Read Online The End of the World by Paddy O'Reilly - Free Book Online

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