by Jane Rogers
‘Does Mum know?’ I asked her.
‘Of course not. I’ve only just volunteered.’
‘D’you want me to get her to ring you?’
‘Sure.’
After I put the phone down I felt mean, because I hadn’t actually spoken to her for ages. I quickly scrubbed some jacket potatoes and put them in the microwave, then I called her back. She was excited all over again.
‘The Noahs are organising 3 big ceremonies in different cities and only women from clean and sacred areas can apply.’
‘What’s a clean and sacred area?’
‘We’ve converted over 50% of households in the streets between the library and the co-op, bounded by Manchester road to the north and the playing fields to the south.’
‘OK.’ She was clearly demented.
‘The old couple next door were the worst, you know the ones who used to complain about Clive’s music? I spent hours trying to explain it all to them – but they finally cracked and came along to meeting last Sunday.’
‘I still don’t really under – ’
‘Look,’ she said patiently. ‘You know how we’ve made it possible for babies to be born?’
‘The Noahs have?’
‘Yes. Through prayer and intercession.’
‘You mean the Sleeping Beauties?’
‘Yes, yes. The Noahs have started to turn the tide of evil, and Sleeping Beauties have borne children.’
‘Isn’t it because the doctors put them to sleep?’
‘You have to look at root causes, Jess. You can’t just take things at face value. If you look at the Bible – ’
I heard the car pull up outside. ‘You mean, the doctors can only do this because of the Noahs’ prayers?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But the Sleeping Beauties aren’t all Noahs.’
‘You’d be surprised how many are. And even those who aren’t, have been found to come from clean and sacred areas. So they’ve been helped by the Noahs’ prayers.’
My Mum came into the kitchen. I handed her the phone and began grating some cheese. Mum seemed to get the point a lot quicker than I had.
‘You don’t even know who?’ she asked. ‘Mand, it could be anyone – some dirty old perv, some religions nutter – ’
I could hear Mandy’s voice rising and falling, arguing away at the other end.
‘Joe’s right,’ said my Mum. ‘You’ve been brainwashed. Listen to me. A man you don’t know – in your house. In your bed – ’
The voice at the other end was getting louder. Mum held the phone away from her ear and shook her head at me. When there was a gap she said, ‘Look Mandy, you can’t do this. I want you to ring them up and – no, no, stop it – no, I do want you to be happy, of course I do … that’s not fair – ’ There was a silence then Mum put the phone down. She stared at it miserably for a moment. Dad came into the kitchen, still with his coat on. ‘Hello, nut brown maid,’ he said. He was going out for tea, no need to make anything for him. I told him it was only baked potato and he grinned and said he must’ve known.
‘Joe,’ said my Mum. ‘Just stop it for one minute, will you. Mandy says she’s getting married in one of those big Noah weddings.’
‘Stop it?’ said my Dad. ‘It wasn’t me that started it!’
‘Please – ’
‘You want to heap abuse on me one minute and ask for my help the next – ’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mum. She rubbed her face. ‘Sorry.’
‘What am I supposed to say?’
There was a silence. Mum shook her head as if she was trying to get rid of an annoying insect. ‘Look, about Mandy,’ she said. ‘Can we get her into hospital?’
‘You’ve got to be joking. They’d have to classify all the Noahs as insane, which they patently are, but I can’t see anyone rushing out with the strait jackets.’ He kissed me on the top of my head and went back out to the car without even saying goodbye to Mum.
Mum went to Mandy’s on Saturday and ended up bringing her back to our house that night. Dad had to help drag her out of the car. Mum gave her a sleeping pill and sat with her in the spare room until she went to sleep. Then she told me and Dad what had happened. When she got there Mandy had her sewing machine out, and was busily making a wedding dress. She’d got hold of some lace curtains and cut them into panels, she was planning to layer them over a flesh-coloured silk underskirt. My Mum tried to find out who was organising the wedding, and Mandy just laughed and said, ‘The Noahs have set me free!’ She was completely hyper, whirring away on her sewing machine and giggling at Mum for being so serious. Then the phone rang and she ran to answer it: and she collapsed like a burst balloon.
They told her she was too old, they only wanted young women in the mass weddings. She was heartbroken – it was like Clive leaving all over again. Except that this time she didn’t even know the man she wasn’t going to marry. But as my Dad pointed out, it wasn’t the man she was interested in. He said the Noahs knew hospitals and clinics would only accept young volunteers to be Sleeping Beauties. They were the only ones whose babies survived. Mum had brought her back to ours because she was afraid Mand might do something daft. Dad took all the pills out of the bathroom cabinet and hid them.
Mandy stayed in bed all week. She wouldn’t eat and she would hardly drink; she just lay there stony faced. Mum was worried about leaving her on her own but she had to go to work. Dad took a couple of days off and after that I looked after her as much as I could. It was pitiful; I’d go in with a drink and she’d just be lying there with her eyes closed and tears trickling down her cheeks. When I begged her to drink she slowly turned her head from one side to the other without even looking at me. I ended up going in and kneeling by her bed, holding her hand and crying myself. She half opened her eyes, like the lids were too heavy to raise, and muttered, ‘They promised. God hears your prayers, he will give you your heart’s desire.’
‘Mand, nobody can give – ’
‘They promised.’
The doctor prescribed a load of pills and Mum managed to find someone qualified – he was called Paul – who could care for her at home. It was expensive and Mand didn’t have any money. If Nanna Bessie’s house had sold it would have been fine because it was left to Mandy and my Mum; but no one had even been to look at it.
If Nanna Bessie’s house had been sold … where would I be now, I wonder? Would he have been able to find anywhere else so perfect for a kidnap?
Mum and Dad had a brisk not-quite-row where she said the only way to pay for Mand’s care was to not replace the car and to not go on holiday. And he said fine by him. Two good decisions for the earth; but at night the vision of Mandy’s crying face was haunting me.
Everything kept churning round in my head. All the women like Mandy, who wanted children, crying in their beds around the world. The suicides. The gangs, roaming through and grabbing whatever and whoever they fancied. And what Sal was thinking – the things the FLAME women said, the way MDS was driving a wedge between women and men. And all the silly chattering little protest groups, achieving nothing.
I thought, there has to be something we can do, before everything fractures and shatters into pieces. I had an image of our windscreen when we were driving on the motorway one time. A stone flew up from the car in front and we heard it ping against the windscreen. It chipped the glass and from that chip a crack slowly spread along the middle of the screen towards the driver’s side. My Dad pulled onto the hard shoulder, to turn off at the next exit. The crack in the glass kept moving, slowly, as if it had a life of its own, snaking across the windscreen. As we reached the turn off it got to the other side and a new crack began, slanting upwards from that point. It was as if someone was doodling lines on the glass. Dad stopped at the slip road roundabout, and when he started again there was a little jerk with the gears, and the whole window suddenly shattered. Dad had to bash it out with the road atlas. And I thought, that’s what’s happening to us. MDS was a crack but now it’
s breaking the whole world into fragments.
The only ray of hope I could see was through those frozen embryos, whose births would kill their mothers.
Chapter 13
I began to think about them quite a lot. They would simply float into my head. At different times, in different moods, I would think of those girls volunteering.
Sal was getting involved in the FLAME group – her mum went too. I wasn’t up for that, and I was lonely, so when Mary phoned to ask if I’d help sort out a big YOFI clothes recycle, and told me Iain was away in London, I didn’t mind saying yes. I wasn’t going to get involved again, but an evening catching up with everyone would be fine. There weren’t that many people there, actually; it seemed lots of others had drifted away too. I reckoned YOFI was on its last legs.
Jacob brought some beer because it was his birthday. The clothes had that manky musty smell of old clothes that’ve been put away. The smell got into everything, even the taste of our beer. They were saving the decent stuff for a Really Free stall, and the rest would be used to pack suitcases for the twice-delayed airport protest. Someone put on a tape and the beat of the music began to speed us up.
‘I bet loads of it belonged to dead people,’ said Mary. I thought about the women who’d died from MDS and wondered if their husbands had given away their clothes. Imagine going through your wife’s wardrobe and just putting it all in binliners – the T shirts, the jeans, that you’ve seen her wearing every day.
I thought about what Dad had said about the frozen-embryo Sleeping Beauties, how they would be helping the survival of the race. I tried to work out how many lives one of those volunteers might create. If she gave birth to a daughter, and that daughter had children, and they all had children … over a few generations, it could be hundreds of people. But it would make a difference sooner than that. It would make a difference to people kidnapping and trafficking young kids. To the Noahs. The suicides. The men who think women are dirty. The FLAME women hating men. The scientists doing awful experiments on animals, the ALF attacking them. It would make a difference to the way everyone looked at the world, because they’d be able to see there’s hope.
Mary threw me a silky blue dress. It was heavy and slippery, the colour of the sky on a clear summer evening. I took off my jumper and pulled the dress on over my t shirt and jeans. It was an old design, tight over the bust then flared, hanging in beautiful folds down to midcalf length. ‘Wow!’ said Mary, ‘look!’ The others all stopped to look, and someone wolf whistled and the others clapped. I gave them a twirl. I loved the cool feel of the heavy silk swishing round me. I found a brown skirt with cream embroidery and passed it over to Mary. Ahmed was pulling on an orangey-golden kaftan. Everyone began scrabbling through the heaps to find things they liked. The old song that came on next seemed to echo through me. Love, love will tear us apart again. It was the saddest song I had ever heard.
‘Jessie! Jessie! Here!’ Mary found a little black hat with brilliant blue feathers round it. They were beautiful, curling round the curve of the hat making a lacy blue pattern against the velvety black. We all began admiring one another, stretching out our arms and necks to display our finery, striding about and striking poses, like models on the catwalk. I wondered who had worn my dress, I wondered if she went dancing in it. I had the strangest feeling, almost as if the dress was a body. I’d put the dress on and in doing that I’d put on another body. A light, twirling, dancing body. And after me, someone else could wear the dress. And someone else. And they would all have a sense of that, the light twirling dancing body. But of course they would be themselves as well. I was thinking, if that much can be passed on just in a dress, how much of every living person lives on after they die? Feeds into everyone else, in different ways, through what they’ve said, and done, and made. All these dead clothes could come back to life as soon as we put them on. I thought, death is really no big deal. I could die and I wouldn’t mind at all.
Who will the volunteers be? I remember asking myself. Mary had put on a leather waistcoat and some black evening gloves. She came up and bowed to me and we sauntered round the piles of clothes arm in arm, bowing and curtseying to everyone we passed. The volunteers will be girls like me, they have to be young. The younger the better. I unhooked my arm from Mary’s and went to sit on the stage steps. I stroked the silk of my skirt, smoothing it over my denim thighs. I thought about those tribesmen Dad was talking about, the sacrifice ones, Meriahs, who live knowing they are special and die believing they are saving the lives of others. They think it’s their destiny. It is their destiny. And I thought, how could anyone have a better life and death than that?
I wasn’t drunk but I was up above the room, high above it, looking down on the mountains of clothes with all their departed lives, and on the energetic YOFI members hurling clothes from one pile into another, or putting them on and dancing about, and it was nothing to do with me because I had something more important to do. I knew that I could take on the knowledge of other sacrificers. Other volunteers who have died for their people. Suicide bombers, strapping on their bomb belts. Young Japanese kamikaze pilots, winding their silk scarves around their necks. Just like putting on the silk dress. Putting on their strength and certainty. Donning my destiny.
I don’t remember my dreams that night but I do remember waking and feeling as if I’d been right down to the bottom of something. Down into the very deep blue water, the sea, going down down down through layers of darkening blue like all the shades on a paint chart, turquoise, teal, aquamarine, royal blue, navy blue, French navy, midnight blue, ink, darker and darker but not scared, just marvelling at the depth and intensity of colour. I knew that whenever I wanted, soon enough, I’d come popping back up to the surface like a cork.
Which is what I did, waking up. And I felt surprised and dizzy to see my ordinary room around me. I remembered that I had thought about volunteering.
I made myself imagine volunteering to be a Sleeping Beauty. Being put to sleep and never waking up. I still didn’t know how anyone could volunteer for that. I felt spacey inside my head, as if there was easily room there for lots of contradictory ideas. Spacey and excited. I wondered if I would talk about it with Baz. I felt as if something extraordinary was going to happen that very day.
Chapter 14
Something extraordinary did happen but it wasn’t good. In the evening when I was watching BABIES OF THE WEEK I heard Mum and Dad’s raised voices in the kitchen. I turned up the telly, because I love that programme. It’s organized by Mothers for Life. They show photos of the babies, and of their mothers before they were pregnant. Someone, usually the Sleeping Beauty’s mother, reads a poem or from the Bible or the Koran. You can choose your own poem but there are also some purpose-written ones, this is my favourite:
Sleep well, dear ______ , in the cool dark earth.
You gave your life for this new birth.
The radiance of your sacrifice
Shines like a star in your infant’s life.
Some people chose to have their favourite song. I tried to imagine myself on there, and wondered what photo of me they’d use. I watched all the babies. There was one like a little monkey with wispy black hair and solemn eyes. And another had a bald head and fat hamster cheeks. I love it when they’re staring at you with that dazed look, like they’re wondering ‘Where on earth am I now?’ After the babies came more news: arson, suicides, wars, famines and fighting as usual; coup in Malaysia, state of emergency in Pakistan, riots in Washington; attacks on the homes of UK animal-research scientists; terror suspects appealing against imprisonment without trial; new Chinese Sleeping Beauty programme recruiting 5,000 volunteers a week; voluntary redeployment into vital services; floods in India; and of course a story about a healthy pregnant woman in Nigeria, kept alive by her followers at a secret location. There was always a story like this, but most mysteriously they never showed the woman on screen, and you never actually heard about it when her baby was born. There were endless rumours about thi
ngs which were supposed to have helped women survive pregnancies: diets, special herbs, round the clock prayers to the Virgin, cannibalism, sterile environments, living underwater, meditation, hypnotism, voodoo, acupuncture, fasting, staying at high altitudes, making blood sacrifices to the mother goddess. Strange how all those healthy pregnant women were invisible, though!
I tuned out and then I could hear Mum and Dad weren’t just having a standard row. Mum was crying, so it was hard to make out what she said. I didn’t need to tell you? I muted the telly. My ears latched onto my own name; Dad in a low voice, something something Jessie knows? Then the shocking sound of a dish smashing against the tiles. I crept to the door and pressed my ear against it.
‘You never even looked at me – ’
‘Oh it’s my fault. Whichever way you spin it, Cath’s the victim – ’
‘No – listen – Joe – ’
‘Why should I listen? Why should I listen to another word of this self-serving shite?’
There was an awful silence and I stretched and strained my hearing but couldn’t get anything – then the kitchen door being snatched open, steps in the hall, the front door slamming shut and the car roaring into life.
I froze, waiting for the next sound, but there was nothing. Dad had gone. As quietly as I could I tiptoed upstairs. I knew what this was about and I didn’t want to see Mum. When I reached my room I shut the door without a sound and put on my headphones so I wouldn’t hear if she called. I sat at my desk and stared at the wall. I had known for weeks. I could have stopped it – I could have told Mum I knew, threatened her I’d tell Dad. But I’d been merrily going along in my own life blanking it out (the note in the pocket? The new trousers? The day out with ‘colleagues’?) as if it was nothing to do with me. And now Dad had driven off into the night in rage and misery, going I didn’t know where, at risk of crashing and never coming back. Something something Jessie knows? Was he asking, did I know? What if he thought I knew and was keeping it secret from him, that I was conspiring with Mum?