9781804990803

NORMAL RULES DON’T APPLY

‘What really binds these stories is their underlying theme, which has perhaps always been Atkinson’s true subject: the nature of storytelling itself. She can be very funny, but she is highly serious about the idea that human existence is bound up with words . . . If you’re thinking about what fiction means, no invocation could be more thought-provoking or ironically complex.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘What joy! A loosely connected collection of short stories from Kate Atkinson. Life in all of its surreal, tragic and comic glory is perfectly captured within these pages.’ Red

‘The short form has always liberated Atkinson to meddle in myth and magic, and here she melds the fabular and the mundane as the universe blinks, the sun winks out, and those in the open are levelled in a “new Pompeii” . . . Atkinson has the control and charm to do with fiction whatever she fancies.’

Guardian

‘Sublime . . . showcases her superb storytelling and the wit of her writing.’ Good Housekee ping

‘Hilarious, breath-taking, horrific, irresistible . . . [Atkinson is] always in command . . . Hear t in mouth, I never wanted this book to end.’

Sy dney Morning Herald

‘A deftly interconnected short-story collection [that is] varied and inventive.’

i Ne wspaper

‘Funny, erudite and profound.’ Excelle Magazine

‘Here you will find lots of tricks, lots of playfulness, clever narrative engineering.’

BBC Radio 4 Front Row

‘Clever . . . a crossword-like exercise in which the reader is always left guessing which element of each story will carry into the next. Much of the delight in Normal Rules Don’t Apply comes from being surprised by who lands where.’

Financial Times

‘Atkinson has the happy knack of capturing the nature of her characters with arch aplomb.’

Daily Mail

‘Atkinson’s sly humour percolates all the way through, but there’s also humanity, hope and forgiveness . . . As soon as you get to the end, you’ll be tempted to just start at the beginning again.’

Press Association

‘Funny and poignant in equal measure, you’ll want to read this captivating collection in one mystical sitting.’

Daily Express

‘Fans of Atkinson will find all of her trademark qualities in these eleven loosely connected stories . . . rather brilliant.’

Mail on Sunday

‘Scintillating, surrealistic and wise-cracking short stories from the wildly inventive Atkinson brain.’

SAGA Magazine

‘Mashes up the mythical and mundane with zest and mischief.’

Herald Scotland

Also by Kate Atkinson

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Human Croquet

Emotionally Weird

Not the End of the World

Life After Life

A God in Ruins

Transcription Shrines of Gaiety

featuring jackson brodie

Case Histories

One Good Turn

When Will There Be Good News?

Started Early, Took My Dog

Big Sky

NORMAL RULES

DON’T APPLY

Short stories

Kate Atkinson

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

Penguin Random House, One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens, London SW11 7BW www.penguin.co.uk

Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers Penguin paperback edition published 2024

Copyright © Kate Costello Ltd 2023

Kate Atkinson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

The credits on p. 225 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781804990803

Typeset in 11.47/14.62pt Goudy by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

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Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

For Larry Finlay

The Void

And in that day they shall roar against them like the roaring of the sea: and if one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof.

Isaiah 5:30

In the beginning was the Void. Then came the Word, and with the Word the World began. Then one day, to everyone’s surprise, the Void returned, and darkness rolled over the land. At 09.12 GMT on Thursday, 4 May 2028, to be precise.

The old man usually beat the sun to rising, but not today. He had been drinking in the Green Dragon the previous evening and woke a little after seven, feeling grouchy. He was not a drinker and remembered with regret the beer of the previous evening. A locally brewed real ale called Old Sheep’s Hooves, or something equally daft. His daughter would chastise him –  too old to be drinking, she would say if she knew. His daughter refused to believe he was going to

die one day, whereas the old man was surprised every time he woke up in the morning. She was his only child, and she was called Barbara.

Meg, the old man’s sheepdog, was asleep on the rug in front of the ancient Rayburn. The dog was old herself and he prodded her gently with his toe and said fondly, ‘Get up, lazybones.’ She lifted her head and looked at him with tired, rheumy eyes. The old man’s wife had died last year, so now it was just him and the dog. They made a good couple, in the dog’s opinion anyway.

The old man blundered through to the kitchen and reached for the coffee pot and the handle came off in his hand. ‘Oh, damn and buggery,’ he said, and the dog cocked her head to one side and looked at him.

He went in search of a screwdriver. Whatever you went looking for in the house, you could find it –  rubber bands, string, stamps, fuses, light bulbs, nails. His wife had equipped the place with every single thing you might ever need. In idle moments (he had many nowadays), he racked his brains for something that she might have overlooked. It was like a game –  tent pegs, a mallet, a jam pan –  but he hadn’t caught her out yet.

His wife was gone, but she had left something of herself behind in every last candle, tea-strainer and chopstick. The chopsticks had been a real test, but the old man had found them eventually, nestling, appropriately, inside a Chinese lacquered box on the dressing table in the back bedroom. He had needed something to poke out a blockage in the plughole in

the bathroom. They had never eaten Chinese food (Not once! Why not?) and he wondered when and why his wife had acquired the chopsticks. Every object was a small revelation. Sometimes he suspected that these things were only brought into existence when he went looking for them. How else to explain the chopsticks? He had always been a practical man, but he found himself having many fanciful thoughts these days.

Grassholm, the farmhouse was called, and it had stood at the top of the village of Hutton le Mervaux for as long as anyone could remember. From the outside, it gave little away –  a grey, weathered building that had long ago grown into the landscape. Inside, it revealed a certain elegance – the house had been nurtured over the years, the broad oak floorboards waxed and buffed, Georgian panelling in the dining room added and kept intact. Outside, the lichencovered walls were stout, the thick-slated roof was snug. A mahogany long-case clock with rolling moon phases stood guard in a corner of the large square stone-flagged hallway, 1760, James Thompson of Bristol written on its face. There was a swag-and-drop cornice in the dining room and a honeysuckle-and-date-leaf one in the hall. The living room was half-panelled in dark oak, and in the big farmhouse kitchen the ancient cream Rayburn beamed comfort.

The farm had been in his family for centuries. Now only the house was his, the fields sold off years ago. Barbara had had no interest in taking over. She was a doctor, and he was proud of that. He had a granddaughter, too, Genevieve, and even a great-

granddaughter, Mabel, named for his wife’s mother. She was a funny little thing, reminded him of his wife. Witchy. There, he’d said the word.

He carried his coffee into the back garden, the dog trailing anxiously at his heels. She didn’t like to let him out of her sight these days.

The garden was walled on two sides, sheltering it from the rugged weather coming off the hills, and on the third side there was a thick hedge of hawthorn, providing a windbreak for the bench that was sited there. The garden was a gentle, feminine preserve. His wife had devoted herself to the sweet peas and dahlias, old-fashioned English roses, every vegetable and herb under the sun. They had eaten well. Now the old man bought steak pies from the Co-op in Richmond or sometimes just ate baked beans, cold from the tin, and a girl called Tabby, androgynous in dungarees and with a shaved head, came up from the village and kept the garden tidy. She had all kinds of interesting views on things, none of which he shared, but they got on very well. The dog liked her.

The old man sat on the bench to drink his coffee. Daisies and tiny violets pinpricked the lawn. They must have grown since Tabby was here last. ‘Pretty,’ he said to the dog. The dog didn’t require the baggage of grammar. The old man had never previously lived a life where there was time to sit in the sun. The dog whined softly, worried about something. The old man rubbed the top of her head with his knuckles. Who knew what thoughts a dog had? He wished she could talk.

It was warm for this time of day. And quiet. There

were more than three hundred Swaledales out on the hills and as many lambs and more. Their bleating was the soothing background to the old man’s life, but not one of them was making a sound this morning.

No birdsong either. The dog sat at his feet, attentive, waiting for him to notice that there was something wrong. He glanced up and felt relieved to see a pair of early swallows high in the sky, swooping on a thermal.

The dog got up and started pawing at the garden gate. Once she would have been able to jump cleanly over the wall.

‘Come on, then, old girl,’ he said. ‘Time for a walk.’

They went out of the back gate and straight up the hill. It was a hard climb, both the old man and the old dog were stiff with arthritis. The dog had long ago retired from the fray. The sheep belonged to another, younger dog now.

Foot and mouth had forced the old man to burn a whole flock once, a great pyre of roasted lamb and mutton. He had wept. He’d had a different dog then. What had she thought, he sometimes wondered, when she had seen her flock go up in flames?

Meg was a conscientious dog and still suffered from the urge to chivvy and herd, although she was making no attempt to shepherd the sheep in the top field. Perhaps because none of them were moving. As they drew nearer, the old man could see that they were all lying down. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ he murmured, glancing at the dog, the expert on sheep

behaviour. The dog’s ears twitched but otherwise she seemed as baffled as he was.

The flock looked as though it had been pushed over by a giant hand. When he was a child (so long ago his life was no longer his life, it was history), he had been given a wooden Noah’s ark, and he had a sudden, unexpected memory of the pleasure he had taken in lining up all the animals and then knocking them over, like dominoes, all the way from the elephants down to the tiny mice. What had happened to the ark? Everything was lost eventually and only sometimes found.

There was something very wrong. The old man could feel his heart jittery in his chest and it took a moment for him to understand. They were all dead. As far as the eye could see, there were dead sheep. He hurried as fast as his arthritis would allow back down the hill. (‘Be careful,’ he could hear Barbara’s voice in his head.)

He went down to the village and banged on the door of the Green Dragon. The landlord opened the door with a shotgun in his hand and for a moment the old man wondered if the publican had gone insane and massacred the sheep. The dog slunk inside past his legs.

‘Are you coming in?’ the landlord asked. The old man could see that the pub was crowded, people clustered together as though in the wake of some disaster. Someone shouted his name and the old man gave a vague wave of acknowledgement, but he called the dog back and left.

The old man’s phone rang, it sounded more urgent than usual somehow.

It was Barbara.

‘It’s unbelievable,’ she muttered.

‘Dead sheep?’ the old man hazarded.

‘No,’ his daughter said. ‘Dead people. Dead people everywhere. Too many to count.’

Genevieve, Barbara’s daughter, the old man’s granddaughter, had been in Waitrose when the event occurred. (It was only later that it came to be called the Void.) She had just dropped Mabel off at her primary school. The weather had suddenly turned foul and she had been forced to seek a place of safety.

She had lied to get Mabel into her school –  a Church of England primary –  said they lived with her mother in Heworth. (‘You’re moving back in with me?’ Barbara said, keeping her face admirably neutral.) Genevieve had lost her job a year ago and now, with all this time on her hands, she found herself frequenting the school’s catchment area – shops, cafés, the library –  mildly paranoid that anonymous authority figures were spying on her, waiting to expose the fraud. (‘They are,’ her mother said.)

As an economy measure, Genevieve had recently sold her car, so here she was, taking refuge from the rain in a place where she couldn’t really afford anything on the shelves. She picked up a ‘mini’ watermelon, hefty and round like a cannonball, before wandering aimlessly over to the flower-stand, where she plucked a slender sheaf of gladioli from a galvanized bucket. She should probably get a basket, she thought, even

though both items seemed too unwieldy to be confined to one. She would not normally have bought either watermelon or gladioli. Fetching a basket would be a commitment. She began to experience the usual kind of low-grade existential angst she associated these days with decision-making.

From her post at the flower-stand, Genevieve had a clear view of the supermarket’s glass entrance doors. It was still raining heavily. Should she make a run for it? She could hardly stay here all morning. (Why not? Other people probably did.) She watched as the automatic doors, obedient to an invisible will, swished politely apart to admit a middle-aged woman, the hearty outdoors type, suitably dressed, top-totoe, in waterproofs. Beyond her, Genevieve could see another woman – elderly, stooped and crooked – who was snailing heroically towards the doors. She was dressed neatly, tweed coat and a woollen hat, a shopping bag in one hand, an umbrella held awkwardly aloft in the other. Perhaps she had once been a little girl like Mabel –  a stoic yet hopeful demeanour, tangled hair and jammy hands (permanently –  how?). Small on the outside, vast on the inside. Mabel would one day be an old woman, too. And Genevieve would not be around to look after her. Genevieve’s heart came suddenly untethered.

A draft of damp air from the open doors made her shiver. The chill brought with it an odd, animal-like premonition. She could smell violets and wondered if she was having a stroke (her mother said ‘olfactory hallucinations’ sometimes accompanied ischaemia). She was still holding the watermelon in one hand

and brandishing the gladioli in the other, as if she were about to spear something. Fruit and flowers, offerings at the temple. She returned the flowers to the galvanized bucket and watched as the old woman stopped to close her umbrella, shaking the rain off it. The doors closed again before the woman could reach them. A bell rang, a delicate sound (ting!) as if Marie Antoinette had summoned cake. (Redundancy had left Genevieve’s imagination free to roam.)

And then the world went dark. Completely, as if someone had flicked the switch on the sun. Pulled the plug, too, for there were none of the tiny jewels of coloured light, the humming and thrumming, that indicated electronic life. Smoke alarms and cash registers, freezers, fridges and sprinklers, were all lifeless. No emergency lights, nothing glowing with faint comfort. No daylight coming in through the automatic doors either. Dark inside and out. For a moment, Genevieve had the Damascene thought that she had been struck blind.

She groped in her bag for her phone. Also dead.

After what seemed like a long silence, as complete and absolute as the darkness, people began to voice their bafflement. A quiet, poignant ‘Hello?’ from somewhere near her right shoulder. ‘Who turned the lights out, then?’ from a would-be joker, and the voice of a small child, inquisitive rather than frightened, but nonetheless distressing to Genevieve, saying, ‘Mummy?’

‘Is there anyone there?’ someone asked, as though they were partaking in a séance. A hand brushed Genevieve’s hair and she was reminded of the Ghost

Train at the seaside of her childhood. Or it was as if they were playing a sombre game of blind man’s bluff, governed by rules of extreme bourgeois rectitude. A raised managerial voice advised everyone to keep calm, although as far as Genevieve could tell no one was panicking. Someone bumped against her (‘Sorry, sorry’), knocking the watermelon from her hands. Genevieve heard it land with a thud and roll away, a planet discarded by a careless god.

She was not the only one, it seemed, who thought they had suddenly lost their sight. ‘Blind?’ someone said, as if trying out the word for size. Genevieve thought of The Day of the Triffids. It seemed improbable. What was more likely – an invasion from outer space by killer alien plants or a total eclipse of the sun? But then surely eclipses were foreseen, charted events, not sudden biblical calamities?

The ‘pulse’. She had read about it in a newspaper a few months ago. It was something to do with solar flares. An increase in sunspot activity was due and was going to cause geomagnetic storms, knocking out satellite communications and causing blackouts on Earth. Speculation or fact? She couldn’t remember. Ever since losing her job, she had developed a tendency to catastrophize.

But then, just as suddenly as it had been turned off, the power snapped on again. People blinked at the sudden assault on their retinas from the overhead lights and looked about in confusion, as if they were expecting something to have changed during their unexpected daytime journey into night. Everything was just as it had been. Daylight had returned

outside. A blink, that was all. The universe had blinked.

The supermarket rebooted itself and the air was filled once more with the low whining and buzzing noises of robotic insects as the big fridges and the cash registers came back to life. The automatic doors began dutifully opening and closing again. Several people headed straight outside, but most customers, after some hesitation, recommenced shopping. But then a babel of mobile-phone ringtones suddenly filled the air. Genevieve supposed everyone wanted to share their own experience of the dark. Once, they would have written laborious letters and the event would have been forgotten by the time the letter was delivered into another hand. Her own phone vibrated in her hand. It was her mother, asking if she was all right. ‘Thank God,’ her mother said and rang off abruptly.

The customers who had left the supermarket were still standing in a little huddle near the doors, looking aghast. Genevieve saw the old woman lying supine on the concrete, her woollen hat dislodged, a peaceful expression on her face, even though the hard rain was falling steadily on it. Genevieve hurried towards her, crouched down and felt for a pulse. (That word again.) Her mother was a doctor, she had insisted that her daughter know every aspect of first aid. (‘Because you don’t know what might happen.’) Genevieve stood up and found herself next to the middle-aged woman who was dressed so well for the rain.

‘Has someone phoned for an ambulance?’ Genevieve asked her, and the woman who was dressed for

rain (but who would never leave her house again, no matter the weather) simply lifted her arm and pointed like a mute seer at the length of the road outside. That was when Genevieve realized that the crowd’s distress was on account not of the old woman, but of a much wider horror.

Everywhere she looked, there were people lying on the ground – as though they had been struck by a narcoleptic spell. The Big Issue seller who always hung around the entrance to Waitrose was curled up like a baby next to the ranks of wire trolleys. A young woman was sprawled in the middle of the pelican crossing, still grasping the handle of a pushchair. The baby inside the pushchair looked –  like the old woman –  as if it were taking a much-needed nap. The ancient Romanian woman who sat outside the shop every day, begging, had keeled over, her hand still outstretched for coins. One man and his dog were bedded down on the pavement together. It was a new Pompeii.

Cars had crashed into each other in the dark; others were slewed across the road. A bus standing at a nearby stop had opened its doors to admit passengers into its belly. Everyone inside the bus looked as though they had fallen asleep in their seats. The people waiting in the queue had dropped where they stood in a tidy fashion like fallen dominoes. The bus driver remained at the bridge, piloting a ghost bus, his head lolling forward as if he were taking forty winks while waiting for his tardy passengers to board. The automatic doors kept trying to close but were foiled by the inert body of a woman draped across the step, her bus pass still clutched in her hand.

No one was waking up. No one was climbing to their feet and shaking their heads in bewilderment at the sudden enchantment that had overtaken them and had now been lifted. They were dead, Genevieve thought. All of them. From what? Gas? A terrorist attack? (In York?) An acoustic device – the kind they had on ships to repel pirates? (Again – York?) Or had they all simply drunk the Kool-Aid, obedient to some bizarre order, while Genevieve was debating the cost of a watermelon?

Genevieve phoned her mother back, but she just muttered something about ‘triaging’ and rang off.

But –  not everyone was dead. No one who had been inside Waitrose was dead, for example, and when Genevieve looked around she could see people in cars, in shops, on buses, who were still alive. People who had stayed inside. Behind closed doors. Whereas everyone who had been outside

Jesus Christ – the school playground! Mabel. Genevieve reeled from the thought as if she taken a physical blow, staggered, and almost tripped over the body of a man, a packet of bacon still clutched tightly in his dead hand. She set off at a run, pushing her way past the living and dodging the dead with the adroitness of the Counties hockey player she had once been.

‘So,’ Genevieve said tentatively, not wishing to rekindle any alarming memories, ‘what happened at school?’

‘The little kids were scared,’ Mabel said.

‘You’re a little kid.’

Mabel made a face. ‘Not really. Mrs Gillette said we were very brave.’