “It has a crack,” said Neku, “down one side. Hairline, almost impossible to spot without X-rays.”

  Kit stared at her.

  “It begins below the rim,” said Neku. “And runs from there to the base. I’ve been wondering if the crack is intentional. An artist’s acknowledgement of the flaws inherent in all perfection…” Looking at Kit, she said, “You don’t have the faintest idea why this matters, do you?”

  “No,” said Kit, going to fetch another jug of water.

  Refilling her glass, Neku returned to her cushion. They were watching the sun settle behind slate roofs, as seagulls circled the London sky above and the western edge of the city finally turned from dark pink to purple. Searchlights already swept the sky, clustered above the obvious places—Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Downing Street, and the financial centres of the city.

  “Are you going to tell me?” Kit asked.

  Neku considered the star-specked sky and shivered in the first stirrings of a night wind. This planet was weird, its cities chaotic and its social structures fragmented to the point of being incomprehensible. Every breath she took was probably poisoning her.

  “No,” she said finally. “I don’t think I am. You wouldn’t understand anyway.” She shrugged, shuffled on her cushion, and got up, only to sit down again a few seconds later.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This body,” she said. “I just can’t get used to it.”

  “You will,” said Kit. “That’s just an age thing.”

  “Yeah,” said Neku. It was the first time he’d seen her grin.

  CHAPTER 31 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

  “Marriage?” So shocked was Lady Neku that she forgot to keep the horror out of her voice, but for once her mother seemed not to notice. The girl could remember that much.

  “Happens to us all,” said Lady Katchatka.

  “Whom will I marry?”

  “Luc d’Alambert. You’ll like him.”

  Lady Neku froze.

  “I’ve got some pictures,” said her mother, touching the wall. “Here…”

  I’ll like him?

  A boy of Lady Neku’s age stared out at her. Ash blond hair, pale eyes, and skin so thin it was almost marble. Someone must have said something funny out of sight because Luc d’Alambert suddenly grinned. Although a glitch froze his top lip and shut one eye.

  “What’s wrong with the picture?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” said Lady Katchatka, waving away the connection. “Luc has a tiny problem with one side of his face. Nerve damage. We’ll have it fixed when he arrives.”

  “Why doesn’t he have it fixed himself?”

  Lady Neku’s mother shrugged. “The d’Alamberts can be odd,” she said. “His father has firm views on augmentation. As I said, we can have it fixed when Luc arrives.”

  Inbreds, throwbacks…Odd wasn’t a word her mother usually applied to the d’Alamberts. Although Neku had heard her use plenty of others. And little about this proposed marriage made sense.

  “I thought we hated the d’Alamberts?”

  “Neku…” The reprimand was swallowed. Instead, the elderly woman stood up and walked to a mirror, flicking her fingers so the glass revealed the dusty landscape laid out below. An ocean filled the window’s upper corner. It looked sullen and lifeless, matted with purple weed. The
waters had been teeming with life once, or so the kami insisted. Unfortunately, nowadays the shade cast by High Strange covered less than a quarter of the Katchatka segment, and it was out there, in the naked sunlight, that Schloss Omga could just be seen clinging to the side of a mountain.

  “It used to be beautiful,” said Lady Katchatka.

  “The desert?”

  “Grasslands back then. Grasslands and forest and savannah. The desert came later.”

  “Can you remember when the world was different?”

  Lady Katchatka glanced at her daughter to see if Neku was serious. “How old do you think I am?” she asked.

  “How old would you need to be?”

  Her mother smiled sourly. “Older than this.”

  Lady Neku nodded. “Mother…” She was taking a risk using the word without an honorific to formalise it, but from the slight nod she got in reply, it had been a risk worth taking. “Where will I live?”

  “With your husband.”

  “Luc d’Alambert?”

  It was Lady Katchatka’s turn to nod.

  “And the wedding?”

  “Will be here,” said Lady Katchatka with a smile. “We will invite the d’Alamberts and the major retainers. I have already ordered our major domo to open up the unused circles of High Strange. It will be magnificent.”

  Lady Neku considered this. The idea still troubled her. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I really thought the d’Alamberts were our…”

  “You don’t have to understand.”

  She watched her mother rein in her anger and take a very deep breath, the kind most people followed by counting to ten.

  “Something must change,” her mother said. “If it doesn’t then the families are going to tear each other apart. No one knows how much longer we can support life, at least at its present level. Five thousand years, ten thousand, maybe more…but first we need peace.” Lady Katchatka shrugged. “I’m sorry it comes at a price.”

  That was when Lady Neku realised the price was her.

  Personally Lady Neku doubted if the moon really had been split into six and divided between families like an orange. All reliable records suggested the moon had a mass of 7.35 x 1022 kg, roughly an eightieth of the original mass of the earth. The total mass of High Strange and the other five knots in Nawa-no-ukiyo, plus all the karman lines and the sails came to less than half this. So if the habitats had really been grown from segments of moon, then where had the rest of it gone?