The End of the World

CHAPTER EIGHT



Mother



When I came to, I found myself sitting at the kitchen table once more. The room was empty, but I could hear the sound of my mother’s voice off in the distance. Why was she here? And how did she know how I’d be here? And most curious of all, why was she impersonating Diana Ross inside one of Mrs. Anna’s kitchen closets? True, she wasn’t the most conventional person you’d ever meet, but this seemed like a rather puzzling way to behave, even for her. I could only assume she must have gotten horribly drunk at some fancy dress party and somehow stumbled upon The End of the World as she tried to stagger her way back home. Small world, I thought.

Presently, my mother entered the kitchen, dressed conservatively – much to my relief – and carrying a small handbag, still talking over her shoulder as she did so.

“No, no, no, Mrs. Anna, if you don’t have 700-count cotton sheets I’m sure whatever you do have will be perfectly satisfactory – but I’m afraid the nylon has to go. That said, I don’t want to be any trouble, do you understand? None at all. I want it to feel as though I’m not even here.”

At first she didn’t seem to be aware of my presence at all, her attention fixed solely upon rearranging a small string of pearls she wore around her neck. After a few moments, however, she looked up and beamed a huge, sparkling smile in my direction.

“Oh darling, isn’t this place simply marvellous? Almost heavenly in some ways. I say almost because…well, let’s face it, it is a bit rough around the edges. But who knows, perhaps that’s what they were going for. Anyway, even though I’ve barely had time to unpack I’m already beginning to feel quite at home.”

Unpack? What was happening? I held my head in my hands and groaned. I thought she’d be smothering me with hugs, desperate to know the state of my well-being, not to mention wracked with guilt at having banished me from home, only to discover I’d been forced to endure the strange and unsavoury environment that was The End of the World. Instead, she seemed oblivious to my condition and was already referring to this place as home.

“And what about Mrs. Anna?” she continued. “Isn’t she a find? A little churlish I suppose, but with her job who wouldn’t be? Overall she seems like an absolute dream.”

“It all seems like a dream,” I said. “A very, very bad one.”

For whatever reason she suddenly seemed far more cognisant of my existence, quickly gliding across the room and sitting herself down next to me.

“Oh dear, what’s wrong, darling?” she said, placing her arm around me. “Is it all the excitement? Is it your tummy – your diarrhoea?”

“No it isn’t,” I said, sharply.

“Well something’s thrown you out of sorts. Is it a cold? A headache?”

“No.”

“Oh dear, don’t tell me it’s something…” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “Is it something sexual? Did someone give you something you weren’t quite expecting?”

“No they did not!” I said, offended by the very suggestion.

“Because if they did I don’t want you to feel the least bit ashamed. Some of the nicest people I know pick up a little something every now and then. It’s just a part of life.”

“It’s not life! It’s got nothing to do with life. In fact–”

“And I am your mother, after all. If you can’t talk to me about these things who can you talk to?”

“A doctor?” I retorted.

“And I’ve heard it all, so I shan’t be shocked. So what is it? Little red sores? A funny feeling when you pee pee? Uninvited guests down there?”

“No! No, it’s nothing like that! Nothing. It’s something worse. Much worse. You see…”

But her attention had already been hijacked by her handbag, which she proceeded to dig through with steely determination. “Yes?” she said, still pretending to listen.

“Mother…Mother, look at me,” I implored.

“I’m looking, darling, I’m looking,” she insisted, as she retrieved a black lacquered compact from the jumbled folderol inside her bag.

“No you’re not.”

She opened the compact, still maintaining her façade of attentiveness. “I am, I am, I…oh damn, where’s the mirror? It must’ve fallen out. Never mind, you’ll just have to guide me.”

By now I realised she was in no fit state to receive the dreadful news I was about to impart. Somehow I had to try and bring her back down to earth, surmising that the shock would be less jarring if she were in a more sober frame of mind.

“Mother, what I am about to say to you is going to put a terrible strain upon your emotional coping system.”

“How’s this?” she asked, as she applied the compact pad to her face. “Am I more or less on target?”

Clearly, this wasn’t going to be easy, but I remained resolute. “You’re going to have to be very brave and to try to absorb this as best you can without resorting to hysterics or outbursts,” I instructed, as solemnly as possible.

“Oh no! Oh, damn, damn, and damn it all!” she suddenly cried.

“What? What is it?”

“I think I just smudged my lipstick. Did I?”

“No, you didn’t,” I sighed.

“Oh, thank God! Imagine trying to fix that without a mirror – I’d end up looking like The Joker,” she joked.

“Mother, I need you to be serious for a moment. I need you to be as calm and logical as you possibly can, for what I have to tell you is something I am only now beginning to fully come to terms with myself.”

She leaned in towards me and moved her face from side to side. “How’s that – do I pass muster?”

By now I was beginning to lose patience. “All except the shiny nose,” I said, testily.

“Oh!” she shrieked, as she applied a few final dabs of powder to her nose, before snapping shut the lid of the compact.

“Really, Mother, this isn’t easy for me to say and I…I…”

“Oh, do hurry up, darling, it can’t possibly be as bad as all that,” she said, once again foraging desperately for something buried deep inside her handbag.

“Yes, I’m afraid it can. You see, Mother, I…it appears that I…that I’m…to all intents and purposes…” I took a deep breath. “Dead.”

“Well of course you’re dead. Is that it?”

“Well…yes,” I said, a little bewildered by her reaction…or non-reaction.

“Oh for heavens sake, that’s old news, darling. What a big build up to nothing.”

She was obviously in a state of either denial or shock. I took her hand gently in mine and looked her straight in the eye with as much intensity as I could bring to bear. “Mother, I don’t think you could have understood what I just said. I have passed on. I cease to exist. I am, according to all reports, completely and utterly dead.”

“Of course you’re dead. We all are. Why else would we be here?” she said, quite matter-of-factly.

“You mean…you mean you’re dead, too?”

“As they come, my dear. Of course, I don’t look it, but when you have a complexion and bone structure like mine all you can do is count your blessings.”

How had she done that? She’d completely turned the tables on me without even trying. There I’d been anxiously trying to find the right way of breaking to her the news of my death, when out of nowhere I was suddenly being forced to grapple with the news of hers. And despite the fact that she was sitting right next to me, chatting away merrily, I somehow believed her. I felt a wave of great sadness sweep over me. My mother was dead. This wasn’t an eventuality I’d ever even vaguely contemplated before. It was simply unimaginable. And even with her there beside me, I suddenly felt more empty and alone than I ever had in my entire life. Quite why, I wasn’t sure, but I did.

“But…but how? How did it happen?” I asked, fearfully, before a dreadful realisation quickly came to mind. “Oh…oh no…I think I know…the baby.”

“The what?” she asked, apparently having no idea of what I was referring to, until a few seconds later when something abruptly jogged her memory of her late-life pregnancy. “Oh that! Oh, no. No, no, no. No, that was all…gas or something. A phantom pregnancy. There was no baby, unfortunately.”

“No baby?”

“Isn’t it ridiculous? All that fuss over a lot of hot air,” she rued. “Pretty much sums up my life now that I look back on it.”

“So I needn’t have…”

“I only wish I had died in childbirth. It would have given my death a far more poignant, BrontQ sisters-like veneer.”

This, all of this…and all for nothing. I’d been ejected from my home, torn from my loved ones, cast out into a brutal, cruel world that robbed me of my life before it had even begun…and all because of some smelly gas bubble. It all seemed so unjust. At the same time, if giving birth hadn’t caused my mother’s untimely passing, what had?

“So…so how did you?” I ventured again.

“Die?”

I nodded, solemnly.

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“It was your father.”

I gasped in shock. This was most certainly not the answer I’d been expecting. Not that I knew what to expect…but, this? My father? My mild-mannered, jolly, jovial accountant father? True, he secretly harboured fantasies of living a double life embroiled in international espionage and government skulduggery, but that was all make-believe…or have-us-believe. But murder? Real life murder? It hardly seemed possible.

“I don’t believe it,” I said, whilst simultaneously trying to imagine what method he might have employed to carry out his gruesome deed.

“It was a shock to me, too,” my mother replied, a little too off-handedly, it struck me, for a victim of violent crime.

“But surely…surely he would never do anything like that?”

“Oh, but he did, my darling, he did. If he’d only driven me into town as I’d asked him to, instead of fobbing me off with some excuse about a meeting he couldn’t possibly be late for, I wouldn’t have had to walk to the shops and I wouldn’t have been run over by that dim-witted bus driver.”

Aha! And there it was. Another of my mother’s cunning twists of events that caused the mind to change gears at warp speed and readjust to what actually was, not what it had been treacherously and rather craftily led to imagine.

“A bus? You were killed by a bus?”

“Isn’t it positively shameful? I’d always imagined myself slipping away under far more glamorous circumstances – or in a foreign country at the very least, my body being shipped back home amid a frenzy of media attention. But no, a bus it was. My only consolation is that it was a No. 73 and not a No. 10. You can imagine it otherwise, can’t you: ‘How did she go?’ ‘Knocked down by a No. 10 bus.’ Urgh! Thank heavens for small mercies.”

“Oh, Mother, that’s awful!”

“Yes, and quite grisly, I regret to tell you. But for a flap of skin and a couple of small tendons, I was all but decapitated.”

“What? Oh my God!” I cried, craning forward to examine her neck for some sort of macabre affirmation.

“Oh, don’t worry, darling,” she said with a knowing smile, as she fingered her necklace. “It’s nothing a few strategically placed pearls can’t disguise.”

“But Mother that’s horrific,” I insisted, my eyes still searching for signs of scar tissue or sutures in and around the shiny, translucent orbs gilding her throat.

“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.