The Testament of Jessie Lamb

by Jane Rogers

  After a moment he said, ‘It’s OK. It’s because you’re a virgin. Do you want me to use my fingers?’

  I wanted it to be like it was before. Now it felt like an operation or something, all the lovely feelings had gone. I wanted it to be proper, like what Sal had told me, with both of us moaning in ecstasy. ‘No,’ I whispered, ‘no.’

  ‘I’m going to try again. I’ll stop if it hurts you. Oh, Jessie – ’ and he kissed me and stroked me, his breath coming in quick panting gasps which somehow transferred themselves to me so that my breaths started racing too and rays of heat were darting up from my vagina, then he was butting his head against my shoulder like a baby lamb trying to get at its mother’s teat. His head was butting and he was pushing into me and it was sore and hot and fiery as if we were going into meltdown and then he gave a sudden sharper jab and I could feel him sliding properly in like a fish slipping into water and he cried ‘Aah!’ and his head came to stillness on my shoulder. It was as if I’d been stabbed with a knife, I wanted him to take it out of me. But at the same time I was desperately wanting him to carry on; the deep swimmy wetness almost made me swoon. He lifted his head.

  ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  He reached down with his fingers and then brought them up to show me. Blood.

  ‘I didn’t hurt you?’

  ‘Not much. I feel – I feel …’ We lay quietly for a while.

  He began to kiss me again. And to move as slowly and gently as a little pink earthworm when you pick it up from the garden in the palm of your hand. And the sweetness came back, sore and sweet, sweet and sore, climbing and climbing till I could hardly get my breath and we were rocking together in the most perfect fit, and then clutched in a spasm of pleasure.

  Afterwards we lay sprawled on the bed with just our fingertips touching – too hot for anything else. I was glad but I think I was in shock. Every part of me was tender. Then I remembered that Baz was going away, to help Nat and the ALFs, and I thought I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to be left on my own, I was so sensitised I needed him to keep his arms around me at all times. It was like I had been peeled. When he asked, ‘What is it?’ I told him, and he hugged me and said he’d be back soon. But I couldn’t help it, and I cried. ‘Stop it,’ Baz whispered, ‘stop it, stop it,’ and he licked the tears off my face like a dog until I couldn’t help laughing, and he called me an idiot. We talked about him going to help Nat and he promised not to do anything dangerous. ‘But don’t try and phone or text me – we’ll have to stay out of contact for a few days, Jess; so the police can’t trace us.’ It was fine, everything was fine. Part of me wanted him to stop talking and just start kissing me again, my blood was fizzy and it made my whole body tingle. But another part of me wanted to have my clothes on and be outside in the cold night walking home, breathing the dark air and letting the thinking bits of me catch up with the feeling bits. We heard noises upstairs so it was definitely time for me to go; Baz said he’d walk me.

  We went upstairs to find his mother vacuuming the curtains. She turned the vacuum off for a minute to hear where he was going and to say goodnight to me, then carried on with her task. As we walked back to my house with our arms wrapped round each other I felt terribly sorry for her. The sky was full of stars. We stood for a while in the shadow of a fir which blocked the streetlamp, and looked for the constellations either of us could name. Then we walked back to my house holding hands and not talking, feeling as if we owned the night and everything in it; moon, stars, the dark shapes of trees, the crouching quiet houses. We knew we would never be stupid in the ways our parents were stupid.

  Chapter 18

  It was the sound of the car in the drive that woke me. Dad was back! I pulled on my dressing gown and ran downstairs to meet him. His big grey coat, his purple scarf, his monkey face and grey floppy hair all seemed brighter than usual, larger than life, more vivid than I had remembered. He gave me a big big hug.

  ‘Where were you? Didn’t you get my texts? What’s happened to your phone?’ I heard Mum come downstairs behind me.

  ‘Hello Joe,’ she said.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he replied quietly.

  Mum nodded. ‘I’ll make some tea.’

  ‘I wanted time to think,’ he said to me. ‘That’s all. I just needed some time on my own, to think things through.’

  ‘But you could have texted!’

  ‘No, it was better to keep it switched off.’

  ‘But Dad we were worried, we didn’t know where you were – ’

  ‘Well I’m home now. Listen Jess, your mother and I need to talk. Give us some peace, alright? There are things we need to sort out.’ He followed Mum into the kitchen and shut the door.

  I went slowly back up to my room. I had news to tell him, had he forgotten? I sat on my floor and listened to the ups and downs of their voices, they were both keeping them low, a running murmur. What were they sorting out? How to get divorced? How to divide up the house and the car and the furniture and knives and forks, how to divide me?

  Mandy was right. I should ignore them. They caused all this distress and disruption because of their argument, so that I had to lie awake night after night worrying, and now they didn’t even apologise! For all they cared, I was perfectly irrelevant. I imagined marching downstairs and telling them – ‘OK, put your big splitting-up drama on hold and listen to me for one moment. I’ve been to see Mr Golding, and this is what I’ve decided to do …’ I would tell them, and they would both stand staring at me, then I’d say, ‘OK. Now you can go back to your self-obsessing.’

  But really, there was no point in telling them. If they hadn’t got time for me, then I hadn’t got time for them. It was none of their business anyway.

  I remembered Baz, and heat crept into me. I could feel my nipples tight against my t shirt. I squeezed my hands against them. The feeling was so – so – oh, I don’t know, I can’t describe it, for a moment I was petrified. I thought, if I could do that every day of my life I wouldn’t even care about anything else. Not the planet, not the future, nothing. I’d be like Sal was with Damien at the start – just a one track mind. If Baz really liked me surely he wouldn’t go away, how could he? Even for a week? Nobody had told me. Nobody had warned me I would feel so – so – like this. Like a sex maniac.

  I wedged my chair against the door and rolled back on my bed and touched myself. But it wasn’t the same. I wanted him. Then the soreness reminded me and gave me that shocked feeling inside again. I was dripping wet. I couldn’t stop, I made myself come. After, I felt disgusted. Sex wasn’t important. Relationships weren’t important. What was important was what I had decided to do.

  I went into the bathroom and had a long wasteful shower. When I looked at myself in the steamy mirror afterwards, I looked just the same. Nobody would have known what I had done. I was going to stick to my plan, I wasn’t going to let the thing with Baz distract me from it. Anymore than he was letting the thing with me distract him from his plans. He’d gone to Chester hadn’t he. Who knew when I’d see him again? I wondered again who else he had done it with. I didn’t care as long as it wasn’t Rosa.

  I was drying my hair when I realised my phone was ringing – I switched off the dryer and grabbed it. Unknown caller. It was Nurse Garner from the clinic. ‘Jessie Lamb?’ she said. ‘You came to the meeting for volunteers.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sorry it’s such short notice, but if you’re free Dr Nichol can do medicals today.’

  ‘Today? What time?’

  ‘Twelve o’ clock?’

  ‘Fine.’ Good. I didn’t have to sit there waiting for Dad to have time to talk to me. I dressed and got myself out of the house so quietly the murmuring voices in the kitchen never even paused. Let them wonder where I was, if they ever had time to notice!

  All the way on the bus to the clinic I could feel a pulse beating inside me, deep between my legs. I hoped the medical wouldn’t examine me down there. That would be trul
y embarrassing.

  Dr Nichol is a small woman with silvery hair and a dark, quiet face. Dark eyes, black eyebrows, something watchful and far back in the way she looks at you. She has a low clear voice. ‘Well Jessie,’ she said, ‘how’re you feeling?’ She’s the kind of person you want to speak honestly to, because you know she’s listening with every scrap of her attention. After she’d taken some samples and done my blood pressure and listened to my heart, she asked about my periods and warned me that she’d need to remove my Implanon next time she saw me, if everything went according to plan. She didn’t make me undress or examine me there at all, thank goodness. Soon I wouldn’t have to think about it.

  At the end she shook my hand and said ‘Well done, you’re fighting fit.’ She smiled at me kindly. ‘But remember, no one will think any the less of you if you don’t go through with this.’ I wondered how it had been with the other girls, if they were all ‘fighting fit’; I wondered if she believed any of us would really do it. I wanted her to believe in me. I didn’t want to disappoint her.

  When I came out of the medical room there were two other girls waiting. Theresa, the quiet one from the volunteering meeting – and Rosa Davis! She was dressed in goth-type black and skinny as a whippet, but there was no mistaking her sly smiling face. I was gobsmacked. She hadn’t been at school since before GCSE’s. Obviously she couldn’t have been pregnant, because here she was. We said hello in amazement, and Theresa went in for her medical. Rosa seemed really happy I was volunteering. ‘How did you hear about it?’ I asked her.

  ‘My Mum’s a nurse.’

  I realised that of course all of us must have some connection to the clinic – how else could we even have heard about the pre-MDS embryos? ‘Are you back at your Mum’s?’

  ‘I’m living with my boyfriend. He’s got a really big flat on Deansgate.’

  I asked her where she’d been since she left school, and she said loads of places, London, Paris, California. She said she’d been to so many places she’d lost track. As she spoke she kept glancing at me with her eye that meets yours, and the other one that seems to be staring over your head, as if to dare me to say I didn’t believe her. Of all the people in the world, she was just about the last one I ever wanted to meet again. She insisted on swapping phone numbers so we could stay in touch through the different stages of volunteering. I told myself it didn’t matter, she’d be bound to drop out. As soon as I decently could I told her I had to meet someone, and hurried to the exit.

  I had no desire to go home so I decided to visit Lisa. When I got off the bus it had started snowing – big polka dot flakes that were silently pattering a layer of white over everything. It was cold enough for it to lie; the first proper snow of the winter, and it had waited till the beginning of March to fall. By the time I got to the Kids House my face was wet and numb. No one answered the door but I could hear noise from inside so I let myself in. There was a bunch of lads playing pool in the big room, and rap blasting out of the speakers. It looked better now it was painted white, but there was still something scruffy and echoey about it. I went up and knocked on Lisa’s door and she called, ‘come in.’ Her room was completely different. There was a row of feathery ferns and plants with dark glossy leaves all along the windowsill. In the middle of the room were two old fashioned armchairs covered with faded Indian bedspreads. Her bed was a mattress on the floor, with a pile of velvety red and purple cushions, and she had a little wooden table and chair in the corner, with her laptop and a glowing lamp. There was a double pile of books against the side of the desk. She’d painted the bare floorboards a dark gloss red. ‘Nice skirting boards!’ I said, and she laughed.

  ‘Yes, very well painted.’

  ‘You’ve made it lovely.’

  ‘It’s good to have somewhere that no one messes up.’ She went to get us a drink and I looked at the titles of the books around her desk, 21st Century Smallholder, How to Grow More Vegetables, The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. I didn’t know there was a garden at the Kids House. She brought us mugs of orange and we sat in the snug armchairs and admired the room. ‘My dad gave me some stuff from home.’

  ‘Was he alright about it?’

  ‘He says we’re better off without him. But then he cries so I’ll feel guilty.’

  I hadn’t planned to, but I found myself telling her about wanting to volunteer, and about the medical I’d just been to. There was something lovely about being in that room and talking to her, nestled in those chairs with the lamp reflecting darkly off the shiny floor. It felt almost like we were floating, it reminded me of the feeling I had when I wore that blue dress, of being above the rest of the world, in a calm place where things seemed possible.

  But when I finished she said, ‘It would be a bit mad, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I think staying alive’s a good plan.’ She laughed. ‘Either they’ll find a cure – which seems pretty likely, I mean already they’ve got a vaccine. Or, if they don’t, everyone’ll get old and die and everything will fall to bits. If that happens – frankly – who’s going to cry about it? I mean, the human race has to end sometime.’

  ‘But how will people bear it?’

  ‘Everyone who’s alive now will have had as much life as they can. Anyone who’s not born doesn’t know what they’re missing. Maybe something better’ll evolve.’

  It had been getting darker as we spoke, and the sky behind the plants on the windowsill was nearly black now. ‘Our lives won’t be worth living if we know there’s no future.’

  ‘Why? There’s no future for anyone beyond 80 years or so. Everyone dies.’

  ‘But we always know there’ll be more people. We know it’ll all carry on.’

  She shrugged. ‘You wouldn’t be there to see it either way. So why should you care?’

  ‘But you care what happens, you wouldn’t have come to YOFI and done all this work on the house if you didn’t. Even if Iain hadn’t been there – ’

  ‘Iain,’ she said disgustedly. ‘That perve.’

  A shiver went through me. ‘Why d’you say that?’

  ‘He asked Gabe – who is nine years old – to go to his flat.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some crap about planning and talking in peace. Haven’t you noticed? Iain’s thing has always been for younger and younger kids to join.’

  ‘D’you really think he is?’

  ‘A paedo? Yes. The whole thing – YOFI – it’s a joke.’

  ‘You’ve got this house because of it!’

  ‘I want to move. We’re going to get somewhere in the countryside, where we can grow our own food and be self sufficient and not have anything to do with the outside world.’

  ‘You and Gabe?’

  ‘There are five of us so far.’

  ‘But the whole thing of Kids’ Houses – ’

  She shrugged. ‘The idea always was to live separately, and that’s what we’ll be doing. Getting on with our own lives without expecting anything from them.’

  ‘If you opt out, you don’t change anything.’

  ‘Why should I run round helping to get power for a group of idiots who’ll end up just as dangerous as the ones already in power?’

  ‘You really don’t think anyone can make things better?’

  ‘No. What’s going to happen will happen.’

  ‘What about people like Nat and the ALF? They’re not trying to get power.’

  She laughed. ‘No, they’re trying to set fire to scientists’ cars.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Nat was here last weekend.’

  After the explosion. Nat and Lisa. A few things fell into place. It was quite interesting, considering how opposed to each other they’d been.

  ‘At least they’re trying to do something.’

  ‘Trying to close an animal research lab. Frankly Jess, on the grand scale – ’

  ‘You can’t think on the grand scale. You have to think on the small scale. Otherwise no-one�
��d ever do anything.’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing. Thinking on the small scale. Planning the life we want to live, instead of joining in with this whole fucked-up mess.’

  I left soon after that. She came downstairs through the pool room with me and out into the snow. ‘Jess – don’t volunteer. Seriously, I wish you wouldn’t.’ She gave me a quick strong hug. It made me think of Sal and I felt sad. I got a bus home, it was too cold and dark to walk. I was the only passenger. We rode through empty streets where the snow on the pavements glowed with a bluish light.

  I was relieved when my phone rang, happy that someone wanted to talk to me. Until I saw that it was Rosa Davis. ‘Hiya Jess! Isn’t it exciting? Are your Mum and Dad really proud of you?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t told them yet.’

  ‘My Mum’s thrilled. She’s told all her friends and they keep sending me presents, flowers and chocolate and stuff. They think I’m so brave – it’s embarrassing!’ She giggled her fake giggle.

  ‘Does your boyfriend know?’

  ‘Yes, he’s heartbroken. He says he’s going to put a red rose on my grave every day for as long as he lives. Are you still friends with Baz?’

  I told her someone was calling me and I had to go. I did not want to discuss Baz with her. Baz was none of her business. I couldn’t believe they would let her volunteer; as soon as she talked to a counsellor they would realise she was a nutter.

  I should have told Mum and Dad that evening. They were both there – Dad cooked tea – and although it felt pretty strained, they were speaking to each other. There was no great announcement about splitting up so all I could assume was Mandy was right and they would get over themselves. But when Dad said, ‘So Jessie, what’s this great piece of news you have for us? YOFI ready to assume world command?’ I simply couldn’t bear to speak. I mumbled something about telling them tomorrow, and slipped off to my room.