Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  The new adventure, which as anyone ought to know from that last line and a half, was Spence’s homage to Bram Stoker and had to feature Gil Bates, dastardly cybervillian. (His editor had loved Gil Bates in The Eighth Sea and demanded more.) He fancied pinning the plot to something about shifting ocean currents, adult jokes go down so well…

  If only Spence could be at the start of a new adventure, but he was trapped in dark December, no respite from the muddy, lowering skies—

  In all his years of monogamy he’d never tried to amputate his sexual imagination. That Filipina maid, Josie, of Number 3 on the poolside terrace at Nasser, whose sexy smile and lovely round butt had brightened his days… When he’d seen Meret with Charles and realized, o-oh, the kid’s unhappy at home and I am playing with fire, he’d still carried on undressing her, handling in his imagination the sugary little peeled-almond body: slightly hostile fantasies, lust mingled with resentment. It was an addiction. And yet alongside this she’d genuinely become a friend, a great collaborator: she was such a sweet kid. Meret’s admiration and respect—completely unexpected, a gift from heaven—had jumped him out of the dire malaise he’d been suffering the summer Jake started school. She had made him realize that he loved the Shere Khan stories, that this was his dream niche, the work that was play. She had been more of a companion than Anna, fuck it, over the past two years. He couldn’t drop her: even if it were professionally feasible.

  So much testosterone in distress about these days, gangs of angry young men roaming the seafront; you had to pity them, but there were other male role-models, even more annoying. He was continually irritated by seeing his own life featured on lifestyle pages, what happened to being ahead of the game, what happened to being like nobody else? It made him want to commit a regression. It made him feel that his slow, timid, undercover lust was ridiculous. Who would cure him of Meret? Shit, why did he need to be cured? A little harmless flirtation, what the fuck is all this fuss about? Better get back to the pirates. Ah, the days that were caught in the pages of these picture books: the taste of rain on wild raspberries, the hot dust of the roadside, the times when thinking up more Shere Khan for a fretty brat had been as much fun as having someone reduce a compound fracture without anesthetic… Every moment so precious, washed and shining in memory. He just wished he could make up his mind. Anything would be better than this pointless…

  He decided to send Mer an email. Something anyone could read.

  Christmas was horrible for Meret. Misery settled in on Christmas Eve, when they were dressing for Julie’s party. Charles gave her, in his off-hand way, a jeweler’s box.

  “You might as well have them now,” he said, “since we’re going out.”

  He knew she’d have preferred to open her present on Christmas day. It was typical of Charles. He would ruin something for her, pretending he was being sensible: but she would see that sly smile in the back of his eyes, and she knew he was doing it on purpose. In the box was a pair of earrings, set with large diamonds and emeralds, ostentatious and dull, the kind of trophies his middle-aged friends’ wives wore: nothing to do with Meret or who Meret was. What cut her to the heart was that she had made a big effort, as she always did, to get him things she knew he’d like (an expensive science book with beautiful photographs, a snakeskin belt, a heavy silk shirt in his best color). She threw the earrings across the room and shouted and sobbed. They had to go to the party anyway, Meret with pink eyes, Charles in a sulk. Christmas has a terrible power: nobody dares to break the rules and stop pretending.

  The disappointments continued the next day, as she sat with her mother and father and Charles and the children, and they opened their presents over Bucks Fizz and a breakfast of fresh muffins and scrambled eggs with slivers of truffles and organic smoked salmon. Dad didn’t look at his presents, just grunted and sat there shoveling food into his face. Florrie and Tomkin started squabbling. Charlie wailed because nobody was paying him enough attention. Mum was the only one who was happy, having license to drink at breakfast time. Meret opened her presents with hope, though she knew this was fated, because nothing you hope for ever comes true, the only joys are unexpected. Not one of them was anything she liked. Charles had already left the table and settled in his armchair in front of the business results, as if neither his family nor Christmas existed: first switching off the Christmas tree lights so they didn’t interfere with the picture on the screen. It was such a beautiful tree. There had been a moment—yesterday, some fleeting moment when she was hanging up her favorite crystal star and Charlie was sitting on the floor being sweet—when she had been truly happy… She stared at the oblivious top of her husband’s head with hatred.

  “I think we should subscribe to many-To-many. It’s the best supplier; they have the radical quality channels and unbiased news coverage.”

  “It’s too expensive. They don’t get the advertising; what can you expect?”

  “Spence and Anna have mTm.”

  Charles made a derisive noise.

  In the darkening afternoon she wandered despondently around the house. Her brother Blondel and his wife were here with their children, and Mummy’s sister Madeleine with her grown up sons. Meret had cooked herself to death while her mother and her aunt infested the kitchen, sniping at each other. She had laid the table beautifully, with ivy and Christmas roses and tinsel ribbons. What was the use? As soon as everyone sat down Charles started trying to force Tomkin to eat things he didn’t like, which was STUPID and IMPOSSIBLE. Then Blondie started a fight with Dad over nothing, and the rest of them quickly pitched in to make things worse. Now the children were running up and down the stairs shrieking, and as far as Meret was concerned the pudding, for which she had carefully simmered the brandy sauce and saved a perfect holly sprig, could stay in the microwave until it was concrete.

  Tomorrow must be divided between Charles’s father, and his mother and stepfather, and Tony, the stepfather’s divorced son—who’d come home to live and who hated Charles.

  Oh, God.

  Someone had left the door of her studio open. Kilmeny was crouched on the highest shelf of the bookcase, bug-eyed with terror, while her father’s two fat Blue Persians stalked below like disgusting live fur-covered cushions. One of the bastards had been sick on Meret’s desk, so copiously that not only was the work she’d been doing ruined, sick had run down the frame of the desk and was splattered over the books and papers and scarves and pens and paints that were lying on the floor. Weeping, she threw the brutes out and fetched a roll of babywipes. The filthy grey sick was still warm. She screwed up her drawing and threw it in the wastebin, and knelt there wiping art books and crying, under the big framed photograph of Le Déjeuner en Fourrure. The photograph was by someone famous, a friend of her father’s. It had been there since she was a little girl, when this had been her bedroom. She’d never had the courage to tell Dad that she hated that fur-covered cup and saucer. She couldn’t look at it without feeling the choking hair in her mouth, as if someone were pushing it down her throat. The horrible cats were yowling and scratching at her door. It opened and her father came wandering in, the gangsters gliding smugly ahead of him. He strolled to the windows and stood there swaying slightly, fists thrust in the pockets of his saggy trousers, gazing out into the grey Christmas night.

  “Diffugere nives…” he rumbled. “Mmm, how does it go? damna tamen celeres reparant caelestiae lunae… But whatever the seasons mar the moons repair again, while we go down into the dust forever. Not any more, eh? We’re the immortals now, and all creation else is doomed, emasculated, tortured into unnatural forms, on the way to extinction.”

  “Get those fucking monsters out of here,” wailed Meret. “Or I’ll kill them!”

  Godfrey did a lumbering turn and fixed the delinquents with a stern eye and an admonishing finger: “Xerxes! Darius! Go to your baskets at once!” The Persians went on staring balefully up at Kilmeny, with heartless orange saucer eyes.

  Meret laughed, through her tears of rage.r />
  “Do other people have Christmases like this, Dad?”

  “Of course they do, darling. We may not be perfect, but we’re excruciatingly normal.”

  “Spence says… Spence and Anna think the way to be happy is to learn to do without things, luxuries and modern inventions. It’s weird, isn’t it. Considering what she does.”

  “Perhaps it’s guilt. Or perhaps the puritans know something we don’t, about the riches of the modern world, or something we prefer to ignore. Who knows. Your mother’s drunk as a skunk. Madeleine told me to fetch you, to help get her to bed.”

  She helped to put her mother to bed, tried to persuade her grown-up cousins to help her clear up the kitchen, failed, and stayed at home with the children while everyone went to the pub. She had some peace then, cuddling Charlie in front of A Muppets’ Christmas Carol until it was time to put the older ones to bed. She had planned a Christmas sleepover for them in the basement playroom, airbeds and sleeping bags as if they were pirates camping on a treasure island, and a grab-bag of Christmas goodies for a midnight feast. She tried to read to them, from Shere Khan and the Canary Wharf Tower, the first of the Shere Khan books and her favorite: with the beginning in the Southwark fog, the sewer rats and the archbishop, and the terrific fight up in the top of the glass pyramid. It didn’t work; the little beasts wouldn’t listen. Juniper and Maisie were bored; Tomkin kept making fart noises and carping comments.

  “Why are they eating chips? It’s stupid to have pirates eating chips.”

  “Because they’re poor.”

  “It’s stupid. Why are they poor?”

  “When pirates have money, they spend it. Then they have none. They’re feckless outlaws; they don’t plan for the future. Can’t you relate to that? Oh darling, leave Florrie alone, you’re being horrible. Florrie, don’t bite him—”

  Her children were hell, simply hell. Why couldn’t she have a child like Jake Senoz, who never had a tantrum in his life? Just say no, said Spence. Tough it out. It’s easy if you have only one child, she’d told him. If you have three, you can’t spend your whole time toughing it out. You have to give in to them or you’d have no life… Easy enough to have only one child, he had coolly pointed out. He was right, Meret had made a mess of everything. Why didn’t she get Charles to hire a nanny? Because she loved these children unbearably—and because Charles was disgustingly stingy. He said, you’re at home all day, what d’you need a nanny for…? Oh, but sometimes, deep in her heart, she longed to take Jake along to McDonald’s, feed him a Big Mac and fries and a chocolate shake, and have him gobble up the dreadful food of the evil empire, just to show Spence.

  She left the children to do what they liked, returned to her studio and coaxed Kilmeny down from her perch. Kilmeny was tortoiseshell and white, gentle and pretty and affectionate, everything the Persians were not. Meret set her on a cushion and knelt in front of her, giving her the admiration she craved: “Oh bonny Kilmeny, Ye’re welcome here!” Since everyone was out, she could check her email. There might not be a message; he probably hadn’t been able to get away. But oh, if there were…

  She didn’t ever phone him; or he her. Tones of voice could put you off; she wanted words she could think about. She wanted lines, so she could read between them. She wrapped herself in a shawl that had escaped the cat-vomit and sat at her computer. Yes, there was a message, a beautiful tingling message.

  Oh dear, she thought, planning ahead, in spite of herself. He’ll never leave Anna. But the thrill of having a romance…it was her only consolation.

  Another year had begun, in wind and storm. Anna lit a candle at bedtime, for the coziness of it, and cuddled up with Jake under his duvet. Ah, how time flies. She was reading him The Lord of the Rings, what happened to Spot and Pookie and The Very Hungry Caterpillar? “Why is Saruman the head of the White Council?” asked the child. “I mean Gandalf’s got the ring of fire, which is the top elven ring, and he’s a main character. Saruman is so nasty and selfish, why did they have him?”

  “Well, Gandalf was Galadriel’s candidate. I expect that didn’t help. The White Council is a humans’ thing, even if it’s made up of wizards. Tolkien never says so, but I would bet that’s how it happened. The humans wanted someone who would push their point of view, which meant Saruman although everyone knew he was a jerk and probably on the take. Does that make sense?”

  “Sort of. Not really.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s office power struggles for you. Shall I go on?”

  Snowstorms on January the twelfth: there was no need to come back to report that… There were shadows looking over the hedge into Anna’s garden. Sometimes, in stolen moments of domestic art, she would raise her head from the treasured task (chopping vegetables, polishing furniture, sewing buttons on Jake’s clothes) and find herself listening, with her heart in her mouth. For what ogre’s footfall?

  I will make it all right. Afterwards. First I have to take the ring to the fire.

  She tried hard, and mainly succeeded, not to think about the human implications of Transferred Y, and in this Nirmal was her perfect ally. Human sexual identity? Leave that for the psychologists. If you find out anything about human sexual identity from infertility genetics, it’s that there is no straightforward match between variations in chromosomal sex and the behavior of the individual. Such a stupid thing to fight about. Wasn’t there enough trouble in the world? If you followed the news, if you ever looked up from the unbelievable grind of work and caught a glimpse of the grim salvation that might be hurrying to the rescue of Clare’s precious living world, you had to recoil in horror. Not that! There’s got to be another way! Is there another way? Will anything break us out of this dreadful fall?

  She did not want to think about the meaning of what she was doing, but she had recurrent nightmares of looking down into a dark mirror, as if into the reflecting lens of a telescope. In the dark something appeared and grew: beautiful and terrible, a devouring vortex. All human life ends in there.

  And so it went on: Spence prevaricating, Meret like a child at a sweetshop window, Anna racing against time. For the first time in her life she knew what it was like to live like an ambitious scientist: scouring the journals, jumping at shadows, convinced that there were competitors leaping on her trail. Any moment, any day, some other team might snatch her victory… It was poisonous, but it was exhilarating.

  She didn’t talk to Spence about Transferred Y because the thing was sub judice. None of the team talked about it. There came a point when they knew they had information (the survey) that was dynamite, but they never discussed the outside-world implications. They were in the home stretch, nothing else mattered.

  In January she found out that one of the Australians had privately warned Nirmal that Anna was going too far. How come this man had had access to the unpublished material? The time for secrecy was almost past, but even so! She came near to having a fight with the boss about it. This is my department, said Nirmal. The work we have done will appear with my name on it. But if you wish to continue, in spite of this advice, I will support you. Anna was oblivious. She put the incident down to stage fright. The paper had been accepted. How could they withdraw it? Why would they? Then the paper was published, and immediately the storm broke.

  One day in early spring, Nirmal called her to his office. She went along unsuspecting. The tabloid journalism was a joke, and the actual scientists who had leapt to the attack were the usual suspects, nothing credible. She thought that Nirmal had called her in to discuss tactics. Instead he showed her a private email, from the team leader in Melbourne, casting doubt on the existence of the male XX effect, suggesting it was an experimental artifact. Anna laughed. She should not have laughed. The interview went into a destructive spiral, while Anna sat reading the printed email upside down and remembering too late that behind the Melbourne team lay their guru, a certain senior geneticist called Dr Pat McCreevy, Nirmal’s lifelong rival. Oh, the pure realms of scientific endeavor are riddled with these enmities,
and you’re a fool if you don’t take them seriously. Oh shit… To be called into question by Pat McCreevy was guaranteed to make Nirmal irrational.

  She heard herself say all the wrong things. What does it matter? The so-called “male” human chromosome changes shape, so what? This is about something far more important! She did not accuse her boss of absurd sexual panic, but when he told her that there is nothing more important than human dignity, she did not agree. When he said he now believed their announcement had been premature and must be withdrawn, she objected furiously, and so—

  It was the school half term. She came home in the middle of the day and was hurt to find the house empty. But Spence didn’t know there was a problem. She’d told him long ago there would be controversy, how could he know anything worse had happened? She went round to the Rectory. Spence and Meret had left the children with Meret’s mother and gone out together. They came back to find Anna waiting for them with a face like death and thunder. “Hi,” she said to her husband—and dimly, dimly, it crossed her mind that it was strange they’d left the children behind. “Hello Meret,” she added politely…“I’ve been fired.”

  iv

  Once Ramone came down to the south coast conurbation for a gig and pulled out at the last moment, because she was sick of the game, these “lectures” that were really fucking Tupperware parties for the product. She walked around the streets that had been familiar long ago, saw a woman with a child, and followed them. It was dusk, the moon riding high in a clear abyss of blue. The trees in the park were leafless; it was winter. The woman was wearing a slim black coat to her ankles and a close-fitting cap. The child was in a dark red duffle coat with a brightly colored muffler. It trotted to keep up, holding tightly to Mummy’s hand… Ramone seriously considered becoming a stalker. She would move to Bournemouth secretly and follow this contented young mother about, up and down the promenade, in and out of the funky shops, around the parks and gardens. She decided later that it couldn’t have been Anna.