by Maggie Gee
I could make a fire, lighting up every time, persevering even if the wood was wet, and cook whatever we found, very badly, either boiling it or burning it, in a cooking pot stolen in Normandie.
I could fish, with a line that Luke and I made, and we enjoyed it, father and son. But we never caught very much with the line, though we once removed halfadozen gasping and wriggling ornamental carp from a pond by hand, overcoloured orange and vermilion things. ‘Like taking candy from a baby,’ said Briony. She skinned them and fried them over the fire, and we ate them, and it was like eating salted leather, and Briony threw them up in the bushes. ‘That’s a waste,’ said Luke, transparently gleeful, which was what we’d told him, a hundred times.
I could drive the car for eight hours at a stretch before I yielded the wheel to Briony, then sleep in the back while she did her stint. I could steer by the sun, without uptodate maps – too much of a risk to try to buy them on the road, a way of advertising our foreignness. Besides, how could we know which of the furtive little shops still open in the rows of closed steel shutters sold anything but looted possessions? No maps would have shown the reality, in any case, the towns abandoned in the rush to the sun, the places where meganauts had crashed across the road and been left to rust once the looting stopped, or where there had been great fires in the riots and black melted plastic, several metres deep, made the route we had planned an inky nightmare, fantastic skewed nests of dark loop and curve. We could never relax, because the road might end, or the little black shape buzzing innocently towards us might prove to be a carload of bandits – but I could cope, I could handle it.
I could travel with a loaded gun in my lap, and be ready to use it when I had to. The worst time was one day when Briony was driving, I’d opened the window to chuck out some paper and an old yellow bus at the very last minute veered purposefully across the road towards us, a dozen male faces, swarthy, avid, were suddenly staring into mine, and they would have forced us off the road, but I let them have it through the open window, blasting their windscreen, windows, faces. The noise inside our car was like armageddon as we swerved and screamed across the tarmac and Briony wrenched the steeringwheel back just in time.
I could kill people, and not feel ashamed.
I grew closer to Luke, slowly closer. I think he began to feel happier. I know he preferred this uncouth life to the terrible safety of the Cocoon.
I could be a father, as I’d wanted to be.
But I couldn’t make Briony love me. I think she liked me, she got on with me, she adored my son, she was my mate, my comrade, but she felt the force of my dogged desire and she always said no, she rejected me, kindly but firmly, Nurse Sensible …
Why can’t they ever be Eve, in the Garden?
True, I was too old for her. And the shadow of Sarah stood between us. Looking back on it now, she was right to demur. In those early days, Luke could not have borne it, for he still missed his mother, and talked about her, and sometimes asked what I felt about her –
Then something happened to change all that.
They had given him hormones. Luke let it out.
For a while I felt nothing but hatred for Sarah.
For decades, of course, it had been considered normal for men and women to take hormones. Mostly it was women who wanted to be male (not male, exactly, but masculine – they wanted to steal our strength, our hardness). There were also the men who wanted to be female. Their numbers had grown, particularly since the women had taken the children away. Men were caught trying to infiltrate Wicca with newly swollen breasts and whispering voices. They were treated with terrifying ruthlessness, though many of them just wanted to be with children. Others, I think, were actually trying to be the women who had rejected them; to become the women they could not have. Mostly it wasn’t sinister, though godknows we men were pretty confused …
Of course we were; we were redundant. They had sperm on ice that would last for decades – defective, most of it, but it would serve – and there was nothing better between our legs, they seemed to say, when their cold eyes appraised us.
So men and women had been taking hormones or ‘taking charge of their identity’, as the first, immensely pompous book I read about the subject put it, since the beginning of our century. But the rules had always been strict; no hormones were to be sold to anyone under sixteen. They were one of the last ‘Restricted’ drugs, after the prescription system ceased to exist and all recreational drugs were made legal, in the socalled ‘Leary Year’, 2020 …
Women can be more ruthless than men. I didn’t suspect; I missed the signs.
We were camping in a beautiful farmhouse in Anjou – we called it camping, but in fact we’d broken in. The water was switched off, naturally, but when I turned the stopcock, to my joy it worked, it wasn’t frozen, it wasn’t broken, so the area still had essential services, unlike Normandie, where everything had gone. We were staying a few nights to dry some damp things and rest the drivers; we did need rest. This new kind of driving was deeply exhausting. Bliss to have water, bliss to rest. But closeness to Briony was bad for my sleep – nights of crazed hope, of hopeless lust.
It was April, and there were rustling alders, silver with new leaf, bordering the garden, and drifts of pale primroses and daffodils, and pastel forgetmenots floating like lace across the wild green depths of grass, and they were late, I registered, because it was cold, spring was replacing summer in Anjou – but never mind, it was beautiful, the light felt young and bright and strong after the terrible gloom of the year of the volcano. I had in my hand a bottle of red wine that I’m sure the Duponts never meant to leave behind, twentyfive years old, a grand vin de Bordeaux – and I thought, let’s all have a glass together, let’s raise our glasses to this great adventure. They were three lousy toothglasses, but what did it matter?
Briony was inside, looking for bedding, washing some crockery in the kitchen. ‘I’ll wash some plates, then we can eat.’ ‘Don’t bother –’ ‘You’re joking, Luke is starving.’ ‘I mean, don’t bother to wash the plates. Come and sit down.’ ‘Yes, in a moment.’
– It’s one thing I never really liked about women, that they didn’t know how to enjoy themselves in those days when there was so much to enjoy. There used to be moments that deserved a celebration, when life, in fact, demanded it, but the women would be somewhere being goodygoodies, cleaning or packing or sorting or preparing, and they’d say, in a holierthanthou sort of voice, ‘No, you enjoy yourself, I’m too busy’. (Granted, she just said, ‘In a moment’, but I understood perfectly the implication. Sarah had said ‘In a moment’ too.)
Luke, by contrast, was tearing round the garden, trying to catch a squirrel that he wanted to skin. These are the moments when it’s good to have a son.
‘Luke,’ I said, ‘have you ever drunk wine? Because if you haven’t, this is a great time to start. It’s a wonderful bottle. Come and look.’
He pulled up, panting. ‘Wine? Me? Do you mean it? Great!’ He was flushed with running, his curls flattened back and dark with sweat, and I suddenly thought, Luke’s thickening up, his neck is no longer a boy’s thin neck, and his face is changing, ever so subtly …
We spent a lot of time in the car, you see, or lurking by candlelight in houses where the electricity was cut off, so I didn’t get much chance to look at Luke properly. Now I looked. The sun shone straight across the hills into his face. His eyes were the clear strong blue of his mother’s, but what had happened to his skin? There were some pimples round his mouth, and was that peach fuzz? I was shocked but also touched to see it. A teenager at last. I said nothing. Perhaps we weren’t giving him enough fruit. Sarah had been obsessed with fruit, and left behind a worry like a little worm.
‘You could have wine mixed with water,’ I said. ‘That’s the way French – young people – drink it.’ I managed to stop myself saying ‘French children’.
A cloud of uncertainty darkened his face. ‘I’m not sure I’m allowed to have it. It’s – alcohol, isn�
��t it, wine?’ He said it as if alcohol were deadly poison. But then, he had been living a protected life.
‘What do you mean, not sure if you’re allowed? I’m your father, aren’t I? I am allowing you.’
‘No – I mean – I’ll have to ask Briony.’
‘What?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ His mouth turned down. There was clearly a secret he didn’t want to tell me. Something concerning his mother, then.
At that moment Briony came through on to the patio. ‘Phew. That’s done,’ she sighed, and smiled. Was she being a martyr? Never mind. ‘What shall we eat?’
‘First we have a drink … What’s this about Luke and wine?’ I said. ‘Did Wicca make all those poor infants take the pledge?’ I was joking, really, but I saw something pass between Luke and Briony, a quick, anxious glance.
‘I think it would be all right for you to have some, Luke,’ she said, slowly.
‘For godsake, woman, don’t make such a fuss. We’ve been through a lot, this is a celebration. One glass of wine never hurt a teenager.’ The look I gave her was hostile enough for Luke to come to her defence.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said, flushing up. ‘She’s not making a fuss. It was … medical.’
‘But that’s over,’ Briony rushed in quickly, her face clearly telling him to shut up.
‘What’s over?’ I asked, twisting the cork, pulling mightily, uselessly, feeling my face redden and swell with the effort. ‘Stop talking in riddles – sod it, sod it!’ For the top of the cork had come away, leaving half of it crumbled in the neck of the bottle.
I don’t think Luke noticed I’d mashed up the cork; he thought I was swearing at Briony. He leapt in at once, talking too fast. ‘It’s not her fault. She didn’t have any say. I was having these pills. To protect my voice. You weren’t allowed to have alcohol if you took them, I mean we weren’t allowed to anyway, but the older boys were always smuggling it in. Juno explained it would be dangerous for me.’
‘To protect your voice? What is this about? Was he on medication, Briony?’
‘Nothing important,’ Briony said.
I began to see. Yes, of course I saw. I probably halfsuspected the truth as soon as he mentioned ‘protecting his voice’, for of course his incredible, thrilling soprano had survived too long, he’d stayed young too long, he was nearly fourteen, why wasn’t I suspicious? Once they used to cut the little boys’ balls off, the poor little castrati, singing their hearts out, but they’d done it to Luke with chemicals …
I shouted at Briony, and Luke. Perhaps I broke a few things, I’m not sure. I demanded to know what Wicca had done.
I was justified. They had drugged my son. The bitches wanted to steal his manhood. Any father would feel the same –
As I hectored them, as I raged and roared, I was adding up the details, somewhere inside, Luke’s amazing, delicate youthfulness when I first saw him three months ago, the absence of adolescent stigmata, for which I was grateful at the time, because that way he could still be my child. Then the sudden pimples, the thickening jaw.
When did Briony admit it was hormones? I’d been shouting at her as if she were Sarah. At some stage she stopped sitting meekly on the grass, stood up and stared with those strange pale eyes, like blue ice, suddenly, cold and sharp, told me to calm down, began talking. When she told me he’d been taking highdose oestrogen and other, subtler, more complex drugs, I started to swear, and smashed a glass, and then another, and another, and Luke sat hunched, gnawing his fingers.
‘I don’t take the blame,’ she said, firmly, ‘but I knew it was wrong. It was against our principles – Wicca’s principles. I mean. They’re so keen on being natural’ (I recognised Sarah’s influence here) ‘and then they start stuffing the boys with hormones. They wanted to see if it made them gentler. And Juno so adored his voice …’
‘Sarah should be shot. Garotted –’
‘I hate you! You … bastard!’ Luke suddenly shouted, ‘I love my mum! And I hate you!’
I suppose I deserved it. And yes, it proved that the hormones had worn off, and my son was adolescent. The words proved it, but so did something else, for as rage and grief burst out of him, his clear voice suddenly fell apart, and through it a bullfrog honked, croaked, a clumsy, hoarse, uncontainable thing, the first sign that his voice was breaking.
And then I felt sad.
And then I felt guilty, and most of my anger leaked away. It was nearly dark. We were all getting cold.
I picked up the glass as best I could, cutting my finger in the process, and we all went in. Just inside the door Dora sat quietly glowing in the dark. Someone had switched her on and then forgotten her, possibly Luke, in the middle of the row, and she sat there muttering peacefully. ‘Hallo,’ she said as we came into range of her sensors, ‘Hallo, good to see you. By the way, I’m hungry,’ oblivious to the trauma we had all been through. Looking at her round innocent face and the gentle smile in which her mouth was fixed, looking at the kind dim light of her eyes and the transparent lashes quivering above them, I thought, much better to be a machine than suffer this crazy tearing pain. Better not to feel, or pass the pain on.
(You tell me – now that the ice has come, now it’s getting dark, and the cities are ruined, and most of the galleries have been abandoned, and the theatres are full of snow, now the ice lies white along the plastic letters that used to blaze the names of actresses in orange light across navy skies, now hardly anyone reads or writes, now the churches have bonfires on the altars and plastic sheeting in their stainedglass windows, now Buckingham Palace is a burntout wreck, its cellars swarming with secret police, now the old are dead, and the young know nothing – you tell me, what is the point of us? What was ever the point of us, our struggling, quarrelling, suffering species, getting and spending, wasting, grieving?
There was love, wasn’t there? I know there was.
That can’t be the point, though. We loved so badly.
Perhaps we were meant to be recording angels. Ringing the earth with consciousness. Mirroring it in our net of signs. Solar singers, messengers …
But our net tore, a tattered cobweb.
And here I crouch with my stub of a pencil in a windowless cupboard that smells of piss, penned in the dark like a dirty beast, trying to scribble my small story.)
I sat there, that night, in the empty salon, lit by a flickering candle on the table which must have been too massive to remove. It sat in the denuded space like a tombstone. My thoughts were no longer springlike and hopeful.
I’d wrecked the frail bond between the four of us, killed the affection Luke was starting to feel. Although I’d told Briony I was sorry, she’d just said ‘Yeah, well,’ and marched off to bed, without offering to cook or clean up in the kitchen. (She had changed, I thought, she had changed already, and we had only spent three months together … Sarah started sweet, but it didn’t last. Women were fickle, like the poets said.)
I remembered the wine. I had got no further than mangling the cork, because of the row. It must be somewhere out on the patio. My spirits lifted. I went out and groped in the icy darkness – how fast the heat died, once the sun had gone. It wasn’t on the slatted garden table, and then I felt the jagged edge of the wood, apparently I had broken the table, and as I drew back, for the splinters were sharp, the bottle fell off and smashed on the concrete. I tried to scoop it up before the glugging finished and managed to save about half of it at the cost of bloodying my hand – the left one this time, so now they were equal.
The smell was wonderful: fruity, oaky, a smell of warm summers of long ago, plus the dark metallic smell of my blood.
Back in the salon, enthroned at the table, I watched myself drink in the big tarnished mirror, a big man, a monster with wild black hair, a darkskinned man splashed all over with blood, for the mirror didn’t show that half of it was wine. Reflected through the window was a fullbellied moon, a beautiful pregnant moon with an aura, a halo of light like a woman’s hair. I was a
man, Esau, Moses, leading my tribe to the promised land, David fighting the Goliath of the ice, I looked at myself, I swelled, I expanded. (But would my son be a proper man? Had they ruined him for ever with their filthy medicines?) I had poured the wine into a plastic beaker – annoying how the French never left their good crystal. It filled three times. By the third, I felt good.
Till now we had all slept in the same room, for safety and to keep warm. But when I stumbled through with my candle in a saucer I could only see Luke, curled up like a foetus on one of the two mattresses Briony had found. She obviously couldn’t stand to be near me. I pulled off my jumper, meaning to sleep in the rest of my clothes, but the smell of rancid sweat was so overpowering that I changed my mind and went to wash in the kitchen, padding back barefoot in the silence.
There was only a narrow shaft of moonlight here. I had snuffed out the candle before I took my clothes off. I heard the tap running. Had Luke left it on? Then suddenly I touched something warm and soft, and Briony was screaming like a mad woman. She’d been bent over the sink drinking water from the tap, and as she flinched away into the path of the moonlight I saw the swing of one heavy breast, which she hid with her hand, but not before I glimpsed the dark star of the nipple, swollen with cold. ‘Don’t bloody frighten me!’ she screamed, once she’d calmed down enough to use actual words.
‘Don’t wake up Luke,’ I said, ‘he’ll be frightened,’ though actually I was frightened as well. My heart was hammering my chest, it was such a shock to find her there and then to unleash this monstrous terror. And I was horribly aroused, I could feel my erection tight in my trousers … But awful to know you are frightening. That I had caused such unreasonable fear, and all by showing a little temper …
I tried to put my arms around her, to steady her as she wept and screamed. She seemed to be wearing very little; she must have woken up warm from sleep. At first she resisted me, then all at once she clung, weeping and cursing, ‘You shit, you shit … You hateful bloody man, how dare you blame me? If it wasn’t for me Luke wouldn’t be here, I hate you, I hate you … ‘