Earth

by Rose Tremain

  I nod. ‘Yes,’ I say. I take his hand and he squeezes my fingers; I am amazed by how hard.

  ‘They might be worried,’ he says, shaking. There is a heat rising from him; he’s on fire with worry, it seems. How do I stop this? How do I make him happy again? Do I return him to his computer? Do I take him to the railway station and let him watch the trains?

  ‘Yes, they might be worried,’ I say. With emphasis I add: ‘But they don’t have to go.’

  Now he moans as though in terrible pain. ‘Yes they do!’ he says. The T-shirt on which he has marked his pancreas and large intestines, his stomach and heart, is getting wet. All the ribs are beginning to blur; both his lungs. ‘Yes they dooooo!’

  ‘Okay, but they don’t have to go today,’ I tell him.

  For a long while we are like this. He cries; I hold his hand. His carefully combed hair stands up straight with the heat of his body. Cars pass us, some with families aboard. None of them know why we are pulled over at the bus stop. Not even this bus, angling behind us, has any clue why we are here.

  The windows are steamed up. Alex’s crying slows, now stops, but the windows shed drops of moisture in long, slow streams.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask him.

  He shakes his head sadly, his mouth turned down.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I say, and turn the ignition.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  I don’t think we should stay here much longer – the bus driver wasn’t too pleased with my blocking him – and there’s no way we can go to the party now. Richard was right. Mrs Whatsit, his teacher, was right.

  ‘Are we late?’ Alex asks. ‘Is it 15:00 yet?’

  It is already ten past three, but Alex doesn’t look at the clock, perhaps because he doesn’t really want to know. He hates to be late to anything. He might find it impossible to go at all if he knows he would be late. ‘Not yet,’ I tell him.

  ‘Go now,’ he says. ‘To the party.’ He sniffs, rubs his eyes with his shirt, the one with the parts of the body, the one he thinks is cool. When I hesitate he looks at me, his mouth opening. What he needs is for me to tell him just one more time that he can do this. That he can manage a birthday party just as he has managed so many things. So I do my best to smile as I put the car into gear.

  ‘Somebody has to be a friend to those boys,’ I tell him. ‘Those other boys in cars right now.’

  ‘I will be their friend,’ he says. He sets his jaw, looking ahead.

  This is the moment I will remember as the turning point, a moment that begins with that change in his expression. He glances at me, then reaches over and takes the invitation from my lap. I had forgotten it was there, so when he plucks it from my lap, it is as though he produces it from thin air. On it are directions that he reads to me now, clearly and slowly and in the manner of a young man reading directions to a driver, who is his companion – a friend, a girlfriend, a wife perhaps. I can see it now. One day he will have a wife. And he will be able to go to such a thing as a party. He will have choices and this, if nothing else, makes him no different than other people. The future is not nearly so bleak as it seemed even five minutes ago. It will be all right, after all. He is making a choice. This is a fact, as palpable as the ledge of his kneecap beneath my palm, or the startling sound of seagulls descending low in the sky, appearing out of nowhere like a cloud, welcoming us forward with their caws.

  Lucky We Live Now

  KATE ATKINSON was born in York in 1951 and studied English Literature at Dundee University, where she later taught. She currently lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year and she has been a critically acclaimed, international bestselling author ever since. Her latest novels – Case Histories, One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News? – all feature former police inspector Jackson Brodie.

  Annihilating all that’s made

  To a green thought in a green shade

  from The Garden by Andrew Marvell

  IT BEGAN WITH THE MOTHS. Genevieve woke up early but in these times of austerity it was too cold to leave a warm bed and too dark to do much anyway. She wished she had a boyfriend to keep her warm in the bleak midwinter. Her boyfriend walked into the freezing fog one night and never came back. Genevieve liked to think of it as a mysterious disappearance but she knew he was living across town with an actress called Melanie who did throaty voice-overs for public information broadcasts, telling people how to cook with hay boxes and emphasising the importance of sealing up draughty windows.

  ‘The theatre is needed more than ever in times of austerity,’ thieving Melanie had declared pompously in an interview that Genevieve listened to on her wind-up radio. Where other celebrities’ fame had dimmed and faded, Melanie’s star now shone brightly (the ‘Voice of Austerity’). She was right, though, people craved entertainment now that there was no more getting and spending. They huddled in theatres, flocking to opera, to pantomimes, to mystery plays – anything that provided government-subsidised spectacle.

  Or a dog. A dog would keep her warm at night. You didn’t see too many about, now that it was no longer illegal to sell dog meat. The dog shelter had been emptied overnight when the law was rescinded. Any day now, Genevieve expected to hear a purring Melanie on the wind-up radio giving advice on the best way to spit-roast a Labrador.

  Genevieve fumbled in the dark for the box of matches that was somewhere on her bedside table. The match flared reluctantly into life and Genevieve lit the stub of a candle. The sight of a naked flame flickering in the dark made her feel strangely hollow inside. She thought fondly of electricity, the way you thought of an old, dead, friend. She was sorry she had taken it for granted and not paid it more attention. The flick of a switch and it had gone.

  The candle flame fluttered wildly in a draught from the window that she had not – in rebellious defiance of Melanie’s admonition – sealed up. It was at that moment that the moths appeared, an angry mob of them suddenly bursting out of the wardrobe. Genevieve had a brief glimpse of their thick, hairy bodies (a surprisingly lovely colour, like Jersey cream) before the downdraught from a roomful of frantically beating wings extinguished the light. Moths to a flame, she supposed. She would have screamed but she imagined the moths swarming into her mouth and suffocating her, their papery wings stuck in her throat, so instead she slid under the bedcovers and hid there until daylight.

  When she finally dared to look out from the sheets, there was no sign of the moths and Genevieve supposed that she must have dreamt them. When she stepped out of bed, however, her feet crunched on something underfoot and she found that the carpet was covered in what looked like hairy, white mints. It took her quite a while to identify them as cocoons – coffin and casket, winding-sheet and swaddling clothes, all rolled into one.

  She realised that she was being watched, and experienced an icy, horror-movie chill spill down her spine. Looking cautiously round the room she realised that she hadn’t dreamt the moths. They were everywhere – perched on the picture rail, clinging to the mirror frame, folded into the curtains. Hundreds of little, unblinking black-bead eyes observing her. Here and there, tiny antennae twitched. Genevieve spotted the occasional slow-motion beat of a wing as a moth opened and closed itself like a small, fragile book. They seemed to be waiting for something.

  ‘Moths?’

  ‘Yes, moths.’

  ‘Clothes moths?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Well, they seem to have eaten all my clothes, although they looked like silk moths.’

  ‘They ate all of your clothes?’

  ‘No. Just the things made from silk.’

  ‘Silk?’

  ‘Silk,’ Genevieve confirmed.

  ‘That’s almost like cannibalism,’ her mother said thoughtfully.

  Clothes were precious, finite things. After all the mills and factories closed, women knitted through the night by candlelight and wished they had listened to their grandmothers who had tried to teach them to darn. The streets we
re filled with people wearing misshapen knitted garments.

  There was a fashion for spinning wheels. Some women pricked their fingers on spindles and fell asleep, the yarn spooling their bodies until they were like bobbins. Like cocoons. Clothes maketh the woman.

  People bought treadle sewing machines in auctions. In the time of austerity everyone looked as if they had been patched together from rags. ‘Handmade is the new high fashion,’ Melanie’s voice intoned over the airwaves. ‘Make jam, not war. Knit someone you love a scarf.’ (‘Oh, please,’ Genevieve’s mother said to Genevieve, ‘don’t.’)

  ‘Remember Selfridges?’ Genevieve said dreamily to the moths. ‘And the Top Shop mothership on Oxford Street? Liberty’s. Peter Jones. Harvey Nichols.’ The names were like poetry in the mouth, like chocolate on the tongue. Genevieve thought about the layers of department stores, like big cakes filled with lovely things. It used to feel so good to hand over a credit card and get something in return.

  Genevieve was a garden designer. She used to design beautiful gardens for a lot of money, but no one wanted expensive, ornamental gardens in the bleak midwinter. Instead they were digging them up and planting cabbages and potatoes in the mud. Genevieve’s mother didn’t have a garden but, a practical woman, she kept an Eglu in her spare bedroom. People grew vegetables in window boxes and in tubs on balconies. There were pigs in back gardens in the New Town. No ducks on Blackford pond any more; they were all laying eggs in people’s bathrooms and cellars.

  Genevieve fell asleep to the faint, fairy rustle of moth wings. There didn’t seem to be any way of getting rid of them. There were no mothballs in the shop, no camphor, no lavender sachets or cedar chests. There were, let’s face it, no shops. Things could be worse, her mother said. It could have been hornets.

  Next it was goats. A medium-sized flock that must have arrived in the middle of the night because they were already there when Genevieve woke up, grazing on the carpet and nibbling the bedspread. When she looked in her wardrobe all her cashmere had disappeared. She phoned her mother.

  ‘Goats have eaten all my cashmere.’

  ‘They eat anything,’ her mother said. ‘How many?’

  Genevieve counted them. ‘Nine.’

  ‘You know it takes four years for one goat to produce enough cashmere for a sweater,’ her mother said. ‘The very best cashmere comes from the underbelly and the throat. You should get shearing.’

  Genevieve tried to imagine shaving a goat’s throat. It seemed like an overly poetic act.

  ‘Come to tea,’ her mother said. ‘I’ve got an egg.’

  The next day her mother arrived with a small, sharp, silver knife in her pocket and slaughtered the goats in Genevieve’s back garden, cutting their shorn throats. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, handing Genevieve a handkerchief for her tears. ‘We were giving dominion over them. Every creeping thing that creepeth upon earth and so on. You look like you’re wearing an old pair of curtains.’

  ‘I am.’

  A cow nudged her awake with its huge wet nose. Only one, thank goodness. Its tragic, brown eyes gazed mournfully at her. Perhaps it knew about Genevieve’s mother and her small, sharp, silver knife. Genevieve still felt bad about the goats, even though they had tasted delicious. A flurry of moths flitted around the cow’s head, like an animated halo. When she got out of bed Genevieve discovered that all her shoes had disappeared. She wondered if it was like the seven plagues of Egypt. Would there be locusts?

  No locusts, just a bee. In the kitchen cupboard the sticky film of honey left at the bottom of the jar had turned into a small frustrated bee. Genevieve was beginning to see a pattern. She took the jar outside and unscrewed the lid. The bee flew away. No one else, she noticed, seemed to be having this problem.

  When she came back in the house she found an entire flock of bleating sheep shouldering each other down the stairs. They streamed around her and pushed their way out of the back door into the garden. The cow bellowed in soft surprise at the sight of them. Genevieve was left with no knitwear, no Uggs, no blankets, no carpets.

  Reivers took all the beasts in the night before her mother could come over with her small, sharp, silver knife. The smell of barbecue hung over Morningside for days. Genevieve’s garden was nothing more than a muddy field of hoofmarks.

  A kangaroo and a deer lurking in the hall cupboard proved to be an Armani jacket and a Jil Sanders coat bought in a Harvey Nichols’ sale.

  ‘You had a jacket made from kangaroo skin?’ her mother said. ‘How extraordinary. Did it have pockets?’

  On the wind-up radio, Melanie warned people about the illegality of hoarding livestock or buying swans’ eggs on the black market.

  Genevieve wondered if it was illegal to hoard moths.

  A flock of geese flew, on lumbering wings, around the living room. Some of them barged into the windows and fell like sandbags onto the bare, carpetless floor. Genevieve shooed them out of the front door and watched them take off into the sky. Upstairs, her Siberian goose-down duvet from John Lewis had vanished into thin air. A few white feathers drifted slowly on the draught of air from the unsealed window.

  In the kitchen, the linoleum on the floor had been replaced by a field of cotton. In the cupboards, instead of plates and cups there were lumps of clay. Where there had been table linen in the drawers there was now flax sprouting. Genevieve’s mother arrived with her spinning wheel.

  The moths still remained. Inedible, neither toiling nor spinning, merely decorative. ‘We could kill them and pin them into pretty shapes,’ her mother suggested.

  ‘No,’ Genevieve said. ‘Let’s not do that.’

  Genevieve and her mother walked into town. They couldn’t stay in Genevieve’s house. Where the furniture had once been was a small forest, and the floors were carpeted in a litter of prehistoric zooplankton and algae that felt like biscuit crumbs underfoot. ‘What is that?’ her mother asked and Genevieve said, ‘All the plastic stuff, I think.’

  ‘Back to nature,’ her mother said. ‘Everything reverting back to where it came from?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ Genevieve said.

  ‘Are you doing this?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  They walked across the Meadows and over George IV Bridge. A small contingent of moths followed at a discreet distance. As they passed the Bank of Scotland headquarters on the Mound, the windows fell out and turned to quartz and the walls disintegrated into great piles of sandstone.

  ‘Maybe you should have stayed indoors,’ Genevieve’s mother said as they watched the North Bridge rattling down into its constituent elements. The spine of the old town collapsed. Buildings everywhere turned back into rock and haematite and water and other things that made Genevieve wish she had paid more attention in chemistry classes at school.

  ‘Who knew there was so much rock?’ Genevieve’s mother said. ‘Have you noticed that there are no people? Anywhere.’

  ‘What do you think happened to them?’ Genevieve said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ her mother said. ‘Where do people come from?’ Later, the night sky gave an answer. Thousands upon thousands of new constellations, brighter than electricity. Genevieve could swear that she could make out the contours of Melanie’s face in one of them.

  ‘How does that Joni Mitchell song go?’ Genevieve’s mother murmured.

  ‘We are stardust?’

  ‘That’s the one.

  It didn’t take long for everything to grow back green. Plants rambled over the ruins, creatures bounded and crept and swam and flew and tried to keep out of the way of Genevieve’s mother’s small, sharp, silver knife. Civilisation disappeared, ‘Back to the garden,’ Genevieve’s mother said. ‘And that’s a good thing. Although I miss gin. And a good orthopaedic mattress.’

  ‘Do you think we’re gods or something?’ Genevieve mused.

  ‘Wouldn’t we know if we were?’

  ‘What should we do about the future? Will I have to mate with the animals?’ Genevieve tried to imagine hersel
f in the heartless clutches of a bear, a tiger or the infamous wolfkin. She’d had some terrible boyfriends in the past. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad.

  The bleak midwinter had been replaced by a permanent balmy midsummer. Peach trees reached their branches out to them, offering lush fruit; ripe apples dropped at their feet; they stumbled on melons. Moths flitted enigmatically around.

  ‘I really don’t know what the future holds,’ Genevieve’s mother said, ‘but you’re the garden designer. I suppose you’d better get on with designing a garden. But the whole Adam and Eve thing? I’d give it a miss if I were you.’

  Genevieve picked up an apple that had fallen at her feet and peeled it with her mother’s small, sharp, silver knife. The apple peel spiralled like a helter-skelter to the ground and turned into a snake that slithered away into the long, green grass beneath an apple tree.

  ‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘No people this time.’

  Fieldwork

  IAN RANKIN was born in Fife in 1960. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into thirty-one languages. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards and in 2004 won America’s celebrated Edgar Award, for Resurrection Men. He has also presented a TV series, Ian Rankin’s Evil Thoughts. He lives in Edinburgh, with his partner and two sons.

  Of his Ox-Tale, Ian Rankin says: ‘I penned this story at the behest of the Hay Festival. They were looking for stories of exactly 200 words’ duration, and I can seldom resist a challenge. I’ve tweaked it slightly, because when I ran a word count it turned out I’d written 202 words!’

  ‘A GOOD AGRICULTURAL SMELL,’ Rebus muttered. It was an August evening, the sun sinking. The field had been ploughed, but there was no sign of manure. Edinburgh’s pathologist, Professor Gates, was crouching over the body of local farmer Dennis Maclay. Rebus peered over his colleague’s shoulder.