Perfect People

by Peter James

  Naomi raised her voice in disbelief. ‘Sexual maturity? What exactly are you saying? Phoebe’s not even two years old – are you telling us she’s sexually mature?’

  The paediatrician stared back with a helpless expression. ‘I’m afraid what I’m saying is exactly that. Extraordinary though it may seem, Phoebe is having her first period.’

  61

  In the car afterwards, Naomi and John sat for some moments in stunned silence. John put the key in the ignition but did not turn the engine on; instead he rested his hands in his lap. The car shimmied in the wind.

  Precocious puberty.

  Naomi shook her head, staring at the rain-crazed windscreen.

  Bone age will be advanced and serum oestrogens will be in the pubertal or adult range. Oestrogen halts growth. Many children with this syndrome are likely to end up with stunted growth. Early development of breasts. Untreated, a five-year-old girl will have the sexual maturity of a teenager.

  ‘The pills will work,’ John said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘He said they might work. They might slow down this syndrome, but they won’t cure it, John, that’s what he said. Sometimes it helps, that’s what he said. Sometimes.’

  ‘At least it’s not life-threatening.’ Then, after some moments, he added, ‘And – everyone is telling us how big they are for their age. Phoebe wouldn’t be this big if she had stunted growth.’

  ‘And Luke? Why is he so big?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why either of them are.’

  ‘Dr Otterman said the children have physiology closer to three – even four – years old, not two.’

  ‘But he did say their rate of growth will probably slow down.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sure it will,’ John said.

  ‘What makes you so sure, John? The integrity of Dr Dettore? That fills you with confidence, does it?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘I want the children to have every possible medical test,’ Naomi went on. ‘I want to find out just what other surprises we are in for; what else that madman has done to them.’

  John started the engine and began manoeuvring the Saab out of the parking space. He spoke quietly. ‘Dr Otterman said this won’t affect her, and she will be able to lead a normal life.’

  ‘For most women, John, leading a normal life means having children. Do you have any idea how she is going to feel when she reaches her teens and all her friends are entering their prime? When she starts dating? What happens when she falls in love? How is she going to explain to someone in twenty years’ time, Oh, by the way, I had my first period when I was not quite two years old and went through the menopause when I was fourteen?’

  ‘He didn’t say that, hon. He said this condition doesn’t affect the menopause, that she wouldn’t have an early menopause.’

  ‘He didn’t know, John. He said he would know more after the scan. He said no two cases were ever exactly the same.’ She rummaged in her handbag, pulled out a pack of tissues and blew her nose. ‘Stunted growth. That’s great. After telling Dettore we wanted our son to be tall, our daughter is going to be a dwarf.’

  ‘You’re worrying at the moment that she’s too big for her age. She’s not going to be a dwarf.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Look, there will be a lot of advances in medicine over the next twenty years – if we find out that—’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, interrupting him. ‘And Phoebe is a victim of one of them. Great to know that our daughter is a guinea pig – and a freak.’

  ‘I think freak is a strong word. She’s not a freak.’

  ‘So what is she? What euphemism would you like? Maturity challenged? Vertically challenged? Perhaps it’s a little too realistic a word. But that’s what she is, John, that’s the reality we have to face. Courtesy of Dr Dettore, our life savings and loans from my family, we have produced a freak. How does that make you feel?’

  ‘Would you rather she hadn’t been born? That neither of them had been born?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel. Tell me what you feel – I never know what you are thinking.’

  ‘All I ever wanted was—’ He lapsed into silence.

  ‘Was what, John? What was it you wanted? Tell me, I’m all ears. And you ought to put the wipers on, might help you see where we’re going.’

  He put the wipers on then pulled out into the street. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, after a while. ‘I don’t know what the hell I wanted. I guess, just the best for our kids, for you and I, I just tried to do the best for us.’

  ‘Is that what you’d like to think?’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Did you really want to do the best for us? Or did you want to satisfy your cravings as a scientist?’

  He braked more harshly than he needed at the end of the street. ‘You don’t trust me, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know what I think any more, John.’

  ‘That’s very hurtful.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Naomi, I’ve always told you the truth. When I first found out about Dr Dettore, I told you everything I knew, and I warned you there would be a risk in going to him. We both agreed to take a chance.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t spell it out quite loudly enough,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t listen quite hard enough,’ he replied gently.

  She turned and stared at him. Stared at the man she had once loved madly, wildly, crazily. The man she had been through so much with. The man who had given her the strength to get beyond the loss of their son, and the will to go on living.

  Stared at him with a hatred so intense that if she’d had a knife in her hand, she honestly believed at this moment she could have stabbed him with it.

  62

  The day began in the monastery of Perivoli Tis Panagias the same way it had begun every morning for the past eleven centuries. At two thirty in the morning, beneath a sky still crowded with stars, the knock of wood on wood rang out. The summons to matins.

  In the marbled glare of moonlight, the stark drumming rose to a frenzied crescendo that was more a shamanic beat than a gong. It rang out across the shadows of the courtyard, echoing off the worn flagstones and the cracked, peeling fortress walls surrounding the mostly derelict buildings.

  In his cell the Abbot rose from his narrow bed, lit the oil lamp on his dressing table, crossed himself beneath the portrait of the Virgin Mary, and dressed quickly in his black robes.

  When he had first entered this monastery as a young novice, sixty-four years ago, it had been Yanni Anoupolis’s task to rise first, and go out and call the brothers to prayer, by hammering with the mallet on the ancient teak plank hung from rusty chains in the cloistered courtyard. Then he had been a young man of twenty-two, whose heart had ached to serve God.

  Now it wasn’t just his heart that ached, but so much else, also, especially his knees and his hips. The body that housed him was decaying just like the buildings that housed the few remaining monks here. His eyesight was steadily failing, month by month, and so was his energy; he did not know how much more time God would spare him, but at least he had the comfort of knowing that after years of uncertainty, the future of the monastery, perched high on this rock atoll in the Aegean Sea, twenty kilometres south of the Greek mainland, was assured.

  Father Yanni pulled his cowl up over his head, then, supporting himself on his stick, walked down the stone steps and into the courtyard, the reek of burning oil from the lamps in the church porch offering scant but welcome relief against the sharp, damp sea air. Behind him he heard the footsteps of three of the four other monks who remained from an original community of one hundred and ninety, when he had first come here.

  Entering the rear of the church he crossed himself again, then stood for some moments in humble silence in front of the beautiful Madonna and Child icon. The blessed Virgin Mary! She protected them all on this island. And she had rewa
rded him for his lifetime of devotion by bringing the American here to save them.

  He wondered if the American would be joining them for matins. Some mornings the American sat beside him, usually accompanied by young novices. Other days, the American had told him, he preferred to hold his own private prayer vigil in his room.

  Father Yanni loved to see these novices in here, all such gentle, polite young men. So sincere, so devout, so dedicated, praying with such vigour and fervour. The energy of youth!

  The American’s name was Harald Gatward. He was a good man, the Abbot knew that much, but he knew little else about him. Only that the Virgin Mary had brought him here – which was all that he needed to know.

  The monastery of Perivoli Tis Panagias had been built in the ninth century as a remote offshoot of the Holy Mount Athos, providing an alternative haven for Greek Orthodox monks. They lived an ascetic life here. Worldly pleasures were strictly forbidden – these were temptations by Satan to distract and corrupt. This included chatter. Conversation was strictly on a need-to-know basis. Idle gossip led to malcontent and sin.

  The Abbot was the only monk on the island who spoke any English, and his grasp of this language was limited and mostly archaic. He assumed the American must be a very rich man. When the Council of the Greek Orthodox Church had made the decision that they could no longer justify the cost of running Perivoli Tis Panagias for just five monks and had placed the tiny island on the market, hoping to attract a property developer to turn it into a resort, the American had outbid everyone. And this wonderful man had assured the Abbot that it was God’s will that he and his four fellow brothers should live out their lives in peace here.

  Of course there had been a few changes. The biggest of these was the new buildings, and women arriving on the island. But they were housed beyond the monastery walls, and none of them had ever encroached on the church, nor entered the refectory.

  *

  In his tiny cell, even more modest than the Abbot’s and lit by a solitary candle, Harald Gatward knelt beside his bed, face buried in his hands, communing with the Lord in a prayer vigil he had held, with only one short break to check his emails, since eleven o’clock last night.

  Gatward was a shambling bull-necked giant of a man, six-foot-six-inches tall, with a baby face that belied his fifty-eight years, and a mane of shaggy, greying hair that hung down from either side of his bald dome. A former colonel of the 51st Airborne, Gatward had been decorated for courage under fire in Vietnam.

  And later that same year, on that same field where he had earned his honours, he had held the charred body of his fiancée in his arms as she died. An over-enthusiastic US military helicopter had inadvertently dumped several gallons of self-igniting chemical defoliant onto a field hospital and its staff, just as he was arriving to collect Patty at the end of her shift.

  She had run towards him, her clothes, her hair, her hands, her legs, her face all burning, screaming for help. He’d rolled her over on the ground, torn his own clothes off and bound them around her to smother the flames. But no sooner had they gone out than like some joke candle on a birthday cake they reignited.

  Later, long after the flames had died and she had begun to cool, her skin suddenly slipped away from her chest and her arms, as if he was easing her out of a coat.

  ‘Dear God,’ Harald Gatward said as he kneeled against the bed, ‘when you created man you made him in your likeness.’ After a brief pause he repeated the same line. ‘Dear God, when you created man you made him in your likeness.’ And then he repeated it again.

  No human being should ever have to die the way Patty died, Harald Gatward believed. Chemicals had killed her. Man messing around with chemicals caused all kinds of problems in the world. All the bad shit. It was Satan who put the formulae into people’s heads. Now stupid, hubristic man was no longer messing around just with chemicals, he was fooling around with human life itself. Doing all kinds of shit with genes.

  God had informed Harald Gatward throughout his life. He had told Harald how to turn the inheritance from his father, who had made a sizeable fortune with auto spares manufacturing plants in Asia, into a multi-billion-dollar global empire. He had told Harald that it was right to go to Vietnam and fight for his country. He had shared many secrets with Harald over the years, many insights, many visions. He brought Harald to the monastery of Perivoli Tis Panagias to save the monks. That was important but that was only a small part of the reason he had come here.

  The real reason, God had explained to him, was that from his island, Harald Gatward must begin the work that would save the world from scientists.

  The sun will never set again and the moon wane no more; the Lord will be your everlasting light and your days of sorrow will end. Then will all your people be righteous and they will possess the land for ever. They are the shoot I have planted, the work of my hands, for the display of my splendour. The least of you will become a thousand, the smallest a mighty nation. I am the Lord; in its time I will do this swiftly.

  You will be named the Disciples of the Third Millennium.

  63

  Naomi had lunch with Rosie, and was so engrossed with discussing what had happened she forgot the time. She was now ten minutes late. Shit.

  To her relief as she drove into Caibourne, in torrential rain, she could see she wasn’t the last. Two large off-roaders were pulling up ahead of her outside the homely, slightly dilapidated-looking detached house close to the village church that hosted the twice-weekly playgroup, and there was a line of cars stationary in front of those.

  She parked untidily, one wheel on the pavement, battled the driver’s door open against a strong gust of wind, then as an afterthought hastily popped a chewing gum in her mouth to mask the alcohol on her breath. She didn’t like being late – punctuality was one of John’s Swedish traits that had rubbed off on her.

  She shouldn’t have drunk anything, because she was driving, but, hey, she thought, these last two and a half years, since well before Luke and Phoebe were born, I’ve had no life. Now they’re getting a little older, I’m damned well going to have one again. And anyhow it was just two glasses, with food, over a two-hour period. Not exactly reckless.

  The path to the front door of the house was a chaos of lashing rain, hurrying mothers, tangled children and tangled umbrellas. Muttering brief hallos to a few familiar faces, Naomi hurried through them, head bowed against the elements, and made it into the sanctuary of the building.

  The hall walls were covered in children’s paintings, stuck up haphazardly, and a row of framed certificates. Squeezing past a bunch of mothers trying to get their children into coats, Naomi went through an open door into the main playroom. A tiny girl, wearing Walkman headphones, was bouncing up and down on the very beat-up-looking sofa. Another girl sat at one of the tables, engrossed with an assortment of plastic creepy-crawlies and prehistoric monsters. Two small boys, one in a green hard hat, the other in a baseball cap the wrong way round, were arranging vehicles in a multi-storey car park on the floor.

  No sign of Luke or Phoebe.

  As she squeezed her way back into the crowded hall, Naomi saw one of the mothers she had met before, who had been very friendly to her. She was busy wrestling her small boy, Nico, into a red coat.

  ‘Hi, Lucy!’ Naomi said. ‘Horrible weather – September is usually such a—’

  The woman, in a plastic rain hat and drenched Barbour, gave her a cursory nod, then dragged her child out towards the front door. Before Naomi had time to react, Pat Barley, who ran the playgroup, a tubby, jolly-looking woman several inches shorter than herself, with a pudding-basin hairstyle, was standing in front of her.

  ‘Hallo, Mrs Klaesson,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if we have a quick chat?’

  ‘No – of course,’ Naomi said, a little surprised at her sombre and formal tone. ‘Where are Luke and Phoebe?’

  Instantly, she detected awkwardness in the woman’s face. ‘Just in the small playroom, through there,’ she said, pointing th
rough another doorway.

  Naomi peered in. Luke and Phoebe were sitting side by side on a settee in total silence, staring blankly ahead.

  ‘Hallo, Luke, darling, hallo, Phoebe, darling,’ she said.

  There was no hint of acknowledgement from either of them.

  She exchanged a glance with Pat Barley, who signalled Naomi to follow her.

  They went through into the kitchen, where there was a long table covered in paint-spattered paper, Styrofoam cups of paint, and dumpy little dough figures covered in paint and glitter. A helper was sponging vivid red and yellow streaks from the face of a small girl in a blue plastic apron.

  ‘Look, Mrs Klaesson, this is rather awkward for me,’ Pat Barley said. She was wringing her hands and staring evasively down at the floor. ‘I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, please. But I’m afraid there have been complaints.’

  ‘Complaints?’ All Naomi’s positive cheer suddenly evaporated.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ Pat Barley seemed to be trying to wring water from her hands. ‘You see, my problem is that parents are so sensitive these days. This really isn’t anything personal—’ She hesitated. ‘Oh dear, I don’t know how to break this to you. I know you are newcomers to this part of the world and we really should be trying to do all we can to make you welcome. But the problem is that I’ve had – well – not just one or two complaints, you see – but about half a dozen, actually.’

  ‘About Luke and Phoebe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sort of complaints?’

  There was a long silence. The helper, a tall, reedy-looking woman with an inane smile, was evidently listening, which was fuelling Naomi’s discomfort.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s the way Luke and Phoebe interact with the other children here. They are among the youngest in the group but they don’t look or behave that way. For their age they seem quite a bit older, physically – and the way they behave is really quite out of character for children this young. For want of a better word, they are – terrorizing – the others.’