Kate Atkinson is the versatile author of at least 13 novels who has also published two substantial volumes of short stories, as well as Festive Spirits (2019), a small book consisting of three short stories set at Christmas. I mention Festive Spirits because reading it led me to suspect that the short story is not her strong point. I haven’t yet read her more recent collection, Normal Rules Don’t Apply (2023) but am unsurprised to find that the Guardian review describes its contents as “linked” short stories and Goodreads calls them “interconnected”.

The 12 stories in Not the End of the World (2002) are linked but it wasn’t until I reached the tenth of them, “Temporal Anomaly”, that I noticed the connections. In that story, Marianne, a married lawyer, mother of a young son and none-too-careful driver, is returning from a visit to her mother when her Audi is overtaken on the inside lane of the M9 by Hades’ chariot, “so close that she could smell the rank sweat on the flanks of his horses and the stench of his breath like rotten mushrooms” (pp. 271–2). A little later, Marianne is hovering above the wreckage of the Audi watching the unsuccessful attempts to revive her corpse. We’ve been at the scene of this accident before, in an earlier story, “Sheer Big Waste of Love”, with Addison Fox, a fortyish traffic policeman.

Addison had just arrived at an accident on the M9 when Clare went into premature labour. It was raining and they’d had a call on the radio to say “the VA looks as if it’s going to prove” (the “fatal” was always left off the end of this sentence — Addison sometimes wondered if it was out of a kind of delicacy). By the time they got there it was over and there was nothing to do but stand around helplessly looking at the smashed-up Audi A4 and somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother lying all broken up on the road. Addison wished his own wife wouldn’t drive so fast. (pp. 146–7)

Clare’s labour probably isn’t really premature. She’s a primary-school teacher by whom “Addison had been courted, bedded and wedded in haste” (p. 128).

Clare, Addison very soon discovered, ran her entire life at breakneck speed. By the time they were sprinting up the aisle he had begun to wonder if she didn’t have some kind of metabolic disease. “Well, neither of us are getting any younger, Addison,” she said, when she proposed to him after two months of hectic dating. (p. 128)

Addison, the policeman, almost certainly isn’t as slow on the uptake as this makes him sound. His mother, Shirley, had been a prostitute, a fact that Addison didn’t mention to Clare or anybody else, not because he was ashamed but because it was nobody’s business but Shirley’s own. He may well have thought that the paternity of the son of whom Clare had just been delivered was strictly her own business too.

Shirley gave her son (as a forename) the surname of the man she always claimed was his father, the wealthy businessman Bill Addison. Young Addison had met his supposed father just once, when he was seven. The man hit him a blow that burst his eardrum.

Not long after Clare had given birth, Addison Fox went to Bill Addison’s funeral. He wasn’t tempted to identify himself to his putative half-siblings. The youngest of these, Susan, had been five at the time of Addison’s encounter with Bill, and had seemed sympathetic to his predicament, placing a toy aeroplane on the grass beside him before being pulled away by her mother. Now, the adult Susan, who of course doesn’t recognize Addison as the injured child from years ago, tells him that her father was a bully and a drinker. “I think he abused my sister, but she won’t talk about it. He had no idea how to love” (p. 153).

“He’ll never go,” Susan said blankly. “He’ll never die. We’ll carry him around inside ourselves for ever. You can’t imagine what it was like to be his child.”

“No,” Addison agreed. “I can’t. I have to go,” he added awkwardly. (p. 153)

The sister whom Susan suspects their father of having abused is Pam, a teacher who appears in several of the stories. Pam gives no direct indication as to how she felt about her father.

And now she hardly ever saw her brothers (whom she didn’t like anyway), and her sister, Susan, was so used to being the baby of the family (she was forty now, for God’s sake) that it never crossed her mind that Pam might not be coping. But she was coping, wasn’t she? She was too much of a bloody stoic not to cope. Maybe she should try falling to pieces, see if anyone noticed. Of course, they’d just give her Prozac again and tell her she was in a period of transition. Life, life was a period of transition. (pp. 298–9)

That passage is from “Wedding Favours”, the penultimate story in the book. Pam has been urged by her school to take early retirement, and her younger child, Simon, has gone off to do Religious Studies in an undistinguished university. (It had been that or Hospitality Management at at an even less prestigious institution.) “The house already felt unlived in” (p. 301). She has been persuaded to join another retiring teacher, Maggie, in a business making and supplying “wedding favours”, little presents for the wedding guests. They go to a wedding fair where they find that their competition is rather more professional than they are.

Pam hadn’t from the start been enthusiastic about going into business with her colleague.

“We’ll have no jobs, no kids — we’ll be free as birds!” A bell rang for the next period, thank God. No job, no kids — what kind of a life was that? (pp. 304–5)

But Maggie is persistent and Pam is worn down.

“Something creative, something we’ll enjoy. We’ll be starting all over again — new lives!” Pam didn’t want a new life, she wanted the old one over again so she could do it better, so she could feed her children organic food and give them a Montessori education and do erotic things to her husband — although she couldn’t quite imagine what — after listening patiently while he talked about the finer points of Scottish conveyancing law … (p. 305)

At a couple of points, the thoughts and dialogue of the characters in this story echo the first story in the book, “Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping”. Buying fabric from which to make some of their wedding favours, Pam finds herself wondering where the word “haberdashery” comes from. In this she is following Trudi from the first story.

“We should make clothes,” Charlene said as they passed through the habeerdashery floor of the department store.

“What a wonderful word,” Trudi said.

“What a wonderful world?” Charlene said doubtfully.

“No. Word. Haberdashery.” (p. 33)

Just after this, the two women hear a calm announcement that Charlene correctly interprets as a warning that there’s a fire in the department store: “Mr Scarlet to haberdashery, please” (p. 34). The fire is real, though the women don’t at first see any evidence of it. Trudi imagines:

… she could smell the excessively combustible materials in haberdashery catching and flaming, she could feel the black smoke choking them. Perhaps they could wrap themselves in the bolts of cloth, like the poor Bangkok sweatshop girls Trudi had read about — hoping that their fall would be cushioned as they threw themselves from the building, as they threw themselves away. Trudi wondered if they would unravel as they fell, like bobbins unwinding, like Egyptian mummies unrevelling through the air. (p. 34)

The other echo in “Wedding Favours” from the first story has to do with the wedding favours themselves. Charlene, who has been pinned down by sniper fire on her way back from a wedding fair (which sounds very like the one attended by Pam and Maggie), phones Trudi.

“A bonbonnière?” Trudi said doubtfully.

“Or bomboniere if you prefer the Italian. In pink shadow crystal net with red roses.”

“Why?” (p. 37)

Compare that with this passage from “Wedding Favours”:

“And as for bombonieres,” Maggie, Pam’s friend, was saying eagerly, “there’s goodness knows how many ways you can make them up.”

“Bombonieres?”

It’s an Italian word, Pam, or bonbonnières, if you prefer the French …” (pp. 303–4)

In the first story, Trudi and Charlene are shopping for, among other things, a birthday present for Charlene’s mother: something that can be put in the post and won’t break. They are given to reciting lists of luxurious things they would like, or exotic places they’d like to go. As they shop, something strange, perhaps catastrophic, is happening in and to the city around them. “Somewhere in the distance a bomb exploded softly” (p. 34). Before the fire alarm in the department store, there were no sales assistants in evidence. The receptionist at the television station has “strawberry-blond hair, coiffed extravagantly” and, it appears, “a Heckler and Koch MP5A3 9mm submachine gun under her desk” (p. 28). Charlene sleeps with an Sig Sauer semiautomatic under her pillow (p. 31). “There was a festive atmosphere generated by communal terror” (p. 35).

One of Charlene’s lists is of strange creatures she’d like to have:

“A singing fish. A fish that sings and has a magic ring in its stomach. A huge carp that is caught in a fishpond — usually at a royal court somewhere — and cooked and served at the table and when you bite into the fish you find a magic ring. And the magic ring will lead you to the man who will love you. Or the small white mouse which is the disguise of the man who will love you.”

“That would be a rodent then.”

“Failing that,” Charlene continued, ignoring Trudi, “I would like a cat as big as a man.”

“A cat as big as a man?” Trudi frowned, trying to picture a man-sized cat.

“Yes. Imagine if men had fur.”

“I think I’d rather not.” (p. 27)

A cat who grows to be as big as a man (and who comes to behave like a man in some respects) features in the story “The Cat Lover”, where a bedraggled tom-cat inveigles his way into the apartment of Heidi — who is Trudi’s twin sister and doesn’t even particularly like cats. As Heidi feeds the cat at ruinous expense to herself, it grows first to the size of a baby tiger. Soon, Heidi has to admit that “the cat was no longer the size of a baby tiger, he was the size of a full-grown one” (p. 232). It begins to sit upright on the couch beside her, with its hind legs crossed, while eating ice-cream out of the tub.

Just as Charlene had correctly understood the calm fire warning in the department store, Heidi, herself a nurse, recognizes the controlled tone in which ultrasound technician asks a student nurse to fetch a doctor for her (p. 238).

As well as being Trudi’s twin, Heidi is the friend of Missy, who trained with her as a nurse but is now a supernanny, and the principal character in “Unseen Translation”, as well as being mentioned in passing in “Transparent Fiction”. At the end of “Unseen Translation”, Missy seems to be turning into the goddess Artemis, as she rushes to catch an unplanned flight to Rome with her eight-year-old charge, Arthur — “A lot of museums in Rome” (p. 182). She and Arthur have been hanging around Munich for a week, fruitlessly waiting for Arthur’s rock-star father (a member of the band Boak) to turn up on his apparently cancelled tour.

Heidi’s former boyfriend, Fletcher, has a more prominent role in “Transparent Fiction” than does Missy. In this story he is the very temporary boyfriend of Meredith Zane, a Californian who has recently been awarded a doctorate in pharmacology and, like her aunt Nanci before her, has apparently got stuck in London while embarking on a European tour. He is also a scriptwriter on a television soap, Green Acres, which is mentioned in several of the stories.

“Untroubled by death or history or love” (p. 71), “Meredith had gone through life borrowing other people’s personalities rather than going to the trouble of developing her own” (p. 73), at least up to the age of 25. She discovers the secret of eternal life and brazenly snatches it from the shoulders of the ancient wife of the most powerful television producer in the world, to whom Fletcher has been pitching his treatment for “a kind of historical-medical-detective thing, sort of Silent Witness meets The House of Eliott” (p. 83).

In “Evil Doppelgängers”, a character named Fielding has the job of reviewing that very show, now titled The Secret Life of Jemima Bates, and finds that he can’t watch more than ten minutes of it without falling asleep. Fielding and “Transparent Fiction”’s Fletcher are in some sense counterparts. Fletcher contributes to the writing of Green Acres, Fielding would write about it if his editor, Flavia, would let him, instead of assigning that task to the new guy, Joshua. Fletcher wrote the treatment for Jemima Bates and it was presumably his idea to start with; Fielding is supposed to review it and isn’t getting anywhere. Both men are obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But Fielding has a bigger problem than an impending deadline. People keep referring to things he supposedly did but that he can’t remember. It looks as if he has a doppelgänger, who seems to be around only when he isn’t. He eventually comes face to face with his other self (who, to his alarm and disgust, is in his bed with Flavia) after he has woken up in an alleyway, with no idea how he got there. A mangy dog sniffs around him and for a moment it seems to have three heads. A passing tramp asks him for “Coin” (p. 216) but Fielding’s pockets are empty: it seems that has been robbed. “‘No boat trip for you, sonny,’ the tramp laughed” (p. 216).

So it seems that the doppelgänger may have been there to take his place, with the original Fielding’s continued existence on this plane some kind of anomaly. When Joshua had earlier suggested to him that this kind of doubling was “the whole basis of Buffy”, Fielding had replied:

“Josh, I never thought I would ever say this but — Buffy isn’t real.” (p. 213)

If Fielding’s situation is an anomaly, it’s similar to that of Marianne, in “Temporal Anomaly”. After the scene of her accident has been cleaned up, she walks along the motorway to a Little Chef where she discovers that nobody can see or hear her. She tries to phone her husband but he can’t hear her either so she walks home. Months later, still invisble and inaudible to the living, and unable to leave her house, she reflects:

She should have hung on to that last coin, the twenty-pence piece she’d used to phone Robert from the Little Chef — what if it had been her fare for the last ferry of all? (p. 282)

Fielding and Fletcher aren’t the only male characters in these stories to be preoccupied with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After Pam’s son, Simon, has gone to university, she finds several Post-Its stuck around the house, remining her to tape the show for him.

Buffy’s friends brought her back from the dead. And she had to get a job and pay bills and take care of her younger sister because their mother was dead, but unlike Buffy she wasn’t coming back. If Pam died would Rebecca look after Simon? She couldn’t imagine it. Would they care if she died? Would they grieve for her as much as Buffy grieved for her mother? They probably would, but in their hopelessly dysfunctional way. (p. 315)

The final story, “Pleasureland”, brings us back to Charlene and Trudi. They are confined to Trudi’s flat. Charlene had been about to leave, to get home before curfew, when they heard the door being nailed shut. Passers-by told them that large red crosses, signifying plague, had been painted on all the flat doors in the building. Charlene and Trudy had an old nurse’s dictionary of Heidi’s: “They seemed to have a lot of other diseases, but not the plague” (p. 327). They have run out of food and have no heat; water and electricity have been cut off; they collect dirty rainwater in a Sèvres bowl that Charlene had stolen (as a gift for Trudi) from an unguarded museum. The radio no longer works: “There was no music any more” (p. 325).

They’ve played all the games they have or know, innumerable times. Trudi wants Charlene to tell her a story.

“I could tell you the story of the seven sisters who became the Pleiades.”

“I think we’ve had that one.”

“‘Marianne was thinking about lemons when she died’?”

“We’ve definitely had that one.” (p. 331)

So have we: that’s the first sentence of “Temporal Anomaly”. And Nanci Zane, Meredith’s aunt, whose story is told in “The Bodies Vest”, is Charlene’s version of the youngest of the seven sisters. Having met in Crete the rather dull Englishman (a lecturer on metaphysical poetry, hence the Marvellian title to the story) whom she’ll marry, Nanci decides that (unlike Missy) she doesn’t want to go to Rome after all.

So it looks as if the stories we have been reading were improvised by Charlene, mixing her memories of Greek myth, popular television, her own history and observations and whatever else came to mind. When she suggests the story of Circe, “who turned men into animals” (p. 331), Trudi thinks she may not have heard that one before.

So Charlene told Trudi the story of the great witch Circe, and the story lasted all night long so that on the morning of the thousand and first day they were still awake when Helios left his magnificent eastern palace, with its columns of gold and bronze and its gables of ivory, and mounted his golden chariot and rose into the sky, the fiery manes of his horses flaming in the dark. (p. 331)

Charlene, then, is a type of Scheherezade, telling story after story, not (in her case) to stave off death but to make her and Trudi’s condition more bearable as they wait for death. I can’t say whether each of these stories would stand alone as a separate short story: by the time I noticed the links between them, I had forgotten how they seemed to me at first. It does seem to me that the connections between these stories are unusually close and intricate, so that this book does strike me as something quite apart from most collections of short stories, linked or othersise. I expect to have more to say about linked story collections in a future post.

Edition: Black Swan paperback, 2003.