The End of the World (5 page)

FutureGirl®

I didn’t know when I was twelve, but by fifteen I had started to guess. By seventeen, everyone had realised. When I turned twenty-one there were few people in the world who had not seen me stretched out in my most famous pose, lazing like a lion on a couch. I wore a skin bikini and two men fawned over me. My arms outstretched, my legs draped over the end of the couch. One man’s hands massaged my feet, my great long feet with bony toes almost the size of his fingers. My red painted toenails peeked out between his hands. The other man cradled my massive head in his arms. Locks of brown hair twined around his biceps and snaked all the way around his chest.

The producers called me ‘the tallest girl in the
world’. I have a large photographic print taken from the stills of the television program with that title. I remember the shoot. Outside the rain had begun and inside the hot, sharply lit studio we laughed and shouted as we listened to the drumming on the roof. It was the first rain in over a year. But the rain kept falling and falling until the streets were slick with a coating of faint luminescent mould. And now we have rain every day, a fine drizzle that drifts across the world, never stopping, never favouring one place over another.

The background of my studio photo shows no rain. A herd of digitally reproduced elephants thunders in a cloud of dust across an African landscape. The sun is orange, a great ball of orange fire hung so low in the sky I seem, with my head tipped back and my lips parted, as if I am about to swallow it like an egg yolk. If you look closely there are huts in the background, small thatched huts clustered in a valley below my left shoulder. I can picture the African women inside there, bending their long necks to pass through the low doorways, crouching in the semi-darkness over cooking fires and crawling on their hands and knees between the sleeping mat and the hearth. Because Africa too had its own giant girls, although few people knew.

My face and body were splashed across the billboards of the world–videoscreens in Tokyo, hoardings in Indonesia, pocket televisions in France. I earnt money for making appearances. When I walked into the venue, heads turned and the nudging and
whispering began. The loud whispers said ‘oh my god’ and ‘she’s magnificent’. The undercurrent hissed ‘freak’ and ‘hideous’ and ‘I think I’m going to be sick’. I lifted my head and stared in the direction of the mutterers. Slowly the hissing would cease.

There were placards sometimes. I remember one that said ‘Biology is Destiny’. And another, ‘Aberration’. Did they think I didn’t know these things? FutureGirl® clubs turned up at some locations and cheered. They were made up of sci-fi fans, and Big People who were actually fat, and crazies who sent letters asking me to pass on messages to God. Perhaps they thought my size made me someone who could sit next to a deity.

At twenty-five I had everything. Fame, money. I was laughing and soaking up the rays of attention and swigging back the French bubbly at each toast to the FutureGirl. At night my joints ached and I felt the motel beds, pushed together to fit my length and weight, creak under me as I turned over to ease the pain. I thought I was tired from all my work of racing around to shopping malls and fashion shows and film premieres. I thought the swelling in my knees and ankles came from drinking too much champagne. I thought my manager Roy loved me and that when he fucked me and screamed as he came, froth bubbling at the corners of his mouth and his tiny body bucking on top of me, he wanted to tell me how much he cared.

‘Fucking baby,’ he would shriek. ‘Fucking FutureGirlbaby.’

I thought I heard ‘I love you’ somewhere in there. I lay under him, my giant body barely registering the thrusts of his little penis, and I reached up and stroked his hair.

‘I love you too, Roy,’ I would say.

People were afraid to speak to me. They whispered, or spoke with their eyes focused on a point somewhere behind me. Only my mother kept up her usual form of communication. She wrote me emails wherever I was on the globe. Often I had little idea myself.

‘Where are we, Roy?’ I would ask, and he would answer, ‘Antigonish’ or ‘Nashua’ without looking up and I would turn my eyes back to the television or the video channel and think, Well what does it matter anyway.

We ate room service food wherever we went. We hurried through the rain from venue to transport to motel. People looked different sometimes–the roundness of the faces, the worn brown skin, the slant of the eyes–and they spoke different languages that I heard as strange guttural murmurs, but Roy always announced me in English, and everyone addressed me as FutureGirl, so I wasn’t bothered about trying to speak other tongues. My mother’s emails gave me clues. ‘Darling, I saw you were on the television in France,’ she might say. ‘The French are usually so aloof–it was good to see them make you welcome.’

I tried to write back to her. My keyboard skills were weak. My fingers were too big and clumsy for the keys, and hunching over the keyboard and peering at the screen gave me headaches. Each day was becoming more and more tiring.

I wanted my mother. I got Roy to try her mobile number, but she was always busy. I imagined her on the net, surfing the planet as a flashing electronic pulse while I lumbered around the physical world, dragging my hulking great body on and off planes and limousines. It was hard to believe that my mother and I were made from the same material. She was a digital signal. I felt like something more dense than flesh, atoms compressed into anti-matter, heavier than the universe could support.

I asked Roy if I could see a doctor. He laughed and threw up his hands.

‘Who do you think you see every six months, FutureGirl?’ he said. ‘A vet?’

At the next checkup I asked my doctor what was wrong with me.

‘I feel like I’m shrinking or something,’ I said. ‘My body’s starting to tense up. My hands are turning into claws. I can feel the muscles of my face contract at night.’

The doctor reached up and put her hand on my shoulder.

‘Sit down,’ she said. I leaned my buttocks against the surgical table.

‘Your body is shutting down,’ she said quietly.

I frowned as I stared down at her. Her face started to flush and she picked up her skinny rubber gloves and folded them over and over tightly until they were wadded into a powdery rubber ball the size of her thumb.

‘We knew it would happen one day. Not all of your organs have grown enough to support your body. Everything is working too hard.’

She had never spoken to me like this before. Usually she did her tests in near silence and sent the results to Roy, who would fold up the sheet of paper and tell me I was fine.

‘Didn’t anyone warn you?’ she said with an odd catch in her voice. ‘Your mother? Roy?’

I emailed my mother. ‘Where are you? I have to talk to you.’ I had no idea where she lived anymore. At seventeen I left the flat in Dandenong where I had grown up. Roy arrived at our front door one day with a contract and a promise of cheques every month and my mother hugged me and ran a few steps after the car, waving and smiling as Roy and I powered away in a Merc. I hadn’t seen her since.

There were only emails. ‘I never dreamed you’d make it as far as Russia. What wonderful clothes they designed for you there, all that brocade. I watched the half-hour special on Russian fashion and saw your appearance. Green always suited you. Love, Mum.’

‘Roy, why did you call me FutureGirl?’ I asked.

Roy’s little moustache quivered. I couldn’t tell whether it was preparing for a laugh or a sneer. I never could tell with Roy. He took off his suit jacket and turned to hang it in the wardrobe.

‘Roy?’

I had heard people talking about me. HormoneGirl they called me, or SteroidGirl–as if anyone would do this to themselves. Once I heard Roy call me MutantGirl when he thought I was on stage. For a long time I denied what I had heard. Roy had become my lover and my mother and my father and my manager all rolled into one. I depended on him for food, for a place to sleep, for money, for reminders to brush my hair. I had forgotten how to perform all kinds of human activities that most people did automatically. Even chewing. Roy had started to give me food that didn’t need chewing.

‘It’s nice,’ I said, ‘but what is it?’

‘Space food,’ he said, grinning. His newly whitened teeth were too bright, as if there was a light behind them. ‘For the FutureGirl.’

‘So I’m going into space? Like what, in a pod or something? The space shuttle?’

‘Not quite.’

‘I hope I get to try anti-gravity.’ I could imagine the freedom, released from the weight of bones and muscles and nails and hair, the hard work of owning this body that encased my small flame of spirit and anchored it to the ground.

‘It’s special food, OK? All the nutrients and medicine you need in a tube, the way the astronauts used to eat. The doctors prescribed it for you,’ he said.

I hadn’t pressed him about what medicine was in the space food. I’d got used to accepting the things he said without question.

Now I asked him again. ‘Roy, why am I the FutureGirl?’

He shrugged. I watched the balding spot on his crown twitch as his shoulders went up and down.

‘Do you want to see some pictures?’ he asked.

The first was a snapshot of black girls standing in front of a plain brown wall. In the second photograph I saw the same three girls sitting on a row of chairs in a grubby grey room. Inside the room, dwarfing the furniture, they were obviously giants like me. Two of them wore scarfs over their heads. They were dressed in colourful clothes, layers piled on top of layers, skirts and blouses and socks and shawls and jumpers. Bare brown shins, shiny skin, arms tight across their chests. They all looked directly at the camera. No one was smiling.

‘It’s a hospital waiting room in Jo’burg,’ Roy said. ‘They’re waiting for their shots.’

‘Shots?’ I said.

‘The African doctors tried everything to slow their growth but the drugs made them ill. Nine girls like you were born in one year. Africa, New Zealand, India, and Australia–you. Only you survived past sixteen.’

I felt dizzy and heavy, sucked down by the intense gravity that had started to pull me into the floor.

‘No one knows why it happened. They thought it might be the beginning of a new race. A new future.’

‘I’m tired, Roy,’ I said. ‘I’m very tired.’

‘I know, baby,’ he said. He pulled me to him and cradled my head. We were sitting on the edge of the bed. I had to hunch my body over for my head to reach down to his chest. ‘I’ll get you some food, then you can rest for while. We have to go to Prague tomorrow.’

‘I don’t want to go, Roy,’ I said. But he shook his head.

‘Gotta go, FutureGirl. We’ve got a job to do.’

I should have pressed him further. I know I should have struggled. But struggle was beyond me. I waited for him to tell me there was a cure, to rush me to hospital, to release a statement to the press about my miracle recovery. I had forgotten how to take action. Roy would do his job and I would do mine.

‘Only a few more stops,’ he said.

I needed to speak to my mother. She had answered my email with another commentary on the way I was dressed in the last television program she saw. ‘Do you think the turban was a good idea?’ she wrote. ‘It did make your head look rather large.’

‘I want to see her in person,’ I told Roy.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he said. ‘She sold you, for Christ’s sake.’

I insisted, for the first time ever. Roy and I both sent emails. Roy told her he would provide plane fares, accommodation, meals. He told her we couldn’t interrupt our schedule to go to her. My mother replied with a polite note thanking us. ‘I’m not a young woman and I never did like to travel. Perhaps Helen could ring me on my mobile?’

It was so long since anyone had called me Helen that I began to cry. Roy dialled the number for me and plugged the earpiece into my ear. The phone rang and rang. Finally an electronic voice came on and invited me to leave a message. I couldn’t speak. Roy took the mouthpiece from my hand, where it had disappeared inside my clenched fist, and left our number and a message for my mother to call.

For the first time in years I began to notice how objects seemed so small against me. Roy’s hand would fit neatly inside my palm. When I sat on a normal chair, the backrest only reached my waist and my buttocks hung uncomfortably over the edges of the seat. I was so used to bending to step through doorways that I was in a permanent stoop, except when Roy called out to me to straighten up for the cameras. But it was becoming harder to straighten up. My spine was curving over. I could feel the cracking and straining as I tried to lift my head and smile at the crowds.

I asked Roy to buy a new mobile phone. ‘I think this one’s broken,’ I told him. I opened my fist, where I had been clutching the phone in my sleep, waiting for it to ring. The casing was cracked. The exterior gleamed with my sweat. Roy crinkled up his face and rubbed his eyes, like he was as tired as me.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to get one tomorrow.’

She sent another email.

‘Don’t think too harshly of me, darling. I’m an old woman. My joints ache, and it’s hard for me to get out. That’s why I live in these hotels, so that I always have room service.’

Roy was making me lie in a warm spa for two hours a day now. We had booked into a health resort and I lay in the spa pool alone each morning. The glass walls enclosing the spa room were greasy from the constant rain. Roy sat on a chaise longue at the side of the pool and read to me from the newspaper. He thought the water might relax my muscles, but it only sapped me of liquid and left me cramped and wrinkled. I told him I didn’t want to do it anymore and he started to sob.