The second end of the world

Nobody expected it to happen the way it did. Not even me. I wanted to go out with a bang, much as I came in, I suppose. Instead it was rather a quiet affair. Painful, of course, but then ‘no pain, no gain’, as they used to say. They don’t say anything anymore. It’s hard to talk when you’ve been obliterated into so many teeny tiny pieces that you’re basically dust. It was nice though, I felt special, that just for once everyone (literally, Everyone) was paying attention to me. I wasn’t on the news, I was the news; I was not just in everyone’s hearts or minds but their very souls. I was the core of all their little existences; I always had been, but this was the first time they’d acknowledged it. Slowly, almost graciously, I slid out of the limelight, not as I had once imagined, with an explosion of light and sound and life itself; instead gently, slowly, into a cruel, silent oblivion.

I remember where I was when the world ended. Who doesn't? It started on a Tuesday. I know it was a Tuesday because Mrs Hartridge next door was watering her hydrangeas, and she only ever does that on a Tuesday. She looked at me hopefully as I walked up the path, and I smiled and said how are you Mrs Hartridge, and she beamed her gappy smile and said she was very well thank you. Won't you come in for a cup of tea, I asked, and barely waiting for her nod of assent I turned away and up the path, lugging the heavy shopping that I lugged every Tuesday, while she went inside and rubbed off gardening dirt, tidying her hair before she came in through the back door, and the kettle was already boiling. Obviously that wasn't the end of the world. It was just little things at first, a little tremor in the ground, a strange high-pitched whining (both of which I attributed to the building works going on round the corner). It seems crazy that I didn't know it was the end of the world, as Mrs Hartridge and I sat sipping our tea, and she told me all about her husband, her dog, her grand-niece; the world was ending all around us. Mrs Hartridge’s grand-niece was a nurse, and a source of great pride to the old bat. In fact, I am so intimately acquainted with Mrs Hartridge’s family that I could ... well, that’s not the point. The point is that it was the start of the end of the world, and I was doing what I always do, sitting, listening, soothing. That’s what people say about me - I'm very soothing. I don't feel soothing. Mostly I feel angry, and frustrated and tired. Well, not now. Now, after the end of the world, I do feel soothing. Or at least soothed. It’s nice here, wherever 'here' is. I'm drifting, floating really, in magic. Once, when I was alive, I went swimming in the Dead Sea, only because it was the Dead Sea, there wasn't really much swimming involved. I went floating in the Dead Sea with John. Dear John. He was so very sweet. (Except when we got out of the Dead Sea and he was salty. Yummy, anyway.) Wherever here is, wherever I am now, it’s like that, in the Dead Sea. But it’s not dead, like the Dead Sea. It should be dead - after all, the world ended, everything should be dead. But rather than being dead its alive. So alive. That’s why I call it magic. I'm not explaining this very well. If you were to see me, you'd see a .. well, you'd see me floating, suspended by nothing in a big cloud of phosphorescence. It glows and sparkles, and is soft and soothing and lovely. It was made when the world ended. I was surprised. How can the end of the world be the start of something this lovely? That’s why I say it was beautiful. It was.

It took three days for the world to end. It ended properly on a Friday. The whining and shaking got worse, as though the whole planet had a bad cold, shivering and complaining, like a baby. (John was a terrible patient. So angry). But people tried to be normal. I could see them walking about, as though it was nothing, as though the world ended all the time. I wanted to run out and tell them, shake them, make them see that this was wrong. They probably knew. I watched men and women in dull grey suits trudge through snow to offices, to start reports they'd never finish, to write proposals for jobs that wouldn't get booked. But I was as bad. I didn't have to invite Mrs Hartridge to tea, and listen to her tell me about her grand-niece. But I did. I still did all the things I was expected to do. Until I thought I’d explode. And then I did. And it was beautiful. It was Friday morning, and I was sitting, drinking my coffee, and listening to the whine that I couldn’t really hear anymore. Then I could hear it, and I realised it was getting louder. And the whole world was shrieking and vibrating, there were no divisions between anything – the sound and the shaking were blurring the world into a vacuum of noise, pressing on me, all I could see, all I could smell, all I could touch was that horribly shrieking, and I was totally alone. Then everything stopped, and I was here, floating in my phosphorescent magic, enjoying the thought that I could be alone for all eternity.

In a clean, white, hospital room, there is the sound of machines whirring. They go about their business quietly, as though scared to interrupt the sacred silence of a tomb. This could be a tomb. The body on the bed is just another machine, deadly silent, devoid of life except in the most literal sense. The doctors don’t agree. They tell me that she might wake up, and I don’t argue with them anymore. I come here every day and I sit and I listen to the machines as they whirr and measure and monitor, as silent and oblivious as she is. At the beginning, I read to her, books, newspapers, anything I could find. I felt a fool talking to myself in an empty room, telling a gently bleeping heart monitor about the state of the world, the local elections, the petrol crises. The IV doesn’t care that Jane Eyre married Rochester – I hardly did but it was on her ‘to read’ pile, and then I still thought it would help. One day I came in, I was going to read her a magazine, one of those trashy things that she liked and I teased her about, and I was halfway through the problem page before the absurdity of the situation struck me dumb. Now I come and I sit, or I read to myself, whiling away the time until I can escape the room with the not-dead-corpse, doing my duty until I can go away and mourn.

I miss her, my Sarah. She’s not there anymore, no matter what the doctors say. Last night I opened her eyes and looked into them, and they were like a dead persons eyes. She stared at me like a stranger, worse than a stranger; she was a corpse from a cheap b movie. I sit and read my book, because there is nothing else I can do. Every day when I go home, I see the curtain twitch next door, and its Mrs Hartridge, and she asks me how she is. Nosy old bag. I don’t see how Sarah put up with her, always dropping in, always sitting and nattering about that grandniece of hers. Its always Julie this and Julie that and never a moment of peace. There is no peace now though, not without Sarah. I never realised that before. My peace.

It’s been weeks now. The doctors still tell me there’s a chance, but I don’t visit every day anymore. Mrs Hartridge goes sometimes. I hope Sarah isn’t really there, trapped in that dead body, forced to listen to the old bag drone on about her grand-niece. I hide whenever she rings the doorbell. Sarah would never have done that. She was always so happy to give, to sit and listen, to anyone or anything. We all loved her for that. She was so happy. The doctors keep on doing tests, they say they don’t understand what did it, there’s no sign of trauma they say, no illness, no reason for her to be unconscious, except that she is. I don’t listen to them anymore.