Perfect People

by Peter James

  She told him life sucked.

  79

  Shelia Michaelides hurried to her Victorian terraced house in the centre of Brighton, her tiny umbrella useless against the gale, and she was drenched by the time she reached the sanctuary of her hallway. Changing into a dry pair of jeans and a sweater, she made herself a coffee, took a Marks & Spencer tuna pasta salad out of the fridge, then carried a tray up to her little study, sat down at her desk and booted up her computer.

  Her mind was churning as she dug her fork in to the pasta, and her stomach felt knotted with anxiety. Haven’t eaten all day, must eat something! She chewed slowly, each mouthful a struggle, forcing herself to swallow, her throat tight and dry. Rain scratched the window, and through the darkness she could just make out the silhouette of her neighbour’s house across from her back yard.

  She stood up suddenly, leaned forward and unwound the cord from the hook, letting the blinds drop.

  She was shaking. Shaking from a fear she couldn’t define. Always she had been in control. Now for the first time she felt out of her depth. There was some syndrome that Luke and Phoebe Klaesson had which she had never encountered, and it spooked her, increasingly.

  She began typing.

  Luke and Phoebe Klaesson observations. Day Three. These are not human beings as I know it. They are manipulative, brooding, in a way that suggests the normal restraints of human existence are absent. Clear signs of sociopathic behaviour, but something beyond that . . .

  She stopped and thought for some moments. She needed to talk to other psychologists about this, but who?

  The cheese plant filling the small space between her desk and the wall looked in a sad state, badly in need of watering. She went downstairs, filled the can, came back and poured the contents into the arid soil, thinking, thinking.

  Thinking.

  She typed again.

  Autism? How to explain this speech between themselves?

  How?

  Then, reluctantly, she forked another mouthful of pasta into her mouth and chewed, thinking. Thinking . . . there must be other case histories out there somewhere, in papers, in books, surely?

  She was a member of a child psychologists’ newsgroup on the internet, that circulated a weekly summary of case histories, new treatments, new drugs and general information. It was a good group, with psychologists in over thirty countries participating, and in the past she had always received informed responses to any questions she had asked.

  She typed out an email, summarizing her observations of Luke and Phoebe, asking if anyone else had ever experienced anything similar with a patient.

  To her surprise, the following day she received emails from ten psychologists. Five of them in the United States, one in the United Arab Emirates, one in Brazil, one in Italy, one in Germany and one in Switzerland.

  Four of the psychiatrists informed her, separately, that the twins they had seen with similar characteristics had been conceived in the offshore clinic of the murdered American geneticist, Dr Leo Dettore.

  She googled the name Dr Leo Dettore.

  Among the first batch of hits that came up, one was indexed:

  Newspaper. USA Today. July 2007. Dr J. Klaesson.

  LA PROFESSOR ADMITS, ‘WE’RE HAVING A DESIGNER BABY’.

  80

  Mr Pineapple Head wore striped trousers, huge shoes, a red nose and a leather hat shaped like a pineapple. He was going down a storm, at any rate for the four children who had come to Luke and Phoebe’s third birthday, who were in fits of laughter. John and Naomi, her mother and her sister, Harriet, and Rosie were also finding his antics extremely funny.

  Luke and Phoebe were the only ones who didn’t. They sat on the floor, staring at the man in stony silence, rejecting all his attempts to get them to join in doing tricks with him.

  It had been a struggle for John and Naomi to get any other children to come to this party. Jane Adamson, Naomi’s friend in the village, had dutifully delivered her son Charlie, who had come in with evident reluctance, clutching a present in one hand and holding on to his mother with the other, eyeing the twins nervously. Naomi had also enlisted a timid girl called Bethany, whose parents had only moved into the village this week and didn’t yet know anyone. Rosie had brought her youngest, Imogen, and a colleague of John had brought her spirited four-year-old son, Ben.

  Suddenly, halfway through the performance, Luke and Phoebe stood up abruptly and walked out of the room.

  Exchanging a glance with John, who was standing to one side, busily taking photographs, Naomi followed the children out into the hall and closed the door behind her. ‘Luke!’ she called. ‘Phoebe! Where are you going?’

  Ignoring her, they trotted upstairs.

  Louder, now. ‘Luke! Phoebe! Come back down at once! It’s very rude to leave your friends! You absolutely cannot do this!’

  Angrily, she ran upstairs after them, calling their names again. She saw them entering the box room and followed them in.

  The computer she and John had given them for their birthday sat on the floor, where John had temporarily set it up after they had unwrapped it this morning. Both children squatted beside it.

  ‘Luke!’ Naomi called.

  Ignoring her, Luke touched the keyboard, and the monitor came alive with a blank Word document.

  Phoebe said something to her brother, then tapped several keys in rapid succession with the competence of a touch-typist. For an instant Naomi was too amazed to be angry. Then she walked over to the wall and yanked the plug out.

  Neither child looked at her.

  ‘It’s your party, Luke and Phoebe,’ she said. ‘You have friends here. Mummy and Daddy have got you Mr Pineapple Head as a special treat, it was very rude to walk out on him, and very rude to leave your friends. Now get up and come back down at once!’

  No reaction at all.

  Furious now, she grabbed Luke and Phoebe each by an arm and hauled them up onto their feet. Still there was no reaction. They just stood, sullenly.

  ‘DOWNSTAIRS!’ Naomi bellowed.

  It produced not the slightest response.

  She tried to pull them towards the door, and to her shock, found she could not. They were resisting with a strength that was more than a match for hers.

  Releasing Phoebe’s hand, she pulled Luke as hard as she could, jerking deliberately to try to unbalance him. But he stood his ground, his polished black lace-up shoes slipping just a fraction on the carpet pile before digging in.

  Close to losing it, she yelled, ‘If you don’t come downstairs right away, you’re going to bed, both of you. No computer, nothing. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?’

  John, camera in his hand, was standing in the doorway. ‘What’s going on?’ he said.

  ‘Dr Michaelides is right,’ she said. ‘We should put them in a bloody institution, miserable little sods.’

  She released Luke’s hand. John knelt down and stared at him, then gently but firmly took hold of both of his hands. ‘Listen, little fellow, you and your sister are having a birthday party and you’ve got friends here and a great clown. I want you to come down and behave the way a host and hostess should behave. OK?’

  Naomi watched Luke. In his navy trousers, white shirt and tie, black lace-up shoes and serious face he looked more like a miniature adult than a child. And Phoebe, in a floral dress with a lace ruff, had an expression like ice. You’re not children, she thought, with a shudder. You’re bloody-minded little adults.

  God, just what the hell are you?

  John stood up. Luke and Phoebe gave each other an unreadable look. Then, after a moment’s further hesitation, Luke walked after his father back out into the landing. Tight-lipped, Phoebe followed.

  They re-entered the living room. Luke and Phoebe walked solemnly to the front of the little group and sat back down on the floor, crossed their arms and fixed their eyes on Mr Pineapple Head, who had engaged the help of Ben in spinning plates on sticks.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Harriet whispered to Naomi. />
  No, she wanted to say. Not all right at all. Instead she just smiled and nodded. Fine. Absolutelysodddingfine.

  *

  That night, after her mother and Harriet had both gone up to bed, Naomi stood wearily in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher and passing plates to John, who stacked them back in the cupboards. Fudge and Chocolate were wide awake, both pressing their faces against the bars of their hutch, making their funny little chamois-leather-polishing-glass squeaks.

  Naomi poured herself a large slug of wine. ‘This residential facility that Dr Michaelides mentioned – maybe we should think about it after all. I’m at the end of my tether, John, I don’t know what to do any more. Maybe they’d respond better to discipline if it comes from someone they don’t know. Perhaps after a couple of weeks they’d start to see reason.’

  She picked up her glass and drank half the contents in one gulp. ‘I never thought in a million years I’d say that. But that’s how I feel. I don’t know what else to do.’

  ‘They were bored today,’ John responded. ‘That was the problem, I think. That’s what Harriet thought, too.’

  ‘She doesn’t know anything about children,’ Naomi said, a little acidly. ‘She dotes on Luke and Phoebe.’

  ‘Does she ever say anything to you about them? About how they don’t respond to her?’

  ‘She thinks it’s a phase they’re going through.’ He concentrated for a moment on finding a place to put a jug, then said, ‘Let’s hope Dr Michaelides is right, that more intellectual stimulation is needed. Maybe we made a mistake having a clown, perhaps we should have had an astrophysicist talking about the molecular structures of rocket fuels, or climate change.’

  She gave him a wan smile. ‘That’s almost funny.’

  81

  At six in the morning John was wide awake after a restless night. Naomi had tossed and turned continually, and he’d twice been woken by the rustle and popping of a blister pack as she took paracetamols. Now she was sleeping soundly, as usual right over his side of the bed, leaving him almost hanging over the edge.

  He extricated himself as gently as he could, trying not to wake her, padded across the floor and peered out of the window into the darkness. It was still the best part of an hour before daybreak. Pulling on his dressing gown, he dug his feet into his clogs and tiptoed downstairs in the darkness.

  Someone else was up, he realized, hearing the sound of voices on television, and seeing light seeping under the living room door. Was it Naomi’s sister, he wondered, although Harriet was normally a late riser. He opened the door and peered in.

  Luke and Phoebe, in their dressing gowns, squatted on the floor, backs against a sofa, utterly absorbed in a television programme. But it wasn’t any of the kids’ shows Naomi would ordinarily have put on for them; it was an adult science lesson, something to do with the Open University. A teacher, standing in front of a three-dimensional model of a complex atomic structure, was talking about the formation of halogen. He was explaining how a quartz halogen headlamp on a car worked.

  ‘Good morning, Luke, good morning, Phoebe,’ he said.

  Both shot him a cursory glance as if he was some minor irritation, then looked back at the screen.

  ‘Like any breakfast?’

  Luke raised a hand, signalling with it for him to be quiet, to stop distracting them. John stared at him, unable fully to take this in. His three-year-old children were sitting in front of the television, at six o’clock on a Sunday morning, utterly engrossed by a man talking about halogen gas.

  He backed out of the room and went through to the kitchen to make some coffee, deep in thought. Just how bright were they? Had it been them accessing his computer and taking over his previous chess game with Gus Santiano – and beating him?

  They were going to have to let the psychologist carry out tests on them, for sure. And he was going to need to discuss with Naomi about sending them to a special educational facility. There must be places that were not residential, where they could just take them each day, and still have a family life with them outside of that – doing fun family activities with them, such as learning about the molecular structure of halogen gas together.

  He filled the kettle and switched it on. Then he spooned some coffee into a mug, and took a bottle of milk out of the fridge. Something felt strange; it seemed too quiet in here, a sound was missing. There was a distinctly unpleasant smell, he suddenly realized, as well.

  Bad meat.

  He wrinkled his nose, opened the fridge door and sniffed. Just fridge smells – nothing bad in there, nothing that had gone off. He closed the door, sniffed harder, puzzled. He checked the freezer door as well, putting his nose close to the trays, but there was nothing bad there either.

  The kettle rumbled louder, then clicked off. He poured boiling water into the mug, added milk and stirred it.

  Then, turning round with his mug in his hand, he saw it.

  The mug slipped from his fingers, hit the floor and shattered, spraying china fragments and scalding coffee everywhere. But he barely noticed. His eyes were riveted to the floor, to the two sheets of newspaper that had been placed beside the guinea pigs’ hutch.

  On one sheet of newsprint, amid a stain of dried blood, Fudge was laid out on his back, paws in the air, his midriff slit open from his neck to his tail, his internal organs placed in an orderly row beside him. On the other sheet of paper, Chocolate lay similarly opened up and eviscerated.

  For an instant, his thoughts wild and ragged, John wondered if a cat had somehow come into the house and done this. But walking over, and peering closer, he realized that theory was a non-starter. A small pile of coiled intestines lay beside each; their kidneys, livers, pancreas, hearts, lungs, were laid in matching rows. The tops of their skulls had been removed with surgical precision, and their tiny little brains placed beside their heads. Some of the organs had been cut in half very cleanly, and the intestines sliced open in sections.

  He turned away in revulsion, feeling very distressed, his mind in turmoil. Such sweet little creatures, so friendly, it had been such a treat to watch Luke and Phoebe playing with them, kissing them, caring for them. Who the hell had done this?

  Who on earth would have wanted to do this?

  The inevitable was in his mind, but he was refusing to accept it. He just wanted to clear this up, get rid of it before Naomi saw it; she wouldn’t be able to handle this. He didn’t want Harriet seeing it either, nor Naomi’s mother. No one.

  Opening the cupboard under the kitchen sink, he pulled a black bin liner off a roll, opened it out, then carefully picked up each of the news sheets in turn, holding his breath against the smell from the intestines and stomach, folded the paper and placed it in the bag. Then he knotted the bag, took it outside, put it in one of the dustbins and replaced the lid securely.

  Back inside, he was shaking. He cleaned up the mess of coffee and broken china as best he could, then went over to the living room and opened the door. The television was switched off and so were the lights. The twins weren’t there.

  He went upstairs to see if they were back in their bedroom, and when he reached the top, he noticed a glow of light from the box room. Walking swiftly down the landing, he pushed open the door. The children’s new computer was on, and he saw a web page was up on the screen. He knelt to take a closer look.

  It was a page from Gray’s Anatomy, the dissection bible of all medical students. It illustrated a section of a kidney that had been cut open, with a list of points for observation during a postmortem.

  82

  John went for a run, feeling very distressed, trying to think clearly and make some sense of what had just happened. Should he have grabbed hold of the children, taken them down to the dead guinea pigs and shaken sense into them? Would it have done any good?

  And, just what the hell had driven the children to that website? And to do what they’d done?

  It was a clear, cold morning. Frost glinted in the early sunlight and glazed puddles crunche
d beneath his running shoes as he made his way along a rutted cart-track up into the hills.

  Halfway up he stopped for breath and looked back down across the vast sweep of the valley, at the farmhouses, roads, lanes, the clock tower of a stately home on the ridge of a far hill. It was half past seven on a Sunday morning, and most people hadn’t risen yet; there was a stillness in the air, almost preternatural. Somewhere, a long way off, he heard the bleat of a sheep. Then just as far off, the bass lowing sound of a cow. High above him up in the sky he could see the vapour trail of a jet heading out towards the Channel.

  He could see their own house, looking tiny, in a direct line between himself and the village church. Everything looked tiny from here. Like some kind of toy-world. Miniature fields, miniature sheep, cows, miniature houses, barns, cars, roads, lamp posts, traffic signals, steeples. So small, so insignificant.

  Guinea pigs were small and insignificant, too. Their internal organs were tiny, little specks, some of them, you really had to look quite hard to tell what they were. And yet . . .

  No life was insignificant. There were insects you might kill, like mosquitoes, because they were a threat – or a wasp in your babies’ bedroom, or something dirty and uninvited, like a cockroach, and there were wild animals you had to kill because they were a threat to you or your farm, or those you had bred for food and you were going to eat them.

  But to kill them out of curiosity?

  Sure, in labs. Fruit flies, mice, frogs, all kinds of creatures were dissected in the name of education, in the name of medical research. In order to learn, creatures were killed all the time. That part he had no problem with – not that he had ever liked seeing anything dead, but there was an arguable reason there.

  And in truth, casting his mind back to his own childhood, there had been a time as a young boy when he had shot at wildlife with a catapult. Then one day he’d hit a sparrow and killed it outright. He’d watched it drop from its perch onto the grass. He’d rushed over to it and saw beads of blood in its beak. Held its warm body, tried to make it stand up, moved its wings, trying to make it fly away and be better. Then, crying, he’d put it back up in the tree to keep it safe from the cat. Hoping it might get better and fly off.