by Jane Rogers
Today when he comes in I say again, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What are you sorry for?’
‘All the upset I’m causing you and Mum.’
‘If you’re sorry, don’t do it.’
‘I’m sorry but I’m still going to do it.’
‘Then I shall keep you locked up.’
‘There’s no point, but I understand why you’re doing it. I forgive you.’
‘Forgive me? Who do you think you are? Jesus fucking Christ?’
‘What I mean is, I know you’re doing this for good reasons so I shouldn’t get mad at you. I’m sorry I bit you.’
‘Jess what is the point of this drivel? I’m sorry I tied you up – we’re both sorry for everything we’ve done – but the point is, we’ve done it. Because every other method of resolving this difference of opinion has failed. We are reduced to violence, which is the last resort.’
I laugh. ‘You can’t hold me captive all my life.’
‘I won’t need to.’
Suddenly I see. He is actually contemplating keeping me here till I’m too old. ‘You can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Keep me here a year?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you can’t.’
‘Watch me.’
There are things I can do. Hunger strike. Injuring myself so I need medical attention. But both of those involve a risk to my health, which is my one really vital asset. My mind is racing now, because I have to find a way of outwitting him. I can, I will, I don’t feel any doubt about it. I will beat him, because what I’m doing is right, and what he’s doing is only negative – blocking me, stopping me. It’s like him trying to dam a river, trying to hold back the tide. The force is with me, because I’m in the right.
I shuffle my chair around so I am sitting with my back to him. He says ‘Jess?’ I ignore him. After a minute I hear him moving to the door, he goes out and locks it.
Once I know he’s gone I start wriggling my feet. They keep going to sleep, even though the plastic loops aren’t tight. Last night when I was lying in the sleeping bag they felt enormous, and I sat up in a panic, thinking they must be swollen. They felt huge, and tender all over. But when I looked they were perfectly normal. I would have given anything for someone to rub and massage them. All I wanted in the world was a person to stroke my feet.
I keep thinking about my feet when there are more important things to concentrate on. But he doesn’t know that. I won’t let him know that any of it is getting to me. I’m strong and he’s weak. That’s the way round it is. And I’m not going to let him imagine he can ever break me.
What’s funny is, back then he was trying to cheer me up. He was trying to cheer me up and he succeeded; what a pity he’s not happy with the result.
Chapter 11
He and Mum must have been as shocked about the gang as I was, because they became ridiculously protective, and offered me lifts all over the place, until it finally sank in to their heads that I had given up car travel. I knew I’d been attacked because I had stupidly walked straight into something; if I kept my eyes and ears open I could avoid trouble. I knew how to make myself almost invisible on the street. I felt as if I could actually control my own visibility, and when girls at college talked about the men calling out to them or following them I laughed in my heart and felt superior.
I asked Mum and Dad to respect Buy Nothing Christmas, and they agreed. I said I didn’t want anything for my birthday either. Then Dad said but at least let’s have an outing to celebrate, just the three of us – a proper outing, like in the old days. Wouldn’t that cheer me up? Sal’d been to this fantastic aquarium in Birmingham, so I asked if we could go there.
I love aquariums. I love the brightly lit tanks like windows in a dark street, where you look in to the private strangeness of the fishes’ homes. The SeaLife centre has one part that’s a glass tunnel through a gigantic tank where sharks and turtles swim over your head, and shoals of fish dart past. It has creatures so strange you can’t believe you’re seeing them. Best of all, it has a special collection of sea horses.
With their dragon heads and fragile mermaid bodies, moving upright through the water, they look so brave! Dad and I watched them for ages, there’s a whole wall of tanks with different species, like the Big Bellied Seahorse and the Spiny Seahorse and the Weedy Sea Dragon which looks just like a drifting piece of seaweed. In one there was a pregnant male who was due to release his babies any day, and in another a pair who were doing a courtship dance, their tails lovingly twisted together.
Dad and I wondered why the male carried the babies – I asked if that could be an evolutionary response to something that threatened them millions of years ago. Like maybe pregnant females got attacked or ill. Dad told me with the male seahorses it’s not exactly pregnancy, because their eggs are fertilised externally, like most fish eggs. The father just keeps the babies in his pouch to grow. They must have a better chance of survival because of that.
I knew Dad and I were both thinking about those frozen embryos which can be put in a surrogate mother and vaccinated against MDS. It’s exactly the same thing. It gives us a chance of survival. And quite suddenly it struck me how amazingly clever that was. I was thinking about the extraordinariness of the way sea horses must have evolved over thousands of years, and then about how humans know so much that within a space of days they can use their brains to choose to incubate their babies in a different way. The shining sea horses hung like question marks in the water, staring at me with their sideways eyes. I remember staring back at them and realising that human beings are beautiful and clever and ingenious.
It was like walking out of a dark tunnel into sunlight. It was like my brain just did a flip and turned itself inside out, and I could see, all of a sudden I could really see, what a hopeful thing the vaccine was. I could see Dad was right to be happy! Scientists had found a way for us to survive.
After the seahorses we looked at the rays. They lie there flat as plates then they ripple their fins and glide though the water like birds through the air. Their bodies undulate as if they themselves were waves. And they’ve found not just one but two ways to protect their babies; some keep their eggs inside, and give birth to live young; others produce eggs in those rubbery brown cases that I always used to think were seaweed. Mermaid’s purses. They float across oceans, drifting in the currents. A time capsule, carrying the babies to a safer place.
Dad and I were still staring at the rays when Mum appeared and asked us if we knew what time it was. She’d finished going round ages ago and had been waiting for us in the café. Dad suggested she go shopping while he and I checked out the rest of the tanks, and she was really offended. ‘Why didn’t you two just come on your own? Why drag me along?’ She walked away from us fast, clicking on her high heels. Dad started to hurry after her but she went right out through the barrier.
By the time we’d been stamped for re-entry she’d vanished. It was cold and grey outside, the light glared off the concrete buildings and pavement. Dad moved away to the side of the canal and rang her. I stood in the doorway staring back longingly into the dimness.
But we had to go and join Mum for lunch in the pub on the other side of the canal. It was new and nearly empty, with a sad tinsel tree and a heap of gift-wrapped boxes. Mum’d combed her hair and put on new lipstick; she looked miserable. I ordered mozzarella and tomato and basil baguette; seeing prawn and tuna melt on the menu nearly put me off eating anything at all. ‘What did you find that was so fascinating?’ she asked at last.
‘The seahorses,’ I said.
‘What about them?’
‘The father hatching the babies. It’s like those frozen embryos being born by surrogate mothers.’
‘It won’t work,’ she said.
Dad came back with our drinks. ‘What won’t?’
‘The frozen embryo surrogacy thing. Even before MDS, it was a legal and emotional minefield.’
‘Yes, w
hen someone’s paying a woman to have their baby,’ said Dad. ‘But isn’t this a bit different?’
‘How?’
‘For a start, the surrogate mother dies. That’s one complication out of the way.’
‘Which leaves the biological parents holding one end of the baby, and the surrogate’s parents the other. Look at the shenanigans over the Sleeping Beauties.’
‘That’s exactly my point. The Sleeping Beauties are giving birth to a child where the genetic father is part of the process. The child has been conceived and brought to term by its biological parents. That’s why you get these horrible squabbles between the father and the dead mother’s parents.’
‘Maybe,’ said my Mum, ‘but here’s another thing. Like you say, those Sleeping Beauties are choosing to have their own genetic baby. The biological motivation for reproduction is in place. Whereas the frozen embryo girls would be expected to give up their lives for alien genes.’
‘But the girls who do this will know they’re helping the survival of the whole race.’ Thus spoke my father.
‘The girls who do this will be poor brainwashed little things. The Noahs will put up girls, and dress them in white and fill their heads with stories about rewards in heaven. They’ll marry them off to all the rejects who can’t attract girlfriends.’
‘They don’t need to marry them to anyone, actually, since the pregnancy will be by IVF.’
‘Right, I forgot. Virgin births. Won’t the churches love it. We’ll be worshipping them in the streets.’
‘Don’t you think these girls will deserve all the razzmatazz they can get? Really, they’ll be heroines,’ said Dad.
‘They’ll have been tricked into giving up their lives.’
‘Think of it as a suicide mission – or, no, a sacrifice … Like the Khond.’
‘Here we go,’ said Mum.
‘The Khond of Bengal. Heard of them?’
‘No. Surprisingly enough, no.’
‘Well they used to have a tradition of human sacrifice, to ensure good crops. And they treated their sacrificial victims like gods. That was what made it possible. The victims had a role to play, and they were important.’
‘They knew in advance that they were going to die?’
‘Yes. They were called Meriahs, and they were practically worshipped. They were given everything they needed. They could marry other Meriahs and have Meriah children. But all Meriahs lived their lives knowing they were destined for sacrifice. Their deaths meant everyone else could live. So they had this status.’
‘You think that’s good.’
‘I think it meant they lived knowing they were special and died believing they were saving the lives of others, and that that was their destiny. And if girls who volunteer for surrogacy think that too – wouldn’t it be good?’
‘It’s like Jesus,’ I said.
‘Yes my Jesseroon, exactly right. There was a long tradition of human sacrifice before Jesus appeared on the scene. The best thing a king could do to get his country out of trouble, was to sacrifice a son.’
‘There you are!’ said my Mum. ‘A parent sacrifices a son. Or in this case a daughter. What right does a parent have to tell a child to die?’
‘There’d be a proper process. Counselling.’ Dad laughed. ‘They missed that bit out of the Bible.’
‘And what about those girls who don’t even think? Who volunteer on a whim, because they crave attention?’
‘Well I don’t know,’ said my Dad. ‘But since it seems the only way forward, I think we have to embrace it. Golding’s already setting up.’
‘You’ll have them at the clinic?’
‘He’s got a volunteers’ meeting scheduled.’
‘But Joe – healthy, strong young girls!’
‘What else can we do? At least until there’s a breakthrough with transgenic wombs.’
‘So the end justifies the means. They’d be taking these girls’ lives.’
‘Like recruiting young men for a war? Asking them to make the ultimate sacrifice for their people?’
‘It’s not certain a soldier will die. He’s not simply a passive victim.’
‘They often are. Have you heard of – ’
‘No,’ said my Mum. ‘And I don’t want to.’
‘Girls who volunteer would be heroines. We have to honour courageous self-sacrifice.’
As we rode home on the train I stared through the layers of reflections on the window, out into the dark countryside. I knew my Dad was right. It would be a wonderfully courageous thing to do, to give your life for a child who would be disease-free. To offer yourself as a gateway for the future. He said it and he was right. In black and white.
But there was a while to go before I thought any more about it. At that time I imagined some distant, shining, heroic girls. Girls that my Dad would praise and honour, girls who were helping to save the world. They were as bright and faraway as stars.
And close up, I had my own busy and annoying life to live. There was Baz. I knew he liked me from the way he reacted about Iain that time. The way he looked after me, after Sal’s rape, was lovely. I knew he wasn’t gay, it was a stupid thing to think. But now we weren’t going to YOFI we hardly seemed to see each other. I waited for him after college one afternoon and asked if he wanted to walk home together. He told me what’d been going on at his house. Since his father’d lost his church he’d spent every day sitting in their house glaring, just like he was the day I went there. He forbade Baz’s mum to go to church, which upset her because she was religious, and he told them that God wanted the world to end. He said the end was coming very soon and the only thing to do was to prepare for it by cleansing your mind. He wanted them both to sit there all day and wait with him. Baz’s mum’s a teacher, she had to go to work. But he shut her in the bedroom and she had to climb out the window; once he tied her to the towel rail and she was stuck there till Baz came home from college. In the end she phoned her school and said she had to take time off for family reasons. He shouted at Baz for going out or even for practising in his room.
‘But he doesn’t try to push me around, like he does my mum,’ Baz said. ‘Maybe he thinks I’ll hit him.’
His mum had talked about getting the doctor and his dad said – ‘if a doctor steps through that door, I’ll kill him.’ Baz and his mother tried to work out what to do in whispered conversations, but his dad followed them around, watching every move. ‘He doesn’t even sleep,’ Baz told me. ‘If you go into that room at night he’s sitting there in the dark like a filthy old spider, staring.’ The only things Baz’s mother were allowed to do were to read the Bible aloud to him or to clean the house. Baz was afraid to go out in case anything happened to her.
‘You have to get help. He’s mentally ill,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but – ’ Baz stopped to tap a little dance with his fingers, as if that would help him find the words. ‘It’s him. It’s like essence of him now, it’s just he’s stopped caring what people think of it.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘He’s always told her what to do. Us. Both of us. You have to go to Sunday School, you have to creep about while he communes with the Lord, you have to jump when he says jump. And if not he turns nasty.’
‘Violent?’
‘No. But even before, if my mum was late back from school, or if she didn’t drop what she was doing quick enough when he wanted something, he’d be furious. Not just irritated, but furious. For hours.’
‘Before MDS?’
‘He’s always been like it. He’s spent his whole life expecting other people to do what he says. That’s why he’s lost it, because his congregation didn’t lie down and let him walk all over them.’
‘You need to tell someone.’
‘He’s cunning. He wouldn’t forget. And he could take it out on my mum anytime.’
What could I do? Baz promised to phone me if things got worse.
Chapter 12
My parents weren’t as bad as his but th
ey were bad enough. They had a particularly idiotic row at the weekend. Mum asked if Dad minded her going out for the day on Sunday for some colleague’s birthday. He went, ‘Sure, fine,’ in the distracted way he does when he’s trying to read and you’re pestering him. But instead of saying ‘good’, she attacked him.
‘You really don’t care if I’m here or not, do you? As long as you’ve got your books, I can prance naked down the street for all you care.’
‘What have I done?’ he kept asking. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done! I thought you wanted to go out.’
‘I’m sick of being invisible!’ Mum yelled. On Sunday she dressed up in a shocking pink top and black wool trousers that were clearly new, although they’d both signed the Compact, and didn’t come home till after I’d gone to bed.
And then Mandy nosedived. She rang up one afternoon just as I got in from college and I dashed to answer it. She said she was getting married. I stood in the kitchen with my coat on staring out at the cold dark garden while Mandy babbled away in my ear. ‘It’s in March. There’ll be an open air ceremony in Platt Fields with hundreds of people. I’m going to design my own dress, it can be any style as long as it’s white. I’ve got some beautiful antique lace – ’
I didn’t understand who she was going to marry. I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend.
‘They’ll give us the names on Sunday,’ she said.
‘Who will?’
‘At meeting. At the Noahs.’
‘Give you whose names?’
‘The names of the men we’re marrying!’ The more she told me the madder it was. 50 couples all getting married in the same ceremony, and they didn’t even know each other’s names. I was impatient because Sal was coming round later to watch a DVD for the first time in ages, and I wanted to sort out my room before she came. I was also supposed to be cooking tea for Mum and Dad.