The End of the World Read online

  Paddy O’Reilly is a multi-award-winning writer of fiction and screenplays. Her first novel, The Factory, was noted as one of the best books of 2005 in Australian Book Review. She has won The Age and other national short story prizes. Her short stories have been published widely in literary magazines including Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly and Island, and in anthologies such as Best Australian Stories 2006 and Best Australian Short Stories 2004. Paddy lives in Melbourne, and spent several years living in Japan working as a copywriter and translator.

  Also by Paddy O’Reilly

  The Factory

  First published 2007 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  www.uqp.uq.edu.au

  © Paddy O’Reilly 2007

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Originally typeset in 12/17pt Adobe Caslon by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

  Converted to ePub by UQ pod

  www.pod.uq.edu.au

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  National Library of Australia

  O’Reilly, Paddy.

  The end of the world.

  ePub ISBN 978-0-7022-4331-8

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  Speak to Me

  Not all fantasy writers are geeks, I tell my friends. Most of us are normal people who like a good story with heroes and villains and right and wrong. We love to weave new worlds, grapple with the strange physical laws we have created and test the fabric of our new world for consistency. There is a single story in fantasy, I tell them, and it is the hero’s journey, where ordinary people become extraordinary. It teaches us that every person has hidden talents, that we are stronger and more able than we know, and that one person can make a difference in the world. This is what I hoped I would find in myself one day.

  I was typing on my computer in the dawn hours while the rest of the neighbourhood slept. An object the size of a thermos flew past my window, bounced like a football, and rolled into the yard. I switched on the yard light and ran outside. I stood there astonished, afraid, staring at the creature lying stunned beside its craft which glowed white hot before fading to grey and slowly crumbling to ash. When the ash had cooled, I bent over and took the limp creature into my hands. My glasses were fogging up. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  ‘Calm, Jules, calm,’ I said. ‘Slow breaths, relax the muscles, put the thing down.’

  On the kitchen table the creature’s limbs shivered and its skin, the colour of raw chicken, puckered in the chilly morning air. With my hands encased in pink rubber gloves I carried it from location to location in the house. No matter where I put the creature down it squirmed, so I would lift it hurriedly, worried I was causing it distress. Finally, when I lowered it into my underwear drawer, it nestled into the silk fabric of an old petticoat like a puppy snuggling into a dog’s belly.

  Mouldy carrots and cheese from my fridge didn’t tempt the creature. I raced to the supermarket and brought home everything from pig’s liver to sesame seeds. Nothing made it stir until I brought out the broccoli. Slowly a suckered foot stretched out and closed around a broccoli floret. When the limb uncurled, the food was gone. It did the same with tiny portions of spinach, string beans, lettuce–anything green.

  After it had eaten, I slid my hands into the new silk gloves I had bought and picked the creature up, careful to cup its spindly limbs. It trembled like a chihuahua for a few seconds before relaxing into my hands.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ I whispered.

  On the first day the neighbourhood was quiet, I took the creature out to the yard and placed it on the grass where it grazed, chewing the blades down to the earth. A white foamy slime trail, its waste I suppose, showed where it had travelled across the lawn. I heard my neighbour’s car pulling into the driveway and hurried to scoop the creature into my hands and carry it back inside. A day later, when my neighbour, Denise, was watering her garden, she saw the network of silver trails criss-crossing the grass.

  ‘I’ve got snail pellets if you want some,’ she said, pointing to the trail leading toward the vegetable garden.

  I shrugged. ‘Live and let live,’ I said to her and she laughed.

  ‘You really are a strange one,’ she said.

  ‘Do these feel familiar?’ I asked the alien, putting an empty water glass and a small volcanic rock in the drawer. The alien’s limbs rippled over the surfaces and inside the rim of the glass. I tried an ice cube and a screwdriver, watching as it read the shape of the objects like a blind person.

  The next day I borrowed braille books from the library and left them in the drawer. Each time I looked the pages had been turned. I bought a fountain pen and green ink and marked out the dots of the braille alphabet on a piece of paper that I also slipped into the drawer.

  Every day I had to wash the silk petticoat of its slime trail.

  ‘Imagine if someone saw this,’ I said to the alien.

  I bought two metres of expensive silk and lined the drawer. My petticoat went into a plastic bag. I knew that one day I would have to tell people about the alien and they would want all kinds of evidence.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I asked by writing a braille message in green ink on paper and leaving it in the drawer. The creature communicated with me by pressing the pads of its feet against the paper. Needle jets of green, a bright chlorophyll green, spurted from the pads and it answered me in braille dots on the paper. It wrote an odd broken English it had learnt from reading the braille books I had borrowed from the library. There were many Regency romances.

  The reply said, ‘Dear Lady. If you will allow. Express my feelings toward your home. This marvellous journey. A word in your ear.’

  I took days to decipher the message because the creature’s ink had bled into the paper. The dots were not spread evenly like printed braille but more like a finger painting or a Rorschach blob.

  Next, I asked the creature’s name.

  ‘Viscount Ryland Pennington,’ he answered.

  I laughed and then wept. Viscount Ryland Pennington. Like the name of a romance hero. I realised that loneliness and isolation had finally broken me. The madness of writing.

  ‘You seem so real,’ I said to the Viscount. I stroked him with my fingertip.

  I said that to the counsellor I booked into first thing the next morning. ‘I’m having a nervous breakdown. I believe an alien landed in my backyard and is living in my underwear drawer. It’s all so real.’ Her eyebrows lifted when I said underwear.

  ‘The alien,’ I said, ‘communicates with me in braille and is called Viscount Ryland Pennington.’ By this time I was laughing, gasping for breath. ‘He calls me Dear Lady, and My One Love.’ The counsellor waited while my hiccups and snorting slowed.

  ‘I think I have a problem,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Julie,’ she answered slowly. ‘It’s good that you recognise it’s a problem.’

  I giggled wearily. The counsellor looked down at my sheet.

  ‘You’re a writer?’ she said. ‘What do you write?’

  All my laughter was spent. ‘At the moment I’m writing about a universe with a fifth dimension. Like quantum physics.’

  She smiled nervously and wrote a note. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun and she wore a suit and held her head on one
side like an experienced listener, but I guessed her age at twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She suggested medication to stabilise my anxiety.

  ‘I know a good GP,’ she said. ‘You’re obviously agitated. We’ll get you a prescription and my receptionist will book some sessions so we can talk.’

  I refused the drugs. I prefer to avoid even headache pills and, anyway, this problem was not anxiety. I understood anxiety.

  ‘Would you like me to bring the alien in here?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps you could tell me it was a rubber toy or something and I’d be cured.’

  ‘Does the alien speak to you, Julie? Does it tell you to do things?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘He’s written me a few notes.’

  When I arrived home I found the next message from the Viscount in the drawer.

  ‘Dear Lady. Our need to communicate. You alone My Love. Speak to me.’

  Each spurt of ink left him pale and floppy, and after a bout of writing he needed several days of grazing to recover. The lawn was quickly shorn to dry nubs of chewed-off grass. Denise, calling over the fence, suggested the gardener was overdoing it.

  ‘When did you get a gardener anyway?’ she asked.

  I wished she would stop watching me. Before her husband ran off, Denise had spoken about fifty words to me. Now she dropped in, she called over the fence, she left notes in my letterbox.

  Wheatgrass seemed to give the Viscount more strength but the health food shop told me they couldn’t grow it fast enough to meet my needs. I ordered deliveries from the wholesaler.

  I imagined Denise inside her house taking notes. I thought she should get a job. Her children were away all day and sometimes I could hear her rattling around inside the house like a tin toy. The vacuum cleaner would drone for five minutes, a pop song would burst into the air followed by silence, the aroma of cakes and biscuits would waft across my yard before she brought them over in Tupperware containers. ‘They’ll keep for months in the freezer,’ she told me.

  ‘How’s the new gardener?’ she asked again, winking.

  ‘He’s quite charming,’ I told her, knowing I was stupid to say it and that she’d be looking over the fence even more often. ‘He writes me notes,’ I said.

  ‘Ooh la,’ Denise squeaked. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Ryland,’ I told her.

  ‘Ryland? How posh!’

  The counsellor suggested that I attend sessions twice a week. Session Two, we discussed my childhood.

  ‘Did you read a lot?’

  ‘I’m a writer, what do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, deadpan, ‘you tell me.’

  ‘Look, I’ve never done counselling before. Is this what we’re going to do–talk about my childhood? I think my problem’s a bit more urgent than that.’

  She recommended drugs again and I refused. She warned me that this kind of delusion could be the precursor to a full psychotic episode. I said she was on the wrong track.

  ‘I feel calmer than I’ve felt in years,’ I told her.

  Session Three I brought in polaroid shots I had taken of the Viscount. She shuffled through the photographs, making odd little sounds.

  ‘This looks like some kind of seafood,’ she said.

  I laughed. ‘Well if it is, it should be pretty smelly by now.’

  She reared back when I leaned toward her and took the snapshots from her hand.

  ‘I’ll bring the real thing in next time.’

  The counsellor winced. ‘I might invite my colleague to join us,’ she said.

  I stared at her. Did she think I would attack her with a rubber alien? If anyone was causing me anxiety it was the counsellor. The Viscount, real or not, had the opposite effect–he had given me a sense of purpose.

  In the movies, when a UFO lands, the government always tracks down its whereabouts and sends agents to kidnap the aliens from the well-meaning citizen. No one came for the Viscount. On the day I was supposed to attend Session Four with the counsellor, I decided to give up the therapy. I was still washing the slime off the silk every day, I had an alien and a box full of notes at home and I had spent a fortune on wheatgrass. How deluded could I be? If I’d ingested that much wheatgrass I would have turned green.

  The Viscount had things to tell me. I attempted to interpret his phrasing and syntax without prejudice but, perhaps because of the Regency romances, he did appear to be flirting with me while he imparted information about himself and his world. The flirting made me think about love. I thought about what love might mean to another species, how you could explain it when even humans can rarely explain it to each other.

  At night I lay in bed imagining myself telling my friends about the Viscount. He comes from a very distant place, I would say to them. Where? they’d ask. But I couldn’t answer. He calls it My Distant Estate. And his name. I would tell them, It’s a translation. You know, like when someone from China called Xia Hue says, Call me Sadie. His real name is probably pronounced with pops and hiccups from some orifice we wouldn’t even identify as a mouth, I’d say to them. And I knew they would laugh.

  ‘Dear Viscount,’ I asked him again, ‘why have you come here?’

  Two days later I had my answer. I noticed that he refused to use commas, although when I checked, the books he had learned from were filled with punctuation of all kinds. I wondered whether this was a sign about his own language. Perhaps even his thoughts were filled with long pauses that deserved more than the brief hiatus of a comma.

  ‘Sweet One. I am charged with a duty. A chance encounter with fate. Your green milieu. My own Estate indisposed. My Dear Lady your charms ensnared me.’

  He is on a mission, I interpreted. He comes from a planet of green that is dying. He is researching our green world. They want to colonise earth because they are running short of chlorophyll on their planet.

  ‘Where is your estate?’ I wrote. ‘Can your people come to get you?’

  I was so busy trying to nurture the Viscount when he first arrived that I was not thinking of the wider implications of his arrival. I am still amazed that we learned to communicate so easily–I have had more trouble understanding fellow human beings. But before long I became uneasy, knowing that I should give him to the world. Each day I told myself I would do something soon, as soon as he had explained to me what he needed, as soon as I had understood all I could about him, as soon as I was ready to lose him.

  I waited for the Viscount’s answer but none came. I opened the drawer and looked inside. The Viscount had barely moved. After three days I began to worry. I lifted the Viscount from the drawer and placed him on the lino floor of the kitchen, surrounded by the snipped stalks of wheatgrass he loved. He lay still.

  At the veterinary hospital, a rambunctious golden retriever kept pawing at the cardboard box holding the Viscount. The dog’s owner smiled and nodded at me and patted the dog as if such behaviour was cute. My name was called. Inside the surgery, I lifted the Viscount from the box and laid him gently on the stainless steel examination table.

  ‘My God,’ the veterinarian said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered.

  The vet was a thin man of Asian descent. His hands were slim and clean, and he lifted the Viscount’s limbs gently. He inserted a thermometer into a body opening I had never noticed on the Viscount. I suppose I had been a little shy in my dealings with him–poking and prodding him, touching and squeezing his small body would have seemed like an assault.

  The veterinarian retrieved the thermometer, examined it and shook his head. He stood opposite me across the shiny silver table. As he spoke, he fondled one of the Viscount’s delicate limbs with one hand while stroking his body with the other. I realised this man must truly love the creatures in his care.

  ‘Normally, an animal with birth defects this severe would
not survive. How long have you had it?’

  ‘Only a few weeks,’ I said.

  He shook his head again and squeezed his face into a sympathetic frown.

  ‘I honestly don’t think it will live much longer. Have you given it a name?’

  ‘Viscount Ryland Pennington.’

  The vet bent his head and leaned in toward the Viscount.

  ‘Well, little fella,’ he murmured, loudly enough for me to hear. ‘Maybe it would be kinder to let you go, Ryland?’

  The vet didn’t look at my face. He was probably used to people crying in his surgery. While I tried to compose myself he kept stroking the Viscount, murmuring reassurances to him.

  ‘Make it easy on you both, hey?’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ I said when I had caught my breath.

  I lifted the Viscount as gently as I could and laid him back on the silk bed in the box. I paid the vet’s bill at the reception counter and hurried past the golden retriever lunging at the box.

  At my front gate I met Denise. She stared at the box as she asked me over for dinner the next week.

  ‘It’s about time,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe I haven’t had you over yet.’ She put her hand on my arm. ‘I’ll get the kids to bed early. We can have a glass of wine.’ I noticed how thin she was getting.

  ‘That would be nice,’ I said. I wondered what we would talk about.

  Three days later, the Viscount showed no more signs of life. His cool inert body felt different to my touch. I thought he had died, but how could I be sure? I left him in the drawer for another day, then I wrapped him, together with his notes, in silk and plastic and put him in the freezer.

  That weekend, my writing group came to the house. One of them was rummaging in the freezer for ice-cubes when the Viscount’s body, wrapped in its shroud, tumbled to the floor. We were sitting at the kitchen table and she turned to us with the package of the Viscount in her hands.

  ‘Hey, Jules, is this octopus?’ she asked. ‘Are you supposed to wrap it up like this before you freeze it? Maybe that why mine’s always so tough.’