by Fay Weldon
Robbie was let through by iris recognition, but a verbal my wife – she’s with me wasn’t enough to get me past reception. The building swallowed Robbie up and I was left to have inked fingerprints and these were checked by a human being not a scanner taken – heaven knows where they’d got the originals for comparison. This took an irritatingly long time, and it was half an hour before I was shown in to a waiting room: it was of the formal kind that Harley Street doctors still have, unchanged since the fifties in order to soothe old ladies, all velvet curtains and chintz sofas. Almost at once a red haired and bearded man in a rather dishevelled suit bounced in and introduced himself at Robbie’s colleague Professor Ben Marcus. It seemed he’d been expecting me.
He led me down corridors to his office. Robbie was all lean and angular and tidy: this man was fleshy and large and enveloping and looked more like a lumberjack than a neuropsychologist. I liked him at once. I have a weakness for large burly men into whose clasp it seems natural to melt, but now was not at all the time or place.
The office looked like any doctor’s consulting room – a desk, a couple of chairs, a photo of a dog, a coffee machine – apart from a typewriter and a big old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder. My breathing came a little oddly. I felt short of air.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Red Beard said. ‘We’re climate-controlled, vibration-protected and dust-free. Make yourself at home. I’d like to talk a little with you and take a few notes. After that we’ll go into the lab and do a test or two.’
‘I’m all yours,’ I said. But I felt wary. Robbie might have lured me into this place to hand me over for experimentation. Scientists will be ruthless in the pursuit of knowledge.
Red Beard offered me coffee from the machine, but I was cautious. I asked for hot chocolate if there was any. It was less likely to have been tampered with – to contain a powdered Doxy or Juve than the coffee which they expected me to choose because I’m a girl and hot chocolate is fattening. When it came it was suspiciously sweet. I thought what the hell, and drank it. A phone rang and Red Beard was called away. I was grateful; I could just sit there for a little in neutral surroundings and think.
What Robbie had told me on the train was beginning to register. I was fairly certain he had been telling the truth. He had confirmed what Cynara had told me over lunch, that I was indeed part of an experiment. I was watched, spied upon, drugged up to the eyeballs. The hot chocolate probably contained some fucking truth drug. Red Beard’s absence was probably calculated to give it time to work. I no longer quite knew who or what I was, or trusted the validity of anything I remembered as happening to me, or whether I could even tell the difference between dream and reality. Jill Woodward had caused Ted’s death. Ted had betrayed me with both her and Cynara. I had been mistaken in him: believed in the self-congratulatory illusion of ‘I love Ted, therefore Ted loves me’ for twenty years. ‘Love’, I realised, had been the staple of my existence. I had defined myself as a woman who loved men. Without that anchor I was adrift in a sea of meaningless sensation; a fluttering of SSRIs in the head did not add up to an identity. I was almost sorry for Robbie: it must have been difficult for him during all these months of Doxies and Juves to keep track of who he was. Somewhere beneath the surface lurked a real self I had never met. Red Beard returned.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘The last thing I wanted to do was keep our most important client waiting.’
It occurred to me that he was treating me rather as one treats royalty, with a mixture of deference, fawning, and an intense desire to manipulate. It was quite fun to be at the receiving end of such unaccustomed respect. But he asked myriad questions, and I talked and talked: he took down my answers in what I assumed was shorthand. My adoptive mother, a trained secretary, sometimes used these strange squiggles for grocery and laundry lists. Perhaps Red Beard was so clever that he could diagnose my mental and emotional state with a single squiggle. I was being recorded on the creaky old tape machine too, its twin spools quivering in a bath of climate-controlled air.
Red Beard’s questions involved the frequency and intensity of the dreams, whether they were recurring – I told him recurring but with variations, and he listed the variations. Why did I describe them as dreams not visions? What traumas had I had in my life? I referred to my birth parents, which seemed to rather startle him; I realised I probably hadn’t mentioned the manner of my adoption to Robbie, all so long ago and dire besides that none of it seemed relevant and all of it too daunting for an ardent suitor. That must have gone on for at least an hour. I felt very relaxed and happy and had some more doctored hot chocolate. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.
Then we went on to list and classify the various minor paranormal experiences I usually kept quiet about, and he seemed particularly interested in the jumping rubber episode. I was about ten and had trained an Indian rubber on my school desk to leap into my hand. I’d been pencilling in the names of all the towns in Britain, and spending a lot of time reaching for my eraser because I’d got them wrong or not written them neatly enough; I was bored and frustrated so I taught the rubber to jump into my hand. Beth Audley in the desk beside me saw it happen and had hysterics and refused to sit next to me anymore. So I stopped training things.
‘When you say taught, Mrs Whitman, what exactly do you mean?’ I was pleased he called me Mrs Whitman, not Phyllis, Phil or Philly. ‘Mrs’ might carry the tang of age, but also of due respect. I thought over his question.
‘A mixture of concentration, will and impatience.’
‘Impatience? Can you clarify?’
I explained that I’d been annoyed with the whole situation. It just saved time having the rubber come to me rather than me having to search for the rubber. In the end I’d been licking the rubber so often and hard the map disintegrated over the city of York anyway. I realised there was always a downside to taking shortcuts between ordinary procedures; knowing what a letter said before it was opened meant it brought bad news: knowing what the cinema was showing before you got round the corner meant the film would be a disappointment. I was late for a dancing lesson and stopped the town hall clock just by wishing, but then it wouldn’t start again for months. Once or twice a tin of tuna or something would end up in my hand when I was looking for it. And then there was the wedding ring. That was really odd, but I could have been mistaken. I’d been on a diet and the ring slipped off in the sink when I was peeling potatoes and went down the waste disposal. I turned it off at the wall and put a hand – I have small ones – down it to fish around for the ring but I couldn’t find anything. When I gave up and manoeuvred my hand out the ring was back on my finger, only now on the middle finger, where it fitted better. That was considerate of whatever it was: just sometimes it was on my side.
‘What was your mood when it happened?’
‘Well, as I said, I was peeling potatoes. Impatient, bored, it had to be done but the sooner it was over the better. That sort of mood.’
‘But no sense of training the ring?’
‘No, I wasn’t thinking at all, just trying to find the bloody thing.’
‘Ted’s ring, or Robbie’s?’
‘Ted’s, of course.’ I was indignant – that got a circle round the squiggle. And so it went on. I was tiring. I accepted another Juve-and-hot-chocolate, or so I assumed it to be. It took more effort to tell lies than the truth. I had nothing to lose. Then the talking stopped, and we moved to the lab and the hospital scenario began.
The lab was wall-to-wall futuristic, monitor displays crouching dormant but alert, softly blinking lights, tiny little bleeps, medical instruments designed to analyse the state of any human body offered for their concern. And very, very hygenic. There were no corners, no firm lines: all was curved and cleanable: screens and lighting inset flat with walls; not a screw head visible, nothing to trap dust. I marvelled that I’d lived so long and so healthily at Dinton Grove, it being so full of the nooks and crannies of domestic life where bacteria multiplied unh
indered, and I was surprised the professor had not been asked to shave off his beard; it was bushy and raggedy enough, I thought, to harbour an army of germs.
Technicians and nurses aplenty attended, all in hospital scrubs. There was a series of blood lettings – the automaton trolley hovered, came, received and went. Graphs flashed up on screens. There were internal examinations: I am perfectly sanguine about this kind of thing – once one’s had twins most ladylike sensibilities are gone for ever. I allowed my body and mind to pass into the care of others.
Only when I was required to lie in an MRI scanner in a lead-lined side-room did I feel nervous. Forty minutes, they told me. I hate the things. They strip one of all metal and one is enclosed, helpless, at the mercy of others while they try and deafen you in the name of science. Clang, clang, clang they go in your ear, driving all sense out of you. But I went like a sacrificial victim naked to the slaughter. My clothes were folded neatly on the chair beside the great hooded pink plastic cylinder. Red Beard made himself scarce. I was left with two technicians, Billy and Mo. They were very talkative:
Mo.... It’s a 7.5 Tesla. Most are only 1.5. This can see everything you’re made of. Really state of the art, so expensive there’s only one in the whole country; a magnetic resonance so strong it can pull the metal fillings out of your teeth. You’re our first patient. Aren’t you the lucky one!
He clucked and fussed around my naked body. He waxed enthusiastic with pride. I was happy to assure them that my fillings were all composite.
Billy.... We know that.
Me.... But what are you going to be looking at?
Mo.... Just taking a little peek at your conarium or epiphysis cerebri, in old-fashioned terms your pineal gland.
But that was my precious third eye! I felt protective of it at once. I remembered it well from my time with the Theosophists. What Billy and Mo planned to inspect was the invisible eye in the centre of my forehead in front of the pineal gland, the portal that leads to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness. My adoptive mother Marion became a member of the Theosophical Society when I was fifteen, and I would be sent off with the Young Theosophists to have apple juice and biscuits while the adults pondered on the Oneness of Everything. All talk was of the ‘atrophied third eye’ with which the ancients saw a higher range of reality. Mine was less atrophied than most, it seemed, and I was outed as ‘a seer’ after pretending to see the ghost of the recently deceased treasurer. I refused to go to meetings after that; it all seemed so silly. The biscuits were whole-wheat and home-made, the boys were pimply and the girls wore long scratchy hand-woven woollen skirts. Fortunately my adoptive mother was not averse to giving up the meetings either: there were some things we agreed on. She always preferred a glass of champagne to fizzy apple juice.
But I could see that today my third eye would have to look after itself. It would have been churlish to object; Billy and Mo were so excited about their new 7.5 Tesla toy. The pink plastic cylinder opened up like a mummy’s sarcophagus; they sedated me, put muffs over my ears, closed the lid down on my prostrate body and slid me into a dim pink void. Every claustrophobic nerve in my body cried out in alarm.
‘Don’t move,’ I’d been told, and sheer fear kept me immobile. I began to hear what the technicians were saying, through pink plastic walls, through ear muffs, and despite a strange clanging noise which grew progressively louder and sounded to me like hammering on the gates of Hell. There was no way I could actually hear what they were saying, yet I did: in the same way I could hear the thought voices of Ted’s relatives after he died. I had gone into telepathic mode. My pineal gland was being stimulated, no bloody doubt about that.
Mo.... Shit! Something hit me!
Billy.... Ferromagnetic projectile. Sodding shrapnel. Better note that for the records – what was it?
Mo.... She had a safety pin keeping her bra together.
Billy.... Idle slut.
Mo.... What’ s up with her pineal?
Billy.... God knows. Seat of extra-sensory perception. Hears voices? Sees things? They reckon this 7.5 will sort it. They’ll get a cell-by-cell picture.
Mo.... Resonance at this strength heats anything up. Everything inside is going to hop about like a box of frogs.
Billy.... If it doesn’t implode.
Mo.... This machine frightens me.
Billy.... But it’s state of the art.
Mo.... It’s already tried to kill me. Supposing she’d left the safety pin open? It could have got my jugular.
Billy.... Perils of modern life.
Mo.... Pretty girl though. Fit! You’d never have thought she’d had twins.
Then they stopped talking or I stopped hearing them, I’m not sure which. The banging got louder; and now I was through into the forest, where Ted was in the clearing, but now beginning to make headway through his normal impenetrable tangle of foliage. I began to help him, chopping away like him at the branches and creepers which stopped him getting through. We were making some progress: there was light at the end of a tunnel though it seemed to me we were going in the wrong direction, away from it not towards. I began to feel frightened. I shouldn’t be in here. Ted’s head, arms and shoulders were at last free. The twins were there too, busy, untangling vines with nimble fingers. They were for all the world like the young Norns of Norse mythology, weaving the fate of mankind from the entrails of dead warriors, deciding who would live and who would die. Ted’s right foot was free now, but his left foot was still trapped by a net of foliage, made up of little saplings like the one which had grown in our carpet last night. Perhaps Ted had visited me in a dream I’d not remembered, bringing with him a seed the same way he’d carried mud in on his shoe the night before – only that time he had brought something that was living and growing. I shouldn’t have taken a sleeping pill. They didn’t stop dreams happening, they just stopped one from remembering them?
We were through now to a place where trees grew more sparsely and Ted could move freely. Now the twins went into Cheshire-cat mode and faded away. Ted turned to me and said: ‘The great juggernaut of progress is not easily held back. You have what you want,’ and I thought: ‘but you’re dead and I’m alive; what can you possibly know what I want?’ The dream world is nothing to do with ours, I realised, it is an alternative universe, and perhaps those that dwell there share it with the dead and they all don’t get on too well. Ted wrenched his foot free: he simply stepped out of the open sarcophagus into the lead-lined booth and walked off through the wall, leaving me trapped and immobile, prostrate in my hospital gown with the dreadful cacophony still attacking my ear drums, stopping all thought and all fear. Just when I thought I really couldn’t stand any more the clanging began to slow and quieten, and finally stopped altogether, and Billy and Mo slid me out blinking into the open.
Then there was a spell of general dazed blank dizziness until I was back on my chair in the consulting room and Robbie was shaking me saying, ‘Wake up, wake up!’: which was odd because I had assumed I was awake. I was dressed and decent, if without my bra. I supposed it had been listed and kept as evidence; just another case of a magneto-ferrous projectile. Robbie seemed agitated. The investigation was at an end, Red Beard was busy clearing away, wiping down, or whatever one did in a climate-controlled, vibration-protected, dust-free environment. Mostly it seemed to be feeding records into the shredder. He too seemed unduly agitated and kept stopping and patting his beard in the mirror to quieten it. The trolley was flitting to and fro, apparently without purpose. That seemed as spooky as anything.
‘Philly, you feel all right, darling?’ Now Robbie was easing the tension between my shoulderblades. I felt a surprising surge of sexual desire. But again this was hardly the time and place. I felt light-headed and cheerful.
‘They’ve asked you to come in for an interview. We must hurry. They’re already in session. We weren’t expecting this.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘The big guys,’ Robbie said. ‘The LIFLs and the ADFs
who flew in and caused the lockdown. They’re conferring upstairs.’
‘I call ’em the Live Forever Lads and the After Death Freaks,’ said Red Beard.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Robbie said.
‘Why should I?’ I asked. ‘I have nothing to hide.’
‘When was that ever a reason not to worry,’ said Robbie, with a flash of shrewdness which reminded me of Ted. Did all husbands, in the end, merge into the one?
I asked what the acronyms really stood for. Robbie and Ben looked at one another as if wondering whether or not to trust me.
‘Tell her,’ said Ben. ‘She knows more than enough already. So much for security.’
They sighed, in unison: I was a mere five. I was reminded of the twins. It was as if the word ‘wife’ kept one out of important matters – decorative and useful for dull, practical matters, and for the satisfaction of lusts, but one was basically replaceable. If I’d been the one to die, not Ted, who would have replaced me? Cynara? Jill next door? Probably neither. Robbie would have explored new possibilities entirely: and the twins would have shed a tear and gone on to eat food cooked by the new wife and lie in sheets laundered by her and the waters would have closed over me, and Robbie and Ben would get on with their work lamenting the loss of one interesting guinea pig. As for Robbie, I now simply discounted him. All those nights of passion? Nothing, nothing: Doxy dreams, every one.
They explained. LIFLs were Life is for Living adherents, a movement whose ambition was to lengthen telomeres via stem-cell technology and with the aid of spare-part bioengineering, rattle hell’s foundations and conquer death’s domain so that humans could live forever – or at least those members of it who had money to pay, which would keep numbers down quite severely. The ADFs were a voluble splinter group, the After Death Friendship society, who felt death was inevitable, and it was important to reach out to ‘the other side’.