The Testament of Jessie Lamb

by Jane Rogers

  Would it help other girls to volunteer? I thought about Ursula Johnson. I suppose in a way she had inspired me. ‘The thing is, it’s confidential.’

  ‘Of course. All I want to do is be able to tell the London New World people that it’s coming, so we can plan in advance. And so that they realise YOFI is bringing something pretty amazing to the merger.’

  I lost track of what he was saying because something had happened at Wettenhall and clouds of smoke filled the screen. An explosion? Iain followed my glance.

  ‘I hope that’s not a bomb,’ he said. ‘They’re going to get themselves arrested, and then how effective will they be?’ We stared at the TV, I could see flames leaping from the buildings now, the place was on fire. ‘Protest is about effectiveness,’ he went on; ‘rallying people to your cause, creating weight of numbers. That’s why what you represent is so amazing.’ He was staring at me unblinkingly. His light eyes made me think of an owl.

  I knew he was right – it was like the old days again. He could see the whole picture, cause and effect, not just the thing under your nose. He was right, what good would it do if Nat and Baz were arrested? I might not even be able to see Baz again. My stomach felt like it was shrivelling up.

  Iain stood up. ‘OK, thanks Jess. This is the best thing for everyone – politically, what you’re doing is pure gold. And I can make sure hundreds of girls will want to follow in your footsteps. You’ll be making it a choice they can respect.’ He stepped towards me and I was afraid he might try to kiss me, but then he held out his hand to shake. It felt hot and damp and meaty. He went out to put on his bike gear. I turned up the telly again, and waved through the window when I saw him unlocking his bike. When I knew he’d gone I went and double locked the door. I didn’t like the feeling in my stomach. I didn’t know if I’d done the right thing.

  Chapter 22

  Then Dad came home that evening and told me Mand was pregnant. Mum had done another test, and the doctor had confirmed it.

  When it actually happens, the bad thing, you can’t feel anything. Feeling seems to drop right through you like a stone, and you’re just this empty hollow tube. Even though I knew it was a possibility, hearing Dad say it was a complete shock. Mum was staying with her, and after Dad told me and I’d tried to take it in, he set about gathering his and Mum’s things together. He asked me if I could sleep over at Sal’s. They didn’t even know she’d moved.

  ‘Aren’t you bringing Mand back here? Or can’t I go there with you?’

  Dad sighed and put down his bag. ‘No. I’m sorry Jess, but no. Is there someone else you can stay with?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s horrible.’

  I knew about MDS. I knew what happened. But a flicker of terror licked at my heart, as if there was something more, something unknown, that I hardly dared to ask him.

  ‘I have to go and be with your Mum. Look, Jess, this is very hard on you love, but it won’t help you or Mandy or Cath, if you go over there now. You need to remember Mandy the way she was.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened? Has something happened already?’ Just asking made me break out in a sweat.

  ‘She thought she’d be allowed to have it. That’s what she believed – that we would take her into the clinic and have her for a Sleeping Beauty.’

  ‘Can’t you pretend?’

  He gave a little hopeless laugh. ‘That’s what Cath said. No, of course we can’t. The clinic has serious work to do – you can’t start taking people in and lying to them about their treatment. It’s not a game.’

  ‘So what’s going to happen?’

  ‘She’ll start to get ill – and, and then – the doctor’ll sedate her – and, she’ll die.’

  ‘But right now, right now – ’

  ‘Sweetie, Mand didn’t understand. She didn’t understand why we weren’t taking her to the clinic. When she finally started to understand, she broke her heart. She wants us to save the baby. She thinks everyone’s betrayed her. It’s not … it’s just too miserable. It’s not going to help you to see her like this, and it makes it harder for your Mum to handle. D’you understand?’ He hugged me and I started crying and he was crying too. I told him I didn’t want to stay anywhere else and that I’d be OK at home on my own. I went out to the car with him and watched the rear lights to the end of the street. When I went back in the house I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t know what to do.

  For a while I sat in the dark trying to think about Mand – trying telepathy, trying to will her into some sort of peace, so that at least she and Mum could kiss and make up before she died. It was useless, I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t stop my racing mind. I went in the kitchen and started cleaning. I sorted the recycling and emptied the dishwasher and scrubbed the sink and the oven, then I cleared out the fridge. No one seemed to have eaten anything proper for days, loads of things were going off. Finally I washed the kitchen floor. At least it would be nice for them when they came home. Not that that would make any difference to anything.

  Nothing could make any difference to anything.

  Only what I was going to do.

  I went upstairs and sat on my bed. It came clear in my mind like a great tangle of string that suddenly unravels when you pull in the right place. I was Mandy’s mirror image. Her opposite. Because it didn’t work for her, it was going to work for me. She was the minus and I was the plus, what I was going to do could cancel her out. Not her, but the badness, the sadness, the hopelessness. I could cancel all that. No baby for her = baby for me. Negative/positive.

  And I wasn’t going to be scared. Because I had already been scared about her. Mr Golding wouldn’t let anything bad happen. It would just be the same as going to sleep.

  By the time I’d gone downstairs and made myself poached eggs on toast, it had all got in tangle again. The awfulness for Mum and Dad – Mum especially. The awfulness for Mand – how could this have happened? My fault. If I had been the least bit observant or thoughtful, the day I visited her, when she was waiting for Paul, I’d have asked what was going on. Instead of obsessing away about Mum and Dad and thinking the only problems that were important were my own. Why didn’t I ask her? Why didn’t I think? Maybe it even happened that very day – maybe that was the day Paul made her pregnant, after he passed me in the street, looking so sleek and cheerful.

  I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. I went back up to my room and looked at all the things I owned, the clothes and shoes and books and makeup and earrings and soft toys, my hand-embroidered shawl and mirror cushions from India, the pearl necklace Nanna Bessie gave me. My CD’s, my DVD’s, my iPod. I fetched a box from the garage and filled it with teddies and books and DVD’s; and packed up all the rest in bags. The box was too heavy for me but I could take the bags on the bus into town, to one of the charity shops for motherless kids.

  When I dragged the last bag out onto the landing and went back to inspect my room, it was cleared of all the knick-knacks and clutter of someone who only thought about herself. You could see the lighter patches on my shelves where books, jewellery box, lava lamp, etc, stood. I liked that, the ghostly outlines where they were. I told myself, each time I walk into this room, each time I miss something, and see its empty space, I will remember her. I felt as if I wanted to put my hand under my ribcage and squeeze my own heart, squeeze it till it hurt so much I couldn’t feel it anymore.

  It was nearly midnight but I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I took my duvet downstairs and turned on the TV again, low. That reminded me of weekends when I was little, creeping down in the morning while they were still asleep, switching the telly on low and curling up on the sofa with cushions pulled around me to keep me warm. When Dad got up to make their tea he’d peer in at me and say ‘It’s the lesser spotted nut brown maid! Got a cosy nest there, have you?’ That’s what let me cry at last. Thinking of Mum and Dad.

  I must have fallen asleep in the end, because when I opened my eyes the phone was ringing and it was morning. Dad was cal
ling to check I was OK, and to let me know they’d given Mand a sleeping tablet and both she and Mum were asleep. We agreed that if she was calmer when she woke, maybe I could go over and see her. Dad’s voice was flat and tired but he said he had to go straight into work, there was something going on.

  I went looking for breakfast. There wasn’t any bread so I had to eat soggy weetabix. On the news, the airport had re-opened. They were showing footage of the evacuation, and focussing on heaps of luggage. They said there had been explosives in some cases, and that it was a terrorist plot. Experts were sifting other unclaimed items. Two people were supposedly helping police with their enquiries; I wondered if they were YOFI members. We’d never planned to use explosives, so what was going on? Then there was a report on Wettenhall, about how yesterday’s confrontation started. The number of casualties hadn’t yet been confirmed. The main clash was between the Animal Liberation Front and FLAME. Onscreen came footage of a FLAME coach drawing up outside the research labs, where a crowd of ALF with placards stood shouting by the gates. The camera closed in on the first woman off the bus. ‘These dickheads want to save furry animals!’ she yelled. ‘This is what scientists should be doing!’ ‘We’re here to make sure they can carry on doing it!’ shouted another. ‘We’re here to fight for every woman who’s died!’ I stared at the faces as they came off the bus, waiting to see Sal. There was a great crowd of Noahs screaming and yelling ‘Abomination!’, angry about human seed being planted in animals. The images flashed past – fighting, smoke, police grappling with protestors, people being bundled into police vans or lifted into ambulances.

  Police had got control of the research labs this morning, they claimed, but when they showed it from the air you saw chaos, a war zone – nose-to-tail vehicles, burning, abandoned, or deliberately overturned and made into barricades. People had climbed the embankment and were crawling under fences and stumbling through ploughed land, like refugees. There were New Worldish kids rampaging up and down. Some gangs had joined in – one lot crashed through the police barriers and came up the other side of the motorway in an old bus. They were targeting empty cars and grabbing anything they could get – food, money, clothes. In London the company that owned the research lab had had their offices firebombed, and there was some kind of siege going on at Charing Cross Hospital maternity wing, which is one of the biggest centres for Sleeping Beauties. I checked my mobile, no messages.

  I was busy scanning all the faces on the screen for Baz or Sal or Nat. They interrupted the news for an appearance by the prime minister, promising extra security for IVF research facilities and hospitals. That’s when I realised, that was why Dad had to go to work this morning. All maternity clinics and wards were on security alert – anywhere they treated Sleeping Beauties or collected donor eggs.

  I wasn’t sure who was making the threats, the FLAME women or the gamete donors? The TV said it may be the people who introduced MDS. So the fights were between those who didn’t want women to be able to have children again, and those who did; between people who were opposed to using animals to help repopulate the world and people who were opposed to using women.

  The Noahs and the ALF and the Donors were all fighting the animal research labs and the FLAME women. But if MDS terrorists were really still about, why would they be exposing themselves to danger on the streets when they probably had the scientific know-how to turn on the dormant virus in the whole of the rest of the population? Dad had been saying that for ages, they can hold us to ransom whenever they like. If it really is a they, and if they were in control of what they did. But he said they’re probably not, it’s probably just a lone nutter who never realised what the consequences would be.

  My mobile went. Rosa. I really didn’t need it. She’d had her counselling, she was feeling great. ‘My Mum’s having a special video made, to remember me by and to show the baby. I’m going to be filmed in all my favourite places like this really lovely restaurant where we usually go, and sitting in my boyfriend’s sports car, and in a big armchair on the patio with roses and apple blossom all around me.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said. I didn’t say roses and apple blossom aren’t in flower yet. Well, I suppose she could get them from a florist. If it was true.

  ‘I’m just choosing the music,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have all my favourite songs.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Lovely.’ I went back to watching TV. If I turned it off Mandy would come into my head, like a massive noise that was too big for my head to hold.

  Chapter 23

  At some point in the afternoon there was a soft knocking at the door. I crept into the hall and stood there paralysed staring at the door. Another little knock with a special rhythm to it, and I knew then it wasn’t Iain. I ran to the door and yanked it open. Baz stood there grinning down at me. He was wearing so many clothes he looked almost fat. There was a thick red fleece bulging out of the collar of his coat, and a woolly green hat pulled down over his ears, with tufts of black hair sticking out, and his trousers tucked into big padded boots like a Cossack. ‘Hello,’ he said, grinning like mad, as if we both knew it was a joke. I stood back for him to come in but somehow we bumped into each other. He put his hands on my shoulders to steady me, and we managed to get the door shut. Then we put our arms round each other and hugged tight. His coat was rough against my face, I snuffled up the layers of cold and smoke and wool, and the close secret heat of his body underneath.

  When we stumbled apart he said, ‘I’m starving,’ and I took him into the kitchen and started to make scrambled eggs. There was still no bread so I put ryvita on the plate. He pulled off the coat and the fleece and the boots and sat drumming his fingers at the kitchen table.

  ‘Have you just got back?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Did you go into the lab at Wettenhall?’

  ‘No. Josh – who did the filming – and Nat were in a student house together and I joined them, all they were interested in doing was getting the film sorted and up on the web. They knew the media would jump on it. But there was another cell with some kids from London, who wanted to break in and liberate the animals. And we didn’t even know about that till the morning.’

  ‘So the fire at the labs – ’

  ‘Nothing to do with us. We literally didn’t plan any violence. The idea was, go public on what’s happening inside the place, and let everyone else slug it out.’

  ‘They’re having to barricade clinics,’ I told him. ‘People like my Dad are under attack.’

  ‘Nobody thought this would happen. I mean, a few reporters and ALF hardcore, maybe some grumpy donors – Nobody imagined this …’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘After we posted it up, we made placards and stuff, and went out there in a couple of taxis early morning for a demo. We arrived just after the explosion. Security were going mental, then we heard there were ALF kids already inside the building trying to get animals out. They thought we were part of that – they wouldn’t let us anywhere near – then FLAME coaches started arriving – and the Noahs – ’

  ‘I saw on telly.’ I dolloped the eggs onto his plate and cut up a tomato.

  ‘They were like locusts, everything you could move or throw, sticks, stones, bushes, the fence, they just ripped it up.’ He’d been with Nat and they got separated when the police broke through their line, and someone lobbed a burning thing. Black smoke belched out so that everyone was coughing and he lost sight of Nat. ‘Then the police were attacking us from behind as well. They must have come through the buildings from inside. There was more and more smoke blowing over from the main gates, someone said it was tear gas.’

  ‘How did you get away? They closed the roads – ’

  ‘I managed to get to the wall and I followed it round to the back of the site where the incinerator is. I climbed over and ran across to the lane. Then I just followed the little lanes, looking out for any signs to Chester. I could see helicopters in the distance, they must’ve been over the motorway.
After it got dark I found a church that was unlocked and slept in there. And this morning I walked into Chester and caught a train.’

  ‘So what happened to Nathan?’ I asked.

  ‘I think he must have been arrested. Jessie?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you seen Iain?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s put a weird thing about you on the YOFI website.’

  ‘What kind of weird?’

  ‘That you’re volunteering for something.’

  ‘He can’t have done – ’ I ran into the spare room to turn on the computer.

  Baz brought his food in and sat on the bed eating while I waited impatiently for the computer to chunter through its waking up. I went onto the YOFI homepage and typed in my password. The members’ page came up and the first thing I saw was a photo of me. New Volunteer Jessie Leads the Way.

  ‘It must have been posted early this morning. I went on the internet at Chester to check the ALF site.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be here! He’s got no right!’

  ‘Want me to close it down?’

  ‘It’s secret!’

  I watched as Baz typed in his own password and went into the message section. He typed intently – a string of characters, some other password, I guessed. A warning message came up and he overrode it and kept on typing. The image on the screen froze, then half of it disappeared. He hit the keys repeatedly. Nothing. He switched it all off then turned it on again. Went on to Google and typed in YOFI’s address. The webpage you have requested is not available. He laughed. ‘You try.’ I tried and then I pressed refresh, and still nothing happened. ‘Pretty good, eh!’ laughed Baz. ‘Thank you Iain. He suggested that, when we set up the site. In case it ever got infiltrated.’ He turned his laughing face to me and leant forward and kissed me. It turned into a proper, long kiss. When we stopped for a moment to breathe, Baz whispered, ‘So, do you still like me?’ and I whispered back,