End of Story

by Louise Swanson

Genres: Dystopian; Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Too much imagination can be a dangerous thing


It's the year 2035 and fiction has been banned by the government for five years. Writing novels is a crime. Reading fairytales to children is punishable by law.

Fern Dostoy is a criminal. Officially, she has retrained in a new job outside of the arts but she still scrawls in a secret notepad in an effort to capture what her life has become: her work on a banned phone line, reading bedtime stories to sleep-starved children; Hunter, the young boy who calls her and has captured her heart; and the dreaded visits from government officials.

But as Fern begins to learn more about Hunter, doubts begin to surface. What are they both hiding? And who can be trusted?

(P) 2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: March 23, 2023

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

Thursday 1 November 2035 – 8.24 p.m.

If you tell a story well enough, it’s true.

This sentence came to me every time I started a novel. I typed it beneath whatever the working title was in that moment. An italicised reminder when I opened the document late at night to resume, coffee steaming on the desk nearby, and a single cigarette waiting as reward for hitting my word goal: very Paul Sheldon. These nine words chided me while I ruthlessly edited every first draft – pruning flowery words, tightening passive verbs, moulding metaphors, letting my voice rise. These nine words forced me to address plot holes, character motivation, the denouement. Only when I finally submitted the manuscript to my publisher did I delete them.

If you tell a story well enough, it’s true.

But I haven’t written a story for a long time.

No one has – or at least if they have, they haven’t shared it with the world. The celebrated career I enjoyed for a brief but bright three years is over. The three books – two bestselling – that garnered pages of reviews, won the British Fiction Prize, took me to all the big festivals, are over. My role as the first ever ­British Fiction Laureate is over. The novel is over. If I wrote one now and shared the fact on social media, I’d be trolled, reported and banned. If I wrote one now and tried to publish it, I fear for the consequences. My books, along with many others, have been burned in mass bonfires across the land, the flames licking and swallowing our precious words.

I dreamt about those flames last night.

And I woke this morning compelled to write, sentences bursting out of me, despite my fears, despite the fires, despite it all. I’ve ­realised that I cannot live in denial of the written word any more.

So, I’m writing. I am a writer. My laptop isn’t safe though. They could be watching me. A physical pen it is. Yellowing pages in a physical notepad I’ve had for years, four daffodils on the front. Neat handwriting on the lines provided. At my desk. Coffee but no cigarette. Lamp on low next to me. Door locked. Curtains shut. Just me. Darkness devouring the outside world with both hands.

I will write.

If my words are discovered by the wrong people, I could incriminate anyone I speak of. I could lose everything I have; not that it’s much. But they can’t accuse me of writing fantasy. Because this is not a novel. No denial: I’m going to tell you how we got here, to this world without fiction. No denial: I’ll tell you about my life, dull as it now is, lonely as it now is, painful as it now is.

No denial: I will speak.

I need to or I think I’ll go insane.

Friday 2 November 2035 – 7.23 a.m.

It’s the middle of another November heatwave. The pavement is melting. At midnight, it was as soft as playground rubber beneath my feet when I carried an empty milk carton to the end of the garden, held my nose, and dropped it in the recycle bin. I hate the smell of milk that isn’t cold. Buttery and rich, like pungent glue, it puts me in mind of when poorer children got a free bottle at school breaktime. My mother once told me the crates stood in the corner of the classroom for hours, until the cream curdled.

When I finished writing here at my desk last night and was finally falling asleep, the fridge made a sound like an industrial nail gun. I almost fell out of bed. Thinking someone had broken in, and terrified they knew I’d been writing, I grabbed the lamp and crept into the kitchen.

No one there. The fridge was silent. It must have been failing for a while because my lettuce has been browning faster than usual, and my Coke hasn’t been chilled for weeks now. Laura next door keeps telling me to get a SuperFridge, but I wouldn’t trust it. I like my old one. I don’t have any sort of voice assistant either. I can’t undo – or whatever the proper word is – my Internet because since 2030 every building has it. But I haven’t opened my laptop for months. I only turn my smartphone on once a week to order groceries. I wonder if I’m the only person who stays offline.

The last time they came I got questioned, and they asked why I avoid it.

I didn’t answer. I don’t have to.

Now it’s dawn. I’m drinking strong tea at my desk, electric fan blasting cool air onto my face, recording the death of the fridge in this notepad. This feels like where I should write. Of course, facing a bare wall and no view and no books, it’s a far cry from my old desk, that large oak thing that saw the creation of so many words. There, I was surrounded by physical books. It was a house of stories. They crowded onto every available shelf, line upon line upon line, crushing those beneath, merging endings with beginnings, fighting for a place in my heart.

I had a place in hearts too then.

I’ll have to get a new fridge. Go to a store. See if my Finance Score will let me spread the cost. A cleaning job doesn’t cover much. I work five mornings a week at the Royal Hospital, scrubbing conference rooms and corridors. They don’t know who I am. Since minimum wage hit an all-time high last year, many small companies went bust. Now some pay you a lesser salary if you’re prepared to take half in cash. It suits me. I was able to give a false name. I do a good job, keep quiet. But it means my Finance Score is low because it only considers the small part of my salary that goes into the bank, and my dwindling savings, which is what’s left of my Starting Out Sum. That was the grant given to me to help until I got a job; it was given to all fiction authors, editors, anyone who lost their jobs as a result of the ban.

I’m supposed to be at the hospital for my shift in an hour. I bike. I can’t afford a car. Not even an old diesel thing. Those AV autonomous ones can’t be trusted, and since 2030 they are all you can buy new. Self-driving cars form about eighty per cent of those on the road now. At least there are bike lanes on every street, though not all AVs recognise this and injure hundreds of cyclists a year. Are humans better behind the wheel, with their tics and emotions? I don’t know. Does a driverless vehicle remove all human responsibility if an accident killed a child?

When I wrote fiction – long, long ago it feels – I had a routine. I’d wake late, as my life permitted then, start the coffee machine going, respond to emails, drink more coffee, and then write. I’d take a break for lunch and return to the page afterwards, an unfinished sentence awaiting me, so I had no choice but to complete it. That was one of my tricks. Never finish that last sentence. Let its mystery be the thing t—

Oh, there’s someone at the door.

My heart. Shit. I’m still on edge from the fridge scaring me last night.

Wait, I’ll—

Friday 2 November 2035 – 9.18 a.m.

I’m back.

I thought it might be them, the tall one and the short one. They don’t come often now, but I dread an appearance. Instead, it was a young man waiting on my doorstep. A mock-vintage van was parked in the street behind him, the kind that’s popular with the return of ‘old-fashioned’ specialist services. Fine-Fayre was engraved on the side in gold lettering, above a picture of a 1990s family drinking tea and eating biscuits. Laura next door orders from them. She said having friendly folks delivering treats, instead of soulless couriers who don’t look you in the eye, is her week’s highlight. I recognised the young man. I’ve seen him wheel up to her door a few times.

‘Good morning,’ he said from beneath me. ‘Have you ever considered buying teabags from somewhere other than a supermarket?’

‘It’s barely eight-thirty,’ I said.

‘Would you enjoy having tea delivered directly to your door?’

He was in a wheelchair. The scar on his right cheek must have been semi-corrected by some sort of too-late surgery. As I stared at his face, I noticed that the joined expanse between his eyebrow and jaw resembled shoelaces when you first try to tie them as a child, where one part of the shoe’s leather is pulled tighter than the rest. Politeness sent my gaze to his thick brown jacket with a gold trim and the words Fine-Fayre stitched into the pocket. My eyes travelled down to neat brass buttons, the same gold trim above the cuffs, and finally to his shiny products laid out in a wicker basket in his lap, where the criss-crosses of weave mirrored his facial injury.

‘Our tea is competitively priced,’ he continued.

‘Did Laura send you?’ I looked towards her house. She’s been checking up on me more recently. It unnerves me. It’s so hard to trust anyone.

He didn’t reply, simply studying me.

‘She feels sorry for me. I hope that’s not why you’re here.’

More studying, no words.

I wanted to ask if he was deaf as well as unable to walk but I’m not cruel. Yet there was something about him that triggered me. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the off milk. The dead fridge. The idea that he pitied me, that I wasn’t sure why he was here.

‘We offer a full-money-back-guarantee if our products aren’t perfectly to your liking,’ he said. I couldn’t place his accent. He spoke carefully as though no one had ever listened to him before. ‘Our biscuits were described by Love Baking magazine as an utter delight.’

‘Do I look like I give a fuck about biscuits?’ I surprised myself; I don’t often say fuck these days, and here it is within a few pages. I do realise that I’m not coming across well. But this isn’t a novel. I’m not perfect. I’m not in denial about this. I had to admire the tea man for not flinching at fuck.

I realised I was irritated at me, not him.

Irritated that I was afraid, always afraid, when people came to my door.

Why was he so insistent? Why me?

Could I trust him? It would be nice to have someone to trust.

‘Might I ask how you drink your tea?’ he said.

‘Hot and strong – hate weak crap.’ I gave him that.

‘Tea that lasts then.’ He paused. ‘And how many bags would you say you consume in the average week?’

‘Who adds up teabags?’

He glossed over my remark. ‘I think we have the perfect teabag for you. Strong tea lovers rave about these. This blend reheats in the microwave and still tastes as fresh as when it was first made. It’s not like no-label tea that reheats and quenches your thirst in a lazy way.’

‘You should be a writer.’ This came out before I could think. ‘Look, I can’t buy your tea. I’ve no money.’

He studied me again. I thought for a moment that he recognised me. I prepared for it to show on his face; to stretch that scar taut. But his features remained even. Hot air simmered above the road. November. Not even nine a.m. And already it was twenty-five degrees.

The tea man took a small gold packet from his basket. ‘How about I leave a sample and give you time to think?’ he said.

‘I don’t need time to think,’ I said.

I closed the door and leaned against it, breath held, and waited until I heard van doors slamming and the buzz of his wheelchair ascending to the driver’s position. After a minute or two I went onto the step to check he had gone. Electric vans are so quiet that I can never tell. They creep up on you like tragedy. The street was deserted. I wondered if I’d imagined him; made him up like I used to make things up.

As I turned to go back inside, I saw it. A flash of gold on the wall separating me from Laura. A piece of sunshine. He had left me a sample. He was real. The gift touched me, but I buried the emotion. I couldn’t risk it.

Why had he knocked? Does he feel sorry for me, living alone? The nerve; him pitying me.

I carried the gold packet to the kitchen – ignoring my useless fridge – and put it next to the kettle. I must go to work now. I can’t decide if it’s safer to take my notepad with me or to slot it back in the incision I made in my mattress. I don’t like the idea of it not being in proximity at any time. I’ll take it with me. I’ll finish later.

Putting pen to paper and recording my life, I feel human again. When I write, I’m the purest form of me. How different can this be to creating fiction? It still has to make sense. I’ll hide leitmotifs in the prose. I’ll play with the words.

Now, to work.

I’m back. No time has passed. Not enough to count.

I was about to leave the house. That’s when I saw it. On the hallway windowsill. A single boy’s blue and white trainer. One for a left foot. Not branded. Not expensive. Scuffed enough to have been worn lots. Around the size that would fit an eight-year-old – at least I imagine so. I reached for it, imagining my hand going right through it, like a hologram. But it was real. How did it get there? Who put it there? The tea man? Laura? Is it a cruel joke?

But they don’t know my pain.

How could they?

Is the tiny fleck of blood on the sole real or di—

Saturday 3 November 2035 – 12.07 a.m.

I’m at my desk again.

My hand aches from writing. It’s a new experience for my fingers. Something I’ve not done for years. Midnight means nothing. The heat does not lessen with the late hour. Aside from this poor, overworked fan that stops me melting like the Wicked Witch of the East, the house is silent, the fridge especially. I binned the rest of its tepid contents earlier, gagging at the rubbery cheese. I didn’t get chance to buy a new one today. I got distracted.

I’ll tell you about it.

And then I’ll tell you more about the books; the fiction ban.

I biked to work, my shirt dampening beneath my rucksack, the air on my face a blast from an open oven. Above, the winter sky was as blue as the stripe on the small trainer in my hallway. I almost hit the kerb. I had forgotten. Briefly. I cradled the shoe in my palm before I left the house, and then put it in the kitchen near the dead fridge. Why just one? Where’s the other one? Who put it on my windowsill? My heavy heart and barren womb had me realising I maybe knew why – I just didn’t know who. It’s a cruel mockery of my childlessness; of the son I’ve longed for and never had; of the tests that found no physical flaw.

But who knows about that?

There is no pain like wanting a child. The clock ticks. Then the clock dies. I’m fifty-two. Out of time. Even with the extension of NHS-funded IVF, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommend that it can only be offered free up to the age of fifty. I could pay for it. They don’t care if you’re single. But I don’t have that kind of money. And I’m resigned to it now. It is my lot.

At the traffic lights, a beautifully made-up woman studied my tear-stained face with pity from her air-conditioned car. She stopped speaking animatedly on a phone, something that’s no longer a crime because of AVs, and frowned as if to ask, ‘Are you OK?’

I wasn’t. I was thinking about the leg that might wear the blue and white trainer, the boy owner of that leg who might run in those shoes, chase a ball, chase a girl, a boy, chase the wind. The woman’s car was blue too.

I got to work, brow damp, heart still heavy. The other cleaners are pleasant, but I keep myself to myself. I began my duties, taking my cleaning trolley in the lift to the top floor. It’s not lost on me that my third book – the one that changed my life – was set in a hospital. Did I set out to end up here? No. I just saw the ad and applied.

The NHS is the best it’s been in years. At least that’s what the politicians and their news channels tell us. Advances in technology – and lessons learned after Covid-19 – have apparently improved its efficiency. For five years health has been monitored digitally by the NHS App. Skin implants are currently being trialled, but many hate the idea of something so invasive. I do. I don’t have the app either. I never will.

While cleaning Conference Room 3a, I faced my nemesis again.

On the long white table – next to a twisted Coke can pierced for some reason with a pair of eyebrow tweezers – was a glass of milk. Half full of room temperature evil; buttery liquid glistening with putrid moisture. According to my shift report, the last meeting in here finished yesterday at three, so it wasn’t likely to be fresh. I put the crumpled Coke can into the bin bag tied to my cleaning trolley. Then I polished the table, ignoring the milk. When I could make out my flushed reflection in the veneer, I finally held my nose and reached for the glass.

The door opened at that point with a life-disturbing squeak. Two men and a woman filed into the room. I recognised Mr ­Patrukal (a squat surgeon with thinning red hair) and Mr Shrivel (a flirtatious orthopaedic surgeon who often makes appraising reference to my appearance), but I didn’t know the willowy blonde woman. My index finger stopped inches from the milk. I snapped it back to my apron pocket and the glass went over, spilling milk across the surface. Rancid drips plopped to the floor. The trio stared at me.

‘Sorry,’ I said, flustered.

I mopped it up with two cloths, and then wrung them out over my bucket, retching at the stench.

‘We need you to vacate the room, Mrs…?’ The willowy blonde – who when she leaned close had breath like off dairy produce – tilted her head slightly, encouraging me to complete the sentence.

‘Mrs D-Dalrymple, but call me Fern,’ I responded. ‘There’s no meeting scheduled in here as far as I know.’ I looked again at my report and shook my head, annoyed because I couldn’t leave the hospital until I’d done every room on my list. ‘I still have to clean the fridge, wash the windows, and empty the—’

‘She can continue,’ said Mr Shrivel, warmly. ‘Fern has worked here for five years; she won’t trouble us, not with that lovely ­disposition.’

His behaviour could be classed as sexual harassment, which if proven is punishable by a short prison sentence. But in my sterile, lonely world I find this appraisal of my personality rather … kind.

Mr Patrukal waved his hand dismissively. ‘Really, I think not for this.’

‘I don’t have any meetings on my report,’ I repeated, like they would simply shrug and leave me to quietly finish my work.

‘It was arranged last minute,’ said Mr Shrivel.

Mr Patrukal glared at him, like these five words revealed some great secret. ‘She’ll have to leave,’ he said.

‘Do you mind?’ Mr Shrivel asked me, with a conspiratorial smile, as though we were both humouring the other surgeon. ‘Just this time.’

I shrugged. ‘Do you know how long you’ll be?’

‘An hour at most, Fern,’ he said.

I wheeled my cleaning trolley out of the room, feeling their eyes heavy on my back. I could tell they were waiting until I closed the door after me before they spoke. Probably some top-secret medical development that wasn’t for the ears of a humble cleaner. Not that I was interested. I went back an hour later and the room was empty, only a stained coffee cup, three crumbs, and one awry chair evidence they had ever been there.

I don’t have a stammer by the way – D-Dalrymple – but I sometimes forget that’s my name when I’m here. I chose one beginning with D so that when I almost say Fern Dostoy, I can at least repeat the D and say the name I’m known by now.

Once upon a time Fern Dostoy wasn’t just my name; she was a writer of novels. Of books that are now digitally erased, physically destroyed. But not all of them. I avoid social media and online news, but I know that reports regularly emerge of pre-2030 novels being found in basements and lofts and garden sheds. One day, the government will have their way though. With fiction no longer being printed – and with every physical paperback being hunted, surrendered, destroyed – our words are dying.

I still have a copy of my final novel, however.

Technological Amazingness: that’s what it was called. It was one of the Big Four that changed everything. I can’t let it go. I’m not recording here where it is right now, but I keep it like you keep the silver shoe charm your dying mother put in your hand with her last breath. I promised to tell you about how the books got banned. And I will. I’m not in denial, I just need to take my time and ma—

Saturday 3 November 2035 – 2.46 a.m.

I’m back. Not at my desk, but in bed. I can’t sleep. The heat. The words. They won’t let me. I didn’t finish the story of what happened yesterday.

I will now.

I cycled home from work, painstakingly slowly, sweat drips clouding my vision. The temperature had soared to a breath-stifling ­thirty-nine degrees. I had to stop twice to wipe my face with my sleeve. The second time, I leaned my bike against a tree and rested in the shade. Voices drifted my way, carried, it felt, on the blast of heat. I looked about for the source but saw nothing except a quiet, mid-­afternoon street. I chained my bike to the tree’s narrow trunk and walked towards the nearby square, where cafes and shops surround a marble fountain. A long queue spilled out of the ALLBooks doors.

This is the UK’s only bookstore now; a glitzy corporate chain. Indie bookshops were another casualty of the death of the novel. They couldn’t compete with the low price of non-fiction in ALLBooks or with their vast budget and monopoly on advertising. It never fails to cross my mind that ALLBooks could not be a more misleading name for a place that doesn’t sell fiction. SOMEBooks would cover it better.

Why the queue though?

No sooner had I wondered this than I realised what the people in line – quiet, heads bowed as though awaiting admittance to a funeral – were holding. Novels. Colourful, different-sized, tattered, brand new, hardback, paperback, beautiful beautiful novels. Some I recognised as ones released just weeks before the ban, never having the chance to find their place in the literary world, now clutched in hot hands for the last time.

I knew then why they queued.

Book Amnesty Day.

The first Friday of every month is the one day when you can hand in your pre-2030 books without fear of recrimination. Though they are no longer sold or published, it’s hard to monitor whether people still have old ones. Plans are to end the amnesty by 2037, that all fiction will cease to exist by then. For now, you can turn up at any bookstore – which, of course, just means ALLBooks – and surrender your illegally owned words.

I joined the queue, curious to see what books they had, longing to see novels, any novel, in the flesh. I’ve never taken part in Book Amnesty Day. Laura next door has. She went last month with Edie Lane’s erotic bestseller Take Me Any Way. I was removed suddenly from my previous house by two government officials, the tall one and the short one as I call them, both of whom now interview me when they feel like it, to make sure I’ve not indulged in any further writing. I don’t know what happened to my vast collection of novels, the copies signed by the author and the unique, special editions that would have been worth a fortune before the ban. Were my beloved books burned? I still can’t bear to think of it. When I walked around the house I was taken to, the one I live in now, I sobbed against the bare walls. Even now, at times, I touch the white expanse and pretend I can feel the raised, glossy spine of a book, of many books.. . .