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

  Every night, the queen begged the king to climb over the wall at the edge of the garden, to pick the Rapunzel flowers glowing under the moon. So he did. He carried them home piled on top of his crown. The queen chewed them as the sun rose, and brewed some petals in her tea.

  One night, when the king was out collecting the flowers, a fairy appeared.

  ‘Those are my flowers,’ said the fairy.

  ‘But I am the king,’ said the king. ‘And I own everything in this land. Besides, my pregnant wife craves them.’

  ‘Then you may take the flowers but, in exchange, you must give me a gift.’

  ‘What sort of gift?’

  ‘You must give me your child.’

  ‘Ha!’ snorted the king. ‘Come and collect her when she’s born, if you think you’re brave enough.’

  So the fairy did. And the king discovered he was bound by magic to give her his child. The child was named Rapunzel, and the fairy locked her in a tower, for she was jealous of her hair. It grew long like vine and she braided it with bracken. She hung it out of the high windows for everyone to see. Her genes mixed with the flowers her mother had consumed. Part girl. Part plant. Raised up above the world …

  ‘Are you saying that Lily has been stolen by a fairy?’ Poppy asks, sipping Miracle-Gro.

  ‘There’s no such thing as fairies,’ Ivy spits. ‘Don’t be stupid. The government’s probably taken her away. I bet they’ve put her in isolation. For experiments.’

  ‘We don’t know that!’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Well, where do you think she’s gone then, huh? Where exactly did she go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps she ran away.’

  Lily was not a wallflower.

  I always thought of her as a waterwheel plant, a carnivorous green that could breathe underwater, propelled through the waves. A water lily. A plant like the Aldrovanda, which doesn’t have roots. It’s free-floating and traps whatever gets in its way, like a Venus Flytrap.

  Lily was like that. Lily took no shit.

  At the end of each summer, when the first leaves would fall, and they’d come at us with pliers for cuttings, Lily never went quietly.

  ‘It’s not OK, Fern,’ she yelled, as they grabbed her by the wrists. ‘It’s not OK for them to do this. It’s not OK, it’s not OK, it’s not OK.’

  The first few weeks at Camp are always the easiest. We catch up, we let them measure us. We accept the Miracle-Gro and drink as much water as they put in front of us, and we let ourselves blossom in the sun. Here, we don’t have to hide. No one’s pointing at us in the street; no one’s refusing to serve us at the supermarket. Here our differences can be prized, noticed and admired.

  Ivy, all six foot seven of her.

  Poppy and her hypnotic eyes.

  Rose with her plants flowering in her throat.

  Clover with her good luck vines sprouting out from her chest.

  Jasmine with her sea-green skin that doesn’t fade in winter.

  And Heath, who embraces his pale-pink flowers. They go by the name of Erica. He calls them the other half of his soul.

  But now the summer is ending, and the September wind is here.

  ‘Lily used to think that we could cross-breed with other plants, if we swallowed certain seeds,’ Poppy says. ‘She said if we became more than one thing, it would make us even stronger.’

  ‘What, cross-pollination?’

  ‘Isn’t that what they say about breeding dogs? Mongrels, and stuff?’

  ‘You better not be calling me a dog.’

  ‘Aren’t we already cross-breeds?’ Rose hiccoughs. ‘I mean, we’re already more than one thing.’

  How to Cut a Rose for Winter

  Begin pruning from the base.

  Always prune dead wood back to healthy tissue.

  Remove any weak branches.

  Roses have a habit of spreading. Keep them under control.

  Cuts must be clean, so keep your secateurs sharp.

  When Madame Honey disappears, as she does at the end of every summer, and the tree surgeons take her place, with sharp tools and needles, feeding tubes and weed killer, we are ready.

  When all is quiet and the moon is out, Ivy and Clover use their vines as extra limbs to prise open the doors of the laboratory, and we all race in. Daisy gasps. It’s humid, with moisture clinging to the windows, and we see ourselves inside, lining the shelves. All the cuttings they’ve taken from us, growing up in glass cages. Parts of our bodies labelled. Sterile and dull.

  We smash the glass.

  We grab ourselves.

  We run.

  Oh, how we run.

  Packets of seeds slide across the vinyl floor and jolt at every pot-hole.

  ‘Tell us another story,’ Heath pleads, as we pull out onto the motorway. Ivy bent over the wheel of our stolen van and us huddled in the back, our arms filled with green light.

  OK. Once there was a creature called a lilit. Lilits appear across the world, ducking and diving through history and culture. But wherever they crop up, they are night spirits. Demons, whose souls are trapped in the abyss. Once, a god reached for a lilit and a woman called Lilith appeared. A witch, with a will of her own. But she didn’t look the way men wanted her to look, and she didn’t do the things they wanted her to do. So they cast her out into the night, where she bore children in the dark. Strange children. Fantastical children. Children with names pulled out from the soil.

  Ivy revs the engine and the wind trickles in through the cracked windows of the van.

  Every so often, we pull into fields and duck into forests, where we plant parts of our rescued selves.

  They shiver pleasantly in the night-time air, surprised to find themselves in the wild.

  ‘How long do you think it will be before they catch us?’ Jasmine asks, peering out at the road behind us, where the sky is turning firebrick coral.

  I shrug, hoping it’s long enough to spread ourselves far and wide.

  Out on the road, Jack came across a man who said he’d buy his cow for a handful of magic beans. Five, to be precise. He said if Jack ran back home and buried them in his garden, a plant would grow there. A plant so tall it would make friends with the sky.

  But what if Jack took those magic beans and planted them inside himself, instead?

  Swallowed them down so they were hidden away inside him.

  Growing, growing, glowing.

  Jasmine tears open packets of seeds and pours them into our waiting hands. We cup them like grains of sand. Tip them into our mouths and swallow.

  At the next petrol station, I find a stamp crumpled at the bottom of my rucksack. We all scribble a letter on an empty packet of tulip seeds and address it to Lily’s favourite newspaper. We want to place an advert, in the hope that she might see it. We argue over what it should say. I want to send her a secret message in HTML colour codes. #7D0541 #CFECEC, which means ‘Bullet Shell’ and ‘Pale Blue Lily’, to let her know that we are fighting and we hope she’s fighting, too.

  ‘She might see it and think we hope she’s dead,’ Ivy says. ‘Bullet shell sounds aggressive.’

  ‘What do you suggest, then?’

  Rose raises a timid hand. ‘Why don’t we just list her favourite colours? To let her know she’s on our mind?’

  So that’s what we do.

  Our version of Morse code.

  Lily, we love you. We hope that you are thriving. x

  #7D0541

  #54C571

  #E9AB17

  #461B7E

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

  In the Dark

  I was in the kitchen doing the dishes when he walked in. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him to get the hell out of my house. I don’t know why my first question wasn’t: ‘Who are you?’ It might have been because he looked so lost; I remember thinking that much. He looked severely out of place, walking in from the garden, as though he’d just found a whole new world. He looked apologetic about the whole thing, actually.


  I didn’t recognise his uniform, but I suppose I must have guessed he was a soldier, because I vaguely remember thinking: ‘My God, what if he’s got a gun?’ But clearly I didn’t panic about that, otherwise I probably would have run away or pushed him out the door. I think I would have done that, anyway. But then I suppose we never really know what we’re going to do in these situations until we find ourselves doing it. Brains can rationalise a lot of strange things. Memories are complicated, too.

  He said something but he didn’t appear to say it to me. I thought perhaps he was speaking into a radio, one hidden out of sight. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, or what language he was saying it in, and it did cross my mind that perhaps he was talking to himself, which would have been awkward for both of us. I also remember thinking, for some strange reason, that I should try and look purposeful and put together. As though I had to somehow justify my existence, in my own kitchen, to this stranger who I hadn’t invited at all.

  I pushed my shoulders back and settled for saying ‘Can I help you?’ You know, as though he’d just walked straight into a shop and I was there to serve. As though I had soldiers coming into my house at all times of day and night – as though I was used to this kind of thing. But then I realised that he probably didn’t speak English, if his whisperings were anything to go by, so I settled for smiling in a way I hoped didn’t look like the kind of fake smile you put on for school photographs. My mother had always told me I looked like an idiot in school photographs. She wasn’t a lady who would hold back on these things. I was pretty sure she would have told this man to get the hell out of her kitchen if he’d just waltzed in and surprised her in the middle of the night. That, somehow, made me want him to stay.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, again, when he didn’t reply.

  He smiled back, in a way that suggested no words were going to follow, but it didn’t seem rude. I wasn’t offended by his silence. Quite the opposite. He shuffled his shoes, which were brown and highly polished. He looked very smart.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ I peeled off the rubber gloves I was wearing and walked over to the fridge. ‘We’ve got … well … it’s only casserole,’ I shrugged, suddenly wondering why I hadn’t cooked a four course meal. ‘We’ve got some left over … James wasn’t very hungry tonight.’ I could hear myself babbling away until I forced myself to stop. It’s like that, silence; you want to fill it up because it’s a frightening nothing that swallows everything around it. Like a black hole.

  The man smiled again and then started walking around the room. He stopped in front of the dresser and picked up a blue vase.

  ‘Oh, that was my mother’s,’ I said, spooning the casserole into a bowl and shoving it into the microwave. ‘She used to collect that kind of old rubbish from car boot sales, but I can’t seem to bring myself to throw it away. Stupid, really, don’t you think?’

  No response.

  I tried once more, eyeing his uniform:

  ‘Are you going to go … out there, to, well …?’ I trailed off. Everyone knew where ‘out there’ was. That morning’s newspaper was on the table, headline pointing to the sky.

  He put the vase down, and raised his arms up on either side, straight out, like a cross. I blinked. Then understanding dawned.

  ‘Oh. A plane,’ I nodded, and relief flooded through me; now I knew something. A plane. He flew a plane. Somewhere, for someone, for something. His uniform camouflaged with the sky. ‘I love planes,’ I heard myself say, stupidly. ‘Well. No, actually, that’s not true. I’m really not a fan of flying at all. Sorry.’

  The microwave pinged. I jumped.

  ‘Here.’ I put the bowl and a fork on the kitchen table between us. ‘Please do have some. You know, to keep your strength up for flying,’ and I found myself spreading out my own arms in imitation before I could stop myself. Like an embarrassing English tourist who speaks loudly on holiday, as though that’s going to make the rest of the world understand. Somewhere, my mother rolled her eyes.

  Nevertheless, he appeared to laugh, and picked up the bowl and the fork. He eyed them in an interested sort of way and began to eat. He shoved the food into his mouth hurriedly but, again, it wasn’t rude. There was even something charming about it, as though he simply hadn’t eaten for a long time. I felt pride that he was enjoying my food so much; I’d never really considered myself a good cook before.

  He didn’t sit down, but continued to stand, glancing up at the light bulbs. This pilot in my kitchen.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I chanced, pulling out a chair, and sitting down right on the edge of it.

  He looked at me curiously and continued to eat.

  ‘My son is asleep upstairs,’ I said to him, changing the subject in case it made him feel uncomfortable. ‘Do you have children?’

  I pressed on, unable to stay quiet. ‘Are you from France?’ I tried to remember my GCSE French. I admit I was relieved when he looked puzzled because I couldn’t remember much. ‘Germany? Holland? Russia?’ I started naming countries in Europe, then Asia, South America … I remembered James’s geography project and wondered if I should fetch his map of the world. Something like pinning the tail on the donkey, but that seemed crude. The pilot scraped the bowl with his fork and winced as though he could hear what I was thinking.

  He set the bowl down firmly and nodded. I think it was more of a thank you nod than anything else. He brushed a crumb from his jacket and made towards the door.

  ‘Are you going?’ I asked, standing up.

  For one wild moment I wondered if perhaps he wasn’t a pilot at all but a burglar who was checking out the area in an elaborate ruse, only to come back later and rob me when I’d fallen asleep. It didn’t seem likely – but, at that point, what did?

  ‘You can’t just walk out and not tell me anything,’ I laughed, even though it wasn’t the least bit funny. ‘I mean, what is this?’

  Why my house? I remember thinking, and not saying it. And why me? I’m just a normal person. Just a normal, everyday person.

  He paused at the back door, and I remember thinking, then, that perhaps he did understand what I was saying. Perhaps he knew a lot more than he was letting on and didn’t want to say it. Just dropped by to see what it was like, this other existence, this thing he wasn’t really part of. Like a changeling, before slipping away into the night. I shivered. In that moment, he reminded me of a man I’d seen walking along the high street with a sign around his neck that says ‘The End is Nigh’. This man stamps and cries loudly about the end of the world and all the people hurry by, pretending they can’t see him. Pretending they can’t hear.

  There was something in the pilot’s eyes, right then, though I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain it properly, to anyone who happened to ask. And, because of that, I knew that I probably wouldn’t tell anyone he’d visited. Knew I wouldn’t say anything at all. I have a feeling that, in that moment, the pilot knew that, too. And because of that, there was something linking us there, for that small second before he stepped outside of my house and disappeared. Something sad hovering on the air between us, unsaid in the dark.

  Margaret and Mary and the End of the World

  Once upon a time, there were four horsemen of the apocalypse.

  God breathed them into the world with his fisted right hand.

  ‘I have a bow,’ said the white horse. ‘I represent Evil.’

  ‘I am War,’ said the red horse. ‘Mark my sword.’

  ‘I am Famine,’ said the black horse. ‘And all that comes with it.’

  ‘I am Death,’ said the pale horse, who was carrying Hades. ‘And this is the end of the whole wide world.’

  Sometimes, there is also a beginning.

  Mostly. Almost always.

  A beginning is wired.

  You can trace it with your finger – snake it around your wrist, follow it to the socket, pull it off the wall and peer into the darkness beyond. If you track it further into the murky depths, it will eventually go back to t
he bottom of the sea. To animals and plants that are stuck between rocks. Between everything and anything and nothing at all.

  Your beginning is somewhere in there, crushed together along with everyone else’s. The imprint of a dead animal.

  You will never find it.

  But, sometimes, the beginning is also near your fourteenth birthday. That’s where most of my wires go – right into the birthday cake with my mother holding the detonator.

  ‘What are you going to wish for?’

  Boom.

  That was then.

  This is now.

  Now I am twenty-eight. I am doubled. My wires spread far and wide, interlinked like the underground and buried just as deep.

  I catch the bus, then walk down towards the river. Blackbirds clutter on the corner there. My mother used to sing a song about putting them in a pie. Twenty-four of them with charring feathers. My stomach grumbles. I look at my watch. The gallery closes at ten to six, and they shut her room first because she is one of the oldest.

  A girl trapped in a painting, stuck to the wall.

  I visit every Friday. The red room she is kept in has air vents lining the floor, and there are twenty-nine people in there with her. Nearby, Ophelia is floating down a river, dead. At the edge of a door, a poet who didn’t make it past the age of seventeen. Her world is a collection of scenes that puzzle me. The public walk through it like it’s some form of freak show. The people they watch sit behind glass, with name tags by their side and golden frames. They cannot talk, they can only stare.

  The painted girl I come to visit is called Mary. She sits in a portrait by Dante Rossetti called Ecce Ancilla Domini. It shows her being told she is to give birth to the son of God.

  Each time I come to stand in front of this painting, I disappear.