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

  EVELYN: Yes, well, I’ll bloody burn his letter.

  JULIAN: He seems to think that you’re not taking this seriously. That grief is driving you mad.

  EVELYN: Not taking this seriously? He’s trying to murder our tree; I’m taking that very seriously. He’s a moron! And I hate him. He can stick it, and his letter, and his complaint to the local council. I bet there’s nothing wrong with his house, either; he’s just bitter.

  JULIAN: About what?

  EVELYN: I don’t know. Life.

  [Pause]

  JULIAN: You really should go to sleep. It’s the middle of the night.

  EVELYN: I know.

  [EVELYN throws a pillow angrily, and buries her way under the duvet]

  [There is a long pause]

  [The ticking clock is ever so loud]

  EVELYN: We met in the middle of the night, do you remember?

  JULIAN [yawning]: Did we?

  EVELYN: Yes. It was at a house party.

  JULIAN: I thought we met at the supermarket.

  EVELYN: No, it was definitely a house party.

  JULIAN: Whose house party?

  EVELYN: Caitlin’s.

  JULIAN: I don’t know anyone called Caitlin.

  EVELYN: You did, back then.

  JULIAN: Back when?

  EVELYN: Back when we met … Keep up!

  JULIAN: Keep up with the past? I don’t remember.

  EVELYN: You don’t remember our beginning?

  JULIAN: Apparently not.

  EVELYN: Julian! You’re so frustrating. In the beginning, there was a house. And there was a party. It was twenty years ago, and it was the end of our first term of university. Well, it was a flat, rather than a house, really, but we’d sort of sprawled out all over the stairwell so we were taking up most of the building. The neighbours weren’t all too impressed. I think they called the police on us at one point.

  JULIAN: We should work on our relationship with our neighbours.

  EVELYN: Ha! Anyway. It was Caitlin’s birthday, or perhaps it was her sister’s birthday. It was someone’s birthday, anyway. Caitlin was mad about Charlotte Bronte. Like, I think she actually wanted to be her. She’d kick up a fuss when we were asked to read anything written after the 1890s because she said that it shouldn’t have been invented yet. Caitlin was of another time, and she was having a party where she wanted us all to dress up like it was the 1800s, only hardly anyone did. I remember her sitting in a white dress in the middle of the kitchen surrounded by empty vodka bottles like Miss Havisham or something. One strike of a match and she’d have been alight.

  JULIAN: And what were you wearing?

  EVELYN: I was wearing a black dress, with ruffles.

  JULIAN: Ruffles?

  EVELYN: I think I got my centuries mixed up. Time’s a confusing thing. But I felt sorry for Caitlin.

  JULIAN: In the beginning, there was a girl in another time who was transported to a future time and she was miserable.

  EVELYN: Exactly. Anyway. There wasn’t really anyone at the party that I liked. I’d got there late, and everyone was pretty much out of it. So, I was just about to leave, when I saw the stairwell up to the roof, and up I went. And then, because that’s how things always go – and then, there you were.

  JULIAN: I was there?

  EVELYN: Yes. You were sitting on the roof. You were by yourself, drinking wine, wearing black trousers and a shirt and a monocle, because you said it was the only thing you could find to make yourself look different. It made one of your eyes look ridiculously large, and I couldn’t help laughing.

  JULIAN: Sounds about right.

  EVELYN: What?

  JULIAN: That the first thing you’d do was mock me.

  EVELYN: Very funny. [Pause] And you did look very funny, you must admit.

  JULIAN: I can’t admit. I don’t remember.

  EVELYN: How can you not remember? It was our beginning. On the roof of Caitlin’s house. I said that I was a girl who’d stepped out from the future, and that I’d come to tell you that the party downstairs was awful, just so you’d be forewarned.

  JULIAN: And I said that it wasn’t a forewarning, because I already knew that, which is why I was on the roof in the first place.

  EVELYN: So you do remember!

  JULIAN: No. I’m just guessing. Because you said that I was by myself, on the roof, drinking wine.

  EVELYN: Well, that’s exactly what you did say. You said that you knew the party was terrible but that it was calm up in the open, so you thought you’d sit there for a while. You handed me the wine bottle, and told me to take a seat, and I did. There were pigeon nests further along, and the occasional puddle. It wasn’t flat, either, the roof. It sloped down, like it was about to fall off.

  JULIAN: Roofs do tend to slope, you know.

  EVELYN: I know that.

  JULIAN: Sounds like a stupid thing to be doing, really, climbing a roof like that in the dark, drunk.

  EVELYN: Yeah, well, it’s the kind of thing we did back then. And, anyway, you went there first.

  JULIAN: That’s true.

  EVELYN: So. We sat, in the wet, near the birds’ nests, slugging wine out of a bottle in this new rooftop world of ours. Wine that probably didn’t even belong to us, and we looked out across the city. There was a park on the other side of the street, past the terraced houses, leading up to the university. Rows of trees along the paths. So many of them, lined up. Like they could uproot themselves and walk. It was dark, but not pitch black because of all the streetlights. The sky was orange, really orange. Like it was on fire. And I said, ‘The sky looks like it’s on fire.’ And you said, ‘I know. I hope the trees don’t burn.’ And we sat there, watching the sun rise. And I thought: I like you. I like you a lot.

  [Pause]

  JULIAN: I do remember the orange.

  EVELYN: You do?

  JULIAN: Yeah, I do. Not an orange light, though. Oranges. I remember oranges.

  EVELYN: What, the fruit?

  JULIAN: Yes, the fruit. I don’t remember the roof, or the wine, or the monocle. I remember our beginning being in a supermarket.

  EVELYN: I hate supermarkets. Why would I have met you in a supermarket?

  JULIAN: Don’t bash our beginning, Evelyn. We met in the fruit aisle.

  EVELYN [laughing]: No we didn’t!

  JULIAN: Yes, we did. I was hungover, and you were hungover. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we’d only just woken up. Or, I assumed you’d only just woken up. It certainly looked that way.

  EVELYN: Charming.

  JULIAN: And I was practically sleepwalking. I’d been writing an essay the night before, and I’d decided to drink whisky to make the essay writing easier, only that didn’t work. It just meant that the essay took longer to write.

  EVELYN: What was the essay on?

  JULIAN: M.W.I.

  EVELYN: What’s that?

  JULIAN: The Many Worlds Interpretation. Where every time you make a decision, the other options you didn’t choose play out somewhere. Somewhere else. In some other world. So, somewhere there’s a you who didn’t go up onto the roof. There’s a Caitlin who wasn’t sitting by herself. And there’s also a me who didn’t drink whisky whilst essay-writing, and so wasn’t hungover, and therefore didn’t feel the need to go and get orange juice and bacon and bread to try and make myself feel better. Anyway. On that particular day, in that particular beginning, in that particular world, I was hungover. And so were you, I think. And we were both in a supermarket. You were filling a basket with oranges. Only oranges, nothing else, and people were staring at you.

  EVELYN: It’s not nice to stare.

  JULIAN: Well, I was staring, too. You were piling about a dozen or so into a basket. There wasn’t any orange juice left, because the supermarket got deliveries on Mondays so most of the shelves were empty. So, I thought, ‘Hey, I’ll just buy oranges and make the juice myself.’ Only you were hogging all the oranges.

  EVELYN: You were going to make orange juice yourself, when y
ou were hungover? Did you even own a juicer as a student?

  JULIAN: I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.

  EVELYN: I guess not.

  JULIAN: So, anyway, I went over to you and said: ‘I’d like some oranges, too, please.’ And you just looked at me, like I’d said something stupid, and you said, ‘Go ahead. It’s a free country.’ And I felt like saying that it isn’t a free country, because all decisions are predetermined and all of them happen, all of the time, just in different places in different worlds. But I couldn’t say that.

  EVELYN: You mean, you chose not to say that.

  JULIAN: Well, I …

  EVELYN: So, that’s free will right there. You chose not to say those things to me.

  JULIAN: Another me, somewhere else, did say those things to you, though.

  EVELYN: Yeah, and another me probably looked at you in disdain and walked off and never saw you again.

  JULIAN: Well, I didn’t say anything back, and you left four oranges in the box, and I picked them up and put them in my basket, and then I followed you to the till.

  ‘What are you going to do with all of those oranges?’ I asked you.

  ‘I’m building a sculpture with them,’ you said. ‘It’s an art project.’

  ‘You’re building a sculpture with oranges? A sculpture of what?’

  ‘The sun,’ you said. ‘A huge burning star. I’m going to use a glue gun. It might not work.’

  ‘Won’t the art … decay?’

  ‘That’s life,’ you said. ‘Things are born. And then they die.’

  EVELYN: I don’t remember any of this.

  JULIAN: Well, that’s what you said. That your art class was doing a project on the beginning of the world. Something pretentious about creating things about creation. And I said, that’s a coincidence, and I told you about my essay. About beginnings and endings and the possibility of other worlds.

  EVELYN: And that was our beginning?

  JULIAN: It was one of our beginnings. Somewhere. Somehow.

  EVELYN: Look at us, beginning and ending all over the place.

  [Pause]

  EVELYN: I miss you, Julian.

  JULIAN: I know. What about your beloved tree? How do you think that began?

  EVELYN: I like to think it began accidentally. Just by chance. A stray seed on the wind that burrowed its way into the soil.

  JULIAN: Or was planted by a king, long ago.

  EVELYN: Or perhaps just an ordinary person.

  JULIAN: Maybe a you in another world planted it, and sent it here.

  EVELYN [laughing]: A tree travelling through time and space?

  JULIAN: Yeah. Why not?

  EVELYN: I can think of many logical reasons why not.

  JULIAN: I thought we weren’t supposed to be using logic tonight.

  EVELYN: That’s true.

  [The clock ticks loudly. Birds begin to sing outside]

  JULIAN: If they cut our tree down, it’ll still exist somewhere else, you know.

  EVELYN [smiling]: I suppose that’s true.

  [Pause]

  JULIAN: Evelyn?

  EVELYN: Yeah?

  JULIAN: What about our ending?

  EVELYN: I don’t like to think about it.

  JULIAN: No. Me neither.

  [Pause]

  JULIAN: I didn’t want to leave, you know.

  EVELYN: I know.

  [Orange light trickles into the room. The sun is rising]

  EVELYN: You’re here now, though, right?

  JULIAN: Now?

  EVELYN: Yeah, right now.

  JULIAN: Sure. I’m here. Go to sleep.

  Pebbles

  The shortest war in history was between the United Kingdom and Zanzibar in 1896.

  It lasted thirty-eight minutes.

  We read a book about Northern Ireland at school. A novel about a boy from one side and a girl from the other. We had one of those teachers who spoke like Shakespeare. Everything she said was for dramatic effect. I remember giggling into my sleeve when she spat out rude words.

  I thought I knew everything about the war. About religious fighting with bricks and fists and falling in love with girls on the other side. It was twenty years ago. I was young.

  ‘What the hell are they complaining about? It’s romantic,’ I said, as we walked home along the cliff tops. ‘War’s like this whole fucking romantic thing. Romeo and Juliet. Those petrol bombs, you know. Burning love.’

  ‘It’s like football.’ George swiped a tongue on a roll-up, nearly dropping it. ‘We’re all sport.’ And he pointed his finger to the side of his temple and mimicked pulling a trigger. ‘Bang, said the gun,’ he said.

  ‘But guns don’t talk,’ I said, squinting at the smoke.

  ‘Neither do the dead,’ he said. Then he grinned like he was mad.

  We walked past some kids sitting in trees, making parachutes out of plastic bags. They tied them to 2B pencils and let them drop, slowly, to the ground.

  During World War I, British tanks were categorised as ‘male’ or ‘female’. Male tanks had cannons. Female tanks had machine guns.

  In the eighties, when I was young, the threat was petrol bombs. Northern Ireland was only a ferry ride away. And we heard about the IRA and raging politicians and other snippets of conversations on the news. And then there was talk of nuclear power, and how damaging was that, exactly? And what was the world coming to? And please could someone protect the children? We played a game called Fireball at school, where you’d throw a rubber ball, hard, across the playground and someone on the other team had to catch it. It hurt like hell. The person catching it had to pretend that it didn’t. They had to stand there and take it. As though it didn’t burn.

  In the 1400s, during the Spanish Inquisition, a form of torture similar to water-boarding called toca was invented. Victims were forced to ingest water from a jar poured over their faces, until they felt as though they were drowning (because they were).

  I liked to think I knew how it was over there, in Belfast. I lay awake one night, thinking about it. Somewhere, there was a girl, one I was deeply in love with, and she had bright-red hair. Her name was something wonderful, and she was the sister of the leader of a local gang. Throwing stones in the name of God. A shared God. A different God. A God from over the other side of town. She was marvellous. She used to kiss boys and girls for cigarettes. I knew that I could find her on the corner of a street, sharpening pebbles, putting them in her pocket. I knew that she would give me one of those pebbles, press it into the palm of my hand until the sharp edges cut me, as she kissed me behind the bike sheds and we forgot about the world, and she said it was all going to be OK – somehow – in the end. It’s because war’s romantic, I thought. And dangerous. It’s a red-haired girl, kissing another girl, me, under a streetlight, with no one caring because there’s a whole damn war on, and they care more about which side you’re on, instead of what gender you are and who the hell you’re kissing. That’s what I imagined, you see. That’s what I thought.

  Did you know at least ninety-two nuclear weapons have been lost at sea?

  You said: ‘Let’s go to Brighton Pride and see how it’s changed.’

  I had nothing to compare it to; I’d never been. You had to work late the night before, so I looked it all up on the Internet – all the pictures, all the stories. When you got back, I spent the night in bed telling you about the first Brighton Pride, in 1992. I dreamed of all the tents, wondering how many people it took to put them up. Joke: how many lesbians does it take to build a tent? And then I woke myself up because I couldn’t think of an answer and suddenly I couldn’t breathe, stuck under the sheets. Like when they used to say you should bury your head in a plastic bag if a country declares nuclear war. Take deep breaths and let the world float away. ‘They’ll blow our atoms out our ears,’ my granddad used to tell me, cursing the modern world. ‘In the future,’ he said, ‘I bet the government’ll weed out plastic bags, too. And how the hell will we save ourselves then?’

/>   We got a train from London Bridge and the platform was packed, the carriage stuffy, one from a smaller company, with chairs that smelled of tobacco and sweat. We just managed to fit on the corner of one seat, opposite a family. Suitcases scattered all around their feet. The mother of the children, one girl and one boy, looked around at the tight clothes, the placards and the feathers.

  A group of twenty-somethings started singing ‘Summer Holiday’.

  ‘Mum, why are those men dressed like cowboys?’

  ‘It looks as though they’re going to a party,’ she replied, raising an eyebrow at those who looked on.

  You collapsed with the giggles and sang along with the rest.

  I closed my eyes but started picturing falling-down tents.

  I could feel my pulse in my throat.

  I took a deep breath.

  I once saw an art installation called One Hundred and Eight. It’s by Nils Volker and consists of one hundred and eight plastic bags. These bags are lined along a wall and are inflated and deflated by a machine. They look like jellyfish lungs and sound like the wind.

  It’s like the exhibition is alive. Like it’s whispering in your ear.

  You offered me a crisp and it tasted like the sea.

  At Gatwick, all the cowboys jumped off the train to let the family get by. They carried their suitcases for them, up over their heads, and tipped their hats. You told me you’d always wanted to be a cowgirl.

  At Brighton, we walked down towards the beach. The street lamps were covered in rainbow bunting. You disappeared for a minute and came back with two ice creams in one hand, and a pink cowboy hat covered with tacky plastic jewels.

  ‘Howdy,’ you said, and slipped it over my head.

  The strap met under my chin, and scratched my skin when I turned from side to side. We marched towards the Royal Pavilion at Preston Park. The website said it had been built for George IV, mocked as a carnival sideshow, transformed into a palace. It announced itself loudly. A place within a place.

  ‘You know, there was a fire here, twenty years ago,’ I said.

  You took my hand.

  As we turned the corner, I saw them. The police first, in their yellow fluorescent jackets looking bored beyond belief. There must have been ten of them, forming a neon circle around a dozen people holding signs.