The Testament of Jessie Lamb

by Jane Rogers

  ‘It must help their mothers to bear it.’

  ‘You really don’t find it disgusting?’

  ‘You said yourself, for there to be new life – ’

  ‘You know what happens to them afterwards? After the baby’s taken out?’

  ‘They get switched off.’

  ‘Some families want to believe a person’s still there. They keep this – this piece of meat alive, pretending to themselves that one day it might magically be restored.’ He carefully moved his stool under the bench. He lifted the next one and put it under the bench too, not scraping it. He began to walk up and down in the little space he had made. ‘I don’t know how to get through to you.’

  ‘I understand you, Dad. I just don’t agree.’

  ‘You think you’ve got some sort of mission.’

  ‘I know what I want to do.’

  ‘No you don’t. You’re in a fantasy world, playing the role of heroine.’

  ‘I’m doing what I’ve chosen.’

  ‘You want to save the world.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  He sighed in exasperation. ‘You are too young to understand. People get by.’

  ‘I don’t want to get by. I want to know my life’s been useful.’

  ‘You’ll be a lump of meat that people have to wash and turn!’

  We stood staring at each other hopelessly then I went and put my arms around him. After a moment he hugged me back. ‘This is so silly,’ he said softly. ‘All this talk about death. Please, Jess, this has to stop.’

  ‘It can’t stop now. You said yourself – it’s helping the survival of the whole race.’

  ‘I am going to have to lock you up till you come to your senses.’

  He said this very calmly and regretfully, as if it was not a new thought. And if I’d had a grain of sense I would have believed him. ‘That would be kidnapping.’

  ‘Not always. When youngsters are indoctrinated by dangerous cults their parents employ experts to de-programme them.’

  ‘You know I’m not indoctrinated. You couldn’t hold me against my will.’

  ‘If I can’t persuade you rationally, what choice have I got?’ A timer bell rang and he glanced towards the heat cabinets. ‘We’ll have to finish this conversation tonight.’ He began to shift things around.

  ‘There isn’t anything else to say,’ I told him, pulling on my coat. He came and let me out into the car park. It was drizzling and I had no umbrella. I strode to the bus stop, feeling the rain sticking my hair to my head and making chilly runnels down my neck. Feeling the gritty pavement through the soles of my shoes, and the specks of water in the air as they hit my face. Imagining lying there in the dimness with the big swishing machine pumping my lungs. I wouldn’t be dead, because something in me, a little green shape, would be alive and growing. I would be lying there dreaming her into existence.

  I’d been home about half an hour when the phone rang. Sal. She launched off before I could get a word in. ‘Jess, don’t do it. Baz has told me. You mustn’t do it.’

  Baz – well, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  ‘Jess, you have to listen to me. It’s not just because I don’t approve. Listen, you’d be in danger – ’

  It was hard to see how I could be in any more danger than I was already putting myself into. Sal’d been anti-everything ever since the rape, and I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t fix it. I told her I was expecting a phone call from Dad.

  ‘You know FLAME are targeting Sleeping Beauty clinics?’

  ‘Well there’s been a picket at my Dad’s work. But people still go in and out.’

  ‘For now. But the tactics will be changing. The plan is to be much more aggressive.’

  ‘Look Sal, I’m sure I can get into the clinic, and once I’m in there’s not much FLAME can do.’

  ‘They don’t know about this embryo implant programme.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So. Imagine what a coup it would be for them to stop it.’

  ‘Well if they don’t know about it they can’t, can they.’

  ‘I could tell them.’

  I thought of the peaceful face of the first Sleeping Beauty whose bed I’d sat by. Sal was my friend. ‘I trust you,’ I said. ‘Sal, I trust you to keep my secret.’ I put the phone down. Then I tried Dad’s direct line at the lab but there was no reply.

  I paced about for a bit and made myself a cheese sandwich, and checked the news. The Wettenhall lab area was still sealed off but they’d finally cleared the motorway. One commentator said the animal experiments were terminated, another said that no decisions had been taken and there would be a government announcement shortly. The police had made 87 arrests and taken them to that special terrorist detention centre in the Lake District. Arguments raged about the legality of the Wettenhall research, and could donors sue, and would the company be prosecuted? Since their office in London had been firebombed, prosecution sounded like the least of their worries.

  I decided to go and see Baz.

  There would never be a good time; he had every reason to be furious with me. But I imagined him putting his arms around me, even if it was only for a minute. I just wanted him to hold me. I persuaded myself that it would be easier for him, once I’d gone, if he could remember one last moment of kindness between us.

  At Baz’s house his Mum answered the door. I smiled to myself because I could hear his piano playing from the doorstep. She said she’d call him but I told her it was fine, I’d go and tell him myself. As I was going down the stairs to his room she said, ‘I think he’s got a visitor.’ I knocked but I knew he wouldn’t hear me while he was playing, so I opened the door. Baz was hunched over his piano keyboard, oblivious. The person who was sitting wrapped in a duvet on his bed looked up and met my eyes. Rosa.

  For a moment I couldn’t move. Then I ran up the stairs and out of the house as fast as I could. I ran all the way home. I sat on my bed and gasped for breath, with my heart pounding under my ribs as if it was trying to escape.

  I sat there all afternoon. Quite simply I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Every thought I tried to think curled up and died before I got to the end of it. How long had Baz and Rosa – ? Why had she asked me if I was still friends with him? Had the pair of them talked about me? I couldn’t move, not even to wrap the duvet around me, although I was cold. The light faded and it began to get dark. My phone rang. For a moment I thought I wouldn’t answer it but then I did.

  ‘You came to see me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She came to see me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She was upset.’

  ‘But why you?’

  ‘Why should you care?’

  ‘Because I do.’

  ‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t see her.’

  ‘Why aren’t you angry with her?’

  Baz sighed.

  ‘Her reasons for volunteering are mad. She’s mad. Do you really – ’ I’d started crying. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stop. ‘D’you really like her?’

  ‘Her reasons aren’t any more mad than yours.’

  ‘Baz? Baz?’ I couldn’t believe it. I needed him to understand it was me, Jessie, talking to him.

  ‘Her boyfriend hit her. She hasn’t got anybody.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever love me?’

  ‘What has that got to do with it?’ he asked angrily. ‘What’s the point in loving anyone?’

  Chapter 27

  I couldn’t make Mum go to Mothers for Life. She said it was unendurable, and I felt about the same. Nothing was endurable. My heart was dead and I was clockwork. But I was wound up and I would run. She called me from work because we’d agreed to meet in town. So I told her I’d make tea ready for when she came home.

  I opened the freezer and started rooting through. The icy ache in my fingers was a relief. I was still doing it when Dad came in – in the middle of the afternoon. He was carrying a box of files and papers. ‘Wha
t’s up?’

  He dumped the papers in the spare room and came back into the kitchen.

  ‘Dad? What’s happened?’

  ‘I’ve left work.’

  ‘Left?’

  ‘A disagreement with Golding.’

  ‘About me?’

  He ran a glass of water.

  ‘Can’t you go back?’

  ‘Jess, why would I want to work for a man who is trying to murder my daughter?’

  ‘But you can’t give up your job!’

  ‘Don’t you think this is more important than my job?’

  ‘No. No. I want you to carry on with your life. I don’t want everything to change.’

  ‘Well tough. Maybe you need to think about how what you do affects other people.’

  ‘I know it does – I know it does – I keep telling you I’m sorry.’

  ‘Right. Well, sorry, but I’ve left work.’

  He would go back once I was gone, surely he would. ‘What did Mr Golding say?’

  ‘He told me to clear my desk and said he was getting the key code changed this afternoon.’

  ‘What did you do? Did you hit him?’

  He shrugged, refilled his glass and went into the spare room. He closed the door behind him.

  All the time I was cooking (I found frozen spinach, and there was cottage cheese in the fridge, so hey presto – spinach lasagne) I was conscious of him in the spare room giving off rays of bad temper like a piece of radioactive waste. The more I chopped and fried my onions and garlic, the more I thought, this is simply about misunderstanding. Mum and Dad don’t understand. They think it’s something awful. If I could make them see that actually it’s making me happy; that deciding what I’m going to do, and setting that in motion, is giving me power; that for the first time in my life I feel safe and in control – if I could make them understand that, then surely they wouldn’t be upset? Because they must want me to be happy, surely? I tried to think of a way of describing it that would make it easy for them. I was on one of those moving walkways at the airport – a travellator; all my preparations had been made, all the fussing and checking and dithering and heartbreak, and now I was simply riding to the check-in desk, where I would be processed and allowed to board the plane. And then – then – I’d fly away. There was nothing to be sad about.

  It was emotional blackmail, what Dad was doing – trying to show how unhappy and disrupted I was making his life, so I’d feel guilty enough to stop doing what I wanted to do. He was unhappy – true enough. I wished he wasn’t. But I could see his tantrum and his sulking were ways to try and get what he wanted, and I could see he never would.

  I can still feel like that now – superior, and almost pitying of him; sad that he can’t see the bigger picture. Then suddenly it all wavers and morphs back into me being the child and him the parent, and I’m scared of his anger and of whatever it is he knows that I don’t understand. I’m scared of my own mistakes, I can’t bear not to have his approval. I chop and change, like Alice in Wonderland when she’s taken her Drink Me medicine and she grows or shrinks but is always the wrong size. The more I think now, the worse it gets. All I can do is cling on to my decision, for better or worse, there’s no steady footing anywhere else.

  On that afternoon, as I made my tomato sauce, it seemed simpler. I think that was the first time I felt that kind of condescending pity for him, like a parent who’s sent a naughty child to his room. ‘That’s right, stay there and sulk till you’re ready to come out and behave sensibly.’

  When Mum came in she already knew; he must have phoned her. She went into the spare room and shut the door and I heard them talking then arguing. I don’t know if I imagined it but it seemed to me they were blaming each other for what I was doing. The lasagne was in the oven and I put on my coat and went out into the darkness of the garden. It was damp and cloudy, not very cold: the bare bushes and stalks in the garden all cast black spiky shadows, from the street lamp. Baz crept into my thoughts and I squeezed him out. No. No. Mum and Dad argued before they had this to argue about, I told myself. I can’t live my life to please them. Their voices filled the house but out here the darkness was huge, all this space and silence. Would she stand out here one day, my surrogate daughter? Would she stand in the darkness of the garden, looking at the lit windows of houses and thinking, my life is bigger than theirs? She would, I felt sure she would. But I couldn’t stop seeing Rosa, huddled in the duvet on Baz’s bed, glaring at me like a cat.

  Somehow the evening was got through, and at the end of it Dad was in the spare room again, and Mum was sitting at the table staring at her hands. I unloaded the dishwasher. Between the crushing ache of Baz, and Mum and Dad’s misery, I felt squeezed almost flat. It was only when I concentrated on what I was going to do that I could draw a deep breath and fill myself up again. I wasn’t trapped. I could escape. ‘Mum, there’s no point in him leaving work, it’s not going to make any difference – ’

  ‘Maybe it makes a difference to him.’

  The only difference I could see would be he’d have to get another job that didn’t suit him so well. I sat opposite her and took hold of her hand.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said.

  ‘I want you and Dad to accept what I’m doing, and not be horrible to each other.’

  ‘You can’t legislate for how horrible we are.’

  ‘No, but – ’

  ‘And you can’t honestly imagine that we’ll ever accept what you want to do.’

  ‘You gave me life. So you have to allow me to choose what to do with it.’

  ‘Not to throw it away – ’

  ‘I’m not throwing it away. I’m using it for the future.’

  ‘The future is an abstract concept, Jess.’

  ‘No, it’s my child and my child’s child.’

  ‘I’m not listening to this.’

  ‘You have to. It makes me happy, you know?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t. I don’t know how that feels.’

  ‘Mum. Something must make you happy? Your friends, work – ’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Going on holiday.’

  She gave a little laugh and shook her head.

  ‘I can make you happy.’

  ‘This is nonsense Jess.’

  ‘Mum, I’ve found the one thing I want to do with my life. And you’ll be able to look after my baby and love her.’

  ‘I don’t want your daughter. I want my daughter.’

  ‘I don’t belong to you anymore than you belonged to Nanna.’

  She pushed her chair back abruptly and went to the kitchen door. There she stopped, and came round to where I was sitting at the table. She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me on the cheek, and told me she loved me. Then she went upstairs.

  After a bit I went and listened at the spare room door. I could hear Dad moving things about. He was probably going to sleep down there, he usually did when they were fighting. I was their captive. Like in Gulliver’s Travels when the little people tie him down while he’s sleeping, with thousands of tiny ropes which are no thicker than hairs, but which taken all together hold him prisoner. Something had to snap.

  I went to bed and lay with my curtains open staring up at the beech tree and the sky. I had to keep slamming the door on thoughts of Baz, just slamming and slamming and closing it away because there was no word from him and there never would be and there was nothing for me to do but shut it out. I had to find a way of getting through to Mum and Dad. One thing. One step at a time.

  The cloud was clearing, I could see a couple of the brightest stars, twinkling away through the branches. Those stars had witnessed all this a thousand times; a girl whose boyfriend likes someone else; parents upset because their child is going away. When I closed my eyes the tracery of the dark branches against the sky stayed on the inside of my eyelids like the mesh I was going to escape through. The open skies were waiting for me. When I slept my dreams were as big and wide as space, and in amongst th
em floated an idea, a solution, about how to talk to Mum.

  I love the way your brain can do that – solve things while you sleep. I remember talking to Dad about it, years ago. He said it’s true and it goes to show how much of your brain you don’t consciously use, like the elves and the shoemaker. The shoemaker went to bed every night leaving unfinished shoes, he was always too tired to finish them off. And every night while he slept, the elves came and hammered and trimmed and sewed, and every morning he woke up to find a perfectly completed pair of shoes.

  That’s what my elves did that night. I woke up understanding that Mum was shifting. She was coming round. What I needed to do was get her away from Dad for long enough for her to acknowledge it. I needed to take her somewhere where she could look up into the distance and see light and space. Where she could see what I saw. I’d thought of the perfect place; the seaside!

  I would take her back to Scarborough. Nanna Bessie’s caravan there was one of my most favourite places in the world. I remember kneeling up on my narrow bed, pushing the stiff little curtain to one side so I could see out. I remember the morning sun shining in, making a huge dazzle in the sea behind the other caravans that stood silhouetted like cardboard cutouts, parked up to the field edge. On the other side of the hedge runs the coast path, along the top of the crumbling cliffs. Frilly waves rush at the pebbles and fill the air with their jostling sounds. And you can look out over the sea and see the path of sheer light the sun makes across it, leading directly to where you stand, up on the windy cliff.

  We used to go in the car with two suitcases and a cardboard box of groceries and Mum’s beach bag with bucket and spade and Frisbee in it, singing daft songs and playing I spy. But she and I could go on the train, without telling Dad. I’d tell her I wanted to go there and it was absolutely true. I only had a short time, I didn’t want to waste a minute. I crept into Mum’s room and snuggled up to her in bed like I used to when I was little. I told her I wanted to go to the seaside. I persuaded her to take the day off work.

  Chapter 28

  There was hardly anyone on the train, only three other people in the whole carriage. We sat opposite each other with fields and moors rushing by our window. You could feel the wind buffeting the train. Some of the trees we passed were bent almost sideways with it. ‘It’s always windy at Scarborough,’ Mum said, ‘I used to think the caravan would take off, at night.’