‘Where have you been?’ Natasha was annoyed.
‘I popped out to see what Paris was like,’ I said. ‘I got us a croissant. Here.’ I passed her the paper bag.
‘You were ages! Jesus, Libby. You didn’t answer your phone. I was worried about you! What’s it like then?’
‘Nice.’
‘Good to have the inside info! Right, let’s go.’
‘The man downstairs wants some money,’ I said. ‘He stopped me on the way in.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Well, he can’t have it. I mean, we do have some saved up – of course we do; it’s why we did the psychic night. But I don’t want to give it to him yet. We need to get busy today. We’ve got a lot to do.’
I made myself smile and look stupid. ‘What are we doing?’
‘Going shopping. The big party is in the Louvre on Friday. Anarchy for the End, it’s called. I want us to go as twins. Do the separated-at-birth thing. And just do our act, like we’ve done loads of times before. It’ll be fun. But we’re going to need to be much, much better dressed for this one.’
‘OK.’
‘What’s the matter, Libs?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Seriously. Something’s wrong. Have you got cold feet? Are you worrying about your mom? Do you want to go home to Zoe?’ She looked searchingly at me and I knew she wasn’t going to let this drop. ‘It’s that, isn’t it? You miss your home. You want to get back. You’ve probably been making plans to get home. That’s fine, Libs! You don’t need to pretend.’
I picked up my bag and stepped back into my flip-flops.
‘I do want to go home, yes,’ I said. ‘But – I mean, why don’t you? It’s the end of everything. Why aren’t you going back to the States on a boat while you still can, to be with your own mother? Why not? Why do you want to be here, with me, when you’ve only known me for, like, five minutes?’
Natasha blinked and sighed.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s because I’m a bitch. And not in a good way. Come on. Let’s go out. We can eat these croissants on a bench somewhere, and get a coffee and I’ll tell you all about it. I know you need to go home, Libs. I do see that. And I wish I could too. I really do. Look, I know I’m all surface, and I know you’re starting to see that. I can see it in your eyes.’
I hated the way she could read me. I vowed to be more guarded. I remembered her voice on the train: So stupid. Oh my God. I’m doing her such a favour, you have no idea. Pathetic.
I would never trust her. She didn’t know I had heard her talking about me, so at least I had that.
The woman who took long showers and swore at hairdryers came out of room eight as we passed. She was older than us, with bright hair and a long green dress, and she tutted as she stood back to let us down the tight staircase first.
‘Hi there,’ said Natasha.
‘Morning,’ said the woman, looking annoyed, but not particularly with us. I wondered what was going on in her life.
The hotel man stood in our way and said, ‘Now you need to pay for your room, like you said on the phone.’
The woman laughed and pushed past us.
‘Good luck with that,’ she muttered as she went. She didn’t look back.
The hotel man was in his fifties, with a jowly face and sad eyes. Natasha beamed and patted his arm.
‘I know we owe you! Don’t worry. We’ll go and get you the money now. I promise we’ll pay.’
He gave a cynical smile with one side of his mouth. ‘OK, but today?’
‘Sure! Definitely today.’
‘No cheating me.’
‘Absolutely not!’
He stepped aside.
We sat on a bench in a square and ate our croissants, and it was almost cold. I watched the Parisians walking past. There were a lot of very chic people of both sexes and all ages. I watched a woman waft by wearing a long striped dress and tall shoes with clear plastic heels that had bunches of dried flowers encased inside them. I saw a man in a crisp purple suit carrying a fluffy white dog that was better dressed than I was.
In that sense Paris was exactly as I had expected it to be. I liked this city, I thought. I would have liked to spend ages here, exploring. With Zoe.
‘So?’ I said, looking at Natasha. It turned out I wasn’t as good at acting as I’d thought I was, because I was finding it impossible to go back to the way I had been before I heard her on the phone, and I knew that she could see that.
‘OK. Look. I’m going to be straight with you,’ she said. ‘I can see that you’re impatient now, Libby. It’s nearly the end of August, and you want to get home. I get that. But will you stay here with me to go to the Louvre on Friday night? After that, then sure. Go.’
‘Yes,’ I said, though I wouldn’t. ‘Of course I’ll stay for the Louvre. But I’m going after that.’
‘I mean, a party in the Louvre to welcome the Creep. It’s going to be insane.’ She looked at me, a bit uncertain. Her hair had definite dark roots now; we were diverging. ‘Also, there’s another one tomorrow. The guys in the bar were telling me about it last night and they said there are still tickets. It’s a huge ball, really grand, called the Fête du Fin du Monde, the party for the end of the world. At an old palace somewhere. There are more – there are huge things going on every day and every night – but those are the two I really want to go to.’
I leaned back and blew out all the air from my lungs.
‘Why, though?’ I said. ‘There were parties all the time in Madrid too, and you weren’t bothered about them. Why do you care about these ones all of a sudden?’
Natasha stood up and walked off. After a while I followed and caught up with her watching some children swinging across a climbing frame in the corner of the square. I should have left her perhaps. I could have left her. If I couldn’t go straight to London, I could have gone to Madrid. If I had, things might have worked out differently.
‘OK,’ she said when I reached her. ‘You’re right, this doesn’t make sense, so I’m going to tell you a couple of things.’
The playground equipment here, I noticed, had age limits on it. This part was for children aged between seven and twelve. How precise. The restriction made me want to go on it myself. I looked at her sideways. I had never felt so cynical.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s a personal thing,’ said Natasha. ‘Not a hustle.’
We started walking. We walked out of the square and down a small street. We passed a stall with newspapers for sale and I looked at the headlines. They were all atmosphere and riots. I paused in front of one and looked at photos of fires in Paris. This very city. I was scared: there seemed to be unrest and danger the world over. What if there were curfews and travel bans before Wednesday? I imagined being trapped here with Natasha until the end.
I didn’t look at her. I started walking again and she kept up with me.
‘What kind of personal thing?’ I said.
‘It’s a long story.’
We had arrived at a canal with boats on it. I could see that it would join up to the Seine at the end. There was a cafe and a little park across a bridge, and we walked over there. It was sunny and getting hotter, and I felt that everything was new and also ending. A new city and a new dynamic.
‘Coffee?’ I said, seeing a little stand.
‘Please,’ said Natasha.
We sat on a bench in the sun with coffee in cardboard cups. I was still waiting for her to say whatever the personal thing was.
A woman walked past carrying a little dog. I smiled at its cute face, and then I wondered about the extinction. All dogs would cease to exist, and soon. Every single one. They might evolve again or they might not. Something different could evolve. Something as different from a dog as a pterodactyl was.
‘Right,’ said my cousin. ‘All I’ve wanted has been to be here for these two parties.’
She stopped, and when I looked over at her I could see that there were tears in her eyes.
I wondered why my cousin had no friends. Being alone on a different continent for the end of the world was a strange choice to make. It wasn’t the choice of a person who had a network of people she loved.
I wondered whether she actually liked anyone. She had people who commented on her social media, but that wasn’t the same as having friends. I knew her family had been ripped apart, and that her mother was in a psychiatric ward and unreachable. But I also knew that, if my mother was suffering like that, I’d want to be nearby, keeping an eye on her.
Or would I?
A pigeon hopped close to us, hoping for food, but we didn’t have anything for it.
My mother was like that. Not quite, but I remembered the last time I’d seen her, only a couple of days ago. She had not been stable. She’d been struggling. I was seventeen, and I’d run away to Paris. Natasha was eighteen, and she had too. We weren’t so different.
On the train she had spoken about me with such disdain. She wasn’t really my friend.
‘OK.’ She took some deep breaths and spoke again. ‘OK. So here’s the thing.’ A man looked as if he wanted to join us on the bench, and we both glared at him. After hesitating, he walked on.
‘What’s the thing?’ I said.
She looked away. ‘You know that when my dad died he was in the car with someone? With the woman I hate?’
‘Yes.’
‘Her name is Deanna. Deanna Glancey. She’s in her early twenties. I mean, gross. Hardly older than me, and Mom had no idea. Deanna walked away with barely a scratch. And she never said sorry. Worse than that, she sent us a mean letter afterwards. It made it all much worse. And then we discovered that Dad hadn’t left us any money. A tiny bit of money. Nothing like what he actually had.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s awful.’
I remembered what Dad had said. Andy had left a ‘life-changing’ amount of money to us. I had assumed that he’d left at least the same amount, and probably a lot more, to his wife and daughter. It seemed impossible that he’d cut them out.
‘You’re lovely. So, Miss Deanna is also in Europe now, doing her grand tour without a care in the world. That’s why I’m here really. I mean, one of the reasons – you’re the other. She basically walked away with a little scar or something. I hate her. I hate her more than I can say.’
‘Is she going to these parties?’
‘I’ve been Facebook friends with her for ages. I made a fake profile months ago, and friended loads of her friends first, and then when I added her we had lots of mutuals so she just accepted me. That’s how I know what she’s up to. She’s going to the gala on Tuesday, and then the Anarchy for the End on Friday. I want to talk to her tomorrow, and then get a full revenge on Friday.’
‘Are you going to hurt her?’
Again, there was silence. Somewhere, far away, there was shouting, then a siren.
‘Her feelings. Sure.’ She looked at me, her eyes boring into mine. ‘I’m going to hurt her feelings, Libby, but not as much as she hurt mine. Because she killed my dad.’
‘You know …’ I wasn’t sure how to say this, but I thought I would try. ‘You know, it doesn’t sound like she actually murdered him. It was your dad’s choice to be out in the car with her, and he was driving, wasn’t he?’
‘Yeah. I do know. It was his decisions that led him there. Sure, he was driving. She was a passenger. She didn’t do anything to make him crash, apart from letting him drink and drive. But he’s gone, you know? So what can I do to him? She’s what’s left.’
I sipped my coffee. It was black and strong.
‘He’s not completely gone, is he? He talks to you.’
‘Yeah. That’s a shadow. Everything that was him has gone. His ashes are scattered in the places he loved most. Yes, his spirit is still there, but it’s not here. His voice in my head makes it all worse. Because he isn’t real. He used to hug me. You know? And now he’s a wisp. And maybe I’m just imagining him. In fact, I think I am and I’ve known that all along, but I’ve always been like: no, it’s definitely him, one hundred per cent. And we’re all going to die anyway and what’s even the point?’
She blinked fast, and I put an arm on her shoulder. I wondered whether this was all part of the act. Even if it was real it was too little, too late. She turned her face into my shoulder and shook a bit. I knew that she didn’t want to cry properly, because her thing was being in control, but, for the first time since I’d known her, I felt that she might be showing real emotion.
Not that I cared now.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t really know what the point is.’
But I saw it all then too. The new atmosphere (which I was seeing at the edges of my vision as green all the time) would seep across the planet, and everyone would choke and drown in poison. The horror of it all. The horror, as life on this planet was extinguished (apart, perhaps, from the cockroaches and the tardigrades). The abandonment of the entirety of human life. People had watched thousands of other species becoming extinct without being particularly bothered about it and now it was our turn and there was no one left to care.
‘I hate her.’ Natasha’s voice pulled me back to the moment. ‘And him, sure, but I’m not going to spend my time shouting at a ghost. Believe me, it doesn’t work. She’s not sorry, though. She’s just walked away. We’re in the middle of fighting her for his insurance. I think I’m getting it, but I haven’t yet because it’s all tied up legally. She said he’d left Mom for her, though he hadn’t, and the lawyers are fighting it out.
‘So here she is, in Paris with her rich friends, going to a grand gala to celebrate the whole of Western culture and civilization, followed by a wild party at the Louvre to stick a finger up at the extinction. And I just can’t. I can’t let her do that and know that I’m here too, staying in a shitty hotel and hustling card tricks for money. I have to find her. She’s pathetic. She comes across as sweet on her social media but so stupid. I’m doing her a huge favour by forcing her to confront what she’s done while there’s still time.’
I froze. Those were the words she’d said on the train.
My arm was still round her shoulders.
‘But what will you do?’ I said. ‘What will you actually do, when you see her? I’m not sure it’ll make anything better.’
‘It will,’ said Natasha. ‘It will make things better for me.’
Had she been talking about Deanna on the train? Maybe it hadn’t been about me at all. I could have got this all completely wrong.
‘How are you going to hurt her feelings?’ I said.
She looked away, and I felt the barrier come down again.
‘I’m not going to do anything really. Just remind her of me for a moment.’
‘Have you met her before?’
‘I’ve seen her. I’ve never spoken to her. It was the most awkward and horrible thing. I hate her so much. So, so much. Her story of the crash was that they’d come back from the best night out, and he was going to come home to our house to pick up his things, and then that was it. He’d told her he was only with Mom because of me anyway, and now I was eighteen, so … Anyway, they were driving back, he was drunk, they were both laughing and messing around, feeling like nothing in the world could ever hurt them. And then it did. He drove into a tree. And she pretty much walked away.’
If anyone could frame a person so they found themselves caught in the act of stealing the Mona Lisa, it would be Natasha. I imagined the Venus de Milo toppling on this woman, or a hall of sculptures coming to life and trampling her to death. I imagined Natasha harnessing her fury, and I was glad I was not Deanna Glancey.
‘What does your dad say about the party?’
‘Oh, Libby,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he says anything really, does he? He never did. He’s dead.’
‘But what,’ I said again, ‘are you actually going to do?’
She was quiet for a long time. I watched the people walking past, amazed at the way life did still go on. Lots of people who had jobs still went to work. As soon as the novelty wore off, life had simply continued. It would probably fall apart again next week, when September arrived, but for now about half the shops were open, and most of the businesses seemed to be carrying on. Humans, I thought, were strange. They were still doing the things they had always done.
I wasn’t. What I’d always done was stay at home and wish I could speak to people. Now I was in Paris in the sunshine, and I was going home on Wednesday to meet up with Zoe. I supposed I would go with Natasha to tomorrow’s party (apart from anything else, I was totally intrigued by the prospect of seeing Deanna). After that I was off. Home.
‘Well,’ said Natasha, and I realized I’d become so distracted that I’d forgotten I’d asked her a question. ‘I’m just going to talk to her. That’s all. Maybe I’ll throw a drink? Tell her friends and a bunch of strangers what she did. I don’t want her to die. I want her to be mortified, and she will be mortified. I want to ruin her hair.’
I looked at her closely, though it was impossible to know, really, what she was planning on doing.
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘What does she look like? Do you have a picture?’
Natasha fiddled with her phone for a bit. She passed it to me, and I saw a screenshot of a profile picture: a picture of a young blonde woman, laughing. She was beautiful, but I didn’t say that. Deanna Glancey, it said.
‘Right.’ We were all running out of time, and nothing I said would stop her anyway. Plus, I was interested to see what was going to happen. ‘OK then. Why do you think she’s sweet but stupid?’
Natasha shrugged. ‘Because of her vapid social media posts, even now.’
‘So what do we need to do before tomorrow night?’
Natasha grinned at me.
‘Cousin Libby,’ she said. ‘I knew I could count on you. We need to get ourselves all dressed up, and we need to make the party unforgettable.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘It’s the end times. So let’s do it.’