Free The End of the World by Andrew Biss Page B

violent crime.
    “But surely…surely he would never do anything like that?”
    “Oh, but he did, my darling, he did. If he’d only driven me into town as I’d asked him to, instead of fobbing me off with some excuse about a meeting he couldn’t possibly be late for, I wouldn’t have had to walk to the shops and I wouldn’t have been run over by that dim-witted bus driver.”
    Aha! And there it was. Another of my mother’s cunning twists of events that caused the mind to change gears at warp speed and readjust to what actually was, not what it had been treacherously and rather craftily led to imagine.
    “A bus? You were killed by a bus?”
    “Isn’t it positively shameful? I’d always imagined myself slipping away under far more glamorous circumstances – or in a foreign country at the very least, my body being shipped back home amid a frenzy of media attention. But no, a bus it was. My only consolation is that it was a No. 73 and not a No. 10. You can imagine it otherwise, can’t you: ‘How did she go?’ ‘Knocked down by a No. 10 bus.’ Urgh! Thank heavens for small mercies.”
    “Oh, Mother, that’s awful!”
    “Yes, and quite grisly, I regret to tell you. But for a flap of skin and a couple of small tendons, I was all but decapitated.”
    “What? Oh my God!” I cried, craning forward to examine her neck for some sort of macabre affirmation.
    “Oh, don’t worry, darling,” she said with a knowing smile, as she fingered her necklace. “It’s nothing a few strategically placed pearls can’t disguise.”
    “But Mother that’s horrific,” I insisted, my eyes still searching for signs of scar tissue or sutures in and around the shiny, translucent orbs gilding her throat.
    “Well, I must admit I did make rather an unpleasant sight, splayed out there in the middle of Elysian Avenue, my body facing in one direction, my head in quite another. I looked like a cheap Picasso knock-off. ‘Woman in Red with Distraught Bus Driver.’”
    “And now you’re here,” I said, feeling both comforted by this knowledge and at the same time very saddened by it. After all, my mother was dead. With me, in death. We were two people in the same boat whose only consolation was just that. Somewhere out there a riverfront cruise was gliding its way across the water with a wild party in progress. We were in dry dock.
    “Yes, here I am,” she said, brightly. “Live and in person – sort of. Naturally I was very disappointed when it first happened. Who wouldn’t be? I mean there were so many things I had yet to achieve, so much unfinished business. But, as I thought to myself at the time, at least I can catch up with my darling Valentine and find out about all the exciting things he got up to in his new life. Not that you could’ve gotten up to much – you’d only managed to get a few streets away from us before the shooting.”
    “What shooting?” I asked.
    “Why yours of course.”
    “Mine?”
    “Darling, you were shot in the back – surely one doesn’t forget a thing like that so easily?”
    She was obviously mistaken. “No, no,” I said. “That never occurred. You must be confusing it with something else.”
    And then…I saw them.
    “Running from some Neanderthal who’d attempted to rob you, by all accounts,” my mother continued. “Quite ghastly, the whole business. We were simply devastated, as you might imagine. I sobbed for weeks on end and your father…well, let’s just say he’s a broken man and leave it at that. But you mustn’t feel responsible, darling – fortitude was never his strong suit.”
    Images. A figure in the shadows. A hood. A voice, harsh. The glint of metal. The darkness. Running. Running faster than I’d ever run in my life. Something exploding. Falling. Shivering. Cold.
    “He’ll never be the same again, I’m afraid to say. Not that that in itself is necessarily a detriment.”
    “But I ran…I ran away…I ran here.”
    “You were shot in the back while