I woke up slowly in the middle of the night, knowing that I’d half heard her coming into the bedroom a while ago but that it had taken me ages to come to consciousness. I’d left her sitting on the terrace writing things on her phone, and I had no idea what time it was now.
The room should have been perfectly dark. The walls were thick, the floors all tiled, and the shutter over the window was metal and worked by pushing a button; when it came all the way down it made a complete blackout. I couldn’t sleep in the dark, however, and had brought over my fairy lights just in case. They were my flamingo ones, and they were now draped across the top of the mirror because there was a ledge there, so when I opened my eyes a tiny bit I could see Natasha by their pale pink light.
I was about to speak when I noticed what she was doing. Natasha was standing in front of the mirror, staring at herself. She had her weight on one leg and had her chin down, while she twirled a strand of hair round her finger. I had no idea what she was doing until she whispered ‘Hello. I’m Libby’ in a British accent. She shifted her posture.
I knew I fiddled with my hair. It was just a thing that I did without wanting to, a form of self-soothing.
Natasha was pretending to be me. I watched her turn this way and that and try out different mannerisms until it was too weird.
‘Am I that annoying?’ I said, and my voice sounded loud.
She jumped, turned and laughed.
‘No, silly,’ she said. ‘I just think a British accent would be cool, and you’re the best person I know who’s got one, so I’m modelling it on you. Sorry for waking you.’
‘That’s OK. But you should keep your own accent. It’s lovely.’
She looked at me for a few seconds, then smiled.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said. ‘I should just learn how to be myself. Anyway, sleep. Sorry, Libs.’
I couldn’t get back to sleep after that. It was too unnerving. Did Natasha really not want to be herself? Was she always changing? It made me feel sad for her.
Sad and a little bit wary.
She went to sleep, but I was still wide awake.
I was imagining myself travelling around Europe. I had said to Zoe, only the other day, that we could meet in Paris (admittedly Zoe didn’t know I’d said it). Perhaps it might be possible. I could go to Paris with Natasha, and – perhaps – meet Zoe there too, though I would have to send her a real message about that, rather than a pretend one.
I would write to her in the morning and tell her I might be going travelling.
I could do street magic now (a basic trick, but it was a start). I hoped I would be able to do that kind of thing with strangers, because it was performing. I was seized by a heady urge to run and travel and live and do everything I could, while it was all still here.
If I spent the summer learning, I could show my new skills to people at home, and I might end up with more friends. Although I knew that, as Natasha had said, my extracting a coin from Zoe’s hair wasn’t going to make her fall into my arms, I still hoped it kind of might, because it would be a different Libby who did that, and so she might notice me.
I listened to Natasha’s sleepy breathing and tried to imagine the rest of my life. Each heartbeat took me closer to the end, but whenever I pictured September the seventeenth my mind swerved away like the pole of a magnet. I could see why people were building bunkers with air in them. Anything. Anything to stop it happening. Anything.
I could see too why they believed in life after death. I looked across at Natasha sleeping with her back to me. I desperately wanted to buy into her happy afterlife, where babies grew into their best selves and no one could die. I concentrated and tried to commit to it, but I couldn’t. I wished I could.
I wondered whether this was what Mum had been through with the churches. Had she tried with all her might to believe in what they were saying, but failed? Had she finally found something that worked for her?
Natasha had said the dead were all around us. I imagined the bedroom filled with ghosts. They stood round my bed. They drifted through walls. I pictured my grandparents standing there. They looked at me, and then turned to look at Natasha, their other unknown granddaughter. They both settled down on the floor to watch over us all night.
It was no good. This was a load of absolute rubbish and I couldn’t believe it for a single second.
I still couldn’t sleep. I used my phone to look at Natasha’s social media, because I hadn’t done that since she arrived here.
Her Instagram account had been renamed @Eurotash and had thousands of followers: she had, somehow, posted twenty-eight photos since she’d been here. I looked at them. There was only one with any people in, and that was a shot of Natasha and me, arms round each other, smiling on the terrace. Her other pictures were of the still surface of the pool and drinks on the cafe table. There were flowers in the garden and wine glasses on the terrace. There was a photograph of my pet tomato. I saw her hashtags: #family #holiday #love #cousins.
Further back there were pictures of Winchester, and one of her with my dad, which was odd to see (#uncle #love #family), and nothing with the babies in it, as she’d said. Beyond that I had seen all her pictures many times before, but I looked anyway. I went back beyond the European landscapes, back to the photographs of New York and her father. I looked at her dad and imagined his voice in her head. I wondered whether he had sounded British or American, or a bit of both. I wondered why she had no pictures of her mother, and how Peggy was doing in her psychiatric hospital, and whether they were in touch. When I tried to ask she just looked away and managed never to answer.
I found a blog that I’d never seen before, from a link on her Twitter account that I’d missed, and read a flurry of posts from a few months ago. I read her excitement at being contacted by her British cousin, Olivia, and, before that, I read about her father dying. I looked at photographs of the funeral. I read the post in which she said she was setting off for Europe because her father’s spirit had told her to go, and anyway this summer was a time to live. I read the comments from her friends wishing her an amazing time. I felt jealous of her friends, of everyone else who had ever met her, because I liked having Natasha to myself.
I comprehensively cyberstalked the girl who was sleeping a couple of metres away from me. By the time I returned the phone to the bedside table I was feeling really quite shabby.
I stared at the pinkly glowing ceiling. I definitely wasn’t going back to sleep tonight.
‘Libby!’
Someone was shaking me. The room was half light. I wanted to stay asleep. I was in the middle of a lovely dream that melted away as I came to consciousness until it had vanished so completely that I didn’t know anything about it at all. I just felt an unfocused longing.
I was tangled in my sheet. It was hot. I was asleep, and comfortable. I did not want to get up.
‘What?’ I managed to say.
It was Mum. If I needed to be woken up, it was always Mum.
Then I remembered we were going to Madrid. I opened my eyes and looked at the empty bed and yawned.
‘Darling,’ said Mum. ‘Sorry! It’s eleven o’clock. You’ve slept in. Do you still want to go to Madrid today?’
I tried to concentrate my mind, but it took a while to shake off the sleep.
‘Does Natasha still want to?’ I said.
‘Very much so, but she says if you want to sleep she can wait for tomorrow.’
I yawned again.
Mum laughed. ‘OK?’ she said. ‘I’ll come back in five minutes.’
That was what she did on school mornings too. She would wake me up, open the curtains, and come back every five minutes until I was actually out of bed.
I rolled out of bed. I had been lazing around like a slug, comfy and snoozy, and all along Natasha was waiting for me, probably swimming up and down my pool, watering my tomato, drinking coffee with my parents, smiling at my long sleep, and narrating it to her dad in her head.
I pulled on some denim shorts and a baggy T-shirt and saw that the shutter was a little bit open. Mum must have done that when I was fast asleep, to try to coax me into consciousness.
I looked a mess, obviously, and did my best with a hairbrush and some moisturizer, though there was nothing I could do about the pillow crease that ran down the side of my face. I took a deep breath and walked down the little corridor and out on to the terrace.
‘Hey, Rip Van Winkle!’ That was Sean, being Seanish.
I walked out there and took the cup of coffee that Natasha was holding out, and I sat down. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t sleep well. And then I did, I guess. Sorry, Natasha! We should be in Madrid by now!’
‘You’re on vacation!’ said Natasha. ‘You need to sleep. There’s nothing to be sorry about. You looked so peaceful and pretty. We can go any day.’
The sun was already burning hot in the sky. I had missed the best part of the day, the bit I loved, when I watered Harry Tomato and his friends, and when I swam, and when I enjoyed the paler heat.
I sipped the coffee and started to wake up properly.
‘Right,’ said Mum. ‘So, if you want to go, there are buses every half hour.’
‘I do want to!’ I said.
Natasha sat down next to me. I was acutely aware of the fact that she was wearing a green bikini and nothing else. She had a scar on her stomach from when she had had her appendix out, and I thought it looked nice. It was a mark of her life being saved. She shook her hair out and pushed her big sunglasses up on top of her head.
‘I took the bus here,’ she said. ‘It was so clean and air-conditioned and smooth. Let’s do it. Let’s get the next bus. Drink your coffee, Libs, and eat something, and then we’ll go.’
I was starving. I found some half-stale bread in the kitchen, and covered it with Nutella, and then I had a quick shower and we set off for the bus stop.
This was my third time in Madrid, but it was completely different being here with Natasha. The sun was bright, the sky deep blue, and the air was hot like a furnace. I felt it coming off the pavements, off the buildings, as if the city were a huge radiator. I listened to my flip-flops slapping on the pavement. My skin was itchy with heat. My hair, which I’d used as a comfort in the British winter, was a burden now. I felt as if the sun knew it might not be able to sustain us all for much longer, and so it was giving it everything it could.
In fact, of course, the ever-increasing heat was part of the Creep. It was part of the greenhouse effect, and Madrid, today, was hardly bearable at all.
‘It’s hot,’ I said stupidly as we walked from the Metro towards the Prado.
It was more than hot. It was a dry heat that made every movement such an effort that it didn’t feel worth it. I dragged my feet, felt a bit dizzy.
‘It sure is,’ said Natasha, looking down a road. Mostly the streets were empty, but as we got closer to the gallery there were more people around. Most of them looked as if they were here to see Madrid while they still could, but down some streets there were people sitting in the road, and there was shouting and singing, with banners and sudden bursts of laughter. It was a bit too far away for me to work out what was going on (a riot? a party?) but I was seized unexpectedly by an urge to join it. I imagined myself running down the street and joining in. For a moment I wanted to do things while I still could. I wanted to become part of the wild panic of the end times.
‘There’s lots going on in the world,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want to be a part of it? All the extinction festivals? Why do you want to be tucked away with us?’
Three cars raced past, speeding as if they were on a Formula One track. Natasha took my hand, and even though our hands were slick with sweat I didn’t take mine away, and neither did she.
‘It’s a bit exciting, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Being in a city. You should see New York right now! But I’d rather be in your Garden of Eden. At least for long enough to catch my breath.’
‘You really want to go to Paris,’ I said.
‘You should come too.’
The queue wound round the side of the building. Even though Madrid felt empty, everyone who wasn’t rioting wanted to go and see the great art, just in case. The end of the line felt a long way from the museum door, but it did move fast and, after waiting in silence for about twenty minutes (it was too hot to speak), we were inside.
‘Oh my God,’ said Natasha, standing under an air-conditioning unit and holding her face up to it. Even her hair was stuck to her face with sweat. ‘Maybe we have died, you know. Because this does feel a lot like heaven.’
The Prado was a place in which you could lose yourself and find yourself. The walls were thick stone, and even without the air con it would have been bearable in there. I saw posters in the atrium advertising free entry for the whole week of September the seventeenth, and I thought it would be a wonderful place to wait for the change.
I had no idea why anyone would want to do anything other than walk straight to The Garden of Earthly Delights and stare at it. Unfortunately everyone else did want to do exactly that, and the room was rammed. As we edged through the crowd Natasha said, ‘You know, I’m not sure your mother really likes me as much as she says.’
‘She does!’ I said, and only after saying that did I stop to wonder whether Natasha was right. I thought Mum did like her. She wouldn’t have been encouraging me to go off adventuring with her otherwise. ‘What makes you say that?’ I added.
‘Just thinking about it,’ said Natasha. ‘This morning, when you were sleeping, I tried to talk about the afterlife but she wasn’t having it. She got quite annoyed with me, so I stopped. I thought she’d be receptive.’
‘She wants you to take me travelling, so she must like you.’
‘Yeah. She doesn’t hate me. But, although she likes the meditation and the yoga and whatever it is she does, she doesn’t believe in psychics. Scratch the surface and she’d say we’re all charlatans trying to part fools from their money. She likes me because you like me, and because she feels sorry for me. There’s something else, though.’
I didn’t reply, because I had no clue what the ‘something else’ thing would be. We got to the front of the crowd and then we were in front of the painting.
‘Oh my fucking God,’ said Natasha. An older woman looked over at her and laughed.
‘I know,’ she said in accented English. ‘Exactly!’
It was a triptych showing what I thought was the Garden of Eden on the left, a kind of weird earthly paradise in the middle, and Hell on the right. All of them were amazing, but I found it hard to look away from the right-hand panel.
‘Look at them,’ Natasha said, pointing to the people in the middle piece, who were naked, doing all sorts of things. ‘They look like people who think a change in the atmosphere might just happen any moment to spoil their fun.’
‘They do,’ I said. These people were certainly living each day as if it might be their last. They were riding strange animals, cavorting, eating a giant strawberry, and doing all kinds of rude things to each other in public.
‘I like it that it’s not just the chicks who are naked,’ said Natasha, pointing. ‘Look. It’s everyone. That’s much cooler than on most of the paintings in galleries like this. You know, it’s always paintings by men of women who just happen to have forgotten to put on their clothes. The history of art should be called the personification of the patriarchy, if you ask me. More dicks in art, that’s what we need.’
The same woman looked over and gave a nod of agreement.
‘Mmm.’ I agreed with her sentiments, but I wouldn’t have said it out loud in a crowded room. I tried not to show that I was embarrassed, but she noticed, of course.
‘Oh, Libby!’ she said. ‘Sorry. I said “dicks” in public, didn’t I? That made you embarrassed.’ She raised her voice. ‘Stop saying “dicks”, Natasha!’
Lots of people looked round at that. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to try to disappear. I felt my cheeks flaming.
‘Have you looked at this panel over here?’ I said quickly. ‘There’s so much to see. Look at this side of it.’
The right-hand panel showed a man whose body was a broken eggshell. There was that bird eating the people and pooing them out. A naked man was being kissed against his will by a pig in a nun’s habit. Everywhere you looked there was a weird, horrifying thing. I could stare and stare and stare at it, and so, it turned out, could my cousin. We stood there in silence for five minutes. Ten minutes. Probably more.
‘This is my favourite piece of art in the world,’ she said in the end. ‘Before this it was a sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle, but now it’s this.’
Natasha whipped out her phone and took a photo, and was immediately told off by a security woman. She apologized and we edged back into the crowd a bit. ‘Still got the photo,’ she whispered. ‘I knew they wouldn’t make me delete it.’
I could smell everyone’s deodorants and perfumes, and the sweat that had dried on to them, and the very humanity of it all, and it didn’t feel so different from that right-hand panel of the painting.
It felt the same. All these people crowded together, and the people outside, and the heat that made it hard to breathe, and the fact that time was running out.
The people around me were the people from the painting and I was scared. They were running around doing mad things to each other, and I didn’t want the bird man to get me. I didn’t want anyone to slice my ear with a blade, or to crucify me on a harp.
I felt the world pressing down. My head started to spin, but there was nowhere to go without the people getting me. My ears were ringing, and there were blotches across my vision. I felt myself wobbling, and then Natasha had my elbow and someone else had my other arm, and I was pushed down and I was sitting in a chair. I felt a hand push my head down, and I sat there, my head between my knees, touching the floor with a hand, until it began to clear.
I was not inside the painting. I was here, in the world, but it almost felt like the same thing.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered. The security lady was on the other side of me, but I could only speak to Natasha.
‘What are you even talking about?’ she said. ‘You don’t say sorry for keeling over. Stay there until you feel better. Don’t you dare go anywhere. I’ll find you a cookie or something.’
I heard her talking to the security guard, and I understood their Spanish. The security woman said everyone wanted to come and look at this painting because of the end of days, and that she could see why. She said she liked to stand and look at it herself before they opened in the morning. She told Natasha that it was more popular than everything else in the museum combined.
I had thought I was being very cultured and clever, linking the current time to the Bosch painting. It turned out I was completely unremarkable and predictable.
The guard said she didn’t have anything sugary but that someone would, and she clapped her hands, and Natasha shouted out in Spanish to ask everyone in the room, and then chatted quietly to an American woman behind me, and handed me a chocolate-chip biscuit, and it did actually make me feel better. I managed to thank the room at large in Spanish, and the guard said I was very welcome. I looked round for the American cookie woman to thank her, but she had gone.
Natasha and I wandered through some of the rest of the gallery arm in arm. It was, indeed, hardly busy at all. I was still trembling, but I calmed down.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I just freak out sometimes.’
‘Hey,’ said Natasha, ‘don’t we all?’
I stopped and turned to her. We were in front of another famous painting, Las Meninas. It was a strange one: a painting of a painting that was being painted, with a million brilliant details.
‘You don’t, though,’ I said. ‘Natasha, you never freak out. You’ve been through so much. You’re going through so much. With your dad. And your mum. You’re so brave, and so strong, and you never show any weakness at all.’
She smiled. ‘I’ve got my coping mechanisms,’ she said. ‘Believe me. I’ve freaked out in my time. But I’m OK now. I know how to get through.’