Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  “It’s a mythic thing, no stags were actually harmed during the… that kind of thing.”

  Romney had offered the choice of name to Arthur but reneged when he opted for “Jane,” a name far too plain for Romney’s tastes. In the end, she went for world geography. Romney’s sister Johdi had a child called Africa and her friend Lily had a baby called India so Romney decided on China for Arthur’s sister. “Like collecting countries,” she said to Missy. “They’ll be like NATO or something when they grow up.”

  “It could have been much worse,” Missy said to Arthur. “Belgium, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Gibraltar, Uzbekistan. The list of worse is endless. That’s not grammatical, by the way.”

  China, although in no way Chinese, was as delicate as porcelain, with creamy skin and a rosy blush on her cheeks. She was more robust than her name implied but nevertheless received round-the-clock attention from a series of maternity nurses who themselves received round-the-clock attention from the nanny-cam in the nursery. Romney had a monitor in her bedroom so that she could watch the nurse watching her baby. Otto’s DNA had finally been forced to own up as the culprit (“Kraut Comes Clean—‘China’s Mine’ ”) much to Romney’s relief, although, “He wasn’t a kraut,” she said indignantly.

  Autumn came. The Primrose Hill household was running smoothly: Romney was sated with money and sex—the sex in the stocky form of a soap star—Arthur was as happy as an eight-year-old boy can be at school (“OK, I suppose”), and China was a dream of a child. Even the tabloid photographers had stopped camping on the doorstep and Missy was looking forward to the school break and some leaf-kicking time in London’s parks with Arthur and the baby, when Romney suddenly announced that Arthur was going to visit his father for half-term.

  “They have joint custody,” Arthur explained over a boiled-egg tea down in the huge basement kitchen.

  “And when did you last see him?”

  Arthur thought for a long time. “Two years ago, I think. You have to come with me,” he added matter-of-factly.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s on tour.”

  “On tour?”

  “Oh yeah, didn’t I say?” Romney said when Missy questioned her. “Boak is in the middle of like this huge world tour, actually I think they’re always on it. Arthur’s going to visit him when they’re in Germany. Flying into Munich, flying out of Hamburg at the end of the week. All the arrangements have been made by his publicist, you’re going too. And I tell you what, I’m going to give you your own credit card. How’s that? One more thing for the kraut to pay for.”

  “He’s Swiss,” Missy reminded her.

  “Same difference,” Romney said.

  “What about my hamster?” Arthur asked Missy.

  “We’ll ask Africa to look after him.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “It’s only a week,” Missy said, “and babies are almost indestructible, you know.” Romney, however, decided not to look after China herself but to go on a “detox meditation” in the Cotswolds with her friend Lily while China went to stay with her maternal grandmother, who had, in Romney’s words, “been dying to get a shot at her.”

  “So China will be fine,” Missy reassured Arthur. “After all, your grandmother managed to bring your mother up.” Arthur gave Missy the most beautifully blank look.

  “You can be very enigmatic sometimes, Arthur,” Missy said (“from the Greek ainigma, derived from ainos—fable”).

  If they were on their way to partake of Boak’s debauchery, there was no indication of it in Lufthansa business class, which was so clean and gray and lacking in decadence that Arthur, a nonchalant traveler, managed to study the Collins German phrase book that Missy had bought him in an Oxfam shop prior to the trip (“Why buy new?” she said to Arthur, “when you can buy cheap?”) while Missy herself read a book about astronomy that she had taken out from the library. Missy thought it was important to use libraries. (“Why buy at all when you can borrow?”) She wasn’t particularly interested in astronomy but she believed an important part of her job was to impart as much general knowledge as possible to her charges, because if not her, then who?

  “Did you know,” Missy asked Arthur, “that they can weigh galaxies?”

  “Sie führen mich an,” Arthur said, consulting his phrase book.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re pulling my leg.” He laughed, pleased that he knew something that Missy didn’t.

  Missy and Arthur were in possession of an extraordinarily detailed itinerary for the German leg of Boak’s tour, prepared by the band’s publicist, a girl called Lulu, who, as well as providing flight times, driver details, and hotel reservations, had also given two different mobile numbers on which she could be contacted. The itinerary also informed them that they were going to travel around Germany on Boak’s tour bus.

  “What will that be like?” Missy asked Arthur, as the plane bumped lightly onto the runway at Munich airport. Arthur frowned, carefully searching for the right word.

  “Extreme,” he said finally.

  There was no car to collect them at the airport, as promised by Lulu, but Missy had changed sterling into euros at Heathrow and they caught a taxi to the hotel with the careless abandon of people on someone else’s expenses.

  The Bayerischer Hof had no record of any reservation. “Two rooms? In the name of Wright?” Missy persisted, showing Lulu’s careful itinerary to the receptionist. The receptionist regarded it politely as if it was a document from another civilization, far away in time and space, and beyond translation.

  “Is Boak actually staying here?” Missy asked, wishing they weren’t called such a stupid name. At first, the receptionist thought she was trying to say “book” and then “Björk.” The smile on the receptionist’s face grew stiff and tired. She called the manager.

  “What does ‘boak’ mean, anyway?” Missy asked Arthur as they waited.

  “It’s Scottish for sick.”

  “Ill sick or vomit sick?”

  “Vomit sick.”

  The manager appeared, smiling sadly, and said that he very much regretted but the hotel never revealed details about its guests. It was growing late by now and Missy felt an uncharacteristic reluctance for battle. Arthur was sitting on their luggage, looking like a weary refugee, and Missy decided they would take a room anyway. She offered the brand-new gold credit card Romney had given her before they left. A few minutes later the hotel manager returned it to her and said in a low murmur that he was very sorry but the card was “not acceptable.” He smiled even more sadly. Missy paid for the room on her own card.

  “How much money do you have?” Arthur asked.

  “Quite a lot actually,” Missy said truthfully. “I’ve been saving for years.”

  “But you’re not supposed to be paying.”

  “True. But it’s only for one night. I expect your father’ll turn up tomorrow.”

  “Das ist Pech,” Arthur consoled.

  The room was nice, although not the “luxury suite” promised by Lulu. The floors were clean and the sheets snappy with starch. Missy ordered cheese omelettes and apfelstrudel on room service. After they had eaten she phoned both the mobile numbers that Lulu had provided. One was completely dead, the other announced something impenetrable in a German that was well beyond the capacity of the phrase book. Missy phoned Romney’s Primrose Hill number but there was no answer. On Romney’s mobile a voice announced that it might not be switched on.

  They filled in their breakfast cards—Arthur found this very exciting—and then watched an incomprehensible game show on television that even if they had been fluent in German they probably wouldn’t have understood. They went to their beds at nine o’clock German time, eight o’clock Primrose Hill time, and they both slept as soundly as babies until the maid hammered on the door with their breakfast, long after the dawn had scattered her yellow robes across the skies.

  After breakfast, which Arthur liked almost as much as the ordering of it,
Missy tried all the phone numbers she had tried the previous evening, with the same result. “Es sind schlechte Zeiten,” Arthur said, leafing industriously through his phrase book. “Wie schade.”

  Missy went down to reception and looked the sadly smiling manager in the eye in the same way that she looked at little boys when she particularly wanted them to tell her the truth.

  “If you were me,” she said to him, “and think about this carefully, would you stay another night in this unbelievably expensive hotel and wait for the band known, unfortunately, as Boak to turn up?”

  “No,” he said, “I wouldn’t.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Look at it this way,” Missy said to Arthur. “Our flight from Hamburg isn’t for another week, we have enough money—even if it’s mine—and we are in one of the great cultural cities of western Europe in the half-term holidays, so we may as well enjoy ourselves.”

  They moved into a guest house on Karlstrasse, although they returned several times to the Bayerischer Hof to check that Boak hadn’t suddenly materialized. “Hat jemand nach uns gefragt?” Arthur asked the sad manager. No, he replied, in English, they hadn’t.

  They trekked to the Olympiahalle and discovered a tour poster slashed with a banner in large red capitals, declaring that Boak’s concert was “Entfällt.”

  “I think that means canceled,” Arthur said without bothering to consult the German dictionary they’d bought (“Sometimes you have no choice but to buy”). After that, they didn’t bother returning to the Bayerischer Hof. Lulu and Romney remained unreachable by all means.

  “Perhaps we’re dead,” Arthur suggested, “and we just don’t know it.”

  “I think that’s a rather fanciful explanation,” Missy said.

  In accord with Missy’s beliefs, they visited museums and galleries in moderation—the Forum der Technik (but only the Planetarium), the Deutsches Museum (but only the coal mine), the Alte Pinakothek (but only pre-sixteenth-century paintings). Arthur stayed awake for the whole of the BMW museum—he wasn’t an eight-year-old boy for nothing—but was asleep on his feet within minutes of going into the Residenz-Museum. The Frauenkirche and the Peterskirche had much the same effect on both of them. An expedition to the Schloss Nymphen-burg might have been more of a success if it hadn’t rained so much. Their favorite museum exhibit was a chance discovery, a stuffed creature, in the oddly named Jagd-und Fischereimuseum (“Hunting and Fishing,” Arthur supplied helpfully). The wolpertinger was a curious Mitteleuropean chimera, a mix of rabbit, stag, and duck, plus something less definable and more frightening. (“Distantly related to the rare wolfkin,” Missy said.)

  “Bavarian primeval creature,” Arthur read from the guidebook the sad hotel manager had given them on their last visit to the Bayerischer Hof.

  In truth, neither of them was much in the mood for history and culture and they spent a lot of time wandering in the Englischer Garten or drinking hot chocolate. Every day at midday they went and stood ritualistically in front of the glockenspiel on the Neues Rathaus and watched for all the brightly colored figures to make their rounds.

  “What did happen to your last nanny?” Missy asked as they waited for the glockenspiel to start. Arthur made a pinched sort of face.

  “What,” Missy encouraged, “she was murdered? She killed herself, she came back as a ghost and wandered round a lake? Fell in love with the master who had a mad wife in the attic and who became hideously disfigured in a fire?”

  “You’re not supposed to talk like that to eight-year-olds.”

  “Sorry.”

  “She left.”

  “Left?”

  “Left. She said she wouldn’t leave and she did. And I liked her.” Arthur stuck his hands in his pockets and angrily kicked an imaginary stone on the ground. “I liked her and she promised she wouldn’t leave and she did. And you’ll leave.” His face began to quiver and he kicked the ground harder. His shoe was getting scuffed. Missy tried to touch the small shoulders, heaving with suppressed tears, but Arthur grew suddenly hysterical and shook her off.

  “You’ll leave just like she did,” he screamed. “You’ll leave me and I hate you! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

  “Arthur—”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” he yelled, so wound up now that he could hardly breathe, and several passersby regarded with curiosity the small English boy struggling furiously to escape his mother’s grip.

  “It feels as though we’ve been away years,” Arthur said when the cab dropped them off at Munich Airport.

  “I know.”

  “Do you think anyone’s missed us?”

  “Can you see the Lufthansa sales clerk?”

  “Over there.”

  Arthur, Missy was relieved to see, was quite calm today, although his eyes were still red from crying—he had sobbed for hours, long after Missy had got him back to the Karlstrasse guest house, long after she had put him to bed with milk and honey cake offered by the sympathetic proprietress. “Die Kinder,” she sighed, as if to be a child was the worst thing in the world. Arthur had finally fallen asleep, flushed and tearstained, clutching onto Missy’s hand. “I don’t hate you, you know,” he said, with a grief-stricken hiccup. “I love you really.”

  “I love you too,” she said, kissing the top of his head, “and I promise I won’t leave you and I never break promises. Ever. You’ll leave me one day, though,” she added softly when Arthur was asleep.

  They waited in the queue at the ticket sales desk. The airport was hot and incredibly busy. So many airlines, so many destinations. Arthur read them off the departure board: “Paris, Rome, Lisbon, New York, London Heathrow.”

  “I think we should have bought these tickets earlier,” Missy said, looking uncharacteristically distracted. Arthur yawned extravagantly. “Ich langweile mich,” he said. “At least I learned some German.”

  “Yes, you’ve done very well, Arthur,” Missy said vaguely.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Mm.”

  The Lufthansa salesclerk regarded Missy’s request for two single tickets to Hamburg with solemnity. She would gladly sell her them, she said, but all the Hamburg flights were full until that evening, did she still want to go?

  “How about London?” Missy asked.

  “I can get you on the next flight to Heathrow,” the salesclerk said, “but not sitting together.”

  “It will be quicker for us just to go straight home,” Missy said to Arthur.

  “Mm,” Arthur said.

  Missy thought about buying a ticket for London. She thought for rather a long time so that the salesclerk grew agitated because of the long queue snaking and coiling and knotting behind Arthur and Missy.

  “Arthur,” Missy said finally, “have you ever been to Rome?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I can get you on a connecting flight to Rome leaving in half an hour,” the salesclerk said hopefully.

  “A lot of museums in Rome,” Arthur said.

  “A lot,” Missy agreed.

  “And there are other places too,” Arthur said.

  “Oh, yes,” Missy agreed, “there are many places. So many places that you need never come back to where you started from.”

  “Which was Primrose Hill,” Arthur said. He tugged at Missy’s hand. “What about China?”

  “China?” the salesclerk asked, looking agitated.

  “Don’t panic,” Missy said to her (“from the Great God Pan, now dead, thank goodness”). “I don’t know about China,” Missy said solemnly to Arthur. “I’m afraid her fate may be to stay with Romney.”

  “You’re going to have to hurry,” the salesclerk said. “The gate will be closing soon.”

  They ran. They ran so fast Arthur was sure they were going to take off before they even got on the plane. Missy pulled him along by the hand and when he looked at her feet her sensible leather boots had turned into silver sandals and he wondered if that was why they were able to run so fast. The air
port tannoy stopped announcing that passengers for Düsseldorf should go to the gate and instead broadcast the rousing sound of a hunting horn. For a few dizzy seconds Arthur saw the quiver of silver arrows on Missy’s back, gleaming with moonshine. He saw her green, wolfish eyes light up with amusement as she shouted, “Come on, Arthur, hurry up,” while a pack of hounds bayed and boiled around her silver-sandaled feet, eager for the chase.

  VII

  EVIL

  DOPPELGÄNGERS

  All that we see or seem

  Is but a dream within a dream.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE,

  “A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM”

  THAT WAS A pretty good night on Saturday, Fielding,” Joshua said cheerfully.

  “Yeah,” Fielding said, concentrating on getting coffee from the pot into his mug. Fielding’s hand seemed to have developed an unnerving tremor, which he thought was probably something to do with alcohol poisoning. The last thing he felt like was a chummy round-the-coffee-machine-chat with Josh whateverhisnameis at this time on a Monday morning. It was considered etiquette in the Features department not to talk unnecessarily before 11:00 A.M. but Josh was new and seemed willfully ignorant of all the rules.

  “I was wrecked,” Joshua persisted. “Not as wrecked as you though.” He laughed. “You were completely out of it. I’m surprised you got home.”

  “Yeah.” There was something fresh faced and bouncy about Joshua that reminded Fielding of a Blue Peter presenter and which was unwelcome at this, or indeed any, time of day. Fielding’s head was pounding. He didn’t think it was possible to have such a bad headache and not be in the middle of a brain hemorrhage. Perhaps he was in the middle of a brain hemorrhage. That might account for the fact that the last thing he could remember before waking up this morning was a round of end-of-the-week cocktails in the bar round the corner from the newspaper’s offices. But surely that was Friday? What had happened to Saturday and Sunday? He downed his coffee quickly and poured another.