The lodge itself, outwardly a traditional longhouse but luxurious in-side, was fully booked. The Gaeglers were in residence, with their surly teenage son on vacation from his school in Singapore. Budi Sujatmiko, the hotshot genomic futures analyst, was there too, with a whole gang of sleek, prematurely-middle-aged Successful Young Things.
Anna and Spence were staying in one of the beach huts. They arrived on Christmas Eve. After eating dinner in the longhouse dining room with the festive company, they faced each other, a little awkwardly—sitting cross-legged on the low square bed, covered in dark red homespun, that was almost the sole piece of furniture. Coming off the moratorium was like leaping from a high place. It was a rush.
Spence was wearing the silk pajamas. He loved them.
"I feel very weird about this," said Anna, "You see, before we did this, for a long time we'd been almost like brother and sister."
"Except that we used to fuck." Spence also spoke as if he could barely remember those days, a month in the past.
"In a functional way. But you know what I mean."
"I know what you mean." The monsoon seas roared quietly, mingled with faint sounds of singing and shouting. The mosquito net enclosed them in a drift of shadow.
"What shall we do?"
"I know. Let's pretend I'm a hungry hyena and you're a bone!"
"What?"
Ah, the sweet trouble in her face. Anna unsure, Anna hoping to be taken in hand. He was in such a glorious tremble he could hardly bear himself.
"Sorry, it was a literary allusion."
"Oh, I know. Alice."
Anna imagined Wolfgang was at her shoulder, telling her don't think, Annie. For once just feel. Which sounded as if it would break the mood (don't think of an elephant!). But no, it worked. They caught their month's abstinence at its peak of meaning and flavor and plundered it: racked it, wrecked it, tore it into shreds. When, exhausted, they were lying in a slick of sweat together, the room coming back from wherever it had been spinning, Spence put his hands under her buttocks, holding their joined bodies together in a strangely intense gesture, his eyes holding hers.
"I love you."
"I—" She stumbled over the avowal that she'd given him so often, but never with this meaning, not to Spence or anyone else: this pure homage.
"Say it! Say it, please.''
"I love you."
They spent Christmas day on a motor launch with the Gaegler party and some more Parentis-or-parent-corporation nobs who'd turned up in the morning, cruising around the mangrove preserve trying to glimpse giant otters. Failing which the young Gaegler and Ruth Hujakul (another objectionable rich expat teen) videoed everyone relentlessly. Mrs Hujakul bravely engaged Spence in conversation. He was living out here keeping house for his British wife? He didn't have a job himself? No Ma'am. Just idling away my time.
"Oh," she said. "Role reversal. Is that the. . .the 'in thing' in the UK these days?"
What days were those? Spence was unable to cope with such depths of neoconservative denial.
"I don't think of it as role reversal. I think of it as natural male behavior."
Late in the evening they slipped away from the festive buffet, each carrying a bottle of champagne by the neck. The night was unseasonably clear. They sat by the tide line in deck chairs, passing the fizz (French, not Australian, but it didn't taste any better to Anna) between them under the blazing southern stars. Anna brought Spence up to speed on Transferred Y.
"So, if they're normally fertile, why are you seeing these XX guys at your clinics?"
"Oh. . . Well, they have healthy sperm, and all that. But in human female cells there's a very complicated system—piss-poor piece of design, gaffer tape and string—to stop both X genes from expressing, in loci where it would do damage. If having the male differentiating genes on the XX disrupts that, then some of the fallout can be failure to conceive, failed pregnancies. . ."
"Anyhow, sounds cool to me," said Spence. "Women and men sharing information, getting to be more like each other, but hanging onto the differences that make life interesting. Perfect. I'll drink to that. This is actually going to happen? Mass chromosomal cross-dressing? End of the line for Y?"
"Nah. It'll turn out to be one of those things where a very small sample gets wildly extrapolated. Like—someone finds a gene associated with a certain behavior in thirteen Italian rice farmers and one New York cabbie, and wow, hold the front page, we have discovered the gene for people liking cheese! An expert system can get overexcited, just like a person. When we get back to town I'll sort it out. But there's something in it, Spence. TY is active. It doesn't look as though it should be, but it is. Suri's simulation predicted that, and what she predicted has turned up in real cell cultures. Look, can I show you something?"
She drew in ballpoint, on a festive paper napkin, using her knees for a desk. "Okay, what happens is that you get these things, a special class of enzymes, called regulatory proteins. The simplest is like a little thermostat: it starts off a reaction and then stops the reaction when the end product reaches a certain concentration. Then you get one where the presence of one of the end-products of a reaction will start that reaction off again; and there's another kind where the chemical product of one process activates a different process, which in turn produces something that triggers the first, so they work in parallel. . .
And then there's a couple more. Of course, they don't just work one at a time. Are you following this, at all?"
"I am more than following it," said Spence, most intrigued. "I am recognizing it."
He took up the napkin, and gazed at Anna's little hieroglyphs. "Well whadd'ya know. This is Boolean Algebra. These are logic gates!"
He swiftly labeled Anna's series: NOT, AND, OR, NAND, NOR.
"Oh," said Anna. "Well, yes, they're control mechanisms, like circuits in a computer. I should have said. But you recognized them, from my bumbling explanation?"
"I sure did. How smart am I? Hahaha! Far out. Boolean Algebra, the Latin of the twenty-first century. I knew the dead language of the classic age of computers would stand me in good stead, one day. Hey, who'd a' thought it! Molecular Biology has logic gates!"
"Computers have regulatory proteins!"
They laughed, and toasted each other.
"Well anyway, I was telling you—" said Anna, unable to leave an idea unfinished. "We've found regulatory proteins in TY cultures, which means transcription is happening, some way, even though these aren't coding sequences. . . This proves that the TY viroid does something; it doesn't just sit there like a scrap of biochemical litter—"
She sighed. "I wish I could get Clare to talk to me. I'm on the brink of proving, maybe, that her theory is right. She won't. I've had her opinions on TY relayed back to me by other people. She thinks it's a Darwinist rip-off of her big idea: because, in my version the virosphere and the other organisms are not co-operating for the common good. The whole, beautiful homeostasis thing just growed like Topsy. It isn't for anything, It just is. . . That's not good enough for Clare. She's been pushed around for too long; she doesn't want a compromise; she wants the peace and co-operation theory to ANNIHILATE those planet-wrecking Stupid Darwinism bastards. Just wipe them off the face of the earth. Ironic, huh?"
Phosphorescent foam gleamed along the shore—
"Oh, it's a battlefield Spence. One side says everything's connected; the other side says no, no, every organism for itself. If I'm not careful, poor Transferred Y is going to get caught in the crossfire. I'm certainly not going to use Suri's latest findings. Not in any form. I'm not going to tell anyone about that. You mustn't, either."
"My lips are sealed. But why not, honey?"
Fleetingly she wondered what Spence's own karyotype would reveal. . . She didn't want to know. Spence was Spence.
"Because it's about sex, and that means trouble. Worse than Continuous Creation, even. There are significant people in life science who would react very poorly, although they'd never admit they were personally
upset about the daft 'death of the male chromosome' aspect. I'm going to have to tiptoe around them." Suddenly she laughed. "God! Listen to me! Worrying about how the great and the good will react to my world-changing publication! Anna Senoz, the babypharm office manager. . . Pinch me someone, wake me up."
"You're not dreaming," said Spence tenderly. "You hit the jackpot. And you deserve it."
There was a burst of activity at the main lodge. Jeeps were being summoned to carry departing guests to the helipad. They both looked over in that direction.
"What are the bosses all doing here, anyway?"
"Dunno. I'd like to think they were sorting out the clingfilm crisis. As Wolfgang says, IVF is like drug running. Without a supply of decent clingfilm, what can you do? Where can you put things? .. .Fat chance. I suspect they might be discussing a withdrawal from Sungai. There's no shortage of customers, but political unrest is a spook. The company doesn't like it."
"Hope nothing happens before the end of your job."
* * *
The Gaegler party left; Budi's party left. Spence and Anna had Pasir Pancang to themselves. There was native black rice pudding and banana for breakfast, instead of platters of eggs, bacon, fruit, and pastries; fried potatoes and chili greens with a few prawns at other meals. The beer supply ran out, which was sad, but the staff became much more human. Hassan the gatekeeper regaled them with stories about the pirates: unromantic pirates who visited these isolated bays to rob and rape and murder with little fear of reprisal. The cook's baby played with Spence, while her mother sat on the hut's verandah and gossiped with Anna.
On New Year's Eve Spence revealed a secret treat. "Want to do some Class A tonight?"
"You haven't got any."
"Oh yes I have."
"Where on earth—?"
Revealing the secret involved a slightly awkward confession.
"From Daz. She's already in town. She dropped by last Thursday while you were at work. Brought us a Christmas present."
"Why'dn't you tell me Daz was here!"
"Because I wanted to have you to myself," he said—with a look so candid and vulnerable that it frightened her. She couldn't stand much of this mood. Yet while it lasted she would never be able to say no, enough, let's get back down to earth. They swallowed the pills in their hut, after they'd eaten their chips and greens, and went to walk by the sea. It was an extraordinarily still evening, overcast and soft-aired. Anna kept watching the horizon. "I hope the pirates don't arrive."
"They won't. Is it coming up on you?"
"It's coming up. Let's go back to our room and have a drink."
"There's no beer."
"We have some whisky."
"Hassan took our glasses away." Spence felt that he was in charge and didn't want to be too drugged if he had to deal with anything, such as pirates or the unexpected return of Anna's boss. They went back to the hut and drank a little whisky. Spence changed into his pajamas.
"You really like them, don't you."
"I want to be buried in them."
Anna laid the shells that she had collected over the week in curving lines across their bed.
"It's a very beautiful bedspread this, isn't it."
They looked at it together. What a beautiful color, the color of blood and wine. And the coarse weave of the fabric made a very good impression. They examined it minutely, admiring the way the threads lay over each other so neatly and companionably such a simple idea and such a fine one. "I wish we could take it with us," said Anna.
"No, better leave it here. It belongs here."
"It's like our friend."
"A holiday acquaintance. We'll exchange Christmas cards."
"Maybe we'll meet it again one day. I like getting to know people for a short time."
"I know what you mean. Pass on by."
"Because you can't trust everyone, not completely, and if you can't trust someone it gets boring to be with them after a while. So why bother?"
They walked on the beach again, to the end of the bay and back. There wasn't a sound except for the soft, dark lapping of the tide. Spence had brought a torch, but he switched it off and their eyes became preternaturally sensitive. The sand was so pale, the edge of the water so mildly bright, the forest so dark and solid on their right hand side, there was no chance of getting lost. Someone had put the deck chairs away, but Anna tracked them down, stacked at the back of one of the empty huts. They could not identify their two friends with certainty, but hoped for the best.
They settled themselves where they'd had the TY conversation.
"When I was at Primary school," said Anna. "When I was five and six and seven and eight, the other children had already decided I was weird, they didn't want to play with me, and they called me a boff. I. . . Peer pressure is supposed to be what forms you, more than anything, I never had enough. Except negatively. I've always thought, well if you don't need me then I surely don't need you. That partly explains how I am."
She drifted again into no-time. She'd decided not to sit in her deck chair but on the sand by Spence's knee. The coolness of the sand caressed her. She was so happy to be alone with Spence and the night.
"Before that, I was in love with my mother. I was really, romantically in love with her. I've been thinking about that: remembering. I used to bring her things, little presents; I used to follow her around. She didn't have time for it. I don't mean that nastily, I mean she didn't have time. It wasn't only Maggie. I didn't want her to give up any of the things she was doing. It still broke my heart to lose her. That's why I didn't want to fall in love with anyone ever again, not even you. I know it happens to everyone, but. . ."
"Not to me," said Spence, after some thought. "Guess I was the one who left Mom; she didn't want me to go. But I know what you mean. It's like the love of God. You can't be first. You have to share God with all these other people, beings. Several billion humans, all the other living things, all those damn beetles, before you even start on the stars and the galaxies and the deck chairs and the bedspreads. Sometimes knowing everybody gets the same whole love, no matter how many of us there are, does not cut it."
"No. . .and so we have to be unsatisfied. It's for the best. If I loved you the way I love my work, you wouldn't like it, Spence. You think you would, but you wouldn't. It would be too much. When I think about Mummy deserting me, now, I think yeah, don't blame you. I know myself, I know what I'm like. I'm a ton of bricks."
Spence felt that he was in charge and ought to be doing this better; it was going downhill. He seemed to recall there was something they had to do, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what it was. "We don't have to think about sad things. Let's go for another walk."
"Hey, don't worry." She turned and smiled at him, the smile dim in her face but warm in her voice. "This is okay, this is fine. I'm happy. I like telling you my troubles."
"Everybody has troubles."
"They're part of us. They're our friends."
"Like good works. They will go with us and be our guide."
They slipped into no-time together, for a while.
"You know Anna, I know the kind of silk-pajamas sex doesn't come naturally to you."
"Mmm." She bowed her head, embarrassed.
"No, don't curl up into your shell. I wanted you to know that I know, and I appreciate the Christmas present. I wanted to say, there is something more important than sex or romance, or any of that man-woman, male-female stuff, between you and me." He drew a breath, relaxing into it: the only knowledge. "What's important is that we know, you and I. Other people don't know, but we do, because of Lily Rose. Rich or poor, failure or success, travel or stay at home, we know what is waiting at the end of all this. . .and the love of God makes no difference because there's nothing says the love of God doesn't end in nothingness. It can do whatever it likes, it owes us nothing. But I'm sure of this."
He leaned down and took Anna's face in his hands. "If you go first, I will be there to close your eyes: if I'm the one, then I
know that you will be there. That's what matters."
"Yes."
They walked again, along the shore. "Shall we go skinny-dipping."
Spence considered the idea. "No. We might swim in the wrong direction."
"Or meet a shark, or forget where we left our clothes. Let's stay where we are. Walk a little, sit and talk a little, walk a little. I like this. It's quiet, but I like it."
A while later they returned to their friends the chairs. Anna sat gazing, completely separate from Spence but shielded by his presence, earthed, except that earth was altogether too temporal a word for the state of resolution that he provided, always within reach no matter how distantly and through what convolutions her thoughts roamed, no matter what extraordinary ephemeral palaces, their details unresolved and liable to crumble and dissolve if you paid them too much attention; so that thought, the idea of investigating something and coming to a conclusion, was revealed as a pretext, a plausible explanation for this activity, whereas in fact the activity itself was. . .
* * *
She woke wrapped in the wine-colored bedspread, feeling chilled and a little burned. Spence was beside her, fast asleep; the hut was full of morning light. She sat up and saw her shells arranged in strange patterns, all over the sandy wooden floor. It was like waking and finding you had managed to bring a flower home from Narnia. It wasn't a dream. They had visited another world.
iv
Ramone was not, in fact, traveling with Daz. When they came to Nasser apartments, the week after New Year, they hardly seemed to be friends. Ramone, who'd contacted Anna and Spence by phone from her hotel, arrived two hours later than arranged and very dressed down (sensible short hair, faded combats, chain store tee-shirt). She now claimed—with an irritating air of important secrets in reserve— that she was here to research a new book. So what was she really doing in Sungai? Daz made no comment. If she thought Ramone's trouble-spot rubber-necking in poor taste, she didn't say so.
Aside from her clothes, the rabid one was the same as ever: same malign, opaque blue eyes, same chimpanzee lip, same mean, arbitrary aggression. Daz had become a new person. She seemed to have shed her great beauty when she stopped being a megababe; she was now a soberly good-looking, well-groomed, grown-up woman. Anna marveled at the changes she'd seen in that ingenuous Malaysian Valley Girl she'd met at the Freshers' Fair and yet felt an instant sympathy. You could see in her eyes that Daz, in spite of her successes, had been living in the wild world, making compromises and accepting defeats. Ramone was more difficult. She was in a discontented phase. She did that trick, the same as she'd done on Beevey Island years ago, of not looking at Anna. She baited Spence and tried to pick a fight with Daz about the wimpish EU Mission—and the forthcoming "Equality and Democracy Rally," a government-sanctioned "expression of free speech" in which Daz would be involved.
Gwyneth Jones - Life(2005) Page 23