Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  Joshua had shadowed Fielding for his first couple of weeks on the paper and still seemed irritatingly attracted to Fielding’s orbit. Fielding was grudgingly grateful for Josh’s existence though, because it meant that, on the last-in-first-out principle, he himself was no longer the newest member of the department.

  Fielding, although nominally the media correspondent, had written hardly anything else but the TV review column since he’d joined the paper. At first he thought being the TV critic would be a cool job. He’d envisaged it as an opportunity to watch endless reruns of Buffy and Star Trek: Voyager and write witty postironic little essays on television and culture (“Levi-Straussian character function in EastEnders,” “ER—High Mimetic or Low Mimetic?”), recycled from his (now rather old) media studies degree, but instead it had turned out to be a relentless diet of worthy documentaries, savage nature programs, and mediocre two-part police procedurals.

  “I couldn’t believe it when you did that thing with Russell’s car—”

  “Yeah. It was a riot. Excuse me, Josh—”

  “Joshua.”

  “Whatever. I just have to go and…” Fielding gestured vaguely behind him.

  “Yeah, me too,” Joshua said. “I’ve got that piece to write up about Green Acres.”

  “Oh?” Fielding said, trying to sound casual. “What piece about Green Acres?”

  “Big piece for the Saturday supplement that Flavia asked me to do.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, I was up there last week on set, doing cast interviews and stuff for the big all-week special that’s coming up. I think you were busy with that lottery winners makeover thing. Romney Wright made a guest appearance.”

  “Did you meet her?” Fielding asked, his intellect suddenly suppressed by testosterone.

  “Yes,” Joshua said. “She was a very nice person.”

  “With huge breasts?”

  Joshua looked uncomfortable. “That’s not how we should define women, Fielding.”

  “Yes, but huge breasts—yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she really going to give birth live on the Internet?”

  “That’s a ridiculous idea. Anyhoo, Green Acres—any thoughts about how I should approach it?”

  “No.” As if he would help Josh. Fielding tried to think, but his brain felt bruised and a vulture appeared to be pecking at his liver. He should have been the one to do the Green Acres piece. How would he ever get out of the ghetto of TV criticism if Flavia had developed a preference for Josh whateverhisnameis over him? For some reason, Fielding’s father’s Conservative Club vocabulary jumped in to help out his own ailing lexicon and “little whippersnapper” were the words that came to his mind.

  “Well,” Joshua said, “must get to work.”

  “Hey, Josh!” Fielding shouted after Joshua’s purposeful, retreating back.

  “It’s Joshua!” Joshua shouted back with a big goofy smile on his face.

  “What did I do to Russell’s car?”

  “God, you’re really funny, Fielding.” Joshua laughed.

  Fielding went and shut himself in a cupboard. Officially the cupboard was called the viewing room but that gave it a dignity above its station. It contained a television, a video recorder, and an upright chair on which it was impossible to get comfortable—which Fielding supposed was the point, otherwise every slacker in the building would have been snoozing away in there. Although the viewing room had the air of a bloodless torture chamber, it was the one place, apart from the toilet cubicles, where Fielding could get some respite from the aggressively open-plan office. Not even senior editors had their own office, a policy that was supposed to foster “democracy and trust,” but which in reality meant that the diversions that made laboring on a computer all day bearable for Fielding—endless games of solitaire and mah-jongg, online gambling, the regular visits to porn Web-cam sites and Buffy chat rooms—were now out of bounds unless he wanted to become the object of censure or, worse, derision.

  Flavia herself sat in the center of the office, claiming that this made her “always available.” Fielding was reminded of an unbelievably ugly spider he had watched on some nature documentary, squatting in the middle of its web, waiting for the arrival of hapless prey.

  The rest of the newspaper occupied the glass-and-air upper floors but for some reason Features was consigned to the Tartaruslike depths of the earth. Lit only by artificial daylight and always hot and airless, the Features department was, Fielding imagined, like that desolate area around the entrance to Hades that was populated by all the bad abstract nouns, such as Fear and Grief, Anxiety, Agony, and Hunger. Fielding was on first-name terms with them all, especially the last. He hadn’t had any breakfast since—when? He was starving. Had he eaten at all on his lost weekend?

  Fielding took a tape out of the padded brown envelope delivered ten minutes earlier by a bike courier and put it into the video’s slot, which made him think of toast, which reminded him how hungry he was. He watched ten minutes of the tape—some historical-medical-detective thing, Silent Witness meets The House of Eliott piece of crap (The Secret Life of Jemima Bates)—and despite the hardness of the chair, fell asleep.

  When he woke up he found that the plot didn’t seem to have moved on at all but time had been measured by a snail-trail of drool that had crept down his chin. He only woke up at all because the door of the cupboard was flung open by Gwen Anderson, who gave Fielding a disgusted look and said, “For God’s sake, Fielding, you look repulsive.”

  “Some of us are ill,” Fielding said. Fielding wondered why no one ever took any notice of the DO NOT DISTURB sign he had pinned to the door. Gwen had curly hair and for an unnerving moment all the curls turned into little snakes that writhed and coiled on her head.

  “Bad hair day?” Fielding said.

  “What?”

  Fielding supposed he was hallucinating from hunger. He suspected he was going to throw up and was intensely relieved when Gwen didn’t engage him in further conversation but left abruptly, slamming the door on purpose so that Fielding winced and gave out an involuntary whimper of pain. Groaning quietly, he got up from the chair and picked his way across the floor as delicately as a newborn deer, in case his head fell off. He took the tape out of the video and stuffed it in his bag. He really needed to go somewhere and lie down.

  Flavia had her back to Fielding and was bawling at some hapless minion and Fielding used this opportunity to try to skulk past her black widow bulk before she noticed him.

  “That ‘pretending you’re invisible’ thing doesn’t actually work, Fielding,” Gwen murmured to him as he crept by her desk. Fielding made an obscene gesture at her; she made one back. Fielding liked to imagine they were indulging in sophisticated foreplay but deep down he suspected that she might really loathe him.

  “Going so soon, Fielding?” Flavia barked suddenly, without even turning round. He supposed she had sensed the vibrations on her web. “It seems like you only just got here,” she said, spinning round in her chair. Fielding caught a whiff of her strident perfume. She checked her watch in a theatrical fashion. “Oh, look, you have only just got here.”

  Working from home was a perfectly acceptable practice and yet Flavia treated it as a sign of the kind of weakness that might easily lead to your being fired. Fielding waved a piece of paper in the air. He had worked in enough newspaper offices to know that waving a piece of paper around in an important fashion usually fooled people into thinking you were on a mission. “Got to research a few things,” he said to Flavia.

  “Ah, the old ‘waving the piece of paper’ trick.” Gwen laughed. Fielding gave her a black look.

  “I do have to,” Fielding protested sincerely to Flavia, so sincerely that he almost believed it himself, and when he got home he started playing Jemima Bates again from the beginning on the television at the foot of his bed. This time, the opening credits hadn’t even finished rolling before Fielding was sound asleep on top of the covers.

 
“Hi, Fielding.”

  “Hi, Nina.”

  Nina was Flavia’s PA, one of those neat, capable sort of girls who were never attracted to Fielding. Nina had French-manicured nails and a precision-cut sixties bob and no sense of humor. Fielding’s heart sank as he saw her approaching his desk because the only time she ever did this was to convey some ludicrous “bright idea” for an article from Flavia (why couldn’t she use e-mail like everyone else?), nearly always on the topic of reality TV (“It’s the future, Fielding”). Would Fielding, for example, like to spend a week as an inmate in the new World War II prisoner-of-war camp reality show (Pow!)? Would he be a contestant on a show where you were locked up for a month with ten other people and vied to see who could put on the most weight for a huge cash prize (Porkie Pie)? Fielding had managed to avoid all of these “bright ideas” so far but he knew it was only a matter of time before Flavia forced him to partake in some deeply embarrassing public ordeal in which some, if not all, of his character weaknesses would be revealed (cowardice, intolerance, complete lack of musical talent—to name just a few).

  Fielding had mugged up the symptoms of several sudden-onset illnesses in case of this eventuality and was quite prepared to go as far as an emergency appendectomy if it helped him to avoid ritual humiliation. Fielding had once pointed out to Flavia that he was someone who had served as a BAFTA judge. “This is a broadsheet, Flavia, I’m a serious journalist.”

  “So?” she had said. “What’s your point?”

  “Nina,” Fielding said in a businesslike way, picking up a piece of paper from his desk and standing up. “Can this wait?” He waved the piece of paper. “It’s just I’ve got to see this.”

  A shadow of confusion, swiftly followed by one of disappointment, passed over Nina’s face. “Oh, right, sure,” she said. “It was just that I, um… I wanted—I thought maybe…” This didn’t sound like one of Flavia’s precise edicts. Nina, no longer merely an intermediary, seemed to be speaking, rather badly, with her own words. Fielding was astonished to see a blush, like rosy-fingered dawn, creep up her neck and spread out over her face. He was intrigued.

  “Go on,” he coaxed. “What did you think?”

  Nina chewed her lip, rubbing away at the shiny pink lip gloss she always wore. Fielding found himself strangely transfixed by Nina’s lips. He couldn’t take his eyes off them—they were perfect. In fact, all of Nina’s features, when he looked at them, were just right, neither too small nor too big, unlike Flavia, who had her lips injected with collagen and now resembled a puffer fish. Flavia also had regular Botox injections, so that more and more she looked as if she was wearing her own death mask. Nina’s features, on the other hand, were untouched by artifice. Fielding thought of milkmaids and meadows. He wondered if he was coming down with something.

  “It’s OK,” Nina said, indicating the piece of paper. “You’re busy.”

  Fielding put the piece of paper back on the desk. “It can wait,” he said.

  “I just wanted to say thank you,” Nina said, smiling at him.

  “For?” Fielding said.

  “For last night.”

  “Last night,” Fielding echoed. Fielding sensed this was delicate. If he indicated that he had no idea what she was talking about, she would stalk off, but if he didn’t know what he’d done… what had he done last night? Surely he’d fallen asleep in front of Jemima Bates?

  “Monday night?” he said brightly.

  “No, last night, Tuesday.” Nina was still smiling at him, waiting for a more meaningful response.

  “Today’s Wednesday?”

  “Yes, Fielding.” He could sense that she was losing patience with him. He’d lost another day? Was he drinking so much that he was beginning to have regular blackouts?

  “Yeah, right, Nina, sorry, it’s just I’ve had a bit of flu.”

  “You seemed all right last night,” Nina said. “More than all right in fact.” She giggled. Had he had sex with Nina? And he couldn’t remember? How unlikely was that? Perhaps he had some kind of brain tumor that was affecting his memory?

  “I had a wonderful time,” Nina said. There was definitely a hint of innuendo in that strangely humorless giggle of hers.

  “Really?” Fielding said. He laughed in a suave kind of way that suggested he was used to sexual compliments.

  Nina giggled again. “You know, the funny thing,” she continued blithely, “is that we always thought you were gay.”

  Fielding took a moment to digest this idea. “We?” he said eventually.

  “Well, you know,” Nina said, tossing her bobbed head in the direction of the entire office. He could see two women with whom he’d had sex. Enthusiastic, albeit drunken, sex. Hetero-sexual sex nonetheless.

  Fielding frowned. “I’m not,” he said. “I’m not gay.”

  “I know that now, silly.” Nina laughed.

  “So, Nina,” Fielding said, deciding that he might as well make the most of this mysterious conquest, “do you want to see me again? Dinner maybe? Tonight?”

  Nina looked surprised and absurdly flattered. “That would be nice, Fielding.”

  “Right, I’ll pick you up about… seven thirty?”

  “Great.”

  Fielding swung by the watercooler, feeling invigorated if puzzled. He took one of the small Dixie cups that reminded him of a mental hospital, or probably a mental hospital in a film because he didn’t recollect ever having been inside a real mental hospital. But who knows, he thought to himself. Now that it appeared he was leading a double life, who knew what he had been up to?

  He suddenly realized that he’d drunk at least six cups of water. He had a raging thirst that seemed impossible to slake. He downed several more cups. He would like to have taken one back with him to his desk but they were the stupid conical cones—what was the point of a cup you couldn’t put down?

  “Hey, Russell,” Fielding said as Russell strode in the door, hefting cameras and camera equipment. He had the air of a man who’d just come back from a strenuous military expedition although he was only a sports photographer.

  “Tell me,” Fielding said, full of camaraderie, “what’s the point of a cup if you can’t put it down?”

  “Is that a riddle?” Russell asked, glaring aggressively at Fielding. Fielding backed away a little. Russell lowered his voice to a menacing growl. “I don’t know how you dare even fucking speak to me, Fielding, after what you did to my car.”

  “Yeah,” Fielding said and dived into the lift. “Gotta go, Russ.” Fielding pushed the button for the top floor. There were several conference rooms on the top floor, usually empty, and Fielding often went up for a wander round as an antidote to the underworld where he worked. The lift was notoriously slow and he waited patiently in an army at-ease stance, or at least a civilian’s approximation of one. Fielding had been told by Greg, one of the security men, that there was a hidden CCTV camera in the lift, and although he didn’t know if this was true or not, Fielding always made a point of behaving impeccably in case Flavia ever looked at the tapes.

  Fielding found an empty room with a sofa in it, lay down, and fell asleep.

  When he returned to Features he found that half the staff, including Flavia, had gone to a seminar on “The Media in the Digital Age,” so he decided to leave early. Nina wasn’t at her desk either. “If you’re looking for Little Miss Butter-wouldn’t-melt,” Gwen said, “she’s gone to pick up Flavia’s kids from school.”

  “Is that part of her job?”

  “It is if Flavia says it is. She asked me to do it the other day. Imagine. Cheeky cow. So,” she added with a sneer, “I hear you’re really hot in the sack, Fielding.”

  Fielding shrugged nonchalantly. “What can I say, Gwen?” He tipped an imaginary hat and left the office, whistling.

  On his way out, Fielding bumped into Crawford and, as surreptitiously as possible, made an archaic gesture to ward off the evil eye, taught to him by an ex-girlfriend. Although she hadn’t so much taught it to him as done it t
o him. Crawford was in charge of Obituaries, a fact which Fielding found unsettling, although not as unsettling as the way Crawford nurtured his old fogeyness, dressing in check suits and mustard waistcoats and sporting a gold fob watch that he frequently pulled out and gazed at as if consulting an oracle.

  “Leaving us so soon, Mr. Fielding?” he asked pleasantly. Fielding had long since given up explaining to Crawford that Fielding was his first name—Crawford’s inability to grasp even this simple fact made him seem particularly unsuitable for the job he was in.

  “Working at home,” Fielding said.

  Crawford peered at him from over his little half-moon spectacles. “You look dreadful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You look as though you’ve spent the night strapped to the winged and fiery wheel.”

  “Yeah, something like that.” Fielding rarely had any idea what Crawford was talking about.

  Crawford consulted his watch and then gestured at the huge tree that dominated the glass atrium. Fielding frequently pondered the logistics of this tree. How had they got it there? Had they lowered it on a crane or simply built the offices around it? Flavia claimed it was a postmodern statement but how a tree could be postmodern was beyond Fielding.

  “The Elm of False Dreams,” Crawford sighed mysteriously.

  “I think it’s a sycamore,” Fielding said. “I think all the elms are dead.”

  “How sad,” Crawford said. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and write Romney Wright’s obituary.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “Not at all. Just in case. You never know with her sort.”

  Fielding didn’t even make it to the coffee machine the next morning before Nina was onto him like a Harpy. She slapped his face so hard that he thought he might have whiplash. Tears of pain stung his eyes.

  “Fucking hell, Nina,” he spluttered, “what was that about?”

  “Like you don’t know?” she shouted at him, her mouth now far from perfect as it distorted itself into a hideous kind of grin. “You are the most disgusting man I have ever known,” she said. “You’re a reptile, jail would be too good for you.” No one in the office was even pretending to work; they were all transfixed by this thrilling real-life soap. Nina started sobbing and Fielding made an instinctive move to comfort her. She started screaming.