Gwyneth Jones - Life(2005)

by Anonymous Author

  "Yeah. Me too."

  Play resumed. They stood close, fists in their pockets, Meret's fleecy-hatted head sweet and vulnerable under his gate. Jake and Florrie's team, despite a courageous sliding tackle from Senoz in the number two shirt (and the fucking mud will clog the machine's filter again. . .), conceded yet another goal.

  "Ten minutes more," said Meret. "Unless there's injury time."

  "Well, hey. It hasn't been too bad. I got to hear about Delilah's mastitis, the hail isn't right in our faces, and I managed not to be linesman."

  "It has been a good day," remarked Meret.

  They laughed together. There's definitely something Ivan Denisovitch about being a full-time parent. You learn to take comfort in small mercies.

  iii

  Anna was checking out at the hotel reception desk. The conference program ended at noon. Most people were staying on, especially the internationals, but Anna was going to visit Simon, as she usually did when she came to Sheffield (where "usually" means about once a year, as time speeds up and old friendships stretch out fragile threads between the nodes of meeting). Someone grabbed her around the hips and demanded hotly in her ear: "What color panties are you wearing?"

  "Miguel? I don't wear panties, I wear pants, or knickers, and if that's your idea of a good line, why don't you try writing across your forehead, I AM A DICKHEAD."

  The hands that had grabbed her hips surged over her breasts. "Wool! Oh God, fine wool, so warm, so firm, so rounded!" The reception clerk smiled indulgently. Anna stepped neatly backwards and ascertained by buttock contact that there genuinely was a rod in his trousers, he wasn't just talking. When she turned round he was blushing like a rose. Serve you right, she thought. You see, I am not defenseless.

  "Knock it off."

  "You're checking out? This is a disaster!"

  "Can't be helped. My university can't pay for another night here, and I'm not going to pay it myself."

  "But you know the best part of these things is after the official shit is finished—"

  "You mean that best part where you start asking me what color panties I have on?"

  Miguel shook his head, the blush still fiery on his sharp-cut cheekbones and reaching up to the already-retreating hairpin bends of crisp black hair above his temples. "That's not all I mean. Come, have a last drink with me?"

  They sat drinking lager in the huge and sumptuous South Riding lounge. Anna was thinking how Jake would be sick as a parrot when she told him the extent of the free movie catalogue in her room, how he would vicariously relish the breakfast spread. The very superior pillow-sweeties were saved for him in her bag. Miguel Penalver, illustrious sex-biologist, Anna's compadre at these things and on the net for years, was telling her that she had to get her act together. She had made a major impact, though their world had been slow to admit it, with TY. The second paper, especially, had an enviable citation record. Since then, what? The TY concept thrived, a healthy little colony, sending out spores in all directions: yet where was Anna?

  "You're treading water, my beautiful Anna. You have to stop minding other people's business, seize yourself a piece of the action. You have to find something sexy. The way I did with the universal male-determining gene, long ago; my part in that drama: I made it work for me." It was true, Miguel had made the big time. He could hang out with the heavies, in Shanghai and Guangzhou and Mumbai, at conferences where Anna would not be found—

  "I don't think I'm treading water."

  "Oh yes. The 'Aether'." Miguel sighed, looking at her with real concern over his trademark horn rims. "What can I say? Anna, think. We have a viroid that can mediate exact, specific changes to the DNA; this is exciting. Your Aether is an ideas thing. It is not exciting here on the shop-floor. Is that right? In the workshop, where you and I live. You are not a high-concept media-scientist coffee-table star; rot them all. Your strength is in the lab, beautiful lady, tweaking the software and manipulating those little cultures."

  At that legendary Sans-serif conference, Anna had proposed that the TY phenomenon (the existence of which had already been accepted, though people refused to grant the implications) joined other significant evidence pointing the way to a new paradigm of life science that saw all species as nodes in a continuous fabric of living particles, viroids, prions, viruses, and their tame relations, interacting with each other constantly, positively, at the nucleotide level. It was a beautiful vision, but Miguel was right. Her part in sorting out the sequence-targeting mechanism in TY had won her far more credit. Everyone knew the Aether was just a new name for Clare Gresley's Continuous Creation: an idea that had failed; an idea that was tired and old. They switched off their brains, new evidence meant nothing.

  Meanwhile Clare, who'd moved to California to be near her daughter Jonnie, reckoned Anna a shameless traitor. Anna had heard news of her lost friend when she last visited Manchester. She and Nirmal were selling a training program to Nitash Davidson (who was in management now and looking very prosperous); she'd been visiting him to talk about course requirements. Apparently Clare was collaborating with her daughter on some billionaire's private nanotech project. When she'd heard that, Anna had been filled with pity. So she'd finally given up, sold out. Poor Clare, she's working for the company, profit for the rich inc. But what if it were Anna who had lost her way? What if her struggle to get that magic "Dr" in front of her name, and university of after it, had been a waste of precious time? Second-in-command of a cash-strapped university science department doesn't mean you're a respectable scientist, not these days. It means you are a PR and marketing exec, only without the salary...

  She left the conference hotel brooding.

  It was a damned cheek for Miguel to take her aside and pep-talk her like that.

  Find something sexy. Ha! If he only knew

  Ever since Sungai, Anna had been waiting for somebody to unveil SURISWATI's bombshell about the human sex chromosome pair. Or better still, for some other less controversial experimental proof of viral-mediated lateral transfer effecting change to emerge. She needed that revelation. What could she do? She was a breadwinner, she had no right to chase after a mirage. No right, no time, and a powerful wariness. Controversy is food for the strong, death for the weak. If she went after the effect Suri had found, and it wasn't there, then unless she somehow kept the work secret, Anna Senoz would be dead in the water, finished.

  Simon's family lived in a condo that had been a fine big Victorian family mansion; in landscaped grounds with a fitness suite, and a pool and squash courts. The deal reminded her of Nasser Apartments, without the austere cachet of the urban tropics. She wondered, did the stakeholders in Gradgrind Gracious Living have a rota? Did they take it in turns to take a private turn around the shrubbery? She was glad to find Simon alone when she arrived in the early evening. Cara was that significant five years or so younger, clean living and sensible, which tended to put a brake on things. They all socializing couldn't get up to speed in sober company.

  "Once," she said, when the children were in bed and they were opening their third bottle, "I was at a conference in Toronto, dead beat after functioning at full stretch all day after a rotten dangerous-feeling red-eye flight from Heathrow, including a casual turning back for spare parts, typical BA. My phone rings at 3 am. It's Miguel from Spain, saying what color panties are you wearing; and then he says, lets make love like this (meaning wank online). Afterwards you can send me your moistened undies to keep, and I will send you mine. He did apologize, that time. He was drunk; he'd figured the time difference wrong. . . Oh, Miguel is okay. He's great, a friend, but with some of them it gets so wearing. They come on to me relentlessly, these male colleagues of mine. I take it lightly, I flirt and act sassy, what else can you do? But of course I know what it means, and it's not friendly. I'm supposed to have forgotten what 'fucking someone up' usually implies, in a professional context? I'm supposed to have not been listening, when a few moments before they were all crowing over the way they absolutely shafted some poor
loser? Sometimes I wish the sexual revolution had never happened. All it means is that I can't call them on the shit that's going on with them."

  "No," said Simon. "I think you're wrong. You wouldn't want to go back to the days when no one was supposed to let on and girls were supposed to keep their knickers locked up; it was worse. Hey, you've enjoyed the revolution, much as any woman I know. When I think of you and Spence, that summer. . . Hahaha!"

  Affluence suited him. He had the presence, in this conventionally well-furnished room, that comes from regular work at the gym, and his conservative casuals sat easily on his older but better-tended body. Though there were already touches of grey in the nappy curls and lines around his eyes, Simon had become good-looking, which she didn't remember him to have been in those old days. But not altogether happy, she thought—

  "Good as the telly, eh?" She grinned. "Yeah, I remember girl power. It was bloody good fun. I couldn't resist the energy of it. It was really, really important that you didn't have to be the one saying no. You could stuff being the banker, being in charge of sexual access, rationing it so's not to be called a slag. . . But did it get us anywhere? Looking back, I feel like what we post-women's lib girls were expressing, with all that license, was our anger, at the deals you have to make when you declare peace with an old enemy. You have to give up the privileges of the oppressed, and we didn't want to do that, not just when we had the muscle to hit back. . . There was a point when we saw that we had to let bygones be bygones, or go for vengeance. We went for the wonderbra option, twin turrets blazing: and la lutte continue."

  "I don't believe you've ever worn a wonderbra."

  "Mm, nah. Underwiring is nasty, I'd rather work out. But I've used my sex as a weapon, I've learned to do that. We all do it, women in science, for all the good it does us. You can use sex, and make men suffer, wearing the full chador. I've seen that too."

  "Tell me. . ." said Simon, ruefully, and changed the topic. "How's Spence, anyway? You and him still okay, in this battleground?"

  "Oh, fine. Still poor as church mice. . . That's another thing I wish, another wrong turn. Elective poverty was great at the time, but failing to make ends meet at our age is not cool."

  Simon checked the bottle, fetched a fourth, and opened it. "Don't worry. You and Spence will always be cool. You know, ever since you came down to Beevey Island that time, or maybe it was at your wedding, you two have reminded me of that Fred Pohl story, I think it's called 'The Midas Touch'? Where the production-consumption pump has gone wild, so that if you're disgustingly poor you have to slave at consuming all kinds of stuff, and you can tell the privileged rich few, because they're dressed shabby and drive a miserable little old car—"

  He broke off, pop-eyed in consternation—

  "Not that! I mean, not that—!"

  Anna burst out laughing, and they both collapsed in helpless giggles.

  "In vino veritas," said Anna gravely, when they could laugh no more.

  "Okay, okay. D'you want a meal by the way? It's late, but we could dial a takeaway?"

  "Nah. I think I ought to go to bed, sorry. Got to be up early in the morning."

  Cara was at her Italian class, which was traditionally followed by a non-alcoholic pub session with girl friends. She'd be back soon, and Anna felt too drunk to be sociable. They cleared bottles, glasses, and snack food residue out into the kitchen.

  "D'you ever hear from Ramone these days?"

  Anna shook her head. "Nope. That connection's pretty well broken."

  "She's living in the States now, isn't she? With that artist and his wife? Seems weird."

  The small room, with the gaunt high ceiling, remnant of its life as some Victorian scullery or housemaid's closet, was full of gleaming doors. She didn't know which would be the dishwasher and which would eject her into outer space. "Weird? Nothing's weird now. Horses getting sodomized in the senate, every day of the week."

  "I mean, it doesn't sound very feminist. Two women sharing a guy, lesbian sex as male entertainment—"

  "You don't know how it works." But she was willing to bitch. "Maybe it's like Daz and the modeling: she's made her fortune on female stuff-strutting, and retired. Next opus she'll be back into violent porn. Where am I sleeping? On the couch?"

  "I've made up Tabitha's bed in the kids' room, that way Cara won't disturb you when she comes in."

  "Oh. . . Okay."

  The flat had three bedrooms, one of which was heavily occupied by an industry-standard server and other office stuff. Anna had seen Tabitha, the seven-year-old, and Jemelle, the three-year-old, snuggling down in their parents' big bed at story time. She realized that they had not been removed at any point.

  "You'll have the room to yourself, don't worry. They sleep with us," said Simon, reaching to replace an unused glass on its proper shelf. There was a grimness in his expression, which should have warned her to shut up.

  "What, all the time?"

  "Yeah. It's the. . .family bed idea. Makes them very secure. It's more natural."

  "Wow, Simon—" She rearranged her tone, feeling a complete heel. "That must be nice."

  "You get used to it. Jemelle doesn't half kick though."

  For a moment their eyes met: and. . . and nothing. No way would Anna and Simon change the good thing they had. Especially not when Cara was due home any minute.

  She woke in the night and lay awake in a sad state of alcohol-related alertness, crowded out by a heap of immaculate soft toys, wondering pruriently when did Cara and Simon have sex? Once every four years? Or did they just do it, quickly and quietly, when the little girls were asleep? Maybe they hired a hotel room, in the Japanese way, maybe they used the living room couch. She was ashamed of herself, but that brief, bitter downtrodden look that had escaped Simon's guard. . . Poor Simon, what malign force had driven her to talk non-stop about over-sexed sex scientists? Pity he couldn't have stayed with Yesha. It must be hateful to change partners, to have whole sections of your own history sealed-off behind you, memories you can no longer treasure. But Yesh was a performer, an artist, she had to go on tour, this week in Amsterdam, next month in Rome. Simon had wanted a good old-fashioned family life, and now he had one.

  Between new, mean girl-power in the workplace and old, virtuous woman-power at home, the blokes have a hard time these days.

  * * *

  On her way home from Sheffield she went to visit Marnie Choy in hospital and then to Rosey McCarthy's house in Norwood, where Rosey lived with the two adopted Tim children, the two young children of her second marriage, and a live-in nanny. And with Wol, unofficially: who was back in favor, the one-night-stand toyboys who had followed the fertile but obnoxious second Mr Rosey having vanished.

  Marnie had ovarian cancer. Her treatment wasn't going very well.

  For years Anna and Rosey had met very rarely, no more frequently than either of them had seen Marnie. But already the sick woman seemed far away, and Anna and Rosey close companions—as if they had spent their lives like this, elbows on Rosey's kitchen table, among the bunches of opening leaves in pottery jars, the sleeping cats, the piles of newspaper, the fragments of legos and sheaves of kiddie art.

  "I thought cancer was curable these days. What happened to all those miracle drugs?"

  "Ah. Ovarian cancer's manageable, not curable; and there are always exceptions."

  "God, you sound like your mother. That ah. . .sound. I phoned her, you know, when Marnie's results came through, and I couldn't get hold of you."

  "They're going to try good old chemotherapy."

  "Chemotherapy is a challenging hobby they give you to occupy you while you're dying."

  "Did my mum say that?"

  "No! She's too kind. It's what my Dad said when he was on his chemo, in the dark ages: for the lung and liver tumors. Before the brain tumor that got the speech centers. Oh, God, poor Marnie. I keep remembering her in the Union Bar, screaming I want a Man! and laughing like a maniac. . ." Rosey's eyes filled with tears. She dashed them away with
a firm hand. "Hey, tell Spence thanks for the Shere Khan books. That was sweet of him. Italia's terrified of them, but Robbie's a big fan: he's a proper little bruiser, revels in all the ultra violence. Could he sign them by the way?"

  Spence disliked signing books. "I'm sure he will if you ask. It's not really ultra violence, Rosey. There's gory details, but it's only in fun."

  "Whatever. I used to think Steven and Joe were aggressive because of the childhood they had before they came to us. But boys will be boys. I was so relieved to have a girl."

  If you put a child into frilly ankle socks at birth, thought Anna, by the time she's three no one will ever know whether genetic predisposition or nurture made her turn out wet as a haddock's bathing suit. She was still frightened of Rosey, so she held her tongue.

  Rosey sighed. "I can't imagine having only one child. Don't you get broody?"

  I have had two children, thought Anna. Ah, Lily Rose. Fleetingly, she contemplated explaining that they'd decided to stop at one because of environmental issues, but dismissed the idea. Rosey was one of those middle-class people who bitched about the monster size of the water bill and the annoying demise of cheap air travel, but if you talked about why this kind of thing was happening, or what the REAL problems were like, she thought you were insane.

  "Well, maybe. A little."

  "You're incredibly lucky, Anna. Spence is so lovely. I hear his publishers are pleased with him too. Or rather Wol hears; he goes to those parties." Wol was something in publishing. Rosey was something in webcast tv, a designer of some kind. Anna had no idea of the details, these arts-degree things all looked the same to her. . . "Weird that his books ended up being illustrated by Charles Craft's wife," mused Rosey. "And I hear Charles is practically a billionaire. Ironic, when you think how you and he used to be the king and queen of Biols, long ago. How d'you get on with Meret?"

  "She seems nice," said Anna, reticently. "It must be tough, trying to work at home with three small children. I get the impression her live-in parents aren't much help."