by Jane Rogers
But I was remembering one particular sunny afternoon, soon after the beginning of term. I had a free period before French. I stuck my nose in the library and it was like a greenhouse with all those floor-to-ceiling windows. There was no-one there but the red-faced librarian, her hair stuck to her head with sweat. I went out the back, thinking I’d find somewhere to sunbathe while I revised my vocab. I was just going to sit on the steps behind the gym, but looking across the playing field I could see bodies sprawled on the grass along the line of the hedge. I hoped there might be someone I knew, and it would be a sheltered spot to soak up the sun. The playing field had been mowed that morning and the smell of freshly cut grass lured me on. As I walked across I was scanning the sunbathers, but when I got closer I realised they were all boys. They’d taken their shirts off to get a tan. I started to feel embarrassed; I kept my eyes on the corner of the field I was aiming for, and walked as fast as I could, as if I hadn’t noticed they were there. I lay on the grass facing away from them, with my vocab book open in front of me. I could hear whispering and laughter. They were urging someone on, trying to get them to do something. I concentrated on my book and when a shadow fell across the page it made me jump. I looked up and there were two boys holding hands, silhouetted against the sun.
‘Excuse me,’ said one, and the other laughed. ‘This is private sunbathing.’
‘Gay boys’ beach,’ said the laughing one.
‘No girls allowed,’ said the first. I could hear the others laughing. As I picked up my things I couldn’t help glancing towards them, and seeing their mocking faces and their bare chests pink in the sunlight, and a glimpse of bare legs and buttocks too. I marched back across the playing field wishing the earth would swallow me up.
A strange thought crept into my head. About Baz. About why nothing ever happened, through I always thought it would. But then why had he asked if Iain had kissed me? Why would he care?
On the bus home Sal told me she’d decided to join FLAME.
‘They’re a bit extreme,’ I said.
‘Don’t you think it’s time to get extreme? Millions of women dead and still no cure. If we don’t get extreme now, when will we?’
I thought of telling her about the women doctors who work at my Dad’s lab, and about all the infertile women who used to go to the clinic, who were glad about IVF, who wanted it. The thing is, I could hear my Dad’s voice in my head, arguing with every single thing Gina had said. I didn’t think anything she’d said was true. But maybe it was. Why did I always have to believe my Dad?
I felt ashamed, as if Sal was older than me and knew more, because of what had happened to her. As if I didn’t have the right to argue or stop her. I knew she knew how I felt and was furious about it; she didn’t want sympathy or anxiety, she simply wanted nobody to know what had happened. She was angry with me for knowing, but we both knew that wasn’t my fault. Neither of us could behave normally.
What the FLAME women said seemed to burn itself into my brain, like when I used to wake up and hear Mum and Dad arguing. You can’t ever unknow things once you’ve heard them. They become part of you, they work inside you like yeast in the dough Sal and I made one weekend. You leave it on a board with a tea-towel over it, and it starts rising and changing its shape. It swells until it’s become something else altogether.
Tuesday
Each time he comes into the room he looks at me expectantly. As if he imagines I will have changed my mind.
I’ve decided to stop speaking to him. When he brings food or drink he says things like, ‘Come on Jess, stop it now,’ and ‘Let’s talk the whole thing through again, shall we?’ And I either look away or stare at the top of his head, like we used to at school when we wanted to really annoy a teacher. This time he says, ‘You know this makes it easier for me? you behaving like a sulky kid. I can just play at cross Dad.’
I am itching to retort, ‘You do that anyway.’ But I won’t give him the satisfaction. When he goes out he stops on the landing and listens to see what I’m doing. I sit very still, listening to him. I hope he is ashamed.
He always turns the light on when he comes in, and when he goes out, I shuffle over and turn it off. Without the light on, the room is bigger, with shadowy edges, and the soft grey that falls through the window can even make a paler rectangle on the floor. It shifts as the day passes, from near my sleeping bag, across to the middle of the carpet. My eyes adjust to the dimness. I feel as if I’m drawing on whatever rays of light there are out there, sucking them in greedily; using them, like a fire sucking in air to feed its flames.
I know everything in this room. The dry wooden boards down the right hand side, where the bed and wardrobe used to be. (The bed has left imprints of two of its feet in the dusty rose carpet. The imprints are deep and rectangular, and the carpet there is dark pink like inside your mouth.) In the doorway the carpet is worn nearly bald, to the yellowish weave underneath. The light-bulb dangling on a brown flex in the middle of the ceiling is an old fashioned energy guzzler. When it’s off I can see the metal attaching bit is speckled with age and rust. I thought they only lasted a few months, but it can’t have been changed for years.
Above the window there’s a white plastic curtain rail. I wonder why Mum took down the curtain. I remember it had a pattern of little pink and yellow flowers. What did she do with it? I wish she had left it here.
The wallpaper is a faded creamy colour, once it was yellow. It has a faint blotchy pattern which you can’t really make out. But this morning for a few minutes the sun shone, and then the pink carpet and yellow walls really glowed, and I thought, my prison is beautiful!
The obvious way out is to lie. That’s what I keep thinking. Next time he comes in, say, ‘OK. You win. I won’t do it.’
Obviously, embroider it a bit. Sound regretful, or as if you’ve just had an epic revelation, or as if you’re heartbroken but resigned. Simply persuade him you’ve changed your mind – and he’ll let you go. And once you’re free, well, you can do what you like.
I keep turning it over in my mind and I don’t know why I can’t do it. Is it because I know he’d see through me? Like when we used to play Lie Detector. Sometimes I would look on Wikipedia for outlandish facts; a silkworm’s cocoon contains one thread a kilometre and a half in length. True! A snail travels at 15 metres an hour. False! (Too slow). Father of Wisdom knows all the answers. But he knew things there were no answers to; I’ve just eaten a chocolate cupcake at Sal’s. False! He could tell when I was lying.
I’m not a child anymore. I could make a lie convincing.
But I don’t want to. As soon as I try to make myself plan it, in detail, something stubborn blocks me. I don’t want to lie. Why should I have to lie? If he forces me to lie, he’s winning. I want him to understand what I am doing, and agree with me.
I go round this loop as often as I shuffle round the walls, from window heading left to the corner, along the wall where the darker yellow outline of the old mirror stands like a second ghostly window; round the corner to the door and the grubby light switch, avoiding bumping my toe again on the plug socket in the skirting board, and on to the bare boards; round that corner and shuffle more carefully in case of splinters, down to the next corner and round onto the carpet and towards the window and the radiator again. I shuffle round as much as I can, to keep my blood moving and so I’ll be capable of making a dash for it when I can.
Why is it alright to run away, but not to lie?
I shouldn’t have to lie. It annoys me. I hear him unlocking the front door and going out. His footsteps on the paving stones of the little front garden. The clank of the gate. It is so quiet here, and still. In a funny way he’s preparing me. Slowing me down; restricting me; forcing me in on myself.
Maybe it’s necessary. That’s an underlying thought. Maybe it’s necessary for me to go through this, maybe it was meant. So that I actually do everything in full knowledge, instead of rushing into it pell-mell.
Maybe I shouldn’t strugg
le or resist at all, but just accept each stage as it happens, and trust where it’s taking me.
Chapter 10
I came home from a college science evening to find Dad telling Mum all about a wonderful new breakthrough. I could hear their raised voices as I opened the front door, Mum was saying it wouldn’t work and he was saying she didn’t understand. There was wine on the table, he offered me some.
‘Have a glass with us to celebrate, Jesseroon!’
‘Celebrate what?’
‘There’s a vaccine!’
‘But it’s no use – ’ broke in my Mum, and he said ‘Shush’ to her sternly. She burst out giggling and after a moment he joined in. I didn’t like it when they were drunk and I told him he could explain it to me in the morning. As I went upstairs they were laughing like a couple of hyenas.
In the morning he was still happy. Mum had already gone off to early theatre, and he was dancing around the kitchen with a porridgy wooden spoon. He gave me a bowl of porridge and said did I want to hear the good news? They had discovered a vaccine against MDS.
‘But what’s the use of that? Isn’t everyone in the world already infected?’
‘It can be used to vaccinate embryos.’
‘Embryos?’
‘There are hundreds of thousands of embryos stored around the world – millions, that predate Maternal Death Syndrome. Pristine, healthy, disease-free embryos, stacked in freezers.’
‘Why?’
‘In IVF treatment, a woman is given drugs to make her super-ovulate, so you can harvest quite a few eggs at once. You can’t freeze eggs so we fertilise them all and pop one or two embryos back inside her. The others, if they look good, get frozen. They’re backup in case the implanted one fails, or to get a sibling.’
‘OK.’
‘Since most women only used a couple of their embryos, fertility clinics have freezers full of them. Which haven’t been touched since MDS.’
‘So now you vaccinate these embryos.’
‘Bingo! There are only 2 possible ways for them to contract MDS, either through the placenta, or once they start breathing: and we prevent both by early vaccination.’
‘Then why was Mum saying it was no good?’
‘Oh, she’s imagining all sorts of arguments and complications, but they’ll certainly want to try it at the clinic and I would imagine at a lot of other places round the world.’
‘The women who have these babies – the first ones – ’
‘Yes, they already have MDS. At least they’ll die in a good cause. And there are all sorts of other possibilities; the frozen embryos could be gestated in artificial wombs, or in animals – all these alternatives become much more interesting, once we know we can vaccinate the embryos.’
‘What are artificial wombs?’
‘Incubators. Machines babies can grow in.’
I thought it sounded disgusting.
‘More porridge for the nut brown maid?’ He shared the remains between our two bowls. He was happy. I was the one who couldn’t see it in a good light. It’s true, he was happy about it from the start off. All I could think was that the scientists were meddling more and more. If there was going to be a cure I didn’t want it to be like this, with frozen vaccinated embryos and artificial wombs or even worse, animals. I thought they’d end up creating a race of half-human monsters for all we knew. What the FLAME women said flared up in my mind: the (male) scientists would always be in control, because they would be the only ones who could make it happen.
I wanted to talk to Sal about it, but she wasn’t in college and when I texted her to find out why, it turned out she and her mum had gone down to Birmingham again. ‘Bad news’ she put in her text, and I texted ‘?’ But she sent back ‘L8r’. I was in a black clumsy furious mood. I couldn’t see the good in what Dad told me, and I certainly couldn’t see any good anywhere else. I hadn’t spoken to Baz since the day after Sal’s rape. I hadn’t even told him I’d left YOFI too. I was waiting to see if he would get in touch with me, but he didn’t.
Then coming home from college I took a shortcut through the car park in front of Blockbuster and noticed 2 youths staring at me. It was one of those moments where someone’s watching you and you accidentally look them in the eye, and then they feel they have to do something. I’d got really good at avoiding weirdo demented men, but this time I just blew it. I told myself that if I kept walking steadily for 20 steps they’d go away. Before I’d done ten they were in front of me. They had long hair tied back, and the taller one had a backpack. ‘Wantae come wi’ us?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘There’s lassies wi’ us an all,’ he said, nodding towards the bus station; and I could see there was a gang of thirty or more, standing in a huddle in one of the parking bays. The bus station was otherwise deserted, everyone had melted away.
‘No thanks, I’m going home.’
‘Och! She’s goin’ home, tha’s nice. Gie us yer bag.’
‘There’s nothing worth – ’
He snatched it off my shoulder.
‘Please don’t! there’s Coursework in there – ’
‘Coursework?’ He unzipped the bag and tipped it upside-down. My History ring binder fell out and sprang open, and pages splayed across the ground. ‘She’s studyin’!’ he said in tones of amazement to the small one. ‘D’ye not know it’s all over?’ And he made a slicing gesture at his throat, with the side of his hand. Then he picked up my iPod and purse, stuffed them back in the bag, and slung it over his shoulder. He kicked at the ring binder so it went spinning through the air, shedding pages as it went. I must have shouted because he swung back round to me and put his face right close to mine, close enough for me to see the dirty pores at the sides of his nose, and he whispered, ‘Fuckin’ stupid bitch!’ and gave me a shove.
By the time I’d crawled to my feet they were gone. I had to go stooping round the car park trying to collect soggy pages of my work. I didn’t realise I was crying till a woman came out of Blockbuster and put her arm around me. ‘Come and get cleaned up, love. The bloody police, we called them half an hour ago. They’re never here when you need them.’
There were three staff in Blockbuster. I realised afterwards they must have seen the gang, and locked up and turned off the lights to make the place look closed. I think they felt guilty, because one of the women drove me home.
I was more scared afterwards than I had been when it was happening – I realised he could have had a knife. It was in the papers all the time, about girls getting abducted by gangs. It was one of the things the roadblocks were meant to stop – terrorists, suicide bombers, and gangs. But mainly they just stopped the traffic. Mum and Dad made a fuss of me, and I had a bath and tea, then watched telly with them and took a hot water bottle up to bed. But I had to leave the light on. I was thinking, how much worse can this get? I felt so futile, so absolutely powerless, it was as if I was transparent.
Sal rang me as I was lying there staring into space. She said things were bad there too.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m still in Birmingham. My cousin Tom’s been kidnapped.’ Tom was the littlest, he was just two. His dad – Sal’s uncle – had gone to pick him up from crèche after work, but Tom had already been collected by someone else.
‘Who was it?’
‘We don’t know. A young woman with red hair. She told them she was his father’s girlfriend.’
‘But didn’t they check?’
‘There’s a password system. If you’re not picking your kid up you have to get the day’s password from nursery staff and tell it to the picker-up.’
‘And this woman had it?’
‘Yeah. Which makes it look pretty suspicious for the nursery. It’s the second time it’s happened.’
‘But why?’
‘Why? Why d’you think? People want babies!’ She went raving on about how the police were questioning all the staff and going to search their homes, sounding more like her old self than she had fo
r a while. I tried to say yes and no and I’m sorry in the right places, but I was filled with numbing tiredness, like someone had poured grey slushy ice water into me and filled me to my eyeballs, and it was freezing my body from the inside, out. I was tired. I was afraid. I was deathly cold.
Wednesday morning
I can still remember that feeling. I never want to feel it again. I never will feel it again: no matter what he does. Never again will I lose all hope, I swear. Never again will I feel there is nothing in my power to do.
Back then it was Dad who got me out of it. Here’s the terrible joke of all this. What Dad said helped me to crawl out of that pit, and gave me the ray of light to follow. It was Dad who made me see there was hope.
He gave me freedom and now he wants to take it away. On a day like today when I’m not in a rage with him, I feel so sorry. I feel so sorry for him and Mum that tears spring to my eyes. But how can I let them know? Last time I tried with Dad it made him furious. Maybe that’s the best I can do. If he’s furious at least he’s not sad. I admitted I hadn’t got the right to be angry – well, I haven’t. I’m the one doing the damage. The way he’s reacted is only natural. But then he told me I was a pious brainwashed fool.