Normal Rules Don't Apply, page 17
* * *
Kitty sheltered with Terry in the doorway of their building—it had begun to rain—and watched Nina tottering away along the street on her too-high heels. Nina really should wear flats, Kitty thought. It was like watching a baby deer stalking delicately across the forest floor, on the verge of collapse at any moment. It made Kitty feel oddly protective of her, as if Nina were innocent prey and Kitty a predator. Dearest Nina, Kitty thought fondly. She would make an excellent understudy for Bambi. Or an Austen character—the foolish friend of the heroine, or a silly sister.
Terry groaned and stretched in the manner of a man who had just come off a long shift at the coal face and lit up a cigarette, sucking hard on it through his teeth as though it contained oxygen and he was a diver on his last breath.
“Smoking kills people, you know,” Kitty said, although she didn’t really care that much—free will and so on—and it hardly mattered anyway at this juncture in the timeline.
Terry contemplated the cigarette in his hand. “Kills people, cures fish though. Want to go for a drink? It must be three o’clock somewhere.”
“Sorry, I’ve got a lot on at the moment. I’m approaching the finale. Making the first people. Mankind 101. The originals. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Deo volente,” Terry said solemnly, almost fervently, and hailed her a taxi.
* * *
“Are you going to do it the traditional way?” her mother asked.
“Adam and Eve? Or ‘Eve and Adam,’ as I prefer. The whole garden/apple/snake malarkey? Yep, thought I’d give it a go. Why not?”
“Why not indeed?”
* * *
Whoa. She hadn’t seen that coming.
One cosmic minute it was working like clockwork; the next, the whole planet had gone to the dogs, and it was all shock and awe, and four horsemen were galloping towards you like Dothraki on speed. And what had happened to all those trees? And as for the cod—to think she’d been worried about making too many, now you could hardly find one for love nor money. Not to mention all the bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
* * *
Ting!
The scent of violets. The great wind. The Void. The machinery cranked itself up again.
* * *
A seagull.
A wasp.
A bee.
A pigeon.
Kitty presumed that it would be two crows and the small, harmless cloud next, but instead a pterodactyl squawked its way across the sky.
So…not always the same. Was it going to be like a poor woman’s Groundhog Day? Or a Netflix drama about parallel worlds that starts off promising but is eaten by its own metafictional self, long before the season one finale that no one even bothers watching anyway.
Kitty sighed. Back to the drawing board. Fail better, as someone once said.
She got all the operatic Sturm und Drang stuff out of the way first and then rolled up her sleeves and focused on the problems. She would have to be more patient, less imperial and more humble(!). Dial down the grandeur.
Kitty was in the details, apparently, so she patiently hand-crafted beetles like weightless jewels, feathered crows with night-black soot. Dappled and stippled and brinded, paid closer attention to Fibonacci when unfurling a fern or whorling the pearly inside of a shell.
At the other end of the scale, she factored in a lot more fish and trees, threw in extra plankton and quadrupled the number of worms. She removed anything that wasn’t essential—dryads, mermaids, the minotaur, the octopus, elves. Took a long, objective look at the dinosaurs and decided they had to go, ditto sea monsters, never mind the blueprint—torn up long ago. Quantity was obviously the key for some species, so she made thousands upon thousands of buffalo to stampede across the plains and tribes of tigers to prowl through the jungles. Nothing was ever going to run out again.
“Fingers crossed,” her mother said.
* * *
Ting!
Scent of violets. Great wind, and so on.
The seagull.
The wasp.
The bee.
A red-and-yellow kite.
* * *
It wasn’t the birds, then. Or the insects. It was the people. It started with Cain and Abel, and before you could say “incest” you had the CIA. You gave them atoms and you couldn’t believe what they did with them. They were ingenious, she’d give them that. Kitty would never have thought of making soup out of a turtle or an umbrella stand out of an elephant’s foot or a handbag out of a crocodile (how had they come up with that one?). And the uses they could put a cow to never failed to astonish her. And as for the poor pangolin, it defied belief.
She took the unicorns out, put the octopuses and mermaids back in.
Ting!
There had, of course, been some blunders along the way—she forgot a vital piece of code and the Great North–South Divide unexpectedly opened up. (They insisted on giving it capital letters, making it seem more important than it really was. It was a tiny oversight on her part. Tiny.) And who could forget the day when magic accidently escaped into the world? Her mother had to help her stuff it back where it belonged. It took aeons. “Everyone gets to make mistakes,” Kitty said. “How was I supposed to know?”
“You’re omniscient. The clue’s in the word.”
* * *
“So I’m thinking—clean and wholesome,” Ewan said. “A milkmaid. A dairymaid.”
“Is there a difference?” Kitty asked.
“Don’t know. Doesn’t matter…So the milkmaid—or the dairymaid, a Skylar Schiller type—is milking a cow, a lovely little Jersey, you know the kind—big brown eyes, bell round her neck. Quite sexy.”
“Sexy?”
“And they’re in a meadow,” Ewan said. “Alpine-ish, full of flowers. And the cow is called a traditional cow name—Buttercup or Daisy—”
“What about the girl, does she have a name?” Kitty asked.
“No, doesn’t need one. And after she’s milked the cow, sitting on a little three-legged stool, she carries the milk away in those wooden buckets, yoked around her shoulders, very Heidi—”
“Any thoughts, Nina? So far?” Kitty prompted, as the account handler, Ollie, seemed to have fallen into a coma.
“Not really,” Nina said. Dear, sweet Nina. Nina and Humble, a pair of Victorian music-hall players. Kitty imagined Nina, startled, in a thicket, in bosky sunlight. An arrow striking her in the middle of her pale forehead, spewing blood and brain matter all over the meeting-room desk in front of her. When did she start having such dark thoughts? Agincourt, if she remembered rightly.
“So,” Kitty said to the room in general, “no resemblance to a commercial milking parlour, then? Pervaded by the stench of slurry, where the cows who probably aren’t called Daisy or Buttercup have been filled with antibiotics and hormones and have had to have their udders washed clean of shit before they can be plugged into a robotic machine so that their milk can be pumped out twice a day while they’re grieving for their calves that have been wrenched from them and for whom the milk is actually intended by nature—or Mother Nature, as I like to call her.” (“She’s vegan,” she heard someone murmur.) “And let’s not forget the necessity of ‘cluster flushing’—”
“Yeugh,” Nina said. “I don’t know what that is, but it sounds obscene.”
“It’s when the milking line has to be flushed with parasitic acid and compressed air to prevent cross-contamination from the Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. And all that just to produce a humble smoothie. You have to ask yourself—is it worth it?”
“Yes, it is,” Ewan said, trying to outstare Kitty like a mad cat. (Impossible! Years of practising with her brother.) Eventually he sighed, like a bull bored with the matador, and turned his attention back to bamboozling Nina.
“Ever think you might be in the wrong job?” Terry asked Kitty.
“All the time.”
“What about kittens?” Nina suggested shyly.
“You can’t milk kittens,” Ewan said.
“Well, maybe…” Terry said.
Nina giggled. “No, I meant…”
Kitty dozed off. When would it all end? (Soon, actually.)
* * *
“You’ve aged,” Terry said later over a drink. “I didn’t realize anyone could be more cynical than me.”
“The world is too much with me.”
“Yeah, me too. Can I still say that? You should get a hobby, you know. Something to occupy you.”
* * *
Ting! Blah, blah, blah.
Night, day, firmament (still no explanation), land, sea, heavenly bodies and so on. Kitty could make fish standing on her head now. Fish weren’t the problem. They were the problem. You gave them paradise and they trashed it. She hadn’t planned for anything beyond pastoralism, of course. Expected them to simply lie around and eat melons and peaches, not to cut down all the forests so they could farm, for heaven’s sake. Who in their right mind wanted to farm? They spent endless hours hoeing and raking when they could have been drinking themselves stupid on coconut rum. And they found the uranium! There was nothing they couldn’t find if they put their minds to it. They’d plundered the treasure house and then sold off the family silver, traded away their birthright. Dominion, she should never have given them dominion.
It was not an easy decision to make. There were so many things she would miss—The Marriage of Figaro, Aboriginal dream time, the temple at Karnak, Twelfth Night, Keats, Detectorists, Paris at night, Barcelona by day, The Mikado, Labradors, pasta. Nonetheless they had to go.
But what to put in their place?
A world of women seemed like an idea worth trying but proved impractical on so many levels. She was hopeful about trees, but apparently you needed insects for trees and insects needed birds—or the other way round, she was never sure—and once you’d factored in three or more species you were back on the downward slippery slope. And, by the way, the birds and the bees were less compatible than you might think. “So I’ve heard,” her mother said. She had been to an Ayahuasca ceremony in Ecuador. “Mind-expanding,” she said.
Kitty had by now abandoned the last vestiges of the Judaeo-Christian model. (“About time,” her mother said.) She had picked from a global smorgasbord of creation myths—Hopi, Yoruba, Maori, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Japanese, to name hardly any. For a while, she had high hopes for the Chinese cosmic egg—nice idea, but quite absurd in practice.
From her own à la carte menu, Kitty had experimented with—
Dogs (chaotic). Ting!
Talking dogs (so disappointing). Ting!
Talking horses—better, but they were so gloomy! She kept one though, a racehorse too charmingly sardonic to eradicate. Ting!
False killer whales (terrible identity problems). Ting!
A parliament of owls? (No! Nasty creatures, completely lacking in the much-trumpeted wisdom). Ting!
A world where rubies and diamonds could be combed from the long locks of mysteriously enchanted princesses. (No princesses ever again. Ever. EVER.) Ting!
A world of toys (unintentionally tragic). Frogs and centaurs (just plain silly). Hamsters and lichen (pointless). Lupins and jackdaws (crazy, both parties). Talking cows and mute swans (doomed from the get-go). Foxes and geese (shockingly listless—not how you’d expect at all). Lions and lambs (they would not lie down together, no matter how much she lectured them).
Analogue, she thought. A pre-lapsarian world before the corruption set in. Maps, hot-water bottles, gramophones, Sunday closing, typewriters, elves—she revived them all, the elves literally. The speed with which this particular world evolved was mind-blowing. Ting!
Kitty tried a world based on a toile de Jouy pattern on her mother’s curtains—eighteenth-century people wandering around in a pastoral landscape of follies and sheep, like Marie Antoinette in the Petit Trianon. They did nothing but loll around and eat peaches, and if they weren’t lolling they were raking hay, again and again. They were so boring! In an act of desperation, she tried a world composed entirely of Ninas (a mad, mad, mad world!).
Ting! Ting! Ting! Ting!
No matter how hard she tried to keep them at bay, every new beginning led to the same old end—people. They always came back. Unlike everything else, they couldn’t be got rid of.
“There is another world,” her mother said, unnecessarily enigmatic, “but it is this one.” She was newly returned from Brighton and a shamanic weekend, whatever that was. As Kitty knew only too well, there was just this one, made and remade over and over again in a futile attempt to get it right—or, at the very least, to stop them trying to make a brush-and-comb set out of the shell of a giant tortoise.
She gave up. Lounged in bed all day long, eating Cheesestrings and watching racing on the TV. The talking racehorse gave her tips and the money from her winnings she put into gold bars, stored in the Royal Mint. Currencies came and went, but gold was for ever. But you couldn’t really get off the carousel, no matter how much you tried or didn’t try.
* * *
A seagull.
A wasp.
A bee.
A pigeon.
Two crows.
The Thames whale. No, not really. The whale had turned round at Henley and nudged his way back out to sea through the Essex marshes on a spring tide beneath a new moon.
The small, harmless cloud. He was back! He felt like an old friend. It made Kitty feel more optimistic.
* * *
The Humble campaign had been a roaring success. Sixteen-sheet posters had been plastered all over the Underground and there had been massive digital billboards in the bigger train stations, all displaying a giant milkmaid proffering an equally giant bottle of Humble. An egregious basket of kittens with ribbons around their necks was clutched close to the milkmaid’s milk-white breasts, and behind her a cow grazed contentedly on grass so green that it must have been heavily enhanced in post-production. The Alps formed a picturesque background. Not really the Alps—they had filmed in South Africa and the cow was a Friesian because they couldn’t get a Jersey. “Less sexy,” Ewan lamented. The adverts were on TV all the time. They were considered “quirky” as the cow spoke to the milkmaid at the end of the advert, telling her how good her milk was (better than the other way round).
“Imagine a world of talking cows,” Ewan said.
“Been there, done that,” Kitty said.
Supermarkets sold bottles of Humble by the crateload. “Addictive!” people wrote on Twitter (Hedge staff, actually). The agency was in line for an award at Cannes. The actress who played the milkmaid got a job on Coronation Street, Nina got a promotion. Of course, Kitty had long since left; there wasn’t enough time in the world to do two jobs. Not if you were serious about getting one of them right.
* * *
Ting! The scent of violets. The great cosmic wind.
Kitty hung on to the nearest thing—the tail of a tiger. Not what you’d call an accommodating animal, and they were both relieved when it was over.
She would have liked a grand denouement—a perfect world to end the task on—but she knew in her heart that wasn’t about to happen. There were no happy endings, just endings. And then more endings. And that was if you were lucky and there was no final ending. Kaboom! End of story. As her brother would have said.
“Not on your watch, though,” her mother said. “You can’t stop trying. You’re a woman.”
“A god, actually,” Kitty demurred.
“Whatever. And anyway you are here now, as was foretold.”
Kitty sighed. She supposed she was going to have to keep putting her shoulder to the boulder and pushing it up the hill. And if not her, then who?
Once more unto the breach, as someone once said. The Great Reset.
Kitty donned the Shannongrove Gorget and armoured herself with a flaming sword and a bow of burning gold and mounted the talking racehorse. Nothing wrong with a bit of theatre.
“Here we go,” she said to her mother.
“Good luck,” her mother said.
“Showtime!” the talking racehorse said.
What If?
“And then—can you believe this?—when I finally managed to get back to the wise woman (aka ‘witch,’ might I just say), she was dead, just a heap of bone and rags on the floor of the hovel. And after I’d lugged the kid all that way! And I’d had to lay out money to buy a nanny goat just to feed him. I had an acorn as well—to return to an oak tree—and a stick to give to the fire, but there was no point if the old crone wasn’t there, so I set off for home—”
“The castle?”
“Yes, where else?”
“Just checking,” Franklin said mildly. He was trapped in the car with a madwoman, he’d better humour her, he supposed.
“But then when I got there, I found that my mother had died years ago. So it was all for nothing. How shitty is that?”
“How long were you gone?” Franklin puzzled.
“Just like a couple of days. Time doesn’t obey the normal rules in my country.”
“And where is that, exactly?”
She frowned. “Dunno, somewhere between sunrise and sunset.”
“Right. And this is your kingdom?”
“Queendom,” she said impatiently. “Aren’t you listening?”
“I’m all ears, trust me.”
