by Andrew Biss
“Well, I must admit I did make rather an unpleasant sight, splayed out there in the middle of Elysian Avenue, my body facing in one direction, my head in quite another. I looked like a cheap Picasso knock-off. ‘Woman in Red with Distraught Bus Driver.’”
“And now you’re here,” I said, feeling both comforted by this knowledge and at the same time very saddened by it. After all, my mother was dead. With me, in death. We were two people in the same boat whose only consolation was just that. Somewhere out there a riverfront cruise was gliding its way across the water with a wild party in progress. We were in dry dock.
“Yes, here I am,” she said, brightly. “Live and in person – sort of. Naturally I was very disappointed when it first happened. Who wouldn’t be? I mean there were so many things I had yet to achieve, so much unfinished business. But, as I thought to myself at the time, at least I can catch up with my darling Valentine and find out about all the exciting things he got up to in his new life. Not that you could’ve gotten up to much – you’d only managed to get a few streets away from us before the shooting.”
“What shooting?” I asked.
“Why yours of course.”
“Mine?”
“Darling, you were shot in the back – surely one doesn’t forget a thing like that so easily?”
She was obviously mistaken. “No, no,” I said. “That never occurred. You must be confusing it with something else.”
And then…I saw them.
“Running from some Neanderthal who’d attempted to rob you, by all accounts,” my mother continued. “Quite ghastly, the whole business. We were simply devastated, as you might imagine. I sobbed for weeks on end and your father…well, let’s just say he’s a broken man and leave it at that. But you mustn’t feel responsible, darling – fortitude was never his strong suit.”
Images. A figure in the shadows. A hood. A voice, harsh. The glint of metal. The darkness. Running. Running faster than I’d ever run in my life. Something exploding. Falling. Shivering. Cold.
“He’ll never be the same again, I’m afraid to say. Not that that in itself is necessarily a detriment.”
“But I ran…I ran away…I ran here.”
“You were shot in the back while attempting to flee. You didn’t run here, you arrived here.”
Of course. It all made sense now. As much as random acts of mindless violence can, I suppose. “Then it’s…there is no doubt,” I said, realising that any faint glimmer of hope I might have clung to that this might all be some prolonged, bizarre dream had been extinguished. “It’s unequivocal…I really am really and truly…dead.”
“Oh honestly, darling, you needn’t make it sound so bleak. There are worse things that can happen, you know.”
“Such as what?”
“Oh, I don’t know…lots of things,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You could end up a vegetable like your father, for instance. Now I ask you, what sort of a life is that?”
“Poor Father.”
“Anyway, there’s only one thing to do when you find yourself in a situation such as this.”
“What’s that?”
“To have a nice hot cup of tea.”
“Tea?” I said, incredulously.
“Yes, now where’s that Mrs. Anna?”
With that, she rose from her chair and wafted effortlessly over to the kitchen door, flinging it open and calling off for our petulant proprietor.
“Mrs. Anna! Oh, Mrs. Anna!”
As she did so, the amplified sound of someone emitting a deep sigh of pleasure echoed around the house, followed by what sounded like the slow, powerful flapping of an enormous pair of wings, as if from some gigantic bird or winged prehistoric creature. Just then a strong, gusting wind suddenly burst through the kitchen door, almost knocking my mother off her feet.
Something told me this wasn’t a good sign.
CHAPTER NINE
Tea and Acrimony
By now I knew it was going to take a lot more than a hot cup of tea to console my heart and mind over the knowledge that I was dead, my mother was dead, and my father was a vegetable, but in the absence of any better ideas it didn’t seem like it could hurt. My mother, having primped her hair and adjusted her pearls in the aftermath of the unexpected squall, continued with her petitions.
“Mrs. Anna! Are you there?”
After a moment, Mrs. Anna’s brusque, impatient voice boomed down from somewhere upstairs.
“What is it?” she growled.
“Mrs. Anna, I don’t wish to–”
Her voice was abruptly drowned out by a loud shriek of mocking laughter that filled the entire house. It was a cruel and taunting sound that I found extremely unnerving. My mother, however, seemed not in the least bit concerned.
“I don’t wish to impose, but would you mind terribly making a pot of tea for my son and I? We’re absolutely parched.”
Just then, a man’s voice, desperate and frantic, cried out from what sounded like the room above us.
“No, I beg of you! I beg of you! Please, please God, no! No!” the voice pleaded, followed by a blood-curdling scream that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. This was followed, rather incongruously, by the cantankerous voice of Mrs. Anna.
“Give me a minute,” she yelled down.
Closing the door behind her, my mother seemed perfectly happy and content. “Charming, simply charming,” she enthused. “Small wonder this place is so popular. Now then, let’s see if we can’t find you something to nibble on,” she said, as she began opening the kitchen cabinets. “You look as though you haven’t eaten in weeks.”
“There is nothing,” I declared.
“Don’t be silly, there has to be.”
“There isn’t. I have it on good authority.”
“How absurd! It’s a kitchen for heaven’s sake,” she protested, her eyes scanning the room. “Ah! The refrigerator – there’s bound to be something in there.”
As she floated her way across the room towards the refrigerator, all manner of potential scenarios suddenly filled my mind. I immediately stood. “No!” I cried out, with great alarm.
“No?” she asked, just as she placed her hand on the Jetsons-like door handle.
“No. It’s empty. I checked.”
“How ridiculous,” she scoffed. “With all due respect to Mrs. Anna, this place is in desperate need of a woman’s touch.”
“I don’t think it really matters, does it?”
“Never mind, I shall just have to have a few words with her at a discreet opportunity.”
And then, out of the blue, I suddenly became overwhelmed by a feeling of melancholy. I wasn’t quite sure why at that precise moment, but without warning an almost unbearable sense of despondency welled up within me. I looked over at my mother, who was now running her fingers along the surfaces of the countertops, like a well-coiffed health inspector in search of signs of dust and grime.
“Mother…can I ask you something?”
“Of course, darling. Anything you like – anything at all.” She sat down at the table again and leaned in towards me, making it quite obvious that she was granting me her undivided attention. “I’m all ears,” she affirmed.
After a moment or two of hesitation, I asked the question that had been eating away inside of me for quite some time – the one I most wanted to ask, yet least wanted to hear the answer to. “What…comes next?” I said, nervously.
“You mean after this?”
“Yes.”
“After The End of the World?”
“Yes.”
“Precisely what you’d expect to happen when you reach The End of the World.”
“Which is what?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer.
“You fall off,” she quipped, before breaking into peals of laughter.
I looked at her stony-faced. “Can’t you be serious and practical for one minute – even in death?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, darling, I just couldn’t resist,�
�� she said, attempting to collect herself somewhat. “And I felt for sure you’d see it coming. Anyway, the truth is I’m afraid that’s a question I can’t answer for you. No one can.”
“Then…what’s happening now? Where am I?”
“Well, that’s a little easier. You’re neither here nor there. You’re everywhere…and nowhere.”
“That’s what Mrs. Anna said, but I still don’t understand.”
“It’s really quite simple, my sweet,” she said, putting a consoling arm around me. “You’re in the middle bit. You were there, and soon you’ll be over there, but in the meantime you’re here – which isn’t really anywhere.”
“In transition, you mean? I’m a…a transient?”
“Precisely! Just a lodger passing through…on his way to somewhere else. Think of it as being in a taxicab where the driver doesn’t speak a word of English and he’s taking you in the exact opposite direction to which you’d asked him to, and now you’ve no idea where you’re going or how long it’ll take you to get there. You see?”
“Yes, I do…though I don’t know that it makes me feel very much better.”
“Then why think about it at all, my love? It really isn’t worth it in the long run. You did far too much of that back there, as I recall. It all comes eventually – good, bad, or otherwise. All that worrying isn’t going to alter it…it’s only going to alter you. Try and enjoy the ride. It’s almost always more interesting than where you end up.”
“But how can I?” I asked. “How can I enjoy all this uncertainty, the not knowing?”
“Just open yourself up to it. It’s really not as scary as it might seem.”
“And this? What can I enjoy about this, about being here? It’s a madhouse. An insane, ludicrous outpost of misfits where nothing makes the slightest bit of sense.”
My mother arched an eyebrow and gave me a knowing look. “And you really find that so very alien?”
“But everyone I’ve met here has turned out to be strange or troubled or peculiar in some way. Until you arrived, that is.”
She took me in her arms, just as she did when I was little, and planted a gentle kiss on my forehead. “Ah, but then that’s because I’m your mother. Why else do you think I’m here? I may be strange and peculiar myself in some ways, but I am still your mother.”
I looked up to see her smiling back affectionately, not looking strange or peculiar at all. For a brief moment I felt happy. Despite everything, at that exact moment I felt happy and loved and comforted. It was perfect. Perfectly perfect. The spell was soon broken, however, when Mrs. Anna entered the room, her hands bloodied, wearing a white apron stained with blood. I had no idea what she’d just been up to, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I consoled myself with the thought that she’d just been preparing a nice cut of meat for the evening meal. I didn’t believe it for a second, but it felt better to pretend.
“Yes, what is it?” she said tersely, wiping her hands in her apron.
My mother immediately stood up, rather melodramatically, and floated across the room towards our host.
“Ah, Mrs. Anna, how terribly kind to drag yourself away. I wouldn’t have interrupted, only my son and I are simply gasping for a cup of tea. Now, I know you must think us gauche and frightfully stereotypical but, apologies aside, we are English after all. So anyway, Darjeeling, Prince of Wales, whatever you have – we’re not fussy.”
As Mrs. Anna began preparing our tea, fetching china from the cabinets and heating a kettle of water, she also took the opportunity to share with us some of her innermost thoughts.
“You Western bourgeois pigs, always with the sense of entitlement. Me, me, I, I. You make me sick, the lot of you. You’re my least favourite. My God, if you took the time to look at yourselves for one second – just one! – you’d be disgusted by your own image. You think you are so clever but you are stupid. Stupid and ignorant. You think yourselves so advanced because you can upload pictures of your precious little doggies on your telephones, when the fact is most of you think Tbilisi is something you put on a cracker. You disgust me, prancing around with those phones stuck to your heads, speaking mindless babble to people who don’t care what you say, just that you say it so they can nod and answer back in their desperation to feel like they matter. Your self-obsession knows no limits. It’s repulsive. It makes me sick to think of you – sick to my stomach. Tea – you want tea? Yes, tea is good for the sick stomach.”
“Isn’t she a gem?” beamed my mother.
But Mrs. Anna wasn’t done. “Perhaps if one day you drank the vomit from the glass of your own incessant introspection you might wake up and feel like a human being instead of one of your two-dimensional creations from your Madison Avenues that needs a pill to have an erection, have an opinion, or to counteract the effects of actually being alive.” She turned back and sneered at us. “Or in your case, dead.”
“If you could heat the water until just off the boil, that would be marvellous, Mrs. Anna,” my mother said, blithely. “I’d hate to scold the leaves, whatever their origin.”
“Are you that blind? Can you not see?” Mrs. Anna railed. “We’re all just off the boil. Does history teach you nothing? We’re all ready to explode.”
“And just the teeniest bit of sugar for me – I do have a waist to consider,” my mother continued.
“Me too,” I added. “I mean, not my waist…I’m just not a sweet tooth.”
Mrs. Anna slammed the teacups onto the tray so hard that I was astonished they didn’t shatter. “And mark my words,” she continued, “it will explode. It always does. Those blind drunk on power soon fall flat on their faces. And when they wake up with their head pounding, you know where they find themselves? Here. Right here. Hah! And this is not a good place to have a hangover. Not at all.”
She placed the tray in front of us and poured from the pot a rather strange, purplish-hued liquid that seemed to have the consistency of hair gel.
“And you know what I do?” she asked. “I laugh at them. I laugh in their faces as they squirm and sweat, wondering why they’re here, wondering what comes next, wondering why all their pious posturing brought them to a place like this. They cry out to their gods like little children, reclaiming their faith and repenting their sins, frantic to recall the few measly good things they did when they were alive. And I stand before them, my arms folded, laughing and laughing, laughing so hard it gives me pains in my insides.” She suddenly gave us a suspicious look that suggested she thought she might have confessed more than she ought to have. “But…I am not a spiteful person by nature, you understand,” she added, cagily.
“You’ve been a model hostess as far as I’m concerned. Take as you find, I say,” shrugged my mother.”
“Running this place must keep you very busy,” I asked, in a rather clumsy attempt to steer the conversation onto a less volatile topic.
“Busy? Hah! Busy isn’t the word,” she scoffed. “Another war, another famine, and on they come – an unending river of human tragedy. On and on they come. Sometimes it feels like the doorbell never stops ringing. It’s enough to make you crazy.”
“How irritating,” said my mother, as she flicked a piece of lint from the sleeve of her jacket and watched it with disdain as it gently floated down to the floor.
“And it’s not just the big ones – I get them all here,” Mrs. Anna continued, as she began counting off a list on her fingers. “Murders, suicides, car accidents, drownings, botched operations, heart attacks, train wrecks, nervous wrecks, broken necks, cancers, dancers, AIDS, parades, malaria, diphtheria, euthanasia, Quadrophenia, Tommy, Keith Moon–”
“Who?” my mother interrupted.
“You wouldn’t believe what comes through my door. I’ve seen it all. Everything.”
“Yes, it certainly sounds like it,” my mother said, sounding only half-interested. “But I’m afraid there’s just one thing I don’t understand.”
“Just the one?” said Mrs. Anna, snidely.
&nbs
p; “Why are there only two cups on this table? Surely you’re going to join us?” my mother asked.
“Me?” cried Mrs. Anna, looking aghast.
“Yes.”
“Have tea with you?”
“Yes, of course. We wouldn’t dream of hearing otherwise, would we Valentine?”
“Please say you will, Mrs. Anna,” I said, taking a sip of the tea, which was actually quite tasty even though it didn’t taste of anything. “I’d love to hear some more of your stories about the dead.”
“My God, you people are insane. You think I have time to sit here and participate in your clichéd, anachronistic rituals of tea and tired anecdotes?” she scolded, as she crossed back to the kitchen door. “I have work to do!”
“Oh, don’t go, Mrs. Anna,” my mother protested. “Surely you can spare us a few minutes?”
“No, don’t go, Mrs. Anna,” I protested.
“Please don’t go, Mrs. Anna,” insisted my mother.
“Don’t go, Mrs. Anna! Don’t go!” we cried in unison.
Mrs. Anna stopped and turned rather ominously, then took a few steps back towards us and folded her arms across her chest in displeasure.
“Look,” she barked, “in my hallway right now I have an 83 year-old Sudanese woman and her 6 year-old granddaughter both wanting to know why the world looked the other way as they were raped, drenched in gasoline, then burned alive in their huts with the rest of their village. I have a group of Iraqi children asking me what a ‘Bunker Buster’ is, I have a U.S. marine with his right arm and most of his head missing, I have a gentleman who survived the Nazi death camps as a boy, only to die from hypothermia in old age because his pension didn’t cover his heating bills, I have three suicides from Guantanamo Bay, and I have a very distraught and embarrassed young man from Wall Street who accidentally choked himself while engaged in an act of autoeroticism. Now, perhaps you would like to go out there with all the answers while I sit here and sip tea and chitchat, yes? You want this?”
“Oh, all right, snub us if you must,” said my mother, reprovingly. “But don’t think you’ll get off so lightly the next time.”
