The End of the World Page 6

  ‘Fucking baby,’ he would shriek. ‘Fucking FutureGirlbaby.’

  I thought I heard ‘I love you’ somewhere in there. I lay under him, my giant body barely registering the thrusts of his little penis, and I reached up and stroked his hair.

  ‘I love you too, Roy,’ I would say.

  People were afraid to speak to me. They whispered, or spoke with their eyes focused on a point somewhere behind me. Only my mother kept up her usual form of communication. She wrote me emails wherever I was on the globe. Often I had little idea myself.

  ‘Where are we, Roy?’ I would ask, and he would answer, ‘Antigonish’ or ‘Nashua’ without looking up and I would turn my eyes back to the television or the video channel and think, Well what does it matter anyway.

  We ate room service food wherever we went. We hurried through the rain from venue to transport to motel. People looked different sometimes–the roundness of the faces, the worn brown skin, the slant of the eyes–and they spoke different languages that I heard as strange guttural murmurs, but Roy always announced me in English, and everyone addressed me as FutureGirl, so I wasn’t bothered about trying to speak other tongues. My mother’s emails gave me clues. ‘Darling, I saw you were on the television in France,’ she might say. ‘The French are usually so aloof–it was good to see them make you welcome.’

  I tried to write back to her. My keyboard skills were weak. My fingers were too big and clumsy for the keys, and hunching over the keyboard and peering at the screen gave me headaches. Each day was becoming more and more tiring.

  I wanted my mother. I got Roy to try her mobile number, but she was always busy. I imagined her on the net, surfing the planet as a flashing electronic pulse while I lumbered around the physical world, dragging my hulking great body on and off planes and limousines. It was hard to believe that my mother and I were made from the same material. She was a digital signal. I felt like something more dense than flesh, atoms compressed into anti-matter, heavier than the universe could support.

  I asked Roy if I could see a doctor. He laughed and threw up his hands.

  ‘Who do you think you see every six months, FutureGirl?’ he said. ‘A vet?’

  At the next checkup I asked my doctor what was wrong with me.

  ‘I feel like I’m shrinking or something,’ I said. ‘My body’s starting to tense up. My hands are turning into claws. I can feel the muscles of my face contract at night.’

  The doctor reached up and put her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. I leaned my buttocks against the surgical table.

  ‘Your body is shutting down,’ she said quietly.

  I frowned as I stared down at her. Her face started to flush and she picked up her skinny rubber gloves and folded them over and over tightly until they were wadded into a powdery rubber ball the size of her thumb.

  ‘We knew it would happen one day. Not all of your organs have grown enough to support your body. Everything is working too hard.’

  She had never spoken to me like this before. Usually she did her tests in near silence and sent the results to Roy, who would fold up the sheet of paper and tell me I was fine.

  ‘Didn’t anyone warn you?’ she said with an odd catch in her voice. ‘Your mother? Roy?’

  I emailed my mother. ‘Where are you? I have to talk to you.’ I had no idea where she lived anymore. At seventeen I left the flat in Dandenong where I had grown up. Roy arrived at our front door one day with a contract and a promise of cheques every month and my mother hugged me and ran a few steps after the car, waving and smiling as Roy and I powered away in a Merc. I hadn’t seen her since.

  There were only emails. ‘I never dreamed you’d make it as far as Russia. What wonderful clothes they designed for you there, all that brocade. I watched the half-hour special on Russian fashion and saw your appearance. Green always suited you. Love, Mum.’

  ‘Roy, why did you call me FutureGirl?’ I asked.

  Roy’s little moustache quivered. I couldn’t tell whether it was preparing for a laugh or a sneer. I never could tell with Roy. He took off his suit jacket and turned to hang it in the wardrobe.

  ‘Roy?’

  I had heard people talking about me. HormoneGirl they called me, or SteroidGirl–as if anyone would do this to themselves. Once I heard Roy call me MutantGirl when he thought I was on stage. For a long time I denied what I had heard. Roy had become my lover and my mother and my father and my manager all rolled into one. I depended on him for food, for a place to sleep, for money, for reminders to brush my hair. I had forgotten how to perform all kinds of human activities that most people did automatically. Even chewing. Roy had started to give me food that didn’t need chewing.

  ‘It’s nice,’ I said, ‘but what is it?’

  ‘Space food,’ he said, grinning. His newly whitened teeth were too bright, as if there was a light behind them. ‘For the FutureGirl.’

  ‘So I’m going into space? Like what, in a pod or something? The space shuttle?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘I hope I get to try anti-gravity.’ I could imagine the freedom, released from the weight of bones and muscles and nails and hair, the hard work of owning this body that encased my small flame of spirit and anchored it to the ground.

  ‘It’s special food, OK? All the nutrients and medicine you need in a tube, the way the astronauts used to eat. The doctors prescribed it for you,’ he said.

  I hadn’t pressed him about what medicine was in the space food. I’d got used to accepting the things he said without question.

  Now I asked him again. ‘Roy, why am I the FutureGirl?’

  He shrugged. I watched the balding spot on his crown twitch as his shoulders went up and down.

  ‘Do you want to see some pictures?’ he asked.

  The first was a snapshot of black girls standing in front of a plain brown wall. In the second photograph I saw the same three girls sitting on a row of chairs in a grubby grey room. Inside the room, dwarfing the furniture, they were obviously giants like me. Two of them wore scarfs over their heads. They were dressed in colourful clothes, layers piled on top of layers, skirts and blouses and socks and shawls and jumpers. Bare brown shins, shiny skin, arms tight across their chests. They all looked directly at the camera. No one was smiling.

  ‘It’s a hospital waiting room in Jo’burg,’ Roy said. ‘They’re waiting for their shots.’

  ‘Shots?’ I said.

  ‘The African doctors tried everything to slow their growth but the drugs made them ill. Nine girls like you were born in one year. Africa, New Zealand, India, and Australia–you. Only you survived past sixteen.’

  I felt dizzy and heavy, sucked down by the intense gravity that had started to pull me into the floor.

  ‘No one knows why it happened. They thought it might be the beginning of a new race. A new future.’

  ‘I’m tired, Roy,’ I said. ‘I’m very tired.’

  ‘I know, baby,’ he said. He pulled me to him and cradled my head. We were sitting on the edge of the bed. I had to hunch my body over for my head to reach down to his chest. ‘I’ll get you some food, then you can rest for while. We have to go to Prague tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t want to go, Roy,’ I said. But he shook his head.

  ‘Gotta go, FutureGirl. We’ve got a job to do.’

  I should have pressed him further. I know I should have struggled. But struggle was beyond me. I waited for him to tell me there was a cure, to rush me to hospital, to release a statement to the press about my miracle recovery. I had forgotten how to take action. Roy would do his job and I would do mine.

  ‘Only a few more stops,’ he said.

  I needed to speak to my mother. She had answered my email with another commentary on the way I was dressed in the last television program she saw. ‘Do you thi
nk the turban was a good idea?’ she wrote. ‘It did make your head look rather large.’

  ‘I want to see her in person,’ I told Roy.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he said. ‘She sold you, for Christ’s sake.’

  I insisted, for the first time ever. Roy and I both sent emails. Roy told her he would provide plane fares, accommodation, meals. He told her we couldn’t interrupt our schedule to go to her. My mother replied with a polite note thanking us. ‘I’m not a young woman and I never did like to travel. Perhaps Helen could ring me on my mobile?’

  It was so long since anyone had called me Helen that I began to cry. Roy dialled the number for me and plugged the earpiece into my ear. The phone rang and rang. Finally an electronic voice came on and invited me to leave a message. I couldn’t speak. Roy took the mouthpiece from my hand, where it had disappeared inside my clenched fist, and left our number and a message for my mother to call.

  For the first time in years I began to notice how objects seemed so small against me. Roy’s hand would fit neatly inside my palm. When I sat on a normal chair, the backrest only reached my waist and my buttocks hung uncomfortably over the edges of the seat. I was so used to bending to step through doorways that I was in a permanent stoop, except when Roy called out to me to straighten up for the cameras. But it was becoming harder to straighten up. My spine was curving over. I could feel the cracking and straining as I tried to lift my head and smile at the crowds.

  I asked Roy to buy a new mobile phone. ‘I think this one’s broken,’ I told him. I opened my fist, where I had been clutching the phone in my sleep, waiting for it to ring. The casing was cracked. The exterior gleamed with my sweat. Roy crinkled up his face and rubbed his eyes, like he was as tired as me.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to get one tomorrow.’

  She sent another email.

  ‘Don’t think too harshly of me, darling. I’m an old woman. My joints ache, and it’s hard for me to get out. That’s why I live in these hotels, so that I always have room service.’

  Roy was making me lie in a warm spa for two hours a day now. We had booked into a health resort and I lay in the spa pool alone each morning. The glass walls enclosing the spa room were greasy from the constant rain. Roy sat on a chaise longue at the side of the pool and read to me from the newspaper. He thought the water might relax my muscles, but it only sapped me of liquid and left me cramped and wrinkled. I told him I didn’t want to do it anymore and he started to sob.

  ‘I don’t know what to do for you,’ he shouted at me, as if it was my fault.

  ‘Get my mother,’ I shouted back. ‘Or take me to her.’

  Roy cringed. He had never heard me shout before. My voice was so loud that the staff in the next room fell silent. Roy looked into the murky blue of the pool.

  ‘I tried,’ he said. ‘She’s not interested. You should forget about her,’ he said, still not looking at me.

  I watched my skin wrinkling in the water, the white ridges forming on my fingers, the fine hairs on my arms drifting in the current. Roy pulled off his shoes and socks, then his suit and his shirt and tie. He waded into the pool with his boxer shorts billowing around his skinny legs. He came to where I sat on the floor of the pool and he slung his arms around my neck and floated above me in the water.

  ‘FutureGirl,’ he said softly. ‘FutureGirlbaby.’

  I felt a lurch of love for him. He knew how small I felt inside. A tiny essence encumbered with a big, stubborn, beautiful body.

  ‘What am I, Roy? Was I made for something, some reason?’ I whispered, sniffing the sharp scent of his hair and the chlorine in the air.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

  He lifted his arm to reach further around me and the water slapped against my chest. I looked down and, as I watched the waves lapping at my breasts, I noticed the new bluish tinge to my skin.

  ‘I’m blue, Roy,’ I said.

  ‘Your heart’s wearing out, FutureGirl,’ he whispered.

  I leaned my head back on the rim of the pool. Roy’s hands touched the small of my back and lifted me to float in the water.

  The Rules of Fishing

  ‘Obsession can lead to chaos,’ Mr Kato said to me once. We were sitting and rocking together, two men in a small boat off the coast of the island of Honshu.

  ‘Take me,’ he said. ‘I am obsessed with fishing. Fishing ruined my life, threw everything into chaos. Fishing got me thrown out of America, and then out of my job. Now I am a poor landlord. I have nothing left but fishing. Now I am a careful man.’

  I needed to distract Mr Kato. If I let him go on, I would hear another retelling of the story of his persecution in the US. When he lived in a backwoods town near a Japanese car factory in the States, Mr Kato regularly caught, fried up and ate members of several species of endangered fish. According to Mr Kato, the park ranger spied on him while pretending to befriend him, and the neighbours reported him only after they had sat at his table many times and enjoyed his hospitality–including dishes featuring the fish they supposedly wanted to protect.

  If he told that story again I would have to ask him once more–because he had never fully explained his actions–‘But why did you do it again, and then again?’ And he would look at me as though I was a fish, a stupid, ignorant fish, and tell me that only a Japanese could comprehend the principle of his act.

  ‘The Japanese have lived by fishing for centuries. It is our custom. It is our life. This is the way we learned to live,’ he would tell me. Then he would add, ‘But now, now I am careful.’

  ‘I was wondering, Mr Kato, are there any rips around here?’ I asked.

  ‘Rips?’ he said. ‘Rips? Paper rips? Rip offs?’

  ‘Strong currents, dangerous currents under the surface,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. All over Japan there are dangerous currents under the surface. Young men like you must take care,’ he answered, and laughed.

  The sea was slightly choppy that bright winter day. The boat dipped and rose under the clear, almost white sky. Mr Kato and I wore waterproof jackets to protect us from the spray and the sharp wind. Each time we went fishing he brought along the pair of jackets, and he always insisted that I wear the new, bright yellow one while he wore the one that had originally been green but was now grey and streaked with crusts of salt. After a time, the jackets had become a necessary part of the fishing day. Having often thought about how the bright yellow of my jacket was so conspicuous against the colour of the water, I would have felt uneasy going out to sea without it. It was a false sense of reassurance–the jackets were only raincoats, not lifejackets–but habit is comforting.

  Our lines had been slack in the water for about twenty minutes when I realised I should be talking. I had been thinking about Rosa, an old girlfriend back in Australia. Once we went on a harbour cruise together. The harbour glittered with the sunshine reflected off white buildings perched on the hills, and we sipped champagne and smiled at each other over the rims of our glasses. Rosa started to complain about feeling nauseous. As a breeze blew up she vomited over the side of the rails and the wind whipped the vomit straight back into her face. Poor Rosa started to shriek.

  I ran to the kiosk and bought ten bottles of Perrier to wash off the sick. She sat down on a deck chair with her head between her knees, swearing and crying and hiccupping, while I stood next to her and poured bottle after bottle of water over her head. I was about to open the last bottle when she stood up and screamed at me, ‘You bastard, can’t you do anything besides pour fucking water over me?’ Of course I didn’t know what to say. What should I have done? No one had ever vomited all over themselves in front of me before. I glanced at Rosa’s face and was frightened by the fury in her curled lips. I had never realised she was so volatile. I thought, Rosa will never seem the same to me now–our friendship has been spoiled.

  �
�I wonder why people get seasick?’ I said to Mr Kato.

  ‘Sick? If you are sick you should vomit into the sea. Good bait.’ He laughed again. ‘You see? Obsession.’

  Mr Kato was my landlord. He charged me half the rent his Japanese tenants paid, and in return I spoke English with him for two hours twice a week while floating in a dinghy on the sea near Hitachi City. Mr Kato wanted to practise English. His English was excellent, but he wanted to practise having intellectual discussions in English. When he found out that I had a master’s degree in seventeenth-century European literature, he told me that I would be a fine conversation partner.

  ‘Do you know about European literature?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, but I can see that you are an educated man,’ he answered.

  He was particularly thrilled when he heard I was studying Japanese before I took the foreign service exam in Australia. Diplomats are expected to speak several languages, I told him.

  ‘You will be an ambassador!’

  ‘No, an employee of a diplomatic post. But everyone in the post has an important role to play.’

  I paid my rent to Mr Kato on the last Friday of every month, and he would have the receipt already written out and sealed in an envelope. He never counted the money in front of me and I never read the receipt.

  We had already caught seven fish between us and thrown back three undersized ones in the hour we had been fishing. The four captives swam around in a large pink bucket up near the outboard motor. Occasionally I would hear a splash as one tried to leap out of the bucket to freedom. When we arrived back at the shore later in the afternoon, Mr Kato would take the fish out of the bucket one by one and kill them with the heel of his fishing rod. I wished he would use a knife, or a stone, anything to vary the routine, but Mr Kato embodied routine. Each time the butt of his fishing rod connected with the head of a fish, he grunted, then inhaled with a hiss.