The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night Read online

  Stories of family and magic, lost souls and superstition.

  Spirits in jam jars, mini-apocalypses,

  animal hearts and side shows.

  Mermaids are on display at the local aquarium.

  A girl runs a coffin hotel on a remote island.

  A boy is worried his sister has two souls.

  And a couple are rewriting the history of the world.

  ‘Interwoven with myth and fairy tale, these stories are surprising, delightful, by turns dangerous and joyful, like walking through a mirror and discovering a world that you both recognise and have never seen before.’

  Rachel Joyce

  ‘This book is full of character and magic, and I found myself mesmerised.’

  Claire Fuller

  ‘These stories are weaved together like silvery fishing nets. Like shimmering, jewel-bright worlds.’

  Helen McClory

  ‘Oh my good god. What a book! It’s so STRANGE and magical and the writing is just beautiful. I loved it. I was hooked from the first sentence. A genuine pleasure to read.’

  Louise O’Neill

  ‘Enchanting and whimsical, curiously beautiful and illuminating.’

  Carys Bray

  ‘Intimate, fantastical and true, like all great fairytales, Campbell’s stories hold whole worlds in single sentences.’

  Kiran Millwood Hargrave

  ‘Magical, dark and dreamy. The best short story collection I’ve read this year.’

  Kirsty Logan

  Also by Jen Campbell

  NON-FICTION

  Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

  More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

  The Bookshop Book

  POETRY

  The Hungry Ghost Festival

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  Franklin’s Flying Bookshop

  www.tworoadsbooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Two Roads

  An imprint of John Murray Press

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Jen Campbell 2017

  The right of Jen Campbell to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 473 65354 2

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Contents

  Praise

  Also by Jen Campbell

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Animals

  Jacob

  Plum Pie. Zombie Green. Yellow Bee. Purple Monster.

  In the Dark

  Margaret and Mary and the End of the World

  Little Deaths

  The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night

  Pebbles

  Aunt Libby’s Coffin Hotel

  Sea Devils

  Human Satellites

  Bright White Hearts

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  ‘It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.’

  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  Animals

  These days, you can find anything you need at the click of a button.

  That’s why I bought her heart online.

  It was delivered this morning along with my groceries, tucked inside a cardboard box, red oozing out the sides. They’d tied a half-hearted bow around the edges, a tag with promises of customer satisfaction and a thirty-day warranty.

  ‘Our hearts are played classical music from the moment they begin to grow.

  Bred to love. Built to last.’

  It is crimson.

  I lift it out and the heart spreads itself across my palm like an octopus. I tickle one of its valves and it flops down onto the kitchen counter, panicking. I pick it up again. I’ve heard other men talk of fishing and hauling. Of holding gasping flounder in their fists that they then throw on an open fire.

  Perhaps this is it.

  The heart flutters.

  There isn’t anything quite like holding love in your bare hands.

  I read the blood-soaked leaflet stuck to the bottom of the box.

  This heart is from a swan.

  Good. They say birds are easy to tame.

  ‘There, there, little one,’ I say. ‘It’s going to be OK.’

  I stroke it gently with one finger and whistle birdsong.

  It visibly calms.

  First things first. You need to treat hearts the same way you treat pets, that’s something my mother understood just fine. You shower hearts profusely and then stop. The stopping is important. You have to wait for the heart to become desperate; wait for it to think you’ve forgotten all about it. Then – and only then – do you smother it again with love and affection.

  It’s the only way.

  It’s how hearts grow.

  It’s how they learn to never leave your side.

  Hearts also need good nutrition and plenty of exercise. If you purchase one, make sure you keep it hydrated. If you’re new to this, you need to buy yourself a heart case until you decide whether or not this is The One. Hearts come in all different shapes and sizes, of course, but they don’t need bespoke sleeping quarters. Just somewhere warm and damp, close to human skin. My mother said, correctly, that love can fill any room.

  I’d recommend keeping your heart case strapped to your chest under your clothes to stop dogs chasing you down the street. Make sure you buy your heart from a reputable source, too. I once bought a faulty one that took on a will of its own and tried to bury its way under my skin. I’d never felt pain like it. That was the last time I took a seller recommendation from my next-door neighbour. Mind you, he’s been using glass hearts for the best part of a year, now, and neither he nor his partner look happy about it. More fool them.

  I slide the swan heart into my heart case and hide it under my jumper, feeling the pulse of both my heart and the swan heart, slightly out of sync. Love needs to be trained in warmth and rhythm and reliability. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

  I rinse out the box the heart came in. Cora always likes to say I use too much washing-up liquid but there’s no crime in wanting things clean. I slot the box into the recycling. Recycling is important. You shouldn’t litter the world.

  That’s why I’ve kept her.

  Most of her, anyway.

  I check on Cora, and go into my study to Google ‘swan’.

  The Celtic goddess of sleep transforms into a swan every other year.

  There are seven types of swan, including mute swans and tundra swans.

  Swans aggressively protect their nests.

  Swans mate for life.

  Swan meat was a delicacy during the reign of Elizabeth I, reserved for the wealthy and noble.

  The word ‘swan’ comes from the Indo-European root ‘swen’, which means to sound, to sing.

  I do like it when Cora sings.

  I put on my shoes to head to the park.
On the way out, I spy Thomas watering his garden. He’s humming a tune I’m not familiar with and stands in a sea of blue forget-me-nots. He raises his hand in an effort at hello, but he’s looking elsewhere. I raise a hand back, just in case he sees, and stride away.

  Many hundreds of years ago, a poet was walking along the Boyne river in Ireland, and saw a flock of swans flying high above him. He picked up a stone and threw it in their direction and one of the swans tumbled out of the sky. The poet ran to catch it and saw that it was no longer a swan but a woman. Her arm was broken and she looked up at him, wildly, and said: ‘Thank you. Demons came to my deathbed and turned me into a bird. I have been trapped ever since and flying for so long, I didn’t know if it would ever end.’ The poet held her close, then took her home, and her heart was thumping, thumping, thumping.

  The number 81 bus is a hive of misery.

  The woman sitting next to me is attached to a portable oxygen machine. She tries to hide it under a blanket, but it’s not something you can easily conceal. She’s been sitting down for at least four stops, but I can still hear her breath rattling. She constantly checks her pulse. Every so often she heaves as though her organs are trying to propel themselves out into the world. I grimace. We all do. Stupid woman. I can almost smell the meat rotting away inside her. We turn our heads to the window in unison and pretend she doesn’t exist.

  I do a gentle lap around the pond when I arrive at the park. My resting heart rate is approximately fifty beats per minute. This is impressive, of course, but I try not to tell too many people (though inevitably it slips into conversations). I don’t want to make others feel bad about themselves.

  I try to focus on my breathing as I jog. I think of two swans and their necks meeting to form the shape of a heart. I think of Swan Lake and mistaken identities. I think of Zeus, tumbling down to earth to cause chaos as a god hidden in a swan’s body, and I yell as a flyaway football narrowly misses the side of my chest. I cross my arms, and continue running, blood pounding in my ears and the swan heart beating so furiously it sounds like it’s trying to take off.

  At the far end of the park, there is a bandstand. People are clustered around a brass quartet, who are blue in the face, and a man in a ridiculous heart costume. He dances on the spot, both to keep warm and to draw attention to the moneybox he is shaking in people’s faces: ‘All proceeds go to the British Love Foundation! Please give generously!’

  Give me strength. I dodge the crowd and, finally, find what I’ve been looking for. A young boy and his mother are feeding the ducks, and next to those squabbling ducks is a swan. Huge, white, majestic. The swan heart strains to the edge of its case at the sound of water and other birds. There are many people milling around. This might cause a scene. Then again, they do say that love loves an audience. So, I pick up a stone from the side of the path, take careful aim, and fling.

  The young boy screams and someone drops their tuba.

  Most people pretend not to notice the dead swan draped over my shoulders as I walk back home. They part to let me through, some tutting as they do so. The swan is heavier than it looks, and its wings keep trailing along the ground, tripping me up. I hoist it higher. Its neck dangles down, beak bouncing off the case of the swan heart beneath, which is practically chirruping. The bus driver refused to let me on, miserable bastard, but the exercise will do me good. I’m sweating, in spite of the wind.

  Thomas is still watering his garden when I get home. There are pools forming around his ankles.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, waving with the wrong hand so the sprinkler he’s holding dowses his clothes. ‘Oh! Nice swan.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  ‘Is it all right? It looks a bit … floppy.’

  ‘It’s dead.’

  ‘Oh!’ He shudders. ‘Doesn’t the Queen own all the swans in the country, or something?’

  I fumble for my keys. ‘Bye, Thomas.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Bye.’

  I slam the door behind me and let the swan tumble to the floor. It stares up at me, blankly. He’s right, though, Thomas. The Queen technically does own all unmarked swans in open water. Not that she’d ever exercise her rights. They don’t make queens like they used to.

  There was a time when jealous queens ate the hearts of their daughters. Elisabeth of Austria, a real-life nineteenth-century princess, used to sleep with raw meat on her face, to keep her skin young and freckle-free. She had hair that took hours to brush, and she would wash it with egg yolk and brandy. At the age of sixty, she was stabbed through the heart by an anarchist who thought she looked ugly. Her corset was so tight that she didn’t die for several hours. Her heart bled out slowly, twitching in a cage.

  Birds and hearts are similar in so many ways, you see. I nudge the dead swan with my foot.

  It’s like poetry, really.

  I check on Cora, who hasn’t moved, and drag the bird into the kitchen. It takes an age to pluck, as I try to keep the feathers whole. I’ll get Cora to make a skirt with them, one that sweeps the floor. She can wear it along with her bearskin coat and wolf-tooth crown, and I’ll take her dancing. The white feathers gleaming against her dark skin, the two of us never breaking eye contact so everyone else feels uncomfortable. We can arch our necks and point our feet. Parade across the floor.

  Swans were sacred to Druids, who thought they represented the soul. They believed these birds could travel between our world and the world of the dead, and, because storytellers brought news from all worlds, they were given ceremonial cloaks called tuigen, made out of songbird feathers. The hoods of these cloaks were decorated with the feathers of a swan.

  Cora loves stories; she deserves a cloak of feathers.

  I take off my jumper, and unstrap the heart case underneath. I don’t want to distress my newly bought heart by keeping it on me as I dissect my kill. I can almost hear it resisting as I put it down, away from the warmth of my body. It shudders slightly. It misses me. Good.

  I pull on an apron and close the blinds.

  I sharpen my knives.

  Butchery is an art form lost on many.

  The six o’clock news filters out from the radio.

  Today’s headlines: US scientists remain sceptical of North Korea’s claims it has created the Elixir of Love. A video from a woman in northern England has gone viral, in which she says she is willing to donate her heart to save someone else’s relationship. The suicidal forty-two-year-old from Northumberland is currently accepting couples’ CVs via email, so she can pick one to donate her heart to.

  I slice through the breast meat.

  The Aphrodite Heart Factory in east London has seen a record number of animal rights protestors, after its announcement that it will be opening five new branches just north of the city. The activists, who have all rejected animal heart transplants, choosing instead to suffer with heart disease, petition for the abolition of the animal heart market. The Prime Minister calls for calm, insisting that these new factories are simply a precautionary measure, not a sign that love levels are plummeting to an all-time low.

  He released this statement earlier this afternoon. ‘Whilst we continue to manufacture hearts for our own needs, we must also take great care to cater for others, by sending out hearts and doctors to those suffering in foreign lands. Love translates into all languages, and should know no bounds.’

  I locate the swan’s wishbone and put it to one side for later, then I pull the swan heart out from its ribcage, blood congealing on my fingertips.

  It’s a special moment.

  It’s still warm.

  I lick my lips.

  It’s not unusual to eat animal hearts. Dare I say it’s not unusual to eat human hearts, either. There are odd people out there who place adverts looking for strangers to eat their hearts while they struggle to stay alive, which is hardly arousing, but the actual act of eating human hearts goes back centuries, probably millennia. One eccentric in the 1800s, William Buckland, used to eat all manner of strange things. Bluebottles and toasted mic
e, panthers and puppies. At least I don’t do that. Mind you, William did also eat the heart of Louis XIV, which had been embalmed for a hundred and fifty years. He simply grabbed the silver container on display at dinner, ripped out the contents and swallowed it whole. That’s not something I’d recommend. Hearts should be fresh. Still beating, if at all possible.

  I trim the fat from the edges of the swan heart and begin working on a marinade. My favourite is a simple one. Two tablespoons of olive oil, one of sherry vinegar, a splash of Worcestershire sauce, a pinch of salt, oregano and black pepper. I chop the heart finely and line it in the marinade. It’ll need to sit for an hour or so. Enough time to clean up, freeze the carcass, make a side salad and check on everything downstairs.

  The swan heart I bought online still sits on the counter top. It’s beating slower than before. Every so often, it jumps in its case, trying to get my attention. I wonder if it’s concerned I’m about to cut it into tiny pieces, too. Part of me feels sorry for it, like a fool. I make soothing noises and reattach it to my chest. The heart sighs with relief. We’re bonding. Once I’ve cooked and eaten tonight’s meal, we’ll bond further. Independent studies have shown that if a human consumes a heart from the same species intended to be put inside his or her lover, then there is a greater chance of creating a lifetime bond. Love consumes you, so you must consume it.

  I carry the chopping board to the sink, squeeze in a good amount of washing-up liquid and relish the silence where a reprimand would be. Through the kitchen blinds, suds up to my elbows, I spy Thomas and James in their living room. They’re sitting side by side on their new designer sofa. No doubt they deliberately left their curtains open so the world could see. A poster image for a glass heart relationship. Like a bloody art installation.

  The water’s a murky red, so I drain it and refill.

  Thomas and James appear to be watching television, though their expressions give nothing away. They were far more interesting when they argued and fought and cared about each other. I’ll never understand glass hearts. Glass may be recyclable but it’s also cold and weak. Amorphous, with no clear shape or form. Charles VI of France believed he was made of glass. He carried pieces of iron in his clothing to protect himself from breaking. Fragile and precious, he was called Charles the Mad and Charles the Well-Beloved. That’s not the kind of love I want, even if it does sit on a designer sofa.