Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  Now that she had been brought back to life, nothing would be hateful anymore, not now that she understood about the days being precious. She had heard about that too, those people who had come back from the shores of Acheron and found their attitude to life transformed so that they cherished even the wind and the rain and every painful, stumbling step made along the hard shoulder of the M9. The neon oasis of the Little Chef on the bypass, ablaze with lights in the dark, was as beautiful as a newly found constellation in the night sky.

  Inside the Little Chef it was warm and smelled of old fat and cheap coffee and Marianne would never have believed how comforting those scents could be. Before. Before she died.

  The Little Chef’s other customers ignored her—a whey-faced teenage motorcyclist, two tired truckers, an argumentative couple, and two young girls who didn’t look old enough to drive. Out of everyone in the place, it was Marianne who looked least likely to be the person involved in a car crash.

  A sullen-looking girl with bad skin was guarding the food under the heat lamps. She was eating a Mars bar and reading a celebrity magazine that had Romney Wright pouting on the cover. According to her name badge, the girl was called Faith. Was she really called Faith or was it some kind of metaphysical statement? In Marianne’s avant-garde hairdresser’s, they had words sandblasted on the mirrors—“Serenity,” “Confidence,” “Compassion”—as if they were promoting Zen Buddhism instead of ridiculously overpriced cut-and-blow-drys. Marianne wondered if Faith’s badge was a sign of some kind. She wondered if now that she had been saved from death she would see signs everywhere.

  “Excuse me,” Marianne said. Faith ignored her. “Excuse me, Faith?” Faith finished her Mars bar and yawned. Marianne leaned over the metal troughs of chips and beans and fried fish and tugged at the sleeve of Faith’s nylon uniform. She pulled Faith’s hair, she pinched her skin, but Marianne may as well have been a breath on the air for all the notice Faith took of her. Marianne tried to accost the other customers, with much the same effect—no one could see her.

  She went into the ladies’ toilets to check her reflection in the mirror—to check if she had a reflection in the mirror—and was relieved to find that she had. What she saw wasn’t good. Her clothes were torn and filthy, she was covered in oil and bruises, her hair was matted with blood and what she very much hoped wasn’t brain matter (it was going to take more than serenity and compassion to fix that), and she had a tremendous gash across her forehead that was in urgent need of stitches. Marianne was mortified. It was no wonder no one wanted to speak to her. She picked a piece of road out of her chin and rearranged her hair to cover some of the skull fracture.

  Was she dead? She didn’t look dead. She didn’t feel dead. She felt fucking awful but she didn’t feel dead. And if she was dead then she would be a ghost, but she couldn’t do any of the things ghosts were supposed to be able to do—she couldn’t float, she couldn’t pass through doors and walls, she was cold and hungry and tired (so tired), and still seemed to be subject to all the same rules of the phenomenal world as before. If she was dead than it seemed a lot like being alive, although worse, admittedly. And surely the astral plane wasn’t going to turn out to be a Little Chef?

  Marianne went to look for a phone. She didn’t have her handbag anymore but she had a twenty-pence piece in her coat pocket. She dropped the coin in the slot and dialed home. Robert answered, “Hello?” sounding abrupt and tired. Marianne thought he must be going mad with worry. “It’s me, Robert,” she said, surprised at how much her voice was trembling, “it’s Marianne,” and she waited for the relief and the tears but all he kept saying was, “Hello? Hello? Is someone there?” then she heard that funny little noise he made when he was annoyed and the line went dead. Marianne tried to get her coin back but she couldn’t. This really wasn’t good at all.

  Apart from a little speeding—and how she regretted that now—Marianne had previously been a law-abiding person, certainly the most law-abiding lawyer that she knew, but given her current invisibility and her dreadful hunger, she thought she was more than justified in stealing food from under Faith’s blackhead-encumbered nose, loading up a plate with chips, beans, and sausages—she couldn’t remember the last time she ate sausages—and washing them down with a can of Irn-Bru. She liked the Irn-Bru a lot and wondered why she’d never allowed Liam to drink it. She would in future. If there was a future.

  Marianne walked the four miles home from the Little Chef. When she got in the house she crawled up the stairs on her hands and knees and went straight to Liam’s room. She turned on the lamp by his bed and looked at her son. His eyelids were blue in sleep and his skin had a faint opalescent sheen of perspiration. He was in the last days of his childhood, she could smell it like a sour trace on his breath. She kissed him softly on his cheek and then she turned off the lamp, lay down on the bed, and curled herself like an overcoat around her son. It turned out that love was everything, after all.

  In the morning she would wake up and everything would be all right. (How many times in her life had she told herself that?) She would wake and hear Robert moving about the house. His morning routine never changed—there would be the sound of running water, the kettle banging onto the hob, Radio Scotland’s Good Morning, Scotland suddenly blaring in the kitchen and, just as she did every morning, Marianne would say to her son, “Good morning, sleepyhead.” And life would go on.

  Marianne woke up. For a moment she thought she had had a dreadful nightmare that had been forgotten on waking but then she remembered the car crash. She ached so much she could hardly move her limbs. Liam slept on peacefully beside her. The house was quiet and Marianne wondered what time it was. Then she heard footsteps on the stairs and the bedroom door opened and Robert entered the room. Marianne couldn’t remember when she had been so pleased to see Robert, not for years certainly.

  She strained into a sitting position. Her mouth was so dry and ashy that she could hardly speak. “Robert,” she croaked. “I’m all right.” Robert sat on the edge of the bed. He looked dreadful, his skin gray, his eyes bloodshot and baggy. “I’m all right,” Marianne repeated. Robert shook Liam gently awake.

  “Liam,” Robert said, his face crumbling in a way that made Marianne worry for him, “Liam, something very bad has happened. To Mum. A very bad thing.”

  MARIANNE THOUGHT FONDLY of the Little Chef on the bypass. It was the last place she had visited in the outside world. For six months now she had been housebound. Presumably, she had come back to say good-bye because that was what the newly dead did—they came back to say good-bye to their loved ones—and somehow or other she had got stuck here. Before she was dead, Marianne would never have used the term “loved ones,” but six months of watching Oprah and Trisha and Sally Jesse Raphael had softened her vocabulary.

  It was only television that gave her life (if you could call it that) any structure. She was glad that Robert had installed cable after she died. Now she had a narrative thread to guide her through the long, empty days. She could watch Crossroads and The Bold and the Beautiful as well as Classic Green Acres, which was currently running episodes from twenty years ago when Veronica Steer was still married to Jackson Todd and Gig Alexander still had hair. The characters on Green Acres were almost as real as Marianne’s own family. In fact, she saw more of them than she did her own family. Robert and Liam never seemed to be home anymore. Liam went somewhere after school, although she didn’t know where because he never talked about it, and as for Robert, he was always late home and when he came in he smelled of alcohol and cigarettes and guilt.

  After the initial grief and despair, Marianne had been shocked at how quickly her husband and her son had returned to the rhythm of their lives. Liam still cried himself to sleep sometimes—Marianne had to go and hide in the airing cupboard with her hands over her ears because she couldn’t bear it—but apart from that, they hardly ever talked about her. Sometimes Liam said, “Mum would have liked this” or “Mum used to do this,” but then he would fall s
ilent and stare into space and she could see him thinking how strange it was that she had disappeared so completely from his life and it seemed such a dreadful shame that she couldn’t tell him that she was still there, that it was beginning to look as though she was going to be there forever. She should have hung on to that last coin, the twenty-pence piece she’d used to phone Robert from the Little Chef—what if that had been her fare for the last ferry of all?

  Marianne didn’t know if she had been buried or cremated but she had known on which day her funeral took place because Robert and Liam returned home in the middle of the afternoon looking pale and numb. Robert was wearing the black tie he brought out only for funerals, and they both carried the sickly scent of lilacs on their clothes. Marianne thought it would have been nice if they had brought people back to the house. She would have especially liked to see her mother. Marianne hoped they made her look pretty in her coffin. Marianne hoped that a lot of lovely things were said about her at her funeral. She wished she could have gone but there was some kind of invisible barrier, like a force field, that prevented her from leaving the house.

  The existence of this force field was the only evidence that there might possibly be someone in charge (but who?) in the afterlife. Although you could hardly call it an afterlife. It was more like a grayish half-life, a kind of uninspiring limbo. Wasn’t it the Plain of Asphodel in the Underworld where people went tediously through the motions of their lives without pleasure or pain? She wished she’d paid more attention in classical studies. Or in religious studies, or indeed anything that might have provided some clues to being the living dead. She supposed she might be a zombie, but were zombies invisible? She was fairly sure she wasn’t a vampire—apart from having no desire whatsoever to drink blood (although a good rare steak would have been welcome)—because she knew a lot about vampires now, thanks to Buffy. But what was she? There were more unanswered questions now than there had been when she was alive. Had she entered into a parallel existence of some kind? Or perhaps she would eventually come back, possibly as a completely different person, like Temple Bain, daughter of Digby Craddock, the shepherd on Green Acres.

  Marianne lifted her feet so that Ella could hoover beneath them. Ella had been Marianne’s cleaner, two days a week, for three years, and all Marianne’s suspicions about how little work Ella did proved to be well-founded. The kettle was on before she even took her coat off and for the first hour of the day she sat with her feet up watching Lorraine, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and drinking the cheap instant coffee that Robert bought nowadays instead of the expensive Italian roast that Marianne used to get in Valvona and Crolla.

  Ella finished her cursory hoovering and sagged down onto the sofa next to Marianne and lit a cigarette. No wonder the place had always reeked of air freshener on the days Ella was in. Marianne sneaked one of Ella’s cigarettes when she wasn’t looking. She felt she had every reason to take up smoking and no reason not to. The bad-for-your-health argument really didn’t apply anymore.

  Ella was wearing a pair of Marianne’s trousers—black Warehouse—far too good for doing housework in. Marianne had been taking a nap in the conservatory the day they got rid of her clothes, and by the time she realized her entire wardrobe was leaving the house in black bin liners, Robert and Ella had already loaded up the boot of the car and left her with nothing but the jeans and sweater she’d been wearing. Robert must have offered Ella the pick of Marianne’s wardrobe, as every time she appeared now she was wearing something that had once belonged to Marianne (and still did as far as Marianne was concerned). And it wasn’t just her clothes that had been disposed of; everything had gone—makeup, perfume, every last hair clip, as if Robert couldn’t wait to eliminate her from the house.

  It was just as well that on the day they disposed of her worldly goods Marianne had been wearing all her jewelry (there was undoubtedly a certain freedom in being dead), including the good pieces her father had given her over the years. Now, of course, she had to keep on wearing them in case they were got rid of. It was easy to feel overdressed when you were slumped in front of Countdown in a garnet choker and diamond earrings, not to mention her bridal tiara, which her father had had specially commissioned out of blue topazes and freshwater pearls. She’d noticed her first gray hairs when she put the tiara on. She was sure they hadn’t been there before. It seemed particularly unfair that she was both dead and getting older.

  If she combed her hair forward and positioned the tiara just right, she could almost hide the ugly scar on her forehead. She had stitched up all her wounds with the only thread she could find in the house (she had never been a needlewoman), which unfortunately was black, so that now she gave the impression of being handmade.

  Where was her mother? Why hadn’t she been the one who had sorted out her clothes and why did she never come to the house to see Liam? What if something had happened to her as well? What if she had fallen down dead from shock when she heard about Marianne’s death? She wished she could speak to her mother about all the puzzling ontological questions raised on a daily basis when you were dead. She wished she could speak to anyone about anything.

  On Star Trek Voyager things weren’t going well (they rarely did). The shields were down, the plasma manifolds were malfunctioning, and the warp drive was off-line. Voyager was lost in space, seventy thousand light-years from home. Marianne knew the feeling. She worked her way through a bag of Monster Munch and a can of Fanta. This was the best time of day because soon Liam would come home and flop down on the sofa and surf mindlessly through every channel. Sometimes Marianne managed to arrange her body so that he unwittingly put his head on her shoulder or lap and those moments almost made her feel alive.

  Captain Kathryn Janeway was trying to stop Voyager from being pulled into some kind of rift in the space–time continuum, “a quantum singularity.” Marianne wondered if there was such a thing or if the writers had made it up. Real or not, she knew what would happen to the crew of Voyager if they couldn’t avoid the rift—they would find themselves in a temporal anomaly. They always did. It happened to Buffy a lot as well. Once you were in a temporal anomaly everything was topsy-turvy—you would find yourself moving backwards (or forwards or sidewards) in time, or there would be a parallel universe where two of you existed, or you might even be dead and come back to life. Did the people who made television programs know something about the physics of time that other people hadn’t noticed? Marianne had a suspicion that if she studied television carefully she might find the key to her own dilemma—only last week, for example, Captain Janeway had watched her own funeral (which on a starship, of course, meant that you floated off into endless, soundless space). And poor Buffy was two months in her grave before she came back from the dead. Marianne had been dead six months now but there might still be hope for her.

  She discovered half a pomegranate that Liam had left lying on the coffee table and picked at the seeds with a pin. She hadn’t started decomposing—the gray hairs hardly counted. It would be easy enough for her to start again where she had left off. Indeed, recently, she had begun to feel quite cheerful again, as if the grayness of her existence was lightening, as if winter was finally turning into spring.

  Voyager had escaped the temporal anomaly and Captain Janeway ordered Lieutenant Paris to set a course for home. Marianne heard the front door open and bang shut carelessly. Liam burst into the room, discarding his schoolbag and jacket on the floor. He flung himself on the sofa and turned to Marianne and said, “Hi, Mum, what’s for tea?” and—just like that, no reason, no explanation—she had her life back, day after day as precious and as delicate as a rope of pearls.

  MARIANNE WAS ON her way to see her mother. She still didn’t understand where her mother had been while she was dead and her mother was reluctant to discuss it, saying it was better to let sleeping dogs lie, which seemed almost willfully enigmatic to Marianne. Marianne had been back in the land of the living for six months, six months of summer. On the telephone lines she c
ould see swallows gathered like musical notes. The summer was over, but there would be more. There were always more summers, even when you were no longer there to see them. That was a thought you had to hold on to.

  And today they would sit in her mother’s garden, which was a miracle for this dreich part of the hemisphere—a cornucopia of lettuce and beetroot and onions, of sweet peas and honeysuckle and roses, strawberries and raspberries and black currants, pears and plums and apples. Marianne wondered what had happened to her Amalfi lemons in the fridge—she had never come across them during the time she was dead—but just then the sky darkened and Marianne heard the sound of horses’ hooves and she looked in the rearview mirror and thought, “Oh no, not again.”

  XI

  WEDDING

  FAVORS

  Her children arise up and call her blessed

  PROVERBS 31:28

  THIS WAS IT then. The moment Pam had never really anticipated had come to pass. Her son had gone. Not that far and not forever (I’ll be back at half-term, for God’s sake) but gone nevertheless. When Alistair had left her it had been devastating and yet somehow inevitable. She was worn out with pretending that they were happy—she just wished that he hadn’t left her for someone else, someone with whom he didn’t have to pretend to be happy. But at least she’d still had the children. Then, when Rebecca had gone to university and moved into a flat (I’m still in the same town, it’s not as if I’ve gone to the moon), it had seemed in the natural order of things and—awful as it was to think it—it had been something of a relief (I can’t wait to get away from this fucking house). And she’d still had Simon.