Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  I sure hope Apuleius had a good agent for all this merchandising. Or did he get ripped to shit, like the best of us always do? I have no idea. Anyway, I wanted to ask you if you know anything about the life cycle of the sea-urchin…

  She didn’t know if she should talk to Anna about biology. She might lose face by misusing some crap piece of jargon, perhaps a risk only to be taken when you were drunk and drugged. But she had recently discovered, in the course of her reading—which roamed as always to and fro across the Great Divide—that sea urchin larvae, instead of growing older, give birth to successive, radically different versions of themselves. Had she misunderstood? Well, that was what it looked like in the pictures. Which were very fruitful and suggestive… She started drawing spiny urchins in her margin, thinking of The Water Babies.

  A woman, instead of growing up, gives birth.

  In Parable there was a woman who thought her works of art were children, that she had literally given birth to them. She told Nou-nou a god came along and shot them, that’s why they were now dead, turned into lifeless objects… A woman who aspires to fulfill her traditional role and at the same time live a life of ideas and achievement is suffering from catastrophic hubris. She wants to be passive and active, private and public, the sculptor and the clay. This is not allowed, this is not possible. But what if she finds the trick not only possible but natural? A thinking woman must be both the consciousness that draws the world into existence by defining it and the world in which that consciousness is immanent… Are we not approaching, through the humble image of the working woman, the busy mother who thoroughly enjoys her part-time job, a new vision—or better, a return with new understanding, to the essential experience of being a conscious animal?

  The thought of Lavvy a cold stone in her stomach.

  …neatly brushed old lady with the bright eyes, says warily I seem to know you?

  Next time you met her she was all right. But she knew what was happening. She knew that she was going down again, this time forever. So young, not even sixty. Ramone had been shocked to discover how young. And in perfect health, physically. Oh god…

  Another time. Think about it another time.

  In some profound way, Ramone knew the game was up. She had peaked too soon; her genius had deserted her; she had missed the crest of the wave She would never invent a new concept of humanity. From now on she was falling, not flying, no matter how long it took to hit the ground. But still, she had an idea for a book. Not the Kota Baru Women’s Prison Spoof the publishers wanted. Something like Parable only different, a work of science and scholarship, dream and autobiography. She felt radiant with promise. Oh, the reading she would have to do! The nights she would spend, the hollow hours she loved, sating her titanic appetite on heaps of text, hearing again the beech tree fingers tapping at her dark window, long ago. She would call it The Earth and the Plough, and dedicate it, as always, to Anna Senoz. If not on the title page, then in her heart.

  Roads and the Meaning of Roads, III

  All this…

  Coming awake at the wheel of a car: you are hurtling along in a box of plastic and metal; you are nominally in charge of this machine, but the engine pumps, functions engage without your understanding. Is this how it feels to wake into consciousness? To see the strange movement that seems so far away, because distance itself is a new sensation. That thing, that big blurred thing, it is my hand, it is moving. I am moving it! I am here, I am me.

  All that, rest of stuff, is not me.

  Mont Ventoux, that high, inimical scoured limestone landscape, where Anna and Jake admired the spoor of the Tour de France and shivered in the cold, while Spence reverenced the site where Petrarch had the experience claimed as the birth of the modern European mind. Our alienation and amaze at the world that is not us. Then the cloud lifted: and it was as the poet said, an extraordinary lightness, légèreté, because of all the white bare stone—air full of light. But this place that he found so strange was his own mountain. Every day of his childhood he had seen it—as you do, from the plain of Carpentras—or from the ridges above Vaucluse—whenever I lifted my eyes… That was what Spence and the medieval poet liked, and Anna too: to make a pilgrimage to the already known. Seeing something twice, knowing it again, the experience of the experience—

  The secret history of Spence as a New Man. In Nigeria, when there was no mainline electricity for months, they kept the lab going on a generator, but domestic chores reverted to primitive drudgery. Anna desperately didn’t want to have servants: no human sacrifices! Spence agreed in principle. But it was Anna who did the drudging, on top of her lab work, because it was her idea, after all. She remembered kneeling beside a tin bath, in a small room with a wet concrete floor and a kerosene lamp, tired to death, tears falling hot onto her hands as she scrubbed pants and socks in the cold soapy water. Spence passing by: looking in at the open door in dumb puzzlement, like a dog who doesn’t understand why mistress is upset. They had sorted it out. She’d had to let him hire a servant: a half-share, actually, of a lunatic called Walter who ruined everything he touched; and thereafter, when they refused to use servants it was out of self-interest, not idealism.

  Spence was righteous. He was more rigid than Anna over some things: wouldn’t have a dishwasher, or a second car, or mass-market connectivity; had never set foot in a McDonald’s except to use the toilet. But Spence will not drudge.

  The secret history of the sophisticated travelers. When they arrived in Sungai there’d been a mightily disappointing orientation trip. She and Spence had stayed for an extra weekend at an old river trading post. The inn, a fine wooden building standing out over the slurry-colored water, was probably the most picturesque “sight” in the whole country. They were sitting in the common room when a man, short and neat in shirt sleeves and suit trousers, started talking to them. At first it was very interesting and a cool achievement. Then he started telling them about his brother. He’d been to Jakarta looking for his brother: and something about…terrible, those bastards…a normal life impossible… He was crying, in an adult way, pinching the tears away with two fingers on the bridge of his nose and still talking. The young foreigners sat smiling nervously, trying to look intelligent. Suddenly he realized how little they could understand. He got up, abruptly said good night, and hurried out of the room.

  We thought we were so well informed: we knew nothing. She remembered Aslan Gaegler’s burly figure, used to look as if he had an invisible football under each arm, his golden beard, (yes indeedy) short and glittering around his firm jowl—standing there with the white chrysanthemums. That dress with the little Audrey Hepburn belt, it was never the same… A white light splashed across her eyes, making her wince. She was in the middle lane, doing what ought to be enough speed for anyone in this heavy traffic, but the flasher was not satisfied. She tried to get away from him, the headlights only came closer. She dropped into the inside lane the first chance she got, but oh shit, he followed her.

  “Oh shit.”

  Spence roused a little. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve got a flasher.”

  She overtook the next car, dropped back again. No use, horns blared indignantly, and he was there, right up her arse and flashing. If it was plain irrational rage, nothing to be done. If it was one of those psychos who objected to a woman driver, then it was too late for them to swap

  “Cut across to the fast lane,” suggested Spence.

  “No thanks. Car won’t take it, and if I have to get rammed, I’d rather be doing sixty.”

  She set her teeth, prepared for long nagging from those lights. But it was worse than that. The little car jolted around her. They’d been shoved. Jake sat up in the back and squeaked with excitement. “Mummy, he’s after you. Will we get killed? What are we going to do?”

  “Deploy the torpedoes. Okay team, hang on, I’m going to lose him.”

  They were coming up to an exit, get-in-lane boards snapping by overhead. She glanced in her mirror and at the las
t moment dived into the twinkling slip road, heading for some different part of the country. “What are you doing?” yelled Spence. The flasher gave chase. He’d been taken by surprise, he came snarling round the high speed curve with his foot on the floor. Anna was running out of road. She hauled on the wheel, the car jolted across lane-end chevrons, the flasher went sailing on by. She completed a jumpy handbrake turn and drove swiftly the wrong way up the hard shoulder, back onto their homeward trail.

  “What the fuck! What are you doing, this isn’t a video game—”

  “Sorry,” she said. She waited for a gap in the traffic. Fortunately, there were no police about. She was shaking, but grimly elated. Beaten the bastard.

  “He’s coming back!” shouted Jake.

  The flasher must have done a U turn on the other road: he must be really angry to be so persistent. The car, which she saw clearly for the first time, was a red saloon, nothing special. It stopped on the shoulder, about twenty meters behind them. The driver’s door opened. “Turn the tv on,” said Anna. “Find loud music. Don’t open the window. Don’t get out of the car. Don’t look at him. Jake, lie down and hide your face.”

  The man came up. Anna and Spence sat with their eyes at an angle of sixty or so, not submissively lowered (which might invite attack) but unavailable to a challenging glare. Spence had hit a classical station, some woman in purple on the postcard screen singing Mozart lieder of all things. The man kicked at their doors, banged on the windows, shook the roof, pushed his face up to the windscreen. But he was alone, didn’t have a weapon, and thank God he didn’t think of going back to his car to fetch a wheel jack or something. He battered himself against the stonewall of loud Mozart for a few terrifying moments, and then he gave up. Horns blared as the red car made a forced entry into the traffic stream. It drove away.

  “I’m sorry,” said Anna, realizing how horribly her plan could have misfired.

  “You should give way to them, straight off. You should never provoke them.”

  “I tried!”

  “Is it all right again?” asked Jake.

  “Yes, baby.”

  “You’re a good boy, you were very good,” said Spence, leaning over the seat to hug him.

  Anna reached across and switched off the tv, an unusual move. In-car entertainment was Spence’s territory. She sat with her hands at ten and two, and the traffic roared by, towards what blank wall, invisible in the darkness.

  “D’you want me to drive? I think you should let me drive.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Inland Far

  i

  Anna and Jake had been working on the allotment. It was the end of March. Anna had been planting seeds: carrots, turnips, radishes, lettuces. She had hoed the over-wintered broad beans and earthed up the potatoes. Maybe the harvest would be better this year. Mr Frank N Furter—whom they had found still flourishing when Anna’s job prospects brought them back to Bournemouth—achieved results on his plot down in the valley, in shelter, that made Anna and Spence’s bumbling efforts look ridiculous. They were learning. Meantime, hunter-gatherer behavior, practiced in the Co-op supermarket on Saturday mornings, made up for the deficiencies of primitive agriculture.

  She watered-in the seeds, unscrewed their tap from the standpipe by the track, and stowed everything in the buggy’s shopping tray: except the spade and hoe handles, which she hid. You couldn’t leave things up here. And this is called having it all, she thought, stretching to free her shoulders. Below her, coastal conurbation sprawled back from the gleaming meadows of the sea, Poole to the west and Christchurch to the east: furzy bare branches reaching up from swathes of public park and garden. With petty theft and the rottweiler tendency for neighbors, yes. Wouldn’t be the same if they were shut out.

  Jake lay on the ground, where a rustling barrier of last year’s sweet corn sheltered him from the east wind, talking in a tiny voice and playing intently with two toy cars and a handful of weeds: a dandelion with a broken tap root, some Shepherd’s Purse, a few sprigs of that infuriating little pink and white convolvulus (the worm that dieth not). She stood over him unnoticed, feasting on the dream of mind’s emergence—

  Behold the child among his new-born blisses, a six years’ Darling of pigmy size.

  See, where –’mid the work of his own hand he lies… He’s four, not six, but he is the young philosopher, dreaming and making worlds.

  “Time to go, Jake-boy.”

  He sat up and stared at her, shocked. “But I haven’t had my snack!”

  When you have a child, you soon learn how quickly practice becomes tradition, and how quickly tradition becomes WRITTEN IN STONE. “Okay, but we’d better get indoors. It’s going to rain.”

  They retired inside the tumbledown shed, which smelled of spider webs and earth, and sat on an empty tin chest while Jake ate pita bread and slices of cheese. On his insistence she told him again the story of how Mummy and Daddy had once been pirates on the South China Seas. In the end they’d been shipwrecked on Bournemouth beach. They’d built this shed from the planks of their pirate ship (you could see the marks of cannonballs), and this was where they had lived until one day they found a treasure map that they’d forgotten about, recovered the gold, and used it to buy the house where Jake and Anna and Spence lived now.

  “If we get very, very poor, will we go back to pirating?” asked the child, hopefully.

  Anna picked fragments of horse dung and dead grass from his dark curls.

  “We’re not poor. We have a house with a garden, lovely holidays, new clothes and shoes whenever we need them. How can we be poor?”

  “I expect you have some more gold somewhere. For emergencies.”

  “Ah maybe so! A pirate never divulges the hiding place of her last treasure.”

  “Shere Khan has an island completely made of gold. She never tells anyone where it is.”

  “Except for Jake. Eat your last bit of cheese.”

  “Yes, she does tell Jake. And Nancy, but no one else. Remind me about the parrot.”

  “The parrot. Well, he belonged—a parrot by the name of Bill, I seem to remember—to the wickedest ruffian in all our bad acquaintance. But I don’t know what became of him.”

  Shere Khan was a female pirate captain who had emerged, somehow, from this story of the shed that used to be a pirate ship: with the name of the tiger lord from The Jungle Book, a dashing young mate called Jake, and a ship called The Royal Processor. It was Spence who maintained the annals, weaving ever more bizarre adventures for the wild, willful captain and her desperate crew: Jake the First Mate, Nancy the Knife and her brother Rafe, Black McGeer the pirate boffin, and all the rest. Anna wondered if he was aware of the touches of Ramone Holyrod that had crept into his characterization. Probably not. Spence had never liked Ramone much.

  Looking back, he’d had a right. For a while after Sungai those Suffer Birdone… letters had been intensely important to Anna: dangerously important. Reckless acts, reckless deeds, wholesale shipwreck might have followed. The letters had stopped, the danger had passed, and the rabid one had vanished into her success: no contact with her for ages. She wrote flashy books, she was a feminist pundit… The squall arrived. Rain thundered on the shed’s patched roof and rattled in the folds of the plastic sack that was taped over a broken window. Jake leaned against her, finishing his cheese meticulously. Anna closed her eyes. She was working so hard, full-time employment, and then whatever lab and machine time she could scrounge for the great mission. She looked forward to the one day a week that she spent looking after Jake (giving Spence a chance to write) as a major treat: but any time she sat down, it was hard to stay awake.

  Was there still a beach lodge at Pasir Pancang? In Sungai the forests were burning. Tough things were happening in that unlucky little country. Tough things were happening in the so-called “free world” too, as the old western powers slipped ever faster into decline; the twentieth century’s institutions and services vanishing into calamitous disrepair. And a clutch o
f grief at the heart any time you remembered the other casualties: ah, to know Jake would never hear a cuckoo’s song, ringing through the Hampshire woods. She lived in a frightening world that had lost its balance of power, scrabbling for stability and finding none; and the pirate treasure might yet turn out to be fool’s gold, or the expedition of the Hispaniola might founder for lack of funds. Next month might be the month when all the paychecks bounced and primitive strip-farming became her family’s only resource. Yet Anna was very happy, with her husband and her child, her frugal household arts and her dream, all sustaining each other. She was back on track: working hard, tasting the sweetness of life.

  After the Sungai bomb mopping-up, Parentis had transferred them to Mexico, which was where Jake had been born just about a year later. Spence had believed he could never want a child again, but the moment he agreed they should give up contraception, he’d felt as if he’d sprouted wings. He’d known that she’d get pregnant easily, and she did. He’d known that the baby would be a boy, and that he must be called Jacob, in honor of Anna’s Spanish-Jew roots and of the first recorded attempt at genetic manipulation (the version in the bible obviously the muddled report of some dumb journalist), and that everything would be fine. And it was. Spence’s Mom came south to be with them, which was brave of her considering she must have known the risk that she would be faced with awkward revelations. The shade of the baby’s complexion had been distinct enough to raise comment as soon as he was born.

  Spence, having acquired a black granddaddy and a big, perfect, coffee-colored son in the same hour, had only demanded “Why didn’t you tell me?” “It was for the best that you shouldn’t know,” Mom had pleaded. “I know Manankee County!” Anna couldn’t have cared less. “Look at this!” she said, laughing. “I am totally humiliated! Everyone who knows me is going to be convinced I bought the trait for a cool color scheme out of a vanity-parenting catalogue…”