The End of the World (13 page)

I took out my hanky, ran toward the far corner of the observation deck, and swung my arm in an arc over my head, a white flutter like a message blowing in the breeze.

The India of Kirsti’s letter is not the real India. She’s ill–of course she’s unhappy. How can she experience the real India while she’s sick in bed? Things will change in the next letter. She’ll describe the food and the street stalls and the pedlars who tell her stories. She’ll make me want to be there.

The rain starts to fall again. Kirsti strolls through the crowded streets of India. She strokes the cheeks of small children. Her boyfriend buys her an ice-cream thick with condensed milk and spoons it lovingly into her mouth. Kirsti licks the spoon and smiles at her short, passionate man while the women with long black hair look up to catch the first drops of rain on their faces. More drops of rain ball like mercury in the dust. The noise of the rain grows louder and louder as it pummels the faded awnings of the stalls, and people begin to shout above the clamour. The market is hot and humid. Kirsti wipes the sweat from her face, her boyfriend orders a fizzy drink, the straw floats lightly in the glass, and Kirsti thinks, for a moment, of me.

Fluid

When the car in front of me brakes, the raindrops on my windscreen shimmer like blood. We all creep forward another metre. In the dusk light the traffic is heavy. Red-faced drivers on mobile phones shout silently behind their windows and a distant siren probably means the traffic jam will get worse. I want to get out of the car and walk. Or run. Or stand and bend over and hold myself. But I turn on the radio and the heater and pick up my own mobile phone so I can shout into it.

The phone rings out. Colin never answers. He has a new lover, a woman of his own age who likes to cook him meals of creamy veal and lamb roasts with gravy and potatoes. The last time I saw him he was fat and old and I wondered how I could ever have lain beneath him and watched his grey whiskery face crease
above me.

‘God, I love you so much,’ he would say after he had come. ‘Was it all right? Did you have a good time?’ I knew that if he had to ask then I probably hadn’t had a good time.

His bedroom looked out over a park. I’d lie there after he got up for a shower, watching the kids on the swing and the gardener sowing flowers in black damp beds of soil. Then I felt calm.

Now Colin’s acting like the eighteen year old while I feel like a crone. My pain is a wetness that is hot and sticky and staining the car seat and the hospital is miles away and here I am stuck in a traffic jam.

Perhaps I should have taken more of his vitamin pills. Colin had a whole shelf of them in his flat and he swallowed them by the handful–trace minerals, megavitamins, iron and calcium and zinc. He said he wanted to stop his arteries hardening and his body weakening but I could imagine the effect all those metals were having–as though he was building a shell of his own body. Sometimes I took a few and washed them down with water. He laughed.

‘You don’t need those,’ he said. ‘Look at you.’

We’d already split up by the time I knew. Colin had told me I was too young for him. He said I needed a father not a lover, that I was too dependent, that my smooth skin and gangly limbs made him feel like a paedophile. He told me that I had no boundaries. ‘You’re not formed yet,’ he said, as if I was a jelly that hadn’t set. He still wanted me though.

‘When I touch your breasts, I wonder how I could have been so lucky. And then I wonder if I’m an old perv.’ He never asked how I felt. ‘I know you’re mature and smart but you’re eighteen. Eighteen!’

He offered me a mobile phone as a present, with credit for plenty of calls. He handed it to me still in the box from the shop, saying, ‘Don’t be a stranger,’ and I felt like I already was.

I sent him a text message. ‘Y did u lve me?’ Then I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Did lve stand for leave or love? I didn’t worry for too long. Old people are useless with mobiles. Colin treated his phone like it was a complex mathematical equation requiring deep thought and number crunching. He probably couldn’t open the message.

I can see from the gauge that my car is overheating. The engine throbs noisily. There seems to be a hissing sound but I can’t be sure because around me car horns are starting to beep. A Range Rover careers past on the median strip, thumping over bushes. Two frightened children’s faces peer out from the back window.

‘You’re a child yourself,’ Colin had whispered. ‘A child with child.’

When I pointed out that the child was his too he promised to pay for everything. ‘For the baby,’ he said. ‘I’m already supporting an ex-wife and two kids, so I can’t keep you as well. But I’ll do the right thing by the baby.’

As the traffic jerks forward I massage my belly with my left hand. The hissing sound has become too loud to ignore. The car stinks–an oily, metallic, watery smell.

‘I suppose it’s so cheap because it’s a student car,’ my mother said when she lent me the money to buy it. She said she wasn’t going to come and rescue me like she had my brother so many times when his car broke down. She said it was a father’s job to fix his children’s cars and put deadlocks on their apartment doors but since he was gone we’d have to learn to look after ourselves.

Lucaballoo, my dad called me. Or Lucibelle or Lucadaluca or Little Luceen. He said I’d grown far too complicated for a name as short as Lucy. If I was in trouble he called me Lucifer.

‘Give Lucifer a break,’ he’d say to my mother. ‘She’s struggling with her devilish nature.’

My mother folded her arms across her chest. ‘Girls and their fathers–God Almighty. It’s like I don’t exist.’

Other drivers are waving at me and pointing to the front of the car. One woman makes a gesture like a volcano erupting. I laugh, thinking that I feel a bit the same way, and she turns her face aside and speaks to the man beside her and never looks back.

So I’m eighteen and Colin’s forty-nine. So he’s having a midlife crisis and I’m looking for a father figure. So I was an innocent and didn’t do anything about contraception even though I knew I should. He never bothered to ask. Then what? He got tired of me?

My girlfriend said she’d never heard of a forty-nine year old dumping his teenage mistress. She said I had it all wrong.

‘You’re supposed to dump him,’ she laughed. ‘After you’ve fleeced him, that is.’

But I was crying. I was in love. I’d thought he was such a softie. I’d decided I would wheel him along and feed him mush when he was ninety. Colin turned out to be harder than that. Now I know that by ninety he will be rigid like a body with rigor mortis. They’ll have to break him to get him into a chair. All those mineral supplements he gulps down each day will have melded into steel, cold hard steel, and he will have trouble even opening his metal mouth.

There’s no good music on the radio. Only drive-time DJs making jokes about each other, and ringing up people to ask them questions about their partners.

‘What’s his most disgusting habit?’

One woman said her boyfriend wore his jocks four or five days in a row. The two DJs, a man and a woman, shrieked and moaned and whistled as if this was the worst thing they had ever heard. Then they did the same thing with the next caller, about a man who pissed out the bedroom window at night instead of going to the toilet.

It’s hard to judge when people are giving you their genuine reactions. Not just on radio but in real life. Sometimes it’s easier to fake it just like the radio jocks. I know I have.

A week before he dumped me, Colin took me on a trip to the town where he grew up.

‘Wow, it’s fantastic. An original country town. Gee,’ I said enthusiastically as we drove down the main street. I kept smiling and turning my head like a clown waiting for a ping pong ball. At the pub they put us in a room with two single beds. We tried to cuddle together in one but Colin’s joints started to ache so we moved to a bed each.

The next morning we cruised around the streets so he could show me the landmarks.

‘We played cricket here,’ he said when we passed the supermarket.

The gate of the new housing estate was locked so I stood holding the bars of the gate while Colin pointed to the spot where his house had been.

At the old schoolhouse we watched a wrecking ball slam into the wall. ‘This is depressing,’ Colin said.

All I’d done to bring this on was say I’d like to meet his family. In the afternoon we visited an aged uncle who made us a cup of tea and gave us Milk Arrowroot biscuits and chattered away as if he hadn’t spoken to anyone for forty years. The uncle never mentioned my age, never looked sideways at us. As we were leaving he patted Colin on the back.

‘She’s a lovely girl. You must be proud.’ He waved goodbye and promised to make us scones next time we came.

Once I tried to cook for Colin. I let myself into his flat early one evening with an armful of groceries, and I made pasta with bottled sauce–although I hid the bottle to smuggle out later–and a salad of those bits of green leaf you buy by the kilo in the supermarket and some dressing from another bottle. I opened wine and wore a teddy under my blouse so that the lace peeked out near my breasts.

‘I don’t expect this of you. I don’t want you to cook for me. We don’t have that kind of relationship,’ he said.

He had my blouse undone before I could ask what kind we did have.

I’ve watched the steam curling out from under the bonnet of the car for a while but now it’s beginning to billow. The engine is still running though. I steer the car on to the median strip, knowing that someone will come racing along soon trying to bypass the traffic and they will be enraged to find my old Escort blocking them.

I get out of the car, clutching my bag. I know how I look, with the seat of my jeans bloodied, so I run crouching across the road between the idling cars and hug the fence on the footpath as I walk. The pain is bad. Now and then I have to double over for a second. A woman winds down her window and calls out, asking if I’m all right.

‘OK,’ I shout back and turn down the next sidestreet.

I try to call Colin on the mobile again. No answer. I think about calling my mother. I think about calling an ambulance, but I have no ambulance cover and no money. I even think about calling my brother but I know his girlfriend will gush, want to nurse me and pump me for details and lecture me later about contraception and older men.

I don’t look behind. I can feel the dripping and I know I am probably leaving a trail. As if I am turning to liquid.

It’s dark and I can see into the houses of people who live in the street. They’re preparing dinner and watching TV. They can’t see me. I find that if I walk fast enough the pain eases, so I’m half trotting, hunched over. Blood runs down the inside of my thighs. I wish I had a father. He would pick me up and take me to a hospital and then drive away and punch the bloke who did this to me in the face. He would hug me and give me a kiss on the forehead and ask me why I hadn’t come to him first.

Colin did say it to me once. ‘I could be your father.’ He had caught sight of himself in the mirror as he was getting dressed and I sat on the bed naked behind him. I shrugged.

‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘I’m withered. You’re still fresh and plump and full of juice and I’m withered like an old apple.’

My girlfriend’s older lover had said something similar. She told him to get over it. I lay back on the bed and stared at the lightshade.

‘Say something,’ he said.

‘I like old apples,’ I answered finally. ‘They’re sweeter.’

When he told me he was leaving, he wanted me to analyse why I was with him, to admit to some complex or neurosis. He wanted me to go crazy and call him Daddy or start doing babytalk to him. Then he would have had an excuse. But he left me without any excuse. He left me without admitting he had used me. He was fully convinced he was doing the right thing. Mr Do The Right Thing. Without asking me of course. That’s what I’ve realised at last. I don’t talk enough. I don’t ask enough questions, or tell people how I feel. All I do is listen and then think back later, again and again, over what people have said to me.

The receptionist in the twenty-four hour medical clinic rushes me past all the other waiting patients and helps me undress.

‘Your sign was so bright,’ I say. ‘That’s how I found you.’

She calls for the doctor and he comes in, a man in his fifties wearing a suit.

‘I think it’s nearly over. I’m feeling better now,’ I tell him.

He tells me to part my legs and he presses his gloved fingers into my belly.

‘You’ve lost a lot of blood,’ he says. He wants me to go to hospital for a transfusion. I tell him that my father died in a car accident, that he lost a lot of blood too, and the doctor says he’s going to give me an injection and call my mother. But I don’t want him to call her.

I still have some of that sensation–that I am melting, that I have always been in danger of dissolving, and that I need a container, something that will hold me while I find my true form. But at least I’m feeling snug now, and sleepy, and the pain is almost gone.

‘Will you look after me?’ I whisper. I can hardly keep my eyes open as the doctor reaches down and brushes the hair from my sweaty forehead.

‘Where’s your boyfriend? He should be here,’ he says, his voice sharp as though he is angry with me.

When my mother met Colin, just a few weeks ago, she reeled back as if she had been slapped. We ran into her in a department store. Perhaps she thought this man I was introducing was my old teacher or the local doctor or my friend’s father.

‘Your boyfriend?’ she repeated after me, with the emphasis on boy.

Colin flushed. He stuck out his arm, shook my mother’s hand vigorously, then excused himself and left.

‘Oh, Lucy,’ she said to me after he had gone. We were standing at the perfume counter. I was heady with the scents. ‘Sweetie, come home for a while. I’ll make up your bed for you.’

I wish she had called me Lucaballoo.

‘Is the baby gone?’ I ask the doctor, but he’s not there anymore. The nurse tells me to try and stay awake.

My eyes want to close. My arms are heavy. I imagine a baby lying beside me. I would have to hold it, nurse it, keep its floppy body intact. Was that how Colin came to feel about me? It’s strange but I can’t remember a single time Colin called me by my name.

‘People looked at us,’ I say to the nurse.

‘Did they?’ she says as she lets the air out of the blood pressure cuff and watches the gauge drop. She makes a note on my chart.