by Fay Weldon
5
By ten o’clock we were on the underground on our way to the new award-winning, art-deco-maroon-and-white-tiled station at Nine Elms, having taken a ticket to Vauxhall. Robbie explained we would not actually get off at Vauxhall, but would stay on the train and pay the extra, the better to forestall watchers. He did not say who ‘watchers’ were. Juve-induced paranoia, I supposed.
Robbie had to use the kitchen scissors to disentangle the roots of the little tree from the carpet – it was a tender sapling scarcely a hand tall but already an inch taller than when I had first seen it – so tightly and firmly had they dug themselves in. He did it with energy and verve. I would have to put a rug down to cover the damage. But it was a small price to pay for getting the thing out of the house. I didn’t like the tree at all, and obviously neither did Robbie. He had placed it, along with its small quantity of muddy soil and some extra tufts of green carpet, inside a sealed zip bag, then put that into his brief case. He carried it with him, rather gingerly now, I thought, as if it was an unexploded bomb. But he remained inordinately cheerful.
After the phone calls, and after he’d showered and found a clean shirt, a fresh suit and a new tie – rather wide and bright yellow, which seemed to echo his cheerful and active mood – he’d suggested I come along with him to the office.
‘It would be good for you to meet everyone,’ he’d said. ‘And my friend Ben Marcus in the neurological department wants to have a word with you about trauma nightmares.’
It seemed as well to co-operate. If Ted had stepped into my reality last night without so much as the courtesy of a dream, and brought with him not just a scrap of mud but a living entity, and this colleague Ben could stop the dreams, then I must let him, whatever else lurked at Portal Inc. I would step into the mouth of the dragon.
‘Because you do love me, don’t you,’ he said, oddly child-like as I helped him with his tie. It took me only ten minutes to get ready: a clean dress, and sandals. No eye make-up.
‘Of course I do,’ I’d said, but I wasn’t sure. An adult Robbie on Doxies was easy enough to love: Robbie, on Juves as well, was fast developing a child-like, trusting quality, which came over as non-erotic, and I wasn’t used to it. But then I’d taken another wake-up pill and they helped me think clearly. I’d only had four hours’ sleep and I could see it was going to be a long, breakfast-less day.
Oddly enough, I rather enjoyed the journey, into the mouth of dragon though it might be. We sat next to each other. I felt at home and safe and liked the feel of his haunch against mine; I was wearing a rather pretty white cotton dress with red poppies on it and I knew I looked good. On our way to the station Robbie had taken another pill from his inside breast pocket, chewed it, and swallowed. He seldom kept things in his pockets, for fear or spoiling the hang of his suits.
‘A Juve,’ he explained, ‘I swiped a couple of extras last night. I’ve had quite a tough time lately; things are hotting up at Portal. Fucking funding priorities.’
‘All the more reason to look after your heart muscles, darling,’ I said. I had never heard him swear before; he was acting like some college boy. But then it was not in my nature to call men ‘darling’. Perhaps it was the wake-up pills. ‘They do say it’s stress that wears them out.’
We were at Archway before he replied. I sat silent. I thought, well, Robbie is a single-tasker. He does not usually talk and catch trains at the same time.
‘It’s not just about fucking heart muscles,’ he said. ‘Juves can make a guy, well, impetuous. But I’m well under control. Not like some I know. I’m not saying a thing. Juves kinda screw up a guy’s ability to keep his cards close to his chest. An anti-lie mechanism kicks in. Not a good idea in this business. They sure put a spring in your step, but they can make you stupid too, so you gotta know how to handle them, d’you get it?’
‘I get it.’ I said. And so I had. I was looking at the psycho-pharma future, where nobody was quite what they seemed. The depressed laughed, the frivolous ceased to smile, pundits believed their own lies. The crazy looked sane and the sane crazy. Doxies made you mistake sex for love and love for sex; Juves made you lose years of wisdom; my little pink pills evened me out into a false serenity. I no longer knew who I was. I’d given up knowing who Robbie was.
At least my wake-up pills helped me think, turned me from passive to active. They were also making me walk fearless into jeopardy. Of course Portal Inc wanted to bring me in. I was their contact with the other side, unwitting and unwilling as I might be, and their robot-slave Robbie had been sent to pull me in. Portal Inc wanted to make the dead walk. Well, fuck them. Maybe I’d rather join the dead than collude. In the meantime I was sitting on a train next to a husband who could not tell lies, and I should make the most of it.
‘Perhaps Cynara had taken a Juve yesterday?’ I asked. ‘She told me all kinds of things at lunch she shouldn’t have.’ Robbie thought about that a little.
‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Stock control is appalling at Portal Inc – they just dole stuff out. They’re far too sanguine about Juves. They’re dangerous in the wrong hands.’ ‘Are you telling the truth?’ I asked.
‘Probably,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s just so much easier to tell the truth: lies are so exhausting. Checking yourself all the time.’
‘I see,’ I said, and then I asked, as casually as I could, ‘are you taking Doxies?’
‘One every night before bed,’ he said. ‘Those are my instructions.’
‘Whose instructions?’ It was like one of those quiz games when you only have so many questions before time’s up. Any moment now and Robbie might decide lies were less troublesome than truth.
‘Portal’s of course. I have my bosses, like everyone else on this earth. Bob Dylan got it right,’ and he began to sing Dylan’s Gotta Serve Somebody, with a bit of air guitar. He was well away.
He stopped and looked at me earnestly. Along the half-empty carriage people shuffled and took up their print or e-reading matter. A well-dressed and handsome man with his cleft jaw and rosy lips and springy clean hair, on drugs or drink or both, and behaving strangely. But no-one did anything. All on psycho-pharms too probably.
‘But it’s nice being in love, Philly, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes, very,’ I agreed.
‘Strange stuff, Doxies. Pass it through the man and the woman falls in love. The Vikings used to pass fly-agaric mushrooms through their womenfolk, drink their urine and end up with berserker rages. The women did the twitching and got the head pains but mostly lived to see another day.’
‘Just great,’ I said. ‘But with the Doxies the man doesn’t get head pains?’
‘Oh no,’ Robbie said. ‘Just a good fuck.’
‘Doesn’t seem quite fair,’ I said.
‘Whatever was?’ he asked. ‘They were right about one thing. The dreams came thick and fast. Doxy sex seemed to bypass the thalamus and get right through to the epiphysis cerebri, where all that hallucinogenic stuff is stored. It was a screwy theory but it got the funding.’
‘I’m so glad,’ I said. ‘So Cynara was right: you’re my minder.’
He looked troubled, like a child trying to remember.
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ he said. ‘You always looked so pretty and nice. I do love the dress. Lucky you, being a five. We sixes have our problems. At least you can be happy. I like to make you happy.’
‘Are we talking IQ points here, Robbie?’
His hand was creeping round to my bosom. He fingered the nipple and gave it a tweak. I subdued a little scream.
‘What else? Sixes are too clever for their own good, I’m a six. 140 plus. I have trouble with empathy. University entrance is only four, 120 plus. You’re a five, I reckon: that’s between 130 and 140. Lower end, I should think. Most mediums are three’s: below 110. You’re an exception. Fives are nice. I love you.’
‘Okay. What’s Cynara?’
‘Five veering to six, that’s why she’s so difficult.�
� I moved his hand. He didn’t seem to notice. Up and down the carriage people relaxed.
‘Female sixes are very rare. They’re not easily employable. Lost in their own clouds. At seven Asperger’s drifts into autism. So no female eights. The female bell curve is steeper. You don’t get the extremes either end of the scale.’
‘And the ones who flew in yesterday and triggered a lockdown?’
‘Little Miss Curious,’ he said, frowning and suddenly suspicious.
Sooty tunnel walls of impacted London dirt and ancient brick flashed past the windows. We held hands. His mood lightened. He raised my fingers to his lips and looked at me with slow, dreamy, teenage eyes. I felt absurdly flattered.
‘I adore you,’ he said.
‘What does Portal Inc do exactly,’ I asked.
‘That’s easy,’ he said. ‘We study the links between the new psychoactive substances and such traditional paranormal phenomena as fall within the scope of entheology and neurobiology. Keep your voice down. We’re being watched, you realise? That guy standing over there by the door is the NSA.’ He was whispering, but smiling at the same time. It was an odd combination.
‘What is Portal’s connection with the NSA?’ Robbie didn’t take fright as I thought he might. He was too far gone.
‘None, really. We’re currently most favoured company, that’s all. They fund, we deliver the research. We’re the old CIA’s Stargate resuscitated. Within certain constraints we’re independent.’
‘That’s really good,’ I said, brightly. ‘What’s entheology when it’s at home?’
‘Entheogens – oh you little five, I adore you – are any psychoactive substances used in a religious or shamanic context – all that incense and chanting, all those voodoo drums and smoky fires and dancing about. You don’t even need the props, you sweetheart.’
I supposed I would get home again. They might prefer me as an in-house specimen, a guinea-pig, monitor me like an egg about to hatch something rare and valuable. On the other hand my credentials were in Robbie’s brief case: a plant, one could only infer, from the other side. Keep me in familiar surroundings, and who knew what I might not produce? A sapling today, a revenant tomorrow? I would play innocent, case the joint, go home, divorce Robbie and dream no more.
Robbie took off his glasses and polished them on the sleeve of my dress – it was a nice soft cotton and would do the lenses no harm. His unshielded eyes looked very blue and kind and luminous. He had a full, curved, sensuous mouth. Ted’s had been rather thin and could look mean.
‘When all this is over,’ he asked, ‘can we stay together?’
I read once about a man with a memory of thirty seconds. When his wife visited him he’d embrace her tenderly, crying, ‘Darling, how wonderful to see you, I love you so much!’ before falling back into baffled melancholy. He was on a memory loop and it was an automated response: anterograde and retrograde amnesia, poor man, he was stuck in that loop for ever. Still, it was nice to be asked, and Robbie took my hand again and we were just like authentic lovers.
‘Of course,’ I replied.
We were at Waterloo: only two stops to Nine Elms, and three to Battersea. I tried again with the seminal question. ‘Did Ted sleep with Cynara?’
‘I’m sorry about Ted.’ Robbie’s blue eyes were filling. A final jolt of empathy. ‘It wasn’t meant to happen. Nothing to do with us.’
‘No? Well, that’s good.’
‘It was our neighbour Jill, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact you might say if intelligence was a disease she’d be the healthiest girl in town!’ He laughed heartily, and I sort of laughed along too.
‘She’s one of ours. I recruited her. Your Ted had eyes for her, and we had our eye on you from way back.’
It seemed our house was bugged, and had been for years.
‘Even the bedroom?’
‘Well, of course the bedroom.’
But visitors from the other side had not shown up, though room temperatures could fall dramatically on nights I had Ted dreams. Then Robbie said things that really shook me. When our neighbours the Woodwards had called in at the gallery to buy their Warhol Mickey Mouse Jill had fallen for Ted in a big way. Richard had gone back to his showroom to fetch his debit card and Ted had fucked Jill in the back room in the fifteen minutes the cat was away.
‘Quite a guy, your Ted. Boris Becker had nothing on him. A natural font of SSRI’s. We had his hair combings analysed. A few men are like that. But it wasn’t fair on you, baby.’
It had gone on, on and off, for a couple of years. The night Ted died Jill had taken a Doxy. They’d been out in the moonlight, listening to the nightingales or whatever and having a quickie while they were at it.
‘We don’t know how she got hold of them. Cynara, probably,’ Robbie said. ‘Taken by a woman they can trigger an allergic reaction in the man a few hours later and that’s what happened. We had to get our own post mortem done. I’m sorry for your loss,’ he added as an afterthought. I presumed Portal Inc offered empathy training to all those sixes on its staff.
‘That’s all right,’ I said, but it wasn’t. That it was two years since Ted died didn’t seem to help much. Jill Woodward was so boring: we’d both despised her. How could he? And Jill, with Ted’s death on her hands. Bitch. No wonder she had been so upset when we were stuffing the turkey.
‘Ted did get about,’ was all I said.
We were at Kennington. The station had been redecorated, all silver tiles engraved with discreet stars and stripes. The train glided off smoothly and swiftly to its destination on new rails.
‘I admired your previous husband, Philly,’ Robbie said. ‘I want you to know that.’
‘I’m glad,’ I said.
‘Doxy love,’ he said sadly, ‘is nothing like true love. True love follows a man to the Other Side.’
We stopped at Nine Elms. Next stop Battersea.
‘Was Ted sleeping with Cynara as well as with Jill?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ said Robbie. ‘Cynara was anyone’s. Wouldn’t you if you were a guy? We none of us took her seriously. High maintenance too, mind you: all those dress bills on expenses.’
Robbie’s voice was slowing, his eyes losing their youthful lustre. The Juves were wearing off. But I had what I wanted, even though I didn’t like it. We were at Battersea. We sped on slinky shiny walkways to the return platform, to go back to Nine Elms, a change of plan which would not show up on our Oyster cards.
Ted, murdered by the neighbour he despised but shagged. I couldn’t run to the police. I’d seem delusionary, out of my mind: ‘Phyllis, the white witch next door who hears voices in her head and complained of poltergeists in her kitchen.’ Jill Woodward would look at the enquiring detective with steady, calm, sane, bourgeois eyes opened wide by an expensive plastic surgeon and tell lies and they would believe her.
Screwed by Ted – me, Cynara, Jill Woodward, and no doubt a whole host of others.
Fathered by Ted – Aspergery twins who didn’t tell lies.
Screwed by Robbie – Cynara, me, who else, the twins? It was a possibility.
Fucked by me – Ted, Robbie , and yes, others. I was the self-righteous bitch. I wasn’t without guilt. I hadn’t been totally faithful to Ted during the marriage – a passing Swedish professor when I was a student, a boss when I was an intern, a meeting on a train, a colleague at a conference. Sex with the stranger was always a draw, how you got to know the world outside your little circle of acquaintance. But always for me with the greatest discretion, never as a threat to the marriage. I’d always had a little doubt about the fatherhood of the twins. The Swede was a possible contender, though it was far more likely to have been Ted; we were young at the time, at it all day and every day, and the professor was only the once. Actually it had been one small source of relief when Ted was finally cremated and his DNA destroyed – the twins might well at some stage have wanted to have Ted’s paternity scientifically proved. I hadn’t reckoned on Robbie getting hold of an anci
ent hair-combing. But this was the old paranoia, a fear too far. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about. We’d arrived at Nine Elms and the new American Embassy was just across the way.
6
It was good to be above ground again. We walked together to Robbie’s workplace. It turned out to be a very ordinary-looking office block, four-square and a mere four stories high, sheltering in the lee of the great glittering prism of the new Embassy. ‘Forward into the Future * Shrine of Science’ was engraved in stone above the entrance. I had begun to imagine something far more sinister.
This was just a visit to my husband’s office for a consultation with a colleague about the oppressive dreams I had been having lately. I even looked forward to it – it would be a kind of confessional. I had nothing to be ashamed of, much to be proud of. And of course it went without saying that the sooner the dreams stopped the better. The last thing one wanted was for one sapling to lead to another – for the dam between the dimensions to be carelessly breached, and oneself to be in any way responsible. I could imagine a hundred US Marine security guards having to battle and chop away at a forest of encroaching trees – the same kind poor Ted faced nightly on the other side – as they took root and flourished in the Embassy grounds. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Security at Portal Inc was agreeably unobtrusive. I did notice that the amiable girl at reception sat behind a typewriter, not a computer. Indeed, during my stay in the building I saw not one single computer, just card indexes and paper files. Here secrets stayed secrets, one supposed, and were not susceptible to hacking: knowledge was exchanged verbally. Everything seemed relaxed and normal, and rather old fashioned. Only when I got to the diagnostic centre, with its futuristic screens and state of the art equipment, was I conscious of any intrusion by the modern world. Our arrival had been anticipated: cameras had noted our approach. The only thing that struck me as quirky was a small automated trolley of moulded plastic which rolled forward to meet us as the glass doors slipped open at our approach. Robbie dropped his briefcase and cell phone into it and the trolley moved swiftly and silently back and disappeared through a hatch into the bowels of the building.