Last and First Contacts (Imaginings)

by Stephen Baxter

  He stood up, putting down his tea cup. ‘I’ve some shirts that could do with hanging.’

  Mother sniffed. ‘There might be a bit of space. Later there’s my papers to do.’

  Another horror story. Simon fled upstairs. A little later, he heard the priest leave.

  The ‘papers’ were her financial transactions, Premium Bonds and tax vouchers and battered old bank books. And they had to go through the dreaded rusty biscuit box she kept under her bed, which held her will and her life insurance policies, stored up in the event of a death she’d been talking about for thirty years. It even held her identity card from the war, signed in a childish hand.

  Simon always found it painful to sit and plod through all this stuff. The tin box was worst, of course.

  Later she surprised him by asking to go for a walk.

  It was late afternoon. Mother put on a coat, a musty gabardine that smelled of winter, though the bright April day was warm. Simon had grown up in this close. It was a short, stubby street of semi-detached houses leading up to a main road and a dark sandstone wall, beyond which lay a park. But his childhood was decades gone, and the houses had been made over out of all recognition, and the space where he’d played football was now jammed full of cars. Walking here, he felt as if he was trying to cram himself into clothes he’d outworn.

  They crossed the busy main road, and then walked along the line of the old wall to the gateway to the park. Or what was left of it. In the last few years the park had been sliced through by a spur of the main road, along which cars now hissed, remote as clouds. Simon’s old home seemed stranded.

  Simon and his mother stuck to a gravel path. Underfoot was dogshit and, in the mud under the benches, beer cans, fag ends and condoms. Mother clung to his arm. Walking erratically she pulled at him, heavy, like an unfixed load.

  Mother talked steadily, about Peter and Mary, and the achievements and petty woes of their respective children. Mary, older than Simon, was forever struggling on, in Mother’s eyes, burdened by difficult kids and a lazy husband. ‘She’s got a lot to put up with, always did.’ Peter, the youngest, got a tougher time, perceived as selfish and shiftless and lacking judgement. Simon’s siblings’ lives were more complicated than that. But to Mother they were ciphers, dominated by the characteristics she had perceived in them when they were kids.

  She asked nothing about his own life.

  Later, she prepared the evening meal.

  As she was cooking, Simon dug his laptop out of his suitcase, and brought it down to the cold, formal dining room, where there was a telephone point. He booted up and went through his emails. He worked for a biotech start-up that specialised in breeding genetically modified goldfish, giving them patterns in bright Captain Nemo colours targeted at children. It was a good business, and expanding. The strategy was to domesticate biotech. In maybe five or ten years they would even sell genome-sequencing kits to kids, or anyhow their parents, so they could ‘paint’ their own fish designs.

  That was a bit far off in terms of fifty-year-old Simon’s career, and things were moving so fast in this field that his own skills, in software, were constantly being challenged. But the work was demanding and fun, and as he watched the little fish swim around with ‘Happy Birthday Julie’ written on their flanks, he thought he glimpsed the future.

  His mother knew precisely nothing about all this. The glowing emails were somehow comforting, a window to another world where he had an identity.

  Anyhow, no fires to put out today. He shut down the connection.

  Then he phoned his brother and sister with his mother’s news.

  ‘She’s fine in herself. She’s cooking supper right now… Yes, she’s keeping the house okay. I suppose when she gets frailer we’ll have to think about that… I’ll stay one night definitely, perhaps two. Might take her shopping tomorrow. Bulky stuff, you know, bog rolls and washing powder…

  ‘Things are a bit tricky for you, I suppose.’ Exams, school trips, holidays. Mary’s ferocious commitment to her bridge club – ‘They can’t have a match if I don’t turn up, you know!’ Peter’s endless courses in bookkeeping and beekeeping, arboriculture and aromatherapy, an ageing dreamer’s continuing quest to be elevated above the other rats in the race. All of them reasons not to visit their mother.

  Simon didn’t particularly blame them. Neither of them seemed to feel they had to come, the way he did, which left him with no choice but to be here. And of course with their kids they were busier than he was, in a sense.

  Mother had her own views. Peter was selfish. Mary was always terribly busy, poor lamb.

  She’d once been a good cook, if a thrifty one, her cuisine shaped by the experience of wartime rationing. But over the years her cooking had simplified to a few ready-made dishes. Tonight it was boil-in-the-bag fish. You got used to it.

  After they ate, they spent the evening playing games. Not Scrabble, which had been a favourite of Simon’s childhood. She insisted on cribbage, which she had played with her father, in her own childhood. She had a worn board that must have been decades old. She had to explain the arcane rules to him.

  The evening was very, very long, in the silence of the room with a blank telly screen, the time stretched out by the ticks of Uncle Billy’s carriage clock.

  In the morning he came out of his bedroom, dressed in his pyjama bottoms, heading for the bathroom.

  Father Gabriel Nolan was coming up the stairs with a cup of tea on a saucer. He gave Simon a sort of thin-lipped smile. In the bright morning light Simon saw that dried mucus clung to the hairs protruding from his fleshy nose.

  ‘She’s taken a turn for the worse in the night,’ said the priest. ‘A stroke, perhaps. It’s all very sudden.’ And he bustled into Mother’s bedroom.

  Simon just stood there.

  He quickly used the bathroom. He went back to his bedroom and put on his pants and yesterday’s shirt.

  Then, in his socks, he went into Mother’s bedroom. The curtains were still closed, the only light a ghostly blue glow soaking through the curtains. It was like walking into an aquarium. She was lying on the right-hand side of the double bed she had shared with Simon’s father for so long. She was flat on her back, staring up. Her arms were outside the sheets, which were neatly tucked in. The cup of tea sat on her bedside cabinet. Father Nolan sat at her bedside, holding her hand.

  Her eyes flickered towards Simon.

  Simon, frightened, distressed, was angry to find this smut-nosed, biscuit-crumby priest in his mother’s bedroom. ‘Have you called the doctor?’

  Mother murmured something, at the back of her throat.

  ‘No doctor,’ said Father Nolan.

  ‘Is that a decision for you to make?’

  ‘It’s a decision for her,’ said the priest, gravely, not unkindly, firmly. ‘She wants to go downstairs. The lounge.’

  ‘She’s better off in bed.’

  ‘Let her see the garden.’

  Father Nolan’s calm, unctuous tone was grating. Simon snapped, ‘How are we going to get her down the stairs?’

  ‘We’ll manage.’

  They lifted Mother up from the bed, and wrapped her in blankets. Simon saw there was a bedpan, sticking out from under the bed. It was actually a plastic potty, a horrible dirty old pink thing he remembered from his own childhood. It was full of thick yellow pee. Father Nolan must have helped her use it.

  They carried her down the stairs together, Simon holding her under the arms, the priest taking her legs.

  When they got to the bottom of the stairs, it went dark on the landing above. Simon looked up. The stairs seemed very tall and high, the landing quite black. ‘Maybe a bulb blew,’ he said. But the lights hadn’t been on, the landing illuminated by daylight.

  Father Nolan said, ‘She doesn’t need to go upstairs again.’

  Simon didn’t know what he meant. Under his distress about his mother, he found he was obscurely frightened.

  They shuffled into the lounge. They sat Mother in her
armchair, facing the garden’s green.

  What now?

  ‘What about breakfast?’

  ‘Toast for me,’ said Father Nolan.

  Simon went to the kitchen and ran slices of white bread, faintly stale, through the toaster.

  The priest followed him in. He had taken his jacket off. His black shirt had short sleeves, and he had powerful stubby arms, like a wrestler. They sat at the small kitchen table, and ate buttered toast.

  Simon asked, ‘Why are you here? This morning, I mean. Did Mother call you? I didn’t hear the phone.’

  Father Nolan shrugged. ‘I just dropped in. I have a key. She’s got used to having me around, during this, well, crisis. I don’t mind. I share my duties at the parish.’ He complacently chewed his toast.

  ‘When I was a kid, you smug priests used to make me feel like tripping you up.’

  Father Nolan laughed. ‘You’re a good boy. You’d never do that.’

  ‘“A good boy.” Father, I’m fifty years old.’

  ‘But you’re always a little boy to your mother.’ He nodded at the fridge, where photographs were stuck to the metal door by magnets. ‘Your brother and sister. You’re the middle one, yes?’

  ‘Sister older, brother younger.’

  ‘Mary and Peter. Good Catholic names. But it’s unusual to find a Simon and a Peter in the same Catholic family.’

  ‘I know.’ Since Simon had learned about Simon Peter the apostle, he had sometimes wondered if Mother had chosen Peter’s name on purpose – as if she was disappointed with the first Simon and hoped for a better version. ‘They’ve both got kids. I’m sure she’d rather one of them was here, frankly. Grandkids jumping all over her.’

  ‘You’re the one who’s here. That’s what’s important.’

  Simon studied him. ‘I don’t believe, you know. Not sure if I ever did, once I was able to think for myself. You can be as calm and certain as you like. I think it’s all a bluff.’

  Father Nolan laughed. ‘That’s okay. What you choose to believe or not is irrelevant to the destiny of my immortal soul. And indeed yours.’

  It had been a very long time indeed since Simon had even considered the possibility that he might have a soul, some quality that might endure beyond his own death.

  He shivered, and stood up. ‘I think I need some air. Maybe I’ll buy a paper.’

  ‘We’ll be fine here.’

  ‘Help yourself to tea. It’s in the –’

  ‘Winston Churchill caddy. I know.’ Father Nolan smiled, and chewed his toast.

  He walked up the close, towards the park.

  This stub of a road had seemed endless when he was a child. Full of detail, every drain or stopcock cover or broken paving stone a feature in some game or other. Now he felt a stab of pity for a child who perhaps could have done with a bit more stimulation.

  But the close seemed long today, stretching off ahead of him, like the hours governed by Uncle Billy’s clock.

  And though the sky was clear blue, the light was odd. Weakening. Once he’d sat through a partial eclipse over London, a darkening that was not the setting of the sun but an eerie dimming. That was what this was like. But there was no eclipse due today; he’d have known.

  It took an effort to reach the top of the close. And more of an effort to wait for a gap in the stream of dark, anonymous cars, and to cross to the footpath by the park wall. He walked along the wall, letting his fingers trail along the grubby, wind-eroded sandstone.

  It had happened so quickly. Would Mother really never make this little journey again? Was that awful bagged fish really the last meal the woman who had fed him as a baby would ever make for him? Grief swirled around in him, unfocussed. He thought vaguely about the calls he would have to make.

  At the gate, he stopped.

  There was no park. No sooty oak trees, no grass, no dog shit.

  He saw a plain, a marsh. The sunlight gleamed from a sheet of flat, green, sticky-looking water. Pillow-like shapes pushed out of the water, their surfaces slimy crusts, green and purple. Nothing moved. There was no sound. Of the park, the parade of shops beyond, there was no sign.

  It was like the scene he thought he had glimpsed through his mother’s lounge window yesterday. But that had been from the corner of his eye, and had vanished when he looked directly. This was different.

  He turned away. The main road was still there, the cars streaming along.

  Carefully, he walked back down the road, and into the close. Every step he took towards home made him feel more secure, and the daylight grew stronger. He didn’t dare look back.

  At home, Father Nolan was still sitting with Mother. It wasn’t yet lunchtime.

  Simon got himself a glass of water and went to the dining room. He booted up his laptop. He dialled into work, to check his emails. He was trying not to think about what he’d seen. He got error messages. The work site didn’t exist.

  He heard Father Nolan climbing the stairs, a splashing sound, the toilet flushing. Emptying a bed pan, maybe.

  He tried Google. That still existed.

  There was a word that had come into his head when he thought about what had become of the park. Stromatolite. He googled it.

  Communities of algae. A photo showed mounds just like the ones on the park. Heaped-up mats of bacteria, one on top of another, with mud and sand trapped in between. They had their own complexities, of a sort, each mound a tiny biosphere in its own right.

  And they were very ancient, a relic of the days before animals, before insects, before multicelled creatures of any kind.

  He followed links, digging at random, drawn by his own professional interest in genetics. The first stromatolites had actually been the height of complexity compared to what had gone before. Once there had been nothing but communities of crude cells in which even ‘species’ could not be said to exist, and genetic information was massively transferred sideways between lineages, as well as from parent cell to offspring. The world was muddy, a vast cellular bun fight. But if you looked closely it had been fast-evolving, inventive, resilient…

  Google failed, the browser returning a site-not-found error message.

  And then the laptop’s modem reported it couldn’t find a dialling tone.

  It seemed to be growing darker. But it wasn’t yet noon. He didn’t want to look out of the window.

  Father Nolan walked in. ‘She’s asking for you.’

  Simon hesitated. ‘I’d better call Mary and Peter. They ought to know.’

  The priest just waited.

  At his first try, he got a number-unobtainable tone. Then the dialling tone disappeared. He tried his mobile. There was no service.

  It was very dark.

  Father Nolan held out his hand. ‘Come.’

  In the lounge the curtains were drawn. The excluded daylight was odd, dim, greenish. The only strong light came from Mother’s fancy new reading stand.

  The telly was like an empty eye socket. Simon wondered what he would find if he turned it on.

  Mother sat in her armchair, swathed in blankets. Of her body only her face showed, and two hands that looked as if all the bones had been drawn out of them. There was a stink of piss and shit, a tang of blood.

  Father Nolan sat beside Mother on a footstool, the bedpan at his feet.

  ‘I probably ought to thank you for doing this,’ Simon said.

  ‘It comes with the job. I gave her the Last Rites, Simon. I should tell you that.’

  Mother, her eyes closed, murmured something. Father Nolan leaned close so he could hear, and smiled. ‘Let tomorrow worry about itself, Eileen.’

  Simon asked, ‘What’s happening tomorrow?’

  ‘She asked if there will be a tomorrow.’

  Simon stared at him. ‘When I was a kid,’ he said slowly, ‘I used to wonder what will happen when I die. It seemed outrageous that the universe should go on, after I, the centre of everything, was taken away. Just as my mother said to me yesterday.

  ‘Then I grew up
a bit more. I started to think maybe everybody feels that way. Every finite mortal creature. The two things don’t go together, do they, my smallness, and the bigness of the sky?”

  Father Nolan just listened.

  Simon stepped towards the window. ‘What will I see if I pull back the curtain?’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Father Nolan.

  ‘Do you know what’s going on?’

  ‘I’m here for her. Not you.’

  ‘Will you tell me?’

  The priest hesitated. ‘You’re a good boy. I suppose you deserve that.’

  Simon touched Uncle Billy’s clock, pressed his palm against the wall behind it. ‘Is any of this real?’

  ‘As real as it needs to be.’

  ‘Is this really the year 2010?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then when?’

  ‘The future. Not as far as you might think.’

  ‘People are different.’

  ‘There are no people.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No. But you’re capable of understanding,’ Father Nolan said. ‘It’s no accident you work in biotechnology, you know. It was set up that way, so if you ever asked these questions, you’d have the background to grasp the answer.’

  ‘What has my job got to do with it?’

  ‘Nothing in itself. It’s where things are leading. Those Day-Glo fish you sell. How do you do that?’

  Simon shrugged. ‘I don’t know the details. I do software. Gene splicing, basically.’

  ‘You splice genes from where?’

  ‘A modified soya, I think. Other sources.’

  ‘Yes. You swap genes around, horizontally, from microbes to plants to animals, even into people. It’s a new kind of gene transfer – or rather a very old one.’

  ‘Before the stromatolites.’

  ‘Yes. You’re planning to put this gene-transfer technology on the open market, aren’t you?’

  It was like the drive to put a pc in every home, a few decades back. The domestication would start with biotech in the mines and factories and stores. Home use would follow. Eventually advanced home biotech kits, capable of dicing and splicing genomes and nurturing the results, would become as pervasive as pcs and mobile phones. Everybody would have one, and would use it to make new varieties of dogs and budgies, exotic orchids and apples. To create a new life form and release it into the world would be as easy as blogging. It was a question of accelerating trends. The world’s genetic inheritance would become open source. And then, a generation later, the technology would merge with the biology.