Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  She let it all go by. She felt that she was living a half-life, persisting as a statistical anomaly, fading into nothingness. Days passed. She ate, she slept, she did domestic work, she didn’t speak, and no one bothered her. One afternoon she was in the garden, picking bugs off the tomato plants with Clarissa. Clarissa suspected that Chelo, the unwed father of Hilary and hir little brother Paul, was still carrying on with the children’s mother, and that his girlfriend in the commune house didn’t know about it… It was a crying shame, because this girlfriend Ronan was a recovering alcoholic, a survivor of parental abuse and maybe incest. Clarissa was going to tell Dorothy: something had to be said—

  “What do I do with the caterpillars?” asked Anna.

  “Oh, get a rock and mash them. We don’t use pesticides, but you can’t leave ‘em for the birds; these days there just aren’t enough birds.”

  Anna had come to the same conclusion at home. Get a rock and mash them; it was the only way. But cabbage white caterpillars were her downfall, so charming in their subtle tweeds, the fabric soft as velvet. She remembered, one day, she had decided she couldn’t bear to kill any more of them. She had Spence and Jake carry a jam jar full of remand prisoners through the house. Spence lined them up and pointed down the street. “Off you go, bugs. Go off and join the circus!” Jake, looking up at his daddy, wondering if this could be normal behavior, even for his nutty parents…

  Spence and Jake—

  Solidity fell on her. She let the caterpillars fall and looked around her.

  “Are you okay? Hey, I’m real flattered you spoke to me—”

  “I’m okay,” she whispered, “Uh, I think I’ll go and find LouLou.”

  LouLou was sorting laundry in the utility room.

  “Hi,” said Anna. “Can we talk?”

  LouLou beamed. “Oh-hoh. She speaks!”

  “I’ve been behaving strangely, I know.”

  “You have not! My no-good son was cheating on you; you found out and took off. There’s nothing strange about that.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Of course not. Everyone’s trouble feels different to them. So what was it like?”

  How often she had seen Spence come down from his work room, or arrive back from a hard day on the kiddy-book promotion trail, and just sit. Anna, in much greater fatigue, would zoom about picking lint from the rugs. Maybe when you have to spend your life running faster than the Red Queen, you became addicted to high-speed drudgery. She picked up a sock and found its mate. I can’t do nothing; I can’t be idle, not ever.

  “I was upset because of all the fuss about Transferred Y. Really, I don’t mind about him and Meret. I’m all right now. Thank you very much for looking after me. Who do these pants belong to?”

  “Chelo. Nope, Marcie. You can talk, but you still don’t want to talk about it, huh.”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “You know, Anna, maybe you should stop guarding that private territory of yours so fiercely. Like that Ramone Holyrod says. Become epimeletic. Try to treat everyone like a brother and a sister, be intimate.”

  Anna thought of a bedroom bisected by string.

  “Epimeletic? Is that Ramone’s new word?”

  “Ye-uh. Like the bees. You know, kind of like the grooming, cuddling, stroking that goes on inside the hive, which is the future, and more our natural behavior than the poke and run of conventional sex.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I know it would do you good, but if you won’t talk you won’t. I can still tell you this much. You won’t start forgiving until you stop making excuses. I know you, Anna. You didn’t deserve what he did. You’d never cheat on anyone. So what do you plan to do?”

  Anna shrugged, shook out a shirt, and settled it on a hangar. “I’m going to hope Meret doesn’t insist he gets a divorce, and learn to live with it. Is that epimeletic enough?”

  “Oh, really? That’s strange, because from what I hear Spence does not have polygamy in mind. What makes you so sure you can’t show the girlfriend the door?” LouLou gave her daughter-in-law a dry, sideways look. “You saw his mom off soon enough.”

  And I’d do it again, thought Anna, compressing her lips. It was you or me.

  “Atta girl,” said LouLou, when the renewed silence had lasted until the basket was empty. “You carry on your own sweet way. Heaven forbid Anna Senoz should cry on her mom-in-law’s shoulder, like the common herd.”

  Before supper every night the group would come together to care and share. Everyone took turns to lead the meeting. Anna usually sat with them, out of politeness. Tonight the leader was her least favorite, Andreas the former Mormon, a thickset, pale-skinned young man with red lips in a black beard.

  “I want us all to tell something that we admire about ourselves… I admire the way I finally got up the nerve to wear my dress to work,” he went on. “I didn’t want to do it, because I felt I’d just be doing this macho thing of challenging the norm.”

  “Who’s Norm?” piped up Ritchie, a bright eyed little terrier of a dyke who often sported a jaunty fake moustache: the house’s self-appointed comedian. “A friend of yours?”

  “Sssh.”

  “But here I am in a dress and pantyhose and high heels, and I spent my whole time today explaining I’m just a normal guy in a dress. I want to say it has felt good.”

  “I want to say I think the sheer pantyhose and heels are unnecessary,” announced Clarissa, “and I think you were right about yourself first time. You try too hard.”

  “This is my thing, Clarissa. I want to go the whole hog, spike heels and all.”

  “The whole macho hog. Right.”

  “I wear heels,” put in Marcie. “I love pretty shoes. Since these things are fated to pass away, I think we can enjoy them while they last. Like national costume. Like Christmas and Hanukkah and the Eid.”

  “I admire that I learnt how to juggle,” announced Hilary the inter. “I didn’t think I could.”

  “I admire,” said Anna.

  A little stir went through the circle, a quiver of attention,

  “I admire my ability to buckle down an accept a new situation. There have been several times in my life when everything has fallen apart, but I’ve picked myself up and started again. I’m glad I can do that.”

  “Hey hey!” whooped Ritchie. “You didn’t tell us it was short for Polly anna—”

  “Yeah,” said LouLou darkly. “You certainly have that ability.”

  “I know you know about me and Transferred Y. I don’t know if you all know—” Anna blushed, “—t-that for me, TY has been all confused with personal problems. But I believe I’m sorting them out. I believe I’ll get back on my feet.”

  They nodded, and waited, but their prophet had nothing more to say.

  “Thank you, Anna,” said Dorothy at last.

  The sharing moved on.

  The next day, LouLou and Anna made another trip to the store. The town center—a few streets of white clapboard houses, two antique shops and a library—was quiet as usual. They filled the trunk with brown paper bags full of treats, staples, and beer.

  “That was a nice thing you did, last night.”

  Anna nodded.

  “I take it this means you’re feeling better. You thought about talking to Spence?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What a grocery packer you’d make. No slouch at cleaning up or ironing, either. The world gained a scientific genius and lost a great talent in part-time employment and housewifery. Are you going to adapt to needing people a little more from now on?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Attagirl. Gee, you’d better not get much better. I don’t know if our little community could stand a fully armed and operational Anna Senoz around the house. I don’t mean that. You know you’re welcome, as long as ever you want.”

  This was a pre-emptive strike. They both knew she was leaving.

  While she was with them, she’d thought the Transformationists
had nothing to teach her. On the train going back to New York she changed her mind. Anna would never do what they had done, drop everything and follow the new, not if an incarnation of the living God made the blind to see and the paralyzed to walk right in front of her. She was a fixed star, a rooted tree: but she could admire their courage. Even if she suspected most of them would have drifted off to the next snake-oil show in a few months’ time.

  It was a slow train. A woman got on, a middle-aged woman with grey streaked hair and a fine, dark, aquiline face. She sat opposite Anna. She was casually, stylishly dressed. She looked good; it was a pleasure to have her sitting there. Their eyes met. It was only a glance, but the secret warmth of it ran through Anna’s veins. She realized, intrigued and astonished, that this might, if she chose, go further. She imagined herself leaving the train with this very attractive person, in silent accord: going with her to a bar, the two of them both ready to get sexual. It wasn’t impossible; it was the way some people behaved.

  Ah, she thought, turning to gaze out of the window. Ramone.

  Anna’s secret nest-egg, Anna’s ace in the hole. This long affair, which Spence had always found so threatening; did it really make all the difference that it had never been physically consummated? It made some difference, but not all the difference. So where did Anna Senoz get off, flying into despair because Spence had ruined the purity of their contract? It was never as pure as all that.

  She had bought toilet things, tee-shirts and underwear, and a bag to put them in; she was on her way home. But her stay in the commune had only restored her mind’s mechanical strength. There was still a great blank in there, a whirling void of confused fragments. It felt like the time when she had first been pregnant with Lily Rose. Here was the street with the gingko trees, here was the dark building: a very unpleasant color, she noticed, like dry, stale blood. She tried her keycards. The doors to the lobby opened, no problem. Perhaps that obligatory session with the “recognition program” had been an invention: possibly it would have involved the lady visitor being obliged to remove her clothing, something like that. She tiptoed to the lifts.

  Apartment seven was emptier than it had been before. None of the surgical looking stuff had moved, but there had been a vase of dead tulips on a carved block of Perspex: they were gone. Some art books were gone, from a lectern by the fireplace-slab. Other things that she didn’t remember in particular, except as patches of color and form, had been shifted around. It looked as if the owners had been here and they’d gone again. Or someone else had been here, to collect the trio’s possessions. However, Anna’s cabin bag was lying just where she had left it.

  “Well,” she said aloud, “Tell her I came, and no one answered. That I kept my word.”

  She sat on the floor, her back against a cold, white wall, keeping an eye on her two bags, now propped against each other for company, as if she were in an airport. She had been in such a state, the last time she saw this place, that she now felt as if she had climbed inside a picture of a bad dream, a dream of which she remembered nothing but this decor and an acute, sickening disquiet. Who is Ramone Holyrod? she asked herself. Someone I invented. My exterior soul. The person I wished I could have been; my repository for those parts of my self I couldn’t use or didn’t want in my real life. Feelings that would have come between me and ordinary happiness. Ideas that would have made it impossible for me to pursue my life’s work. Truths that would have made me an outlaw.

  Or a crackpot.

  But my ordinary happiness is gone, my life’s work is gone, and those outlaw truths—

  She had come to the end of the journey, which had begun in those hours of silent, passionate remembering on the road from Manchester. As the beat of a bass-line can raise the ghost of ecstasy, so that it walks through the mind as delicately as the spirits of John Keats’s claret; as REM the memory drug, the regressor, taken in mild doses, can bring welling from deep springs an inexplicable bliss, she felt rising towards her, joining with her, becoming one, the Anna out there, the wild girl on the other side of the dark glass. Well, she thought, I have achieved something. I’m battered and broken, I’m tattered and torn, I’ve suffered cruel losses. But what else do you expect, at the end of such a great adventure? I should be satisfied: and I am. The room grew dim. Anna stayed where she was, thinking: afraid she hadn’t been and couldn’t ever be fair to LouLou, wondering if Anna Senoz was a horrible person, and should she try to change herself or should she turn determinist and give up in despair? Or should she just go on being Anna, trying to be the best Anna she could be—

  The cardlock clicked, a loud noise in the silence. The door to the apartment was opened, slowly, by someone unseen. A face peered around it. It was Ramone. She was clutching a bunch of letters. She looked about and seemed gratified by the emptiness. She turned and hauled in her bags and shut the door carefully behind her.

  She saw Anna. “Hallo! What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you. Where have you been?”

  Ramone smiled—a warm and happy smile that reached her eyes, totally different from the manic glaze one had seen in publicity pictures of the ménage à trois. Evidently the rabid one had found herself again.

  “Having a second honeymoon.”

  She came over and sat down by Anna, the smile turning into a more Ramone-like malign grin. “So, the famous Dr Senoz, I presume.”

  “Notorious. Briefly notorious. It’s over already.”

  Ramone cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think so! I flatter myself,” she added with a glint of resentment, “that I’m going to be mentioned in biographies.”

  “Knock it off, Ramone. If you know about my claim to fame, then you must know that I’ve been trashed. Fired by my university; denounced as a nutcase. So much for that.”

  Ramone drew out a battered dayglo tobacco tin and a zippo from the pockets of a jacket too heavy for the season. “Shall I skin up? Why are you here?”

  “Please. I’ve run away from home.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Spence is having an affair with his illustrator.”

  “His illustrator? Huh? Oh, yeah, I know. The kiddy books. I’ve heard of them. The bastard,” said Ramone, looking pleased. “What’s her name? What’s she like?”

  “Her name’s Meret, like the surrealist woman, Meret Oppenheim. Her father’s called Godfrey Hazelwood, a well known painter in his day, but she’s never gone in for what,” Anna managed not to look at the surgical table, “is known as pure art. She’s small, dainty, and very feminine. She has long red-gold hair, green eyes, and the sweetest smile.”

  “D’you want me to get rid of her for you? Shall I kidnap her and torture her in a deserted house?”

  “No need for that.” Anna took the joint, and drew on it gratefully. “She’s married to Charles Craft.”

  “She isn’t!” Ramone cackled. “Charles Craft! What a fate, hahaha. Small world!”

  “Isn’t it.”

  Anna felt she had to make some kind of declaration, after coming all this way, but she couldn’t decide what form should it take. Here I am. Do I stay or do I go? “How are you, anyway? What have you been doing, since you gave up being a feminist?”

  “Oh God,” said Ramone, curling her chimpanzee lip. “The feminists!”

  “Lesbians, bitter housewives, and fat people,” recollected Anna, with a grin. “I don’t think you’re going to eat lunch in that town again.”

  “Hahaha, I’d rather starve.” Ramone looked worried. “I did qualify the lesbians.”

  “Ye-uh. You made some bullshit disclaimer that you were trashing only an unaware, full-of-shit, sexist kind of lesbian. I don’t believe the targeted group was fooled.”

  “Umm… Oh well, I don’t care.” Ramone flicked ash across one of the room’s beautiful pale fur rugs. “I’m flattered you’ve been committing my press-releases to memory. I tried to read a paper of yours once…the bits in English.” She laughed. “You know what, Anna? When
we first met, and I ranted about the disgusting way post-liberation women behave? Freed slaves, no political perspective, nothing but groveling, simpering opportunism. I was right, but I was fucking wrong about them being helpless. They’re everywhere. Especially over here. They’ve got no interest in leaving gender roles behind. They are out and proud shameless female supremacists, and I don’t like them. I used to say, women ought to be the Goths and Vandals, sweeping in to rape and pillage. Now, that’s exactly what they’re doing: and the joke’s on me.”

  “At least you haven’t lost your sense of humor. I dunno, the rape and pillage has never worked for me. I’m as screwed as ever a woman scientist was.”

  “Well, maybe.” Ramone gave Anna another curious look. “Since you’re here, you can explain to me what the fuss is about. As far as I get it, in about fifty or a hundred years or something, all human beings will have two X chromosomes. But about fifty percent of these human beings will be physically male and fertile, and about the other fifty per cent female, likewise. So what is so exciting about that?”

  “Umm…”

  “It’s bullshit, isn’t it? Nothing’s going to change.”

  “Well, hmm… How much can you follow, if I try to explain? I suppose you know that in male mammals, the X and the Y chromosome don’t exchange genetic material much, because they don’t match up well. Whereas all other chromosome pairs reshuffle their genetic traits?”

  Ramone rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows that. They bloody do now, anyway. I bet mammalian sex genetics is a big topic in Ulan Bator this season.”