The End Of The Millennium

The End of The Millennium

Love brought me that far by the hand, without
The slightest doubt or irony, dry-eyed
And knowledgeable, contrary as be damned;
Then just kept standing there, not letting go.
from 'The Walk' by Seamus Heaney

The streets and fields, where people lived and worked, did not change
overnight. Snow fell from the moon, a bitter icing to January's bleak
cake of cold earth. Silly little cars wriggle up the hill and down
again. I pull the door to, and slide on each step of ice.

We didn't know. How could we? We had only just met. You remember the
street celebrations. Every open space in the country thronged with
people expecting the world to change in some mysterious and magical
way. Not just the end of a century and the start of another, still less
a decade or a year, but a millennium. A millennium, an inconceivable
stretch of time, a ball of string longer and more tangled than all of
us joined together shouting and singing our hearts out. No. This was a
demand, an order, not the usual exhortation. It had to happen. There
had to be an about-turn in the event horizon. In short, a cataclysmic
new order. You will enjoy The New Millennium. Tomorrow is not just
another day.

Is this your glove? I felt the space in my pocket; it must've dropped
out. They were her first words to me. It became a fish in her fingers,
sleek, lithe, shining with life, as if the air we breathed had turned
to deep blue water. I threw it high up into the depths of the night,
lost, free forever. Don't worry, I replied, quick fingered wizardry to
her puzzled, nearly hurt stare of disbelief - Why, here's another!
Which she threw back into the sea too. We laughed and shrieked
alongside everyone else at the last few drops of an old way of life.
But when the very last fell to the ocean floor we made no sound at all.
Just kissed, our silly little lips snogging in front of time's nose. My
hands were cold then too. She told me later that the glove never did
drop out of my pocket. She took it from me to give it back.

We were the last. She realised long before me. Our parents weren't
interested, let alone concerned. Their children's future became less
important to them than last night's repeats on television. The vicar
shrugged her shoulders; the Crown &; Sceptre hardly listened. Both
remarked they were busier than last year, rushed off their feet,
business picking up with the new millennium. But no one appeared
bothered one way or the other. It meant nothing to them. Let's cancel,
she said. The dress-hire assistant continued to take my inside leg
measurement. Why, I asked, don't you love me? Of course I do, but love
seems to have gone out of fashion.

It hadn't. It was dying. At first we believed it was how people not in
love react to those who are. Love-besotted lovers soon become foreign
tourists in their own land, caring only for each other in their own
language; a sweetly selfish dislocation from the ordinariness of
existance. Meanwhile the rest of the country gets on with the rest of
their life, somehow put out by a fraction of envy over boredom.

It wasn't that: it went on for far too long. We were wrong. No one
bothered to look or look away when we necked in the street. Her parents
continued to change tv channels while we told them their daughter was
pregnant. You're having a baby? Flick. The Wedding Show. Flick.
Couples. Flick. Married To Love. Flick. We dashed outside and argued.
This was no Millennium Bug, confined to computers and cured with a few
dozen keystrokes. This was real. They're my parents, she cried, and
this is our child, forcing my hand nearly into her stomach. We must not
become like them. Never. We felt trapped. The sun watched. From inside
we heard another Flick. Secret Wish. Flick. The baby kicked.

When Adam was born you couldn't move for wedding stationery in
newsagents. With Beth, dating agencies dominated the FT100. The divorce
rate had halved by our tenth anniversary. The BMA reiterated a
remarkable and sustained drop in diagnoses of depression, which matched
an equivalent fall in Home Office crime figures, which all helped the
government to win the next election. Our own children were no trouble.
Well-behaved, unremarkable in every way, except they never ran to the
door, or cried because we were too busy or too tired to give them
everything they wanted. It unnerved us because it failed to worry them
in the slightest. Odd traits are said to skip a generation. They grew
up to be like the grandparents they scarcely ever saw. They never knew
what they were missing.

It became news. Of course Love hadn't died, they said. Far from it, it
thrived and flourished more than ever. A New Way Of Life, proclaimed
the experts on Promise TV. The evidence lay before our eyes. True, no
one grew angry or jealous, or shouted or wailed. No one loved or hated
themselves. Keyhole surgery into the heart had removed the need.
Replaced awkward emotions which led to conflict. Numbed all feeling
into artefact. No longer news, it became accepted.

Everyone said love was like toothpaste. Squeeze gently and out it
comes. They believed it. Fruit, succulent looking, stopped tasting in
the throat of fruit. Apples, silicon-waxed perfection, became the
strangest taste of them all. Simply plastic - how did love die? I'm
sorry, I cannot tell you. It just did. All I know is that early each
summer between apple blossoms a brief fluttering species of butterfly
had lost its colour in the name of the species. They say love does not
need a reason. There was no reason for it to live, and it died. That is
all.

I became ill first.

Don't worry, a number of people at your age say they feel the same, the
doctor told the computer screen. You're not susceptible to stomach
upsets or heartburn, are you? These pills will calm you down.

I don't want to calm down, I told my love. Listen: whatever that doctor
says, there's nothing wrong with me - except I've no idea what's wrong
with the rest of the world. It's as though, it's as though love is dead
out there, no longer whole, no longer alive, no longer part of
creation. She stared at me without a smile. You've felt it too, I said,
I know you have, long before me, almost as we met. You've felt its
imprint in a fern leaf, its shell in a pebble while we've walked along
a beach. A fossil. The fossil skeleton of a microscopic organism
previously considered extinct for millions and millions of years until
we drift into the bell of a flower and die.

Then it is gone, she whispered. There is nothing we can do. Accept it's
gone, finished forever. She was right. In the silence we both knew it.
I'm glad I didn't have to tell you, she eventually said to me. Don't
cry, I said to her. Please don't cry, I can't bear it. It would be far
worse if I didn't cry, she replied.

We became the last of a species. The clearer it came to us that love
was dead and buried outside the bell of our flower, the more the radio,
television, magazines and the internet declared it stronger than ever.
They screened the National Lottery Numbers on Blind Date. Romance
replaced Arithmetic as the third R in the National Curriculum. The Ford
Eros became the nation's favourite car.

We watched it happen and grew old. We understood a process we were
powerless to alter. The millenium was a marker. Looking back we saw it
begin long before the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of a
minor Jewish prophet. Before we met, before we were born. No quick
death, its truth lost its colour in the same way that charity had
disappeared. No longer a virtue: a quality ascribed to giving of
oneself, just a certain sort of business with certain sorts of
tax-breaks. This is what love, something we all once knew and needed,
had become. A business. Something you could no longer simply give, or
take - a hand, a glove; the bell of a flower, a magical fish.

The Stock Exchange gave it a gilt edge. The Government will send
everyone Valentines soon. Don't joke, I told my wife. I wasn't, she
replied, if they do, it'll help them win the next election. Love.com It
helped them win the next election. By the time we could expect to
become grandparents, our children bought Lottery Tickets to see if they
had won the chance to have a baby. Europarliament determined the
economic population ideal and people paid good money to fulfil it. Most
couples had at least one child, some many more, and if you stopped
wanting kids, you stopped buying lottery tickets. The Pope supported
it. He had to, the Vatican had won the franchise to run the Lottery. It
reminded us of the delicatessen counter at our supermarket, you pulled
a number from a roll of tickets to earn a place in the queque of
things. Adam and Beth had stopped seeing us. You couldn't buy tickets
to see your parents. You couldn't sell them either. By then we did not
know whether we had grandchildren or not. We did not want to know. Calm
down, said my wife, they might not want to know whether they have
grandparents. Don't joke, I told my love, don't cry.

When she died she held my hand to her stomach with all the truth she
had when first with child. They did not come to her funeral. It would
be too sad, they said. Were our paths to cross again I believe I would
kill them. Last week I told them to go away, and never come back. Not
my real children. No. These are "Stattkinder," the unemployable
mistakes in Europarliament's economic population ideal. I do not blame
them. They have become the official children of those too old to look
after themselves. Carers, gentle squeezers of toothpaste.

They will be back. It is against the law not to love and refuse to see
your Stattkinder, the children your country has given you. She died
five years ago. I made sure I bought enough black-edged lottery tickets
to have the opportunity to bury her in a decent grave. Get out, I shout
at my children, get out. Leave me to die in peace, or at least on my
own.

It is hard to describe those last years. Strangely enough, animals did
not seem affected. We promised each other that after one of us had died
we would get a cat, a small dog, a budgerigar even, whatever we could
afford. Pets are perceived as a social menace, tolerated only because
it is uneconomic to stamp them out. The Stattkinder say I have mice.
While she lived, with each grey infirmity we watched in fear for signs.
Not of falling out of love, which, after the great distance our pair of
gloves had magicked, would be as simple and justifiable as falling in
love. No, of losing the capacity and desire to love, a terrible loss,
to judge by those who surrounded us. Blazing rows meant survival.
Meant, for better or for worse, we still had each other. A look of
indifference, the fossilisation of neutrality, meant the end. She lost
her breath walking up the hill, dropped the shopping, which rolled down
back towards the shops. I'm dying, she said. Don't joke, I told my
wife, and don't die.

I've escaped. Slid on the ice and run away before they came back. Of
course I'm too old to run at all, never mind far. But never mind, in my
mind I'm running, which is all that counts. Headlights wriggle their
way under snow from the moon. They dare not stop, not in this weather
when no one else is out and about on foot. Or almost no one.

When I die she will lose her place in the cemetery. Snow, crisply
untouched, has drifted over all but the tallest of headstones. It
suddenly seems a living place. A pattern of shallow dips in the snow
leads to her grave. Someone has come before, between falls of snow.
Someone mysterious. Who? Slow and crooked legged I give chase to their
footsteps. A shiny fish swims in these waves of dark whiteness. Her
footsteps lead away from the grave. I hold her hand in the glove, the
glove disappears and I understand.
The End of The Millennium David Fine 4 Pickford Villas Monyash Road
Bakewell DE45 1FG 3