Free The End of the World by Andrew Biss Page A

applied a few final dabs of powder to her nose, before snapping shut the lid of the compact.
    “Really, Mother, this isn’t easy for me to say and I…I…”
    “Oh, do hurry up, darling, it can’t possibly be as bad as all that,” she said, once again foraging desperately for something buried deep inside her handbag.
    “Yes, I’m afraid it can. You see, Mother, I…it appears that I…that I’m…to all intents and purposes…” I took a deep breath. “Dead.”
    “Well of course you’re dead. Is that it?”
    “Well…yes,” I said, a little bewildered by her reaction…or non-reaction.
    “Oh for heavens sake, that’s old news, darling. What a big build up to nothing.”
    She was obviously in a state of either denial or shock. I took her hand gently in mine and looked her straight in the eye with as much intensity as I could bring to bear. “Mother, I don’t think you could have understood what I just said. I have passed on. I cease to exist. I am, according to all reports, completely and utterly dead.”
    “Of course you’re dead. We all are. Why else would we be here?” she said, quite matter-of-factly.
    “You mean…you mean you’re dead, too?”
    “As they come, my dear. Of course, I don’t look it, but when you have a complexion and bone structure like mine all you can do is count your blessings.”
    How had she done that? She’d completely turned the tables on me without even trying. There I’d been anxiously trying to find the right way of breaking to her the news of my death, when out of nowhere I was suddenly being forced to grapple with the news of hers. And despite the fact that she was sitting right next to me, chatting away merrily, I somehow believed her. I felt a wave of great sadness sweep over me. My mother was dead. This wasn’t an eventuality I’d ever even vaguely contemplated before. It was simply unimaginable. And even with her there beside me, I suddenly felt more empty and alone than I ever had in my entire life. Quite why, I wasn’t sure, but I did.
    “But…but how? How did it happen?” I asked, fearfully, before a dreadful realisation quickly came to mind. “Oh…oh no…I think I know…the baby.”
    “The what?” she asked, apparently having no idea of what I was referring to, until a few seconds later when something abruptly jogged her memory of her late-life pregnancy. “Oh that! Oh, no. No, no, no. No, that was all…gas or something. A phantom pregnancy. There was no baby, unfortunately.”
    “No baby?”
    “Isn’t it ridiculous? All that fuss over a lot of hot air,” she rued. “Pretty much sums up my life now that I look back on it.”
    “So I needn’t have…”
    “I only wish I had died in childbirth. It would have given my death a far more poignant, BrontQ sisters-like veneer.”
    This, all of this…and all for nothing. I’d been ejected from my home, torn from my loved ones, cast out into a brutal, cruel world that robbed me of my life before it had even begun…and all because of some smelly gas bubble. It all seemed so unjust. At the same time, if giving birth hadn’t caused my mother’s untimely passing, what had?
    “So…so how did you?” I ventured again.
    “Die?”
    I nodded, solemnly.
    “Are you sure you want to know?”
    “Yes.”
    “It was your father.”
    I gasped in shock. This was most certainly not the answer I’d been expecting. Not that I knew what to expect…but, this? My father? My mild-mannered, jolly, jovial accountant father? True, he secretly harboured fantasies of living a double life embroiled in international espionage and government skulduggery, but that was all make-believe…or have-us-believe. But murder? Real life murder? It hardly seemed possible. 
    “I don’t believe it,” I said, whilst simultaneously trying to imagine what method he might have employed to carry out his gruesome deed.
    “It was a shock to me, too,” my mother replied, a little too off-handedly, it struck me, for a victim of