The Testament of Jessie Lamb

by Jane Rogers

  ‘I don’t like Iain telling us what to do.’

  ‘But nothing would happen if he didn’t. People’d just argue all the time.’

  ‘Iain is on a power trip. He’s got his own agenda.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That crap about the vote.’ Well we do live in a democracy. We had spent hours discussing it. Why shouldn’t anyone over 10 should be able to elect representatives and have them stand up for us in parliament? How else could kids have power? But Nat and Lisa said why would you want to join their stupid system. And Lisa said why did Iain care, he already had the vote and it’d done a fat lot of good. I actually thought we should get the vote, like the suffragettes. But they made it seem tame. It turned into one of those endless arguments that made precisely nothing happen.

  I was working out how to reply to Nat when we reached the main road, and had to wait for the pedestrian signal. A car full of lads came past and slowed right down when it was level with us. There was music blaring out and they were shouting something. Then one of them leaned right out and spat on me. A horrible big glob of white slime sliding down my bare arm. I screamed. I wasn’t hurt, it was just the shock. Nat grabbed a handful of leaves from a dusty little garden behind us, and quickly scooped it off. I asked him what they were shouting.

  ‘Just crap.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rubbish. They’re dickheads.’

  I knew he’d heard something he didn’t want to tell me. I felt like scrubbing my arm until the layer of skin they had polluted was scraped right off. I was furious but there was another feeling too, like a dog that slinks back towards you after you’ve yelled at it, looking up at you with his eyes ashamed and hopeful. I wanted them to come back so I could prove to them that I wasn’t the sort of person you should spit at. I tried to pull myself together. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked Nat. ‘If you’re leaving?’

  ‘Animal Liberation Front. I’m going underground!’ He looked extremely pleased with himself.

  I remembered what Lisa’d said at the first meeting. ‘You think what happens to animals is more important than what’s happening to women.’

  ‘No, I think MDS came out of this kind of research, and scientists should be stopped before they invent something even worse. D’you really think it’s OK to torture animals?’

  I didn’t but bashing scientists just wasn’t the most important thing. It seemed childish, cloak and dagger stuff, underground, breaking the law in the name of the ALF. I thought we could achieve more inside YOFI.

  Then the next day Sal said she wanted to start coming to meetings. I was surprised because she was usually busy with Damien. But she came and had tea with me and we walked down to the community centre together. I asked her what had happened to Damien.

  ‘Football.’

  He worked at the leisure centre so that wasn’t very surprising, but she said, ‘He’s obsessed with it.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘His football mates. They meet up every night.’

  ‘Every night?’

  ‘Well. About four times a week. For a practise and a drink, he says.’

  ‘You think he’s seeing someone else?’

  She shrugged. ‘He’s an arse.’ But she didn’t say it as if she couldn’t care less, in the usual Sal way.

  ‘Sal?’

  ‘Oh, he’s just being weird.’

  I knew it must be something embarrassing, because she used to tell me most things. Then she suddenly said, ‘I think he might be gay.’ I couldn’t help it, I just went ‘Ooh ducky!’ and we both burst out laughing. I thought about the times I’d seen him, when he was all over her.

  ‘He’s changed,’ she insisted, ‘I can’t explain it, but the way he is now, he’s impatient, he’s kind of contemptuous.’

  ‘Well sack him. Plenty more fish in the sea.’ Sal’d been going out with lads since we were 11 and not one of them had ever dumped her. It was hard to see why she was making such a fuss over Damien.

  ‘He wants me to go out with them, him and his football mates.’

  ‘Well can’t you?’

  ‘I can. But they drink themselves stupid and only listen to each other.’

  ‘Haven’t they got girlfriends?’

  ‘On Friday I was the only girl. He changes when he’s with them. It’s like he’s bored with me.’

  With everything that was happening in the world, all Sal could do was obsess about a stupid man. ‘Forget him,’ I said.

  I wish she had. Or I wish I had taken her more seriously. But I took over organising the airport protest, and I was so busy co-ordinating that, and helping set up the Recycle Fashion shows, I didn’t even stop to think. It’s one of the things I regret most in my whole life.

  Chapter 7

  There was only one ray of hope that whole autumn. Baby Johnson was delivered by Caesarean section. The first post-MDS baby! His picture was on the front of all the papers, shops put up flags, and people went round with huge grins on their faces. Even the suicide rate dropped. His grandmother’s street was full of flowers, and the news showed her holding him, crying, thanking everyone. Baby Johnson’s mother was 15 and they held her funeral in Westminster Abbey. She was called Ursula. Her mother told the story. Back when Ursula’s pregnancy was confirmed women were still having abortions, in the hopes of saving their own lives. It was the first time in Ursula’s life she ever had sex. She believed that because her baby had been conceived, he had the right to be born. Her parents tried to dissuade her but Ursula must have known how important her baby would be for the world, because she had this amazing faith in him.

  Her doctor knew that researchers were working on putting women into a coma and helping the babies survive, and he told Ursula about them. She was one of the first to volunteer for the Sleeping Beauty experiment. Her mother described how they had stayed awake all night before they signed the consent forms, crying and praying for guidance. But Ursula had never wavered, and the last thing she had done before they gave her the injection, was to smile at her parents and thank them for her beautiful life.

  ‘And I believe in fairies,’ said Mum.

  Dad said, ‘Still – good for her!’

  What I loved was that Ursula decided she wanted to save her baby, and she made it happen. She chose what to do. By then they had some Sleeping Beauties at my Dad’s clinic and I asked him if they were like Ursula. He said he didn’t know, it’s the doctors who deal with them, he only does technical stuff. Then he grinned and admitted that two of their babies might be going to be delivered soon.

  And in the days after Baby Johnson there were new babies delivered all around the world. At my Dad’s clinic, baby Jill was born one week later, though the other one who was due at the same time, who they called Jack, died. Dad was saying there wouldn’t be many more pregnancies after this wave, because these babies were all like Baby Johnson, conceived before girls knew the consequences of MDS. ‘Since then, everyone’s taken care not to get pregnant. We’ve hardly got any other pregnant women coming through. Our ward’s nearly empty.’

  The sadness attached to these wonderful new babies was that they had MDS just like the rest of us. It was in their cells from their parents. In the papers there was a flood of statistics calculating the future population. To keep it stable, every woman has to have 2.1 children, which means 10 women should have 21 babies between them. But now a woman dies to produce just one baby. And obviously, since pregnancy is death, most women would choose not to have a baby at all. Experts said the population would shrink to nothing.

  Dad was wrong, though, about there being no more pregnancies after this batch. Because once it was proved that babies really could be delivered from the Sleeping Beauties, and that they were healthy except for dormant MDS which everyone had anyway, a stream of girls started to volunteer. You could see why they did, even then. They were following Ursula Johnson’s example. They did it for their husbands, or their families, or their religions. They did it for the future. Wh
at better single thing could a person do with her life?

  But naturally people fussed and objected like they always do when someone tries to do something positive. ‘The girls who volunteer are too young to know their own minds, blah blah blah.’ Or, ‘the programme is too expensive, families should pay for the life support of a Sleeping Beauty’. Or, just for a change, the opposite; the family should get compensation for their girl’s sacrifice, and no girl should volunteer until that’s agreed. OK there are bad things, like the Chinese who sold their daughters to clinics – OK – but because there are bad things does it mean nothing new should happen? That nothing can be done?

  It was like a wave of energy washing over the whole world, the way babies could be born again – even when it was bad, it was good. I knew the world would be different when they grew up, because the population would be so much smaller. Everything really could be better. I began setting my alarm for 5.30 so I could get more done. We were trying to persuade more kids to join us – I had this dream that we might get everyone, one day, everyone under 20 – and simply root out all the bad old ways of consuming and spoiling and wasting. The world was changing so quickly no one could guess what would happen next!

  After the Manchester rally YOFI was offered a big old pub, the Rising Sun, to turn into a centre where Lisa and Gabe and other motherless kids could live. I went along to help clear it out. Lisa and Gabe had their sleeping bags spread in one of the bedrooms, and were working on the room next to it, which would be theirs when it was finished. Other kids were stripping walls downstairs and ripping out the seats. They had music on and it was noisy down there, with people shouting across the room. I asked Lisa if I could help her upstairs and she gave me a pot of white paint and asked me to start on the woodwork. It was all stained dark tobacco brown. The floor was covered in shrivellings of paper they’d scraped from the walls. I crawled round sweeping a clear path by the skirting boards.

  ‘You and Gabe here permanently now?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘What does your dad say?’

  ‘My dad’s an alcoholic,’ said Lisa.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He’s not fit to look after children, and the joke is he knows that himself. I was looking after him.’ Neither of us said anything for a bit, there was just the sound of our brushes slopping and swishing, and the music and hollow voices from downstairs.

  ‘I did feel bad at first,’ she said suddenly. ‘Leaving him on his own. But Gabe and me have to survive. And now I just think, you’re sick. Lots of adults are. I mean, if they don’t drink they take drugs or medicine, or they’re addicted to some crappy routine. They’re like those horses in the olden days that used to walk round in a circle to turn a mill wheel. They keep on walking in a circle even when the mill wheel’s gone. That’s why so many of them are killing themselves. They don’t know how to change.’

  I thought about Mum and Dad and their package holidays. ‘They’re all mad, our parents’ generation.’

  ‘Mad and useless. The world will be a better place without them.’

  ‘But it’s hard for you, if you have to look after Gabe as well.’

  ‘Gabe can look after himself. Anyway, looking after people is easy.’

  ‘I guess I’ve never had to.’

  ‘Taking responsibility for things is easy. That’s how they infantilise us. They make us think that if you decide to do something and take responsibility for your decision, you’ll have a really tough time. But it’s not true. What’s hard is being in someone else’s power.’

  ‘Aren’t you ever frightened?’

  ‘Look, we don’t have to be trapped in our parents’ lives. How will we know what we can do unless we try?’

  Lisa’s right. You can choose to do something and plan your own destiny. It’s never as hard as you fear. You can make yourself free, you can be responsible for yourself. The only difficulty is other people. And I don’t just mean Mum and Dad.

  The difficulty is also other people like Baz. In the beginning I went along to the meetings because of him. He and I did some really good things together there. The YOFI website, for example; I wrote the content and Baz created the site. We’d sit side by side together at that big desk in the office, trying different versions, making it more user friendly, putting in the links, selecting graphics. We’d work on it till everyone else had gone home, and it was quiet and peaceful in the building. We turned off the light to cut the glare, and sat muttering to each other and making suggestions, both sets of our eyes fixed on the bright screen. I could feel the warmth of him next to me. Once he looked up and said, ‘Why’re you smiling?’ and I pointed to his jiggling leg. He jumped as if it didn’t belong to him, then after a couple of minutes the jiggling started up again. We didn’t do anything, we didn’t say anything, but it was a lovely feeling, that it was all in reserve. I thought we were both waiting till the urgent business of getting YOFI to a point where it could really make a difference, was achieved, and then – then there would be the time for the two of us.

  But instead of growing and blossoming into what I had hoped, everything went wrong. YOFI was already going wrong, with people bickering endlessly about priorities, and about what we should do next. The airport protest became a nightmare. People had to buy their own tickets – obviously. It would have been a bit of a giveaway if the airport noticed one purchaser buying tickets for 60 consecutive flights. We agreed to reimburse them from the donations that came in after the Manchester rally. Some people didn’t have enough cash so Mary gave them the money up front, but then they didn’t buy tickets right away. Some who had agreed to participate dropped out after their flights and times had been agreed, so there were time gaps: they realised you have to give your details when you book, which meant they could be traced by the police. Since the point of the whole thing was anti-flight publicity, and YOFI was going to claim it at the end of the day, I couldn’t see the problem. It got into more and more of a mess – a scattering of tickets bought, too much money handed out, recriminations. Iain said he’d help me sort it out.

  He began to notice me more and more. At meetings I didn’t have to keep trying to interrupt the boys, he’d glance at me and raise his eyebrows to see if I had anything to say, and if I nodded he’d tell them to shut up. He used to put his rucksack on the next chair in the circle and when I came in he’d lift it off and indicate the seat was for me. I liked it at first; it made me feel important. But it all went pear-shaped.

  We’d been painting banners and everyone else had left. Iain was in the office emailing publicity to other groups. I was finishing off the tidying up. The banners were on sheets spread on the floor and I didn’t want to move them till the paint was dry. I was in the little kitchen washing the brushes when Iain came in. I knew it was him so I didn’t turn round. I just said, ‘All done?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ surprisingly close behind me. Then he took another step and I could feel his breath on my neck. I turned the tap off. I kept my eyes on the brushes I was washing, slowly rubbing my fingers through the bristles to get them clean, staring at the little clouds of faint red that came puffing out of them into the water. He was right against me, I could feel the heat of his body. I twisted my neck to try and see his face and he took a tiny step back so I could turn round. Then he was pressing me against the sink and kissing me and my heart was galloping with the surprise of it. I noticed his hands. He was holding his hands out to the sides – holding his hands away from me as if I might burn him. The weight of him was squashing me against the sink. I jerked my head away and he opened his eyes then straightened up and moved back. There was a little gap between us and I could breathe.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not a good idea.’

  He turned and went into the office and shut the door. I got my things as quickly as I could and let myself out, leaving him to roll up the banners. My heart kept pounding madly all the way home. I hadn’t thought of him like that. For a moment, for that moment when he was squashing me against the sink – I was s
cared. But then how contradictory can a person be? There was a strand of my mind that kept going back to that moment by the sink, imagining; if I hadn’t jerked my head back. If he’d put his hands on my hips. If. … It was a hot shameful excited feeling.

  Nobody else knew what had happened but it made things different between me and Iain. We were hyper-aware of each other. I could feel myself blushing whenever he came near. And Baz picked up on it. He fell into step beside me as I was heading for the bus stop and asked me how I was getting on with Iain.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You like him.’

  ‘I didn’t say I liked him. I said he was OK. He’s good at keeping meetings in order.’

  ‘Nat’s group are managing without him. Without some adult telling them what to do.’ He was fidgeting about with a stick he’d picked up, twitching it from side to side.

  ‘You in touch with Nat? What’s he doing?’

  ‘There’s an animal research lab near Chester that they’re trying to infiltrate. They’ve already targeted some of the scientists.’

  ‘You’re not – ’

  ‘I might join them. I’m not really interested in all this bickering, or in recycling.’

  ‘But what about the website?’

  ‘It’s done, isn’t it.’

  ‘But will you go to Chester too? What about piano?’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘Baz? You still playing?’

  ‘For what it’s worth. I’m entering for a scholarship.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Salzburg. There’s an under 17’s piano scholarship.’

  ‘You’d go to Austria? When?’

  ‘January. If I get it. Which I won’t.’ There was a silence then he suddenly said, ‘Has Iain kissed you?’

  And like an idiot I blurted, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ said Baz. ‘Uh huh, uh huh,’ and he began to run the stick along the railings, backwards and forwards, making it into a demented rhythm.