Anyone who had ever been any sort of coward—anyone—would have understood why I felt a need to seek out the man in the cloak again, to find him, to become intimate with him, to offer him anything I had if only he would make me unafraid for ever.
Alas, he was not unafraid himself. He was real, he was powerful and he was magical, but he was not unafraid.
4
I knew that I'd have to let Gil screw me eventually. It was just part of the dynamic of the situation. He was always polite, but his politeness was based in expectation; the pressure he put on was steady but relentless. He knew that in a way I'd already consented, and he was eager to push the process through to its appointed end. As Sharon would have said, he was panting to get inside my knickers. He wanted to do it in his flat but I decided that I would rather it happened in my room, at least the first time.
It might all have been different, I think, if it had been summer instead of winter, but the university year starts in October, and there are two terms of winter before you ever get to the long, warm days when you can spend more time in the open air. I think things got set up that way because the long vacation was originally arranged to coincide with the harvest; only when the serious business of laying in an adequate store of the necessities of life was taken care of could people's thoughts turn to education. Whatever the reason, the effect is that life in university begins indoors, and stays there as the nights darken and the wind blows icier.
It wasn't a particularly cold winter—it was mild enough to lend a little support to everyone's anxieties about the greenhouse effect—but it was still winter, grey and unpleasant. It forced relationships into places where they were surrounded by walls—into corners, under the dead glare of artificial light. If we'd been able to walk about more, in the afternoon sun, with greenery all around us and the scent of flowers, I think I could have found more pleasure in being with Gil: more delight, more comfort. But winter casts a pall over daylit life, stealing its colour.
Gil was the kind of person who would have blossomed in the sun. He was quite intrigued by the phenomena of the English winter—in California, he said, things are pretty much the same all the year round—and he professed to like it. But he didn't really like it at all. His tan faded by imperceptible degrees and, almost as if he were a chameleon, his Californian buoyancy cooled into a reasonable imitation of English sobriety. He said that he didn't mind the cold, but he felt it. He always had the central heating in his flat turned up a few degrees too high, and he wore some kind of flying jacket all the time, even indoors. He spent more time than was strictly necessary at the labs where he worked, and I think that it was because they were always warm. He said that it was because he was fascinated by his experiments, and got separation anxiety if he was away from his animals and his purple blotches for too long, but I didn't believe him. In the heat of summer, he'd have been outdoors all the time, with his shirt half unbuttoned, soaking up the radiation, and he'd have laughed more and bounced with enthusiasm. I didn't see the best of him.
I never saw the best of him.
I asked him once why he hadn't stayed in California to do his research.
'It's a better system here,’ he said. ‘I already did some postgrad back in the States. It was mostly programmed classroom work. Course after course. Here, it's just the research project, and I'll get much more freedom to design my experiments once Viners has shown me the ropes. Anyway, there are problems back home getting licences to do the kind of work I'm doing—there's a lot of very vocal opposition to experiments using live animals and research on viruses, and when you've got both together things get completely tied up in red tape. Viners doesn't seem to have too much of that kind of crap holding him back.'
'People here get angry about animal experiments too,’ I said.
'Yeah, but you don't have a Freedom of Information Act which means that you have to tell every sucker and his cousin exactly what you're doing, and a University Ethics Committee to sit in judgement on every experiment. In ninety-nine fields out of a hundred the US is ahead of Britain because we spend more money, but in psychotropic genetics Mike Viners is way ahead of anyone else. When I heard him speak at a conference in LA I knew he was doing the kind of stuff I wanted to be in on. My dad pulled a few strings for me—he knew some guys at the foundation that paid me to come over. They expect me to go back in three years’ time with a lot of useful data, ready to kick-start some kind of project at CalTech. It's a big break for me. There's an element of scholarly espionage in what I'm doing—not that it's secret or criminal or anything. Viners knows that I'm here to plunder his expertise and take what I learn back home, but he just wants to get the work done, and your SERC or whatever won't fund the number of research assistants he thinks he needs.'
I found it difficult to understand exactly what it was that Gil was doing, although I tried hard to be interested. I hadn't done enough science at school to follow all the jargon, and though he tried to explain it in easy terms he simply couldn't do it without using the private language of his subject. It wasn't easy to follow his arguments all the way through.
'Psychotropic means mind-altering,’ he told me. ‘Intoxicants like pot and alcohol, hallucinogens like LSD and psilocybin—they're all psychotropics. The familiar ones are chemicals produced by plants. Heaven alone knows what good they are to the plants which make them; I don't think anyone has ever managed to find out what opium does for the poppy or psilocybin for the magic mushroom. Since we invented organic chemistry and started messing about with the natural psychotropics, we've been able to devise new variants of the traditional compounds and invent dozens more but it's a pretty hazardous business trying to figure out exactly what psychotropic properties new substances have. A lot of them are highly toxic, and there are ethical problems inhibiting experimentation.
'What makes a substance psychotropic is that it interferes in some way with the ordinary chemistry of the brain. Some drugs enhance or inhibit the passage of information across the synapses, promoting hallucinations or inducing a kind of remote, spaced-out feeling. Morphine and other opium derivatives mimic a class of chemicals which the body itself uses to control the activity of the nervous system—the endorphins. Now we're beginning to understand the chemistry of the nervous system, we're beginning to understand why various kinds of psychotropics have the effects they do, and we're better able to use our knowledge of chemistry to design new psychotropics from scratch.
'Psychotropic genetics is a fancy name for the study of the mind-changing capabilities of DNA. It started out as a way of trying to investigate the hereditary components of certain mental illnesses—manic depression, schizophrenia and so on. Mental aberrations like those do seem to have a brain-chemistry component, although there's a lot of argument about whether the chemical changes in the brain are a cause or a consequence, or sometimes one and sometimes the other. Anyway, it went on from there to study the mental states associated with diseases—if you like, the psychotropics of nausea, of induced coma, of feverish delirium or of simply feeling ill. Psychotropic theory isn't all to do with getting stoned.
'Viners is interested in the psychotropic effects of fairly ordinary viruses—ones that cause mild fevers. They're all naturally occurring viruses, but he's imported some of them from the tropics. Some of them are animal viruses, but most are viruses that can affect lots of species, including humans. We're trying to study the effects the viruses have on the brain chemistry of the animals, in the hope of getting a better understanding of the way our dreams and our everyday consciousness are linked to brain chemistry and the genes.'
'Do you have to do vivisections?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘We sometimes have to operate on the animals,’ he said, with carefully calculated vagueness. ‘But we don't hurt them. We use anaesthetics. We aren't in the torture business.'
'Isn't it dangerous, working with viruses?'
'Not really. I'll take you to the lab some day—there's a special sterile section, where I do most of my work
. You can watch me through the observation window. I wear a mask and rubber gloves whenever I'm handling infected animals. But the viruses aren't killers—most of them produce the same symptoms as a cold in the head or a bout of flu, along with a few bad dreams. If I caught anything, I'd be better inside a fortnight.'
'Be sure to let me know if you do,’ I said.
'I will,’ he promised. ‘It's worth the risk. The work's pretty tedious, but it has some very interesting theoretical ramifications. It opens up some possibilities which are so way out as to be positively wacky. Some of his colleagues seem to think that Viners is lost in the further reaches of unorthodoxy—but that's only because nobody ever heard of me yet. When I start to publish my stuff, they'll see something wild and wonderful. Back home, I doubt if I'd be able to get anything really interesting approved as a subject for a doctoral thesis, but here it's all so relaxed—no limits. I like that.'
I asked him what he and Professor Viners actually did to their experimental animals, but he wouldn't go into detail. It wasn't that he didn't trust me; he was simply obeying an undertaking he'd given to Professor Viners.
'People overreact,’ he told me. ‘Viners is very anxious about the possibility of wild rumours getting started. People don't mind about the rats, but they sometimes get funny about cats and rabbits. It's not Son of Frankenstein up there, believe me.'
He didn't expect me to understand all the stuff about DNA, and in a way he might have been disappointed if I had done, because he liked to feel that he was on a higher intellectual plane than I was. He felt comfortable with my youth, my ignorance, my innocence and my helplessness. He could never have been quite as comfortable with me if I'd known what he was talking about as well as he did ... or as well as he thought he did. Like me, he'd had a fairly narrow upbringing, pushed hard by his parents to be a high achiever. And no matter what he said, this was the first time that he'd really been away from home, even though he was five years older than me.
Gil thought he was doing me a favour by patiently going out with me, easing me along, and treating me gently when I finally let him screw me. He needed to feel like that, maybe because he didn't have quite enough confidence in himself to handle a relationship with someone from whom he could only accept favours, without giving any of his own in return. He desperately wanted to feel that he was managing the affair, that he was in complete control of his life. He wanted a girlfriend who was young, shy and a virgin. It made it easier for him.
It wasn't at all like that with Maldureve. I gave Gil far less than I gave Maldureve—I'd never in a million years have wondered whether it was worth dying for the sake of what I did with Gil—but what Maldureve offered me in return was never offered with condescension, never as a favour. Maldureve didn't pick me because I was young, no more than averagely pretty, and not quite clever enough to understand all the things he said. Maldureve wasn't a creature of summer fading in the grey light of a foreign winter; he was a creature of night emerging from the shadows into strength and solidity, thanks to the power of my eyes.
Even so, I had to go to bed with Gil just as I had to go to bed with Maldureve. I had to let him screw me just as I had to let Maldureve suck my blood. It was dull by comparison, but it wasn't bad. It didn't hurt as much as I'd feared, and it wasn't as undignified as it must have been for Sharon, backed up against that wall.
Before we actually did it, Gil asked me if I was on the Pill. It was as if he hoped—perhaps he had—that I'd gone to the doctor immediately after meeting him, making preparations for the big occasion.
'No,’ I said. ‘I'm sorry.’ I felt foolish, because I had known that it was going to happen, and approximately when, and hadn't done anything at all to prepare for it, despite all Mum's lectures about the importance of being prepared, and not being ashamed to seem calculating, and how an intelligent girl like me ought to know how to take care of herself far better than all the stupid ones who ended up as teenage mums.
'It's okay,’ he said. ‘I got something from the machine in the rest room.’ He meant the gents'.
I felt stupidly glad to be rescued from looming embarrassment. For a moment, he didn't seem quite so much like a sordid counter of unhatched chickens—more like a knight in glistening armour.
He was pathetically patient about the time it took him to get into me—which was understandable, even though I didn't any longer consider myself to be an authentic virgin—and humbly awkward about the way he couldn't help bearing down on me. Maybe he thought I might break, being so very pale and fragile, and not at all like a brown, busty, gum-chewing California girl.
His fingers were unexpectedly rough when they touched the sensitive parts his gropings had never quite reached before, and I was surprised by the coarseness of the hair on his body that I'd never felt before, some of which was only on his back and legs. He seemed much coarser than Maldureve, much more animal. He wasn't really clumsy—no clumsier, at any rate, than anyone else would have been—but after Maldureve's unearthly gentility he seemed unfortunately ham-fisted. It was while he was on top of me that I realised how ill-designed the human body is for sex. Our limbs are shaped for walking and tool-using, our heads for sight and hearing; when it comes to sex we just make do as best we can. I suppose that it's not quite as difficult for us as it is for elephants or dolphins, but it's difficult nevertheless to overlook our essential awkwardness when push comes to shove.
Gil didn't say much, perhaps because he didn't know what, if anything, he was supposed to say. I was grateful for his silence, even though I couldn't help wondering whether it was slightly inadequate, because I didn't know what he was supposed to say either, if anything.
It wasn't bad. It wasn't bad at all. It was even possible to see how one might get to like it, once it was unburdened of all its fearful anxieties. But it wasn't a feast of blood. It wasn't ecstatic, enfeebling, glorious and devouring. It was difficult, pressurised, wintry and fake. Not that I faked anything—I didn't even know how. I knew that it wasn't enough just to groan, the way they do on TV; I knew that there had to be something beyond the groaning, something which the groaning only signified, but whatever it was, I didn't know how to fake it and I didn't even try. If he cared about that, he didn't let it show.
Gil could have abandoned me once he'd had what he wanted, once he'd made his score, but he didn't. I'd known all along that he wouldn't. He wasn't the type. Doing it just confirmed in his mind the fact that I was his girlfriend, and that he was the central sun around which my emotional life must henceforth describe its orbit. He wanted that; he wanted an orbiting satellite as well as just a score. But he didn't want me to circle him too closely—at least, not yet.
He never said he loved me, that night in my room, but I think it was embarrassment that prevented him, not scrupulousness. He didn't say ‘fuck’ either, or even ‘hell’—it was an evening unusually free of commonplace expletives, we spoke plainly to one another when we did speak, even though we didn't have very much to say.
5
I didn't make any particular effort to return to the spot where I'd seen Maldureve, after the first time I caught sight of him. When I did pass by, in daylight or after dark, I looked into the shadows, curiously, but I didn't stop. Usually, I was with Gil; he had enough of a proprietorial claim on me even then to insist that he should walk me home, and he wanted to do so as often as possible, ever hopeful that he might not have to walk back again. I wasn't with Gil every night, though. I wouldn't have wanted to be, even if his experiments hadn't sometimes made it necessary for him to work late in the labs. As things were, he had to work late into the night twice or three times a week, sometimes because his experimental animals had to be observed intensively, and sometimes because his tissue cultures had to be monitored.
'Brain tissue's difficult to culture,’ he explained. ‘When we get fresh material in—whether it's from our own animals or the local abattoir—we have to put it through its paces while it's fresh. Otherwise, the tide of corruption would carry away the short
-lived proteins we're trying to track.'
Sometimes he had to work all night, in which case I wouldn't see much of him during the daytime either. I went up to the labs three or four times but he couldn't let me in because of the security procedures, and he wasn't able to spare more than fifteen minutes at a time to come out and chat. There was a double-glazed window mounted in the wall so that people outside could see about half the laboratory, and signal to those within, but the animals were always out of sight, and watching Gil play about with Petri dishes and test tubes, or peer down his binocular microscope, left much to be desired as a spectator sport. Usually, he wasn't alone—sometimes Professor Viners would be in with him, but more often it was a lab assistant—and I felt very self-conscious about hanging around outside while they were trying to get on with their work. The lab assistant was a dark-haired girl named Teresa, not much older than me, who didn't seem to appreciate my turning up, so I mostly refused Gil's invitations to visit him at the lab.
On the nights when he had to work, therefore, I had the opportunity to walk home alone—although I didn't think of it, at first, as an opportunity.
I walked the path more than once and saw nothing, but there were other people about on those occasions. Some time passed before an incident occurred which might have made me avoid the path for ever.
In the end, nothing actually happened. If I'd described the event to anyone, they would probably have said that it was nothing at all, certainly nothing to worry about. Dad would have reassured me that however unpleasant it might have seemed, I'd never been in real danger. ‘Boys do things like that,’ he would have said. ‘It's not nice, but they don't really mean it. It's only young blood.'
Dad used phrases like ‘young blood’ all the time, mostly because he didn't know the proper jargon; the only thing he knew about hormones was the old joke about the difference between a hormone and an enzyme (when you're asked, you're supposed to say ‘I don't know; I never heard an enzyme').
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