Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Anna—”

  The whimpering little voice set her teeth on edge. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Please, will you talk to me?”

  They went into the Biols coffee bar and found a table. “Anna, look, I’m not going to try to be dignified. I’m going to throw myself on your mercy.”

  She thought, I will never set foot in here again. Never. The drab scuffed tables, the terrible counter food. Three years to end like this. She couldn’t bear it. But you have to.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re so much prettier than I am, and so much more talented. You’ve got everything. Please don’t take Charles away from me. Please.”

  The pastel-sweatered one sat with bitten lips, full of trembling boldness, feeling so proud of herself for having screwed up the courage to brave this monster, Anna. Anna kept the bile behind her teeth. Not Ilse’s fault… But she hated the creature. That dowdy uniform, the terrible little dangly earrings, at once sexless and groveling. Where do they learn to dress like that, to cut their hair like that: why didn’t anyone teach me how to do it? I wanted equality, but it cannot be had. You have to take the whip hand or else submit.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not interested. He is all yours.”

  On the day her period was due she took the bus to town, walked out on the pier and leaned on the rail, watching the rough, opaque, water. The sky was thick and low. Young herring gulls with their brown mottled backs sailed under the boardwalk, rocking on angled wings. This is why women should never try to compete with men. Because this will happen, and a woman will not be strong enough to cope. Anna had not been strong enough. She had made her corrupt decision to keep quiet about the amateur rapist, but it had done her no good because she had been unable to throw the experience off, the way a tough person would have done. She couldn’t blame Charles. He’d done nothing specially terrible. It was Anna who had been unforgivably careless. She had answered him back in seminars, making him feel she was a challenge. She had allowed him to flirt. From the first moment he made “advances” she should have taken every possible step to keep out of his way. Instead she had pursued him. She had let him touch her shoulder, squeeze her waist, so he would do the work: imagining she was being clever. To Charles it was as if she’d been saying please fuck me. And he had.

  This is what happens, she thought. Women lie, they keep silent, because no one likes a whistleblower. This is how it all carries on. Now I am doing it. I am part of the machine that destroys women’s chances. The fall was terrible. She did not see what was the point in going on living.

  Ramone didn’t find it odd when Anna stopped coming to the Pinebourne flat. She assumed it was because Anna knew. The salon was closed, and Ramone had enough to do without wondering what had happened to the third Norn. She came back from one of her papers and found their front door standing open. Shit… Lavvy was kneeling in the center of the green and blue rug that had been a present from an admirer, the textile artist Andrea Waters. Her thin hands were raised above her head, locked and thrust heavenwards. Her hair flowed down her back in light-catching silver tangles. She looked like the repentant Magdalene as ecstatic hermit, agonized and glorified. The room smelt strongly of fresh poo.

  “Oh no,” muttered Ramone. She spotted the turds and dealt with that problem first, before the philosopher could get interested in her own productions.

  “Lavvy?”

  The Magdalene began to cry out in a loud voice. “Oh Jesus Christ, Oh Jesus Christ, take this cup away from me. That art thou, that art thou, there are worms of flames eating my knees, my medieval knees that have no health in them until they bend. What do you think? Did Jesus Christ come to earth to found a new religion? The world must change in every atom, and the answer to that prayer is never never never never never. Cordelia, the warm-hearted, will come no more… If you are tenderhearted they will kill you. Mad women are the Marthas, Martha means the mistress, mistresses of humanity, who hear the cry of the world. Mary, which means bitterness, is the isolate, the contemplative. If I am mad, if I am crippled, does it make any difference how I was MADE MAD? I was made mad. Studies of Afro-Caribbean schizophrenics, I must trace the reference, show that though the percentage in the population diagnosed with schizophrenia is high, the diagnoses are accurate. Race hatred is a factor, genetic constitution is a factor, the hall of thought shattered; is shattered—”

  Ramone noticed she’d left the door open: confusion in the mind is infectious. She shut and locked it, and fetched the camel dressing gown, the dope tin, and Pele. The rabbit was for herself, Lavvy wasn’t queer for soft toys. She preferred hard-edged things, shells and cans and broken plastic bottles. She draped the dressing gown over Lavvy’s naked back and sat beside her to roll a fat spliff on the back of A Great Favour: The Visionary Experience And Human Knowledge. This was the new book. It had set Lavvy off, or pushed her over the edge. It could be the fact that this book was so sleek and glossy, with a big promotion budget, a further step into the circus of fame-and-exposure: the arena where, Ramone knew, Lavvy was mortally afraid that she would fail, be dismissed, be exposed as a charlatan. She hadn’t been well since the launch party, which had been in London (often a dangerous voyage) and which had ended when the demanding child had thrown a tantrum. At least Ramone didn’t have to tolerate that the disease is our baby metaphor, for the moment. It had always made her feel sick.

  “What about being a woman?” she asked, lighting up. “Your secret vice, oh teacher. What’s madness got to do with that?”

  “No comment,” said Dr Kent, grasping the dressing gown and arranging it sideways around her shoulders. “Not for publication. You distract yourself, Ramone. I warn you, if you make a, a thing out of being a woman, you may get a quick buzz of interest, but you will look around twenty years from now and you’ll have been marginalized. I have never allowed that to happen to me. I am judged as a mad holy-savant. Anyone can be mad. Only half the world can be female, and let’s face it, it’s the wrong half.”

  “I don’t accept that.”

  “You’re a fool.”

  “You’re the fool. You’re living in the past. I know what I’m doing. Just watch me. See me blow my trumpet, see me ride my big shiny car, see me fly.”

  Dr Kent took a deep draught of the healing smoke. “Ahh. How did the torture go?”

  “Okay. I’m not an exam type, it’s scraping bone. But I think I’m doing okay.”

  When she was well, Lavvy spoke with radiant calm about resorting to the heavy chemicals whenever necessary. In reality (Ramone had been told, she’d never seen it happen before), the transition was difficult. Soon she was in agony again, seeing flames and worms erupting from her skin, refusing any medication stronger than cannabis but forced to whip herself with a home-made cat o’ nine tails. The cat’s tails were tipped with knapped flints; they drew blood. In her lucid intervals she still claimed all of this was a creative struggle and would lead to new work. For all Ramone could tell it might be true. If Lavinia’s scholarship and her teaching were really brilliant—and everyone seemed to think they were—why dope her and call her crazy? Why not let her have her whips and fetishes and get on with it? Perhaps then she’d have been able to stay as sane as the dead saints, self-mutilating “women of power,” who had apparently never lost the plot as far as shitting on the carpet.

  Or maybe not. Maybe Teresa of Avila’s worst moments had been edited out of the record, leaving only the acceptable face of ecstasy. Anyway, Lavinia’s brother came and took her away. He warned Ramone—he’d been through this movie before—that when she came out of it his sister probably wouldn’t want to know her former protégée. Schizos are like that. They skip from stone to stone and quickly forget the past.

  Ramone sailed from Southampton to Le Havre as a foot passenger, with Marnie Choy and Daz Avritivendam. Daz had signed a modeling contract and was acting, in a weird way, as if she was taking the veil: this was one last fling before the cloister. Ramone was traveling with 200
francs in her pocket, free as a bird. She had no idea how she was going to live. She left the other two getting drunk in the saloon and went out on deck. The weather was dull and sad. Maybe Gaia had been tinkering again, to counteract global warming. The spoilsport: in Ramone’s opinion global warming was fun. She crouched by a life raft, watching the last of England. Goodbye, Lavvy, goodbye my alma mater, my gossip, my destroying angel, my corner stone. Good luck with the next incarnation. Oh God, she prayed. Make me a philosopher. And the sea said, yes. But it will cost you everything.

  iii

  Anna walked into the freezer in the basement of Parentis plc with her worksheet and checked out two canisters of pelleted DNA. One container held samples cloned from 500 normally fertile male volunteers, from a survey on reproductive health in the South of France. The other can was from an academic project on the genetic history of Europe, run by the University of Marseille: DNA from bones and mummified tissue, from the tenth century ossuaries of an ancient Provencal settlement called Huits Bories.

  Parentis was a global company, involved in all aspects of Human Assisted Reproduction; in this lab the concern was basic science. It was unlikely that Anna’s doctoral project—identifying pseudogenes on the Y chromosome—would have direct bearing on an infertility treatment, but it was good for business to have a profile in pure research. Anna didn’t care much either way. Sometimes she remembered that Human Assisted Reproduction was the last kind of work she would have wanted to do, before her fall, but she tried not to think in those terms. She was resigned to her lot.

  For weeks after what had happened with Charles she had been in cruel distress; her mother checking her surreptitiously for needle marks; hardly able to speak to her poor father. She had tried to take an AIDS test and been sent away to think it over by a puzzled counselor (you don’t want it on your record, love, not unless there’s good cause). She had dreamed incessantly of being attacked, by monsters with human faces… She had emerged from her nightmare not pregnant (she’d started to bleed three weeks after her period was due) and with what Dr Russell called a very creditable 2:2. Of course she’d lost the PlasLife studentship. She had learned, before she left Forest, that Charles Craft had put in his application. So it would be Charles, not Anna, who would get the spear, the sword, the bow of burning gold. And it served her right.

  For the rest of her life, whenever she heard of some woman’s career blighted by sexual harassment, or a girl raped by a man who really did not feel that he was doing wrong, she would have to remember that she, Anna Anaconda, was partly to blame.

  It was Dr Russell who had managed to get her taken on at Parentis: tender-hearted Seraphina, who could not understand what had gone wrong, but would not desert her protégée. The director of this lab, KM Nirmal, was an old friend of hers. He would be a good supervisor, an inspirational mentor, someone who would recognize Anna’s quality.

  Anna had let it all happen. She knew that she was better off than she deserved to be. Her studentship was registered with Leeds university, the funding was reliable, the work involved skills that would stand her in good stead. She lived with a cheery, overweight staff nurse called Roz Brown, who needed a lodger to help pay her mortgage. Roz had pastel-sweater tendencies, a little girl of five called Shannon, and a Rugby playing boyfriend whose voice and presence made Anna cringe. But it was all right. Anna babysat Shannon, tried to save the lives of the reduced-to-clear azaleas that stood in pots on the damp back patio, and taught Roz to cook the food of well-managed poverty. At weekends she went home to Manchester, if she wasn’t needed in the lab. She had slightly more money than if she’d been investigating solanum succulentum. She could be clear of debt in five or six years, with care.

  KM Nirmal—always Nirmal to his juniors and colleagues—was a stick-limbed individual with small hard eyes, wire-rimmed spectacles, fragile brown skin stretched tightly over his facial bones, and an almost lipless mouth between two deep grooves, like a capital H inscribed below his beak of a nose. He looked like Gandhi’s mummy and had so far shown no sign of being inspirational. At the weekly meetings, when Anna reported on her task, he would nod and make some bland remark and proceed at once to discuss other work. That was fine by Anna. The Parentis lab stood in a science park on the outskirts of Leeds. Through the windows of the sequencing lab, beyond the slabs of car-park concrete and industrial-unit walls, cloud shadows strode over the Pennines. When she looked out, to rest her eyes, the open upland sky was like a promise of freedom. One day, this would be over. One day, she might escape and get back on track.

  Her work on the samples was not easy, because no matter how repetitive and automated it was, you still had to give it your full attention, hour by hour. At least, since nobody was in a hurry for her results, she could amuse herself by being as meticulous as she liked. She worked alone. When she first found her anomaly—a sequence common to the ancient Provencal DNA and to the gorilla DNA she was using as a control, that ought to hybridize with the modern Frenchmen but refused to do so—she thought she was imagining things: but it wouldn’t go away. She became a little obsessed. At the weekly meetings she said nothing: it was no problem if she spent a little time on a side issue. Anna Anaconda could always work harder. She found ways to fine-tune the pseudogene sequencing and spent the hours she saved tinkering with her puzzle. Finally she decided to get a second opinion from Sonia Blanchard, an older woman who had tried (as far as Anna could be mothered) to take the postgrad under her wing.

  Sonia was a middle-aged woman who’d dropped out to bring up her children and returned to work with an easy-going attitude. She and her minions reared clone mice from embryos that had been injected with strange genes; killed them, squashed them, and spun them; extracted their eggs and sperm, gouged fresh embryos from their bellies, snipped away their testicles, all in the cause of a pharmacopoeia of cures for human infertility. The mice appeared to bear her no ill will. They liked Sonia. They seemed to listen for her voice; they were more relaxed and more active when she was in their lab.

  Anna found her standing dreamily by the mouse cages, while an xx sry mouse called Harry—a transgenic female, induced to develop as an infertile male—climbed and whiskered busily between her gloved hands.

  “Sonia, I’ve got a problem with my normal men.”

  “Surprise me,” drawled Sonia.

  “Would you have a look?”

  “What would you say,” asked Sonia ruminatively, without moving, “if someone offered to turn you into a man? Temporarily, no operations, everything functional. Just for a week or two, so you could try out the equipment.”

  “It sounds like a computer game. I’d say no thanks.”

  “Our Harry likes it fine, don’t you love? She gives her little kit a good work-out. All to no avail, eh? She’s shooting blanks, poor lass.” The mouse clung to Sonia’s fingers, berry eyes gleaming. “Some day soon, we’ll be able to make a Harry with fertile sperm. Next thing, we’ll be injecting fertility into any male customer that still has the bits, and we won’t even need to work out what his problem was… There’s no such thing as normal, Anna. You ought to know that. Variation’s something you have to filter out: deletions, damage, bases knocked off, stuck together wrong way round, extra ones tacked on. Do you really want me to suit up?”

  Spermatogenesis Factor, SGF, was the main event in Nirmal’s lab: Anna’s project was boring. Ordinarily, she’d have let it go. But her curiosity had been roused.

  “I know about random variation. This is the same variation, over and over again.”

  Sonia dumped Harry back in her cage. “Let’s have a look.”

  Anti-contamination precautions in Nirmal’s lab were rigorous. Sonia dressed to match Anna, in a clean room suit, mask, gloves, and goggles.

  “Tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

  “It’s here. You can’t get the modern sample to line up with the gorilla and the ancient Provencal DNA. Something’s missing. I’ve been getting the same result, a missing chunk of bases in
the same location, in nearly every modern sample.”

  “Mmm. Could be you’ve run into a local population thing, but it’s not likely. Men are the same the world over, did your mother ever tell you? The Y’s a genetic fossil, owing to the pattern of sexual inheritance, it doesn’t get messed around much. Are you sure you’ve not been accidentally testing the same bugger over and over again?”

  “The point of that French survey is that it’s individuals, each with a medical and familial profile. I’m sure as I can be. Now look at this. I think the missing bases have moved. They’ve shifted to the X chromosome. Okay, not so strange, you get illegitimate interchange between the X and the Y when they pair up for meiosis: a Y pseudogene might hybridize with part of the analogous functional X gene. But this isn’t in a gene sequence, and it’s weird to find the same chunk of Y moving to the same locale on the X, over and over again. What would do that?”

  The two women stared at the glowing hieroglyphs.

  “It’s that medieval DNA,” said Sonia. “I know Nirmal doesn’t trust the stuff. It’ll be contaminated?” She frowned, and looked at Anna suspiciously. “How’ve you done all this?” she demanded. “I thought you’d hardly started on the Huit Bories comparison.”