Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The hugs got longer and longer. Then came touching, touching that was okay because he was her daddy and he loved her very much, but that she must never tell anyone about in case Mommy found out and became jealous, which would be so hard for her to take because she was very, very ill. Then came her touching him. It was called helping. Doing things Mommy would if she could, only she was too sick. Maddy was helping her mommy in secret, like the little girl in the movie. She was a good little girl, and God could see how much she must love her mommy by doing all this for her. But God would become angry if she ever told anyone how she was helping: it said in the scriptures that in acts of charity the right hand must not know what the left hand is doing. It didn’t mention anything about the mouth, but she got the point.

  During the two years it went on she tried to banish thoughts of it from her mind. She was confused by it, didn’t understand it. It didn’t hurt but she felt it was wrong; she knew it made her feel uncomfortable, ashamed, but didn’t know why. She also knew she couldn’t stop it, knew she had to do it, knew it would go on. Mostly she thought about it in bed, lying awake and wondering whether he’d come in tonight; or afterwards, unable to sleep, asking herself why, if she was being such a good girl for her mommy and daddy, she felt guilty, like she had done something terrible. When it popped into her mind by day she smothered it, like holding her ears and shouting when she didn’t want to hear what someone was telling her.

  It stopped after Mommy died.

  Not a while after, not soon after, but right then. He never came back to her room, in fact became very distant from her, reluctant to hug her or show any physical affection. She wasn’t sure why it had stopped, but she did know she was glad; that was as much as she wanted to think about it.

  She knew now, though, why it had stopped when it did, and why it had started too. Reasons never soothed, but they did make the torment quieter by silencing the screams of all the other possible explanations why something had happened to you.

  Finding answers hadn’t been easy. She couldn’t talk to her father about it, because he wouldn’t acknowledge that anything had ever happened. He had married again and his political career was skyrocketing. Louisa had been ordered from the Sears Catalogue GOP Candidates’ Wives section: early forties, blonde, tall, big tits, big shoulders, big hair, glamorous without being overtly sexy, supportive rather than strong, and well spoken but with just a measure of Southern accent and down-hominess to offset any offputting impression of intellectualism. The right-wing Christian bandwagon was progressing at a rollicking tilt, and he had a seat up-front and a hand on the reins. It was hardly surprising that he would deny any knowledge of what she was ‘supposedly’ remembering. He sounded so convinced of himself she figured he could probably pass a polygraph test.

  The closest he came to conceding their past was even in itself a warning to her to back off.

  ‘Mathilde’s illness was a very difficult, very painful time for all of us, Madeleine,’ he’d said, a grave but defensive tone in his voice, vulnerable but ominous, dangerous when cornered. ‘A very difficult time. That disease struck this whole family, not just your mother. In times like those you do what it takes to get through. And you don’t look back, because you’ll only find more pain.’

  He talked about her mother’s trials, her tortures and indignities. The implication was simple: the Witherson family had been blighted by a tragic ailment, of which they all endured different symptoms; Maddy should be glad she wasn’t the one who had died in agony, and neither should she forget her other fellow sufferer.

  It wasn’t something he had done to her, or even that they had done together. It was something that had happened to them. All of them. And now it was over.

  Yeah right.

  Her subsequent behaviour and his dynastic wealth brought her into contact with a number of shrinks, but they could only dissect the rubble of the aftermath. And anyway, they had been employed mainly for her father’s benefit, seeking a palatable diagnosis to present to those who had heard the stories about Bob Witherson’s daughter. Like the time she had her stomach pumped empty of two bottles of vodka and three dozen aspirins; or the time she slashed her forearms with a steak knife under the table at a reception dinner then sat up with her elbows on the wood and her chin on her palms, bleeding messily over the clean white plate in front of her while talking politely to the State Governor’s wife.

  ‘She took her mother’s death very badly – she’s in therapy, you know,’ the onlookers were told, but their sympathy was reserved for the poor widower who had to put up with this basket-case daughter on top of the dreadful tragedy he’d suffered. He was so strong, so dignified and stoical throughout these things – but then he had his faith to help him, hadn’t he?

  Madeleine had more than the usual complements of self-doubt and self-accusation, but she was still strong enough to know that the explanations for what had happened to her were not to be found within herself. Unfortunately, of the two people who could have shed some light, one was in the ground and the other was not about to get on the couch. However, that didn’t mean she couldn’t get inside his head and have a look around.

  She tried to immerse herself in the kind of crap he read and construct a model of the Bob Witherson world-picture. It wasn’t hard. He had shelves and shelves of ‘Christian literature’, rows of books with nauseatingly pious titles like Faith Is the Way, Led By His Light, Know Thyself Through Him and Living the Word.

  She had only to flick through a few pages of these things to understand how little any of them had to say. They all took vague and undefined concepts, such as ‘Faith’ or ‘God’s Word’, then yabbered on for pages and pages in this weighty-sounding but utterly vacuous religio-babble. ‘God’s Word is to be found wherever you look, on the printed page and in His signature upon the world of nature. Each tree and bird you see, each blade of grass and summer sky is a chapter in the endless tale of His wonder.’ Your brain could melt reading such drivel. It was the philosophical equivalent of a placebo. But this was just the airy-fairy, ‘don’t we all live in a wonderful white-bread Christian world’ stuff. The hard-core material was, appropriately, on the higher shelves.

  The Constitution said everyone should have the freedom to believe what they liked. Madeleine didn’t have a problem with that. Anyone who wanted to buy into all that ‘God’s Holy Path Through the Forest of Fluffy Bunnies’ shit had her blessing, long as she never had to sit next to them on a long trip. But it didn’t stop there, and that was the tricky part. For these guys, it wasn’t enough to believe what you believed and to live your own life accordingly – because part of your belief was that a whole lot of what other people did, said or believed was wrong, sinful, disgusting, depraved and, of course, forbidden. So it was your duty to God – and to them, poor misguided souls – to put them right. Out of Love, of course, but sometimes you had to be cruel to be kind.

  Hate the sin and love the sinner, the Bible said. They were often a little short on love for the sinner, but they sure made up for it on the hating-the-sin side.

  At first she thought the Fluffy Christianity books were a sort of cynical window-dressing for her father’s true beliefs, but she gradually came to understand that there was a genuine symbiosis: this wonderful holy world was what he saw in himself when he looked in the mirror; the unforgiving, harsh morality was the backing that caused the glass so to reflect.

  We may all be sinners, he believed, but there was a hierarchy of sins, and some were more damnable than others.

  It was in a book about child abuse that she finally found corroboration for her theories, and in it the seeds of an explanation. The book talked about the Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Program in Santa Clara, CA, and quoted the organisation’s founder, Dr Henry Giaretto. When she read the sentence concerned she wanted to put a blow-up of it on a billboard on Sunset, right next to one of those ‘The family that prays together, stays together’ posters.

  ‘In contrast to common belief,’ it read, ‘a great nu
mber of men who turn to their children for sexual purposes are highly religious or morally rigid individuals who feel that this is “less of a sin” than masturbation or seeking sexual liaisons in an outside affair.’

  Especially when your poor wife is seriously ill and it would break her heart if you cheated on her.

  Madeleine felt safe in her own embrace, clutching herself in that hotel-room tub, but the cooling of the water told her how long she’d been in it and reminded her that she couldn’t stay. She turned the hot tap on to refresh the bath then stood up, leaning out to the three-legged table that sat between the tub and the wash-basin. There was a small wicker basket on it, holding mini soap bars, bottles of shampoo, bubble bath, all the usual stuff. There was also a neat paper parcel enclosing two razor blades, and it was this that she was after.

  She sat back down and removed one of the metal slivers, then gripped it tightly between her thumb and forefinger and drew it across the darkening patch on the front of her left thigh, bleeding the bruise. She watched the blood run out of the slit and trickle down off the skin, dispersing cloudily in the clear liquid below. Then she repeated the operation on the other thigh before submerging both, suppressing thoughts of how blotchy legs were the last thing she had to worry about right then. The bruise-blood drifted in cotton-candy wisps, gradually and faintly pigmenting the water. She looked at the razor in her right hand, then at her wrists and their scars. Another bath, another blade, another bleeding.

  Irony seldom came crueller.

  And it wouldn’t be lost on the watching world if it got out. From their side of the line there was a logic to it, kind of like rape shouldn’t matter so much if the victim was promiscuous.

  It was during her first and only year at college, here in LA.

  They said people who opened their wrists didn’t really mean to kill themselves. They wanted attention, it was a cry for help, all that stuff. Parasuicide, they called it. Opening the wrists was messy and dramatic, and it took a hell of a long time, making it more likely that the person would be ‘found’, and maximising the impact when they were. Another aspect of the longevity was that even if they thought they meant to kill themselves at the start, suicides had so much time to think about it that they often changed their minds midway through.

  Madeleine hadn’t changed her mind. She hadn’t intended to be found either, or at least she believed so. She still asked herself what clues she might have given, what she might subconsciously have said or done so that her room-mate came back to check on her that night instead of going out to that party with her friends.

  There were easier ways to kill yourself, people said, but it hadn’t seemed that way to her. A warm bath and a sharp blade seemed simple enough. There was no barrier to cross about penetrating her own flesh, either. The reception dinner hadn’t been the first time Madeleine had cut herself, just the first time she’d meant anyone to see it. So by the time she’d lain in that tub with the knife in her hand the feeling of steel breaking her skin was too familiar for it to hold any fears.

  There had always been a sense of release in the pain, a strange fulfilment. That night she had intended to find total release, ultimate fulfilment.

  At least, she thought she had, at the time. Those days and weeks remained an enigma to her now. She could never be sure of her true intentions, or her true motives, or quite what caused that pursuant sense of cumulation. She could only look back at discrete fragments. If she tried to put several of them together it was like opening the door to an asylum scene from a Terry Gilliam movie, a cacophony of hysteria and a kaleidoscope of frantic chaos.

  She did know that it was related to losing what was technically left of her virginity – there had been a sense of hopelessness after that, maybe from the pain of finally understanding the extent of the damage her father had done. Her hymen had remained chastely inviolate, but her sexuality had been rent to pieces.

  She’d thought, stupidly, that sex – intercourse – would be different, would make things different. That all she had done before, all she had known before, might come to seem like just a naughty little game. Real sex would be something adult: she would be initiated into this mystical rite they made so much goddamn fuss about, and what she and her father had done together would seem an infantile insignificance, something she had moved on from.

  But it was no different. Lying on Ben Myers’s bed with him inside her, she felt the same as she had making out with him and all his predecessors, on couches, in cars and on messy coat-room carpets. It started out fine. Kissing was fine. Tongues were fine. Having her breasts touched was nice. But when it went further, something inside her turned to ice. She was no longer an adolescent indulging with her boyfriend in the grope-a-Sutra sexual phoney war known as heavy petting; she was an eleven-year-old girl ‘doing things’ with her father, for her father. But she didn’t call a halt and throw them off; she wasn’t frigid. She was something worse than that: she was compliant. She did what she was told, like a good little girl, all the time feeling dirty, used and wrong.

  And nobody could help her. She couldn’t talk to anyone about it or rather she didn’t want to, because anyone she confided in always said the same thing: ‘Why don’t you tell people? Why don’t you go public with it?’ They never realised they ’d answered their own question: all they could think of was her father, the senator, and this wasn’t about him. This was about her. Her pain, her injury, her distress, not his fame, his stature, his crime.

  Even the shrinks were guilty of it when she told them, though they masked their reactions in a shrewd professionalism. ‘You have a great deal of anger towards your father. Do you think it might make you feel better if you exposed his hypocrisy?’ On the couch, as soon as she dropped her bomb-shell she was no longer the Patient, she was Bob Witherson’s daughter. The smug sons-of-bitches: they were winning every way up. They couldn’t disclose anything she’d told them if she did make an accusation, but their own private outrage nudged her in that direction, and all the while their bills were being paid by the man they wanted to see punished.

  Madeleine wasn’t looking for punishment, she was looking for healing. Bringing her father down, having the world know what he had done, wasn’t going to help her. Because it didn’t matter that he was a senator, or rich, or a moral crusader. It didn’t matter who he was, who the perpetrator was. It only mattered what she had suffered, what had happened to her. Did it help the rape victim that the world knew her assailant’s name?

  Yes, she did want him punished, exposed before the world, forced to contemplate the enormity of his guilty secret. As one shrink got her to admit to herself, what else could have been behind her bloody stunt at that reception dinner but wanting to accuse her father in public? And yes, seeing her father up there, pontificating, putting plenty of Right into righteous, unburdened by his crime, that did make her angry. It added insult to injury. But it wasn’t the insult she was worried about.

  Another reason she didn’t want to go public was that it would never work. She knew this because she had seen someone else try. Juliette Miller was the eldest daughter of Harland Miller, CEO of one of the major auto companies. She went to the media with accusations that he had abused her from the age of eight. Nobody believed her.

  He was just such a stand-up guy. A good Christian, a family man, not a whiff of scandal or extra-marital impropriety about him, whereas she was a nut. History of mental problems, drug abuse, alcoholism, overdoses, suicide attempts. She had done so many things to hurt him when he had obviously given everything he could to help her and keep her together. This latest outrage was a real desperate throw of the dice. Anyone could see her stories were a bunch of preposterous lies. Who’s gonna believe a screw-up like that against a pillar of the American establishment? Your heart went out to the poor guy, having to contend with such accusations on top of everything else he’d put up with from that girl.

  Madeleine saw the equation the right way round. Saw that all the reasons presented to society why it shouldn
’t believe Juliette were actually the reasons why it should. But nobody else did – or at least, nobody who was prepared to stand up and be counted on pain of multi-million-dollar libel suit.

  Juliette Miller sought salvation in telling the world what her father had done to her. What she found was new depths of suffering. Every aspect of her disastrous personal life was trawled through the media as the establishment endeavoured to protect its own by destroying her. It was an all-American crucifixion. Her medical, social and sexual histories were made public property. Former ‘lovers’ told all. Photographs of her after overdoses and suicide attempts found their way into the mainstream press; more ‘intimate’ ones were ‘happened upon’ by the ‘adult’ publications. She was a photo-composite hate figure for just about every demographic: a slut junkie alcoholic rich-kid slacker. And on top of that, she had tried to drag her poor father – a good man, a decent man – into the slime alongside her.

  America wouldn’t have pissed in her mouth if her teeth were on fire.

  She bought a snub-nose and blew her brains out. A week later Madeleine opened her wrists in the bath.

  Juliette’s suicide definitely spawned its own banshee wailing inside the vortex of Gilliam’s Kaleidoscope. This ultimate act of surrender by someone whose experience offered so many parallels, warnings and premonitions served to intensify her own spiralling despair. But looking at it now, the difference in method seemed significant. At least, Madeleine hoped it was.

  Juliette Miller had cut her wrists also. Twice, in fact, on top of several less immediately life-threatening acts of self-harm. But when she actually committed suicide she used a gun. The wrist-slashings, the parasuicides, were not attempts to kill herself. They were attempts to draw attention to herself, and more specifically to the fact that there was something wrong with her and she needed help. When all of that failed, when she decided she actually wanted to end her life, she shot herself through the head. Quick, comparatively painless, and utterly decisive. No chance of rescue, no opportunity to change your mind.