Gwyneth Jones - Life(2005)

by Anonymous Author

  "And she's married to the world's prize sexist pig, yeah. . . I wouldn't feel too sorry for her, if I were you. I'm not defending Charles. It was a typical male trick: ditches his dull boffin girlfriend after she's helped him to build the business, snags himself a foxy young trophy-wife. But I heard it was Meret who made the running: took out poor old Use like with a chainsaw. You must remember Use, Charles's girlfriend back when you and him were quite close?"

  Anna nodded, taking Rosey's arch look with a straight face.

  "Apparently she—Meret—went for work experience at Charles's company, while she was at art college, designing GM seed packets or something. He fancied her, and they started dating. When he wouldn't chuck Use, Meret went bananas. Got pregnant: he paid for an abortion. So she got pregnant again, practically before the bill for the first scrape came in, threw terrible scenes, threatened to kill herself, and poor old Charles surrendered. She chucked her course, he dumped Use, and gave Meret everything she wanted: the frock, the white Rolls, the whole vulgar works. She's not such a helpless kitten."

  "I'm amazed the way you keep up," said Anna, diplomatically. "I know nothing."

  Rosey heaved another sigh and gazed dreamily at a pot of sycamore leaves. "Don't you sometimes wish you'd gone for the big frock and white Rolls, Anna? With Wol it was a registry office quickie. I hadn't the heart for anything more, when it was because we had to, to get on the A list for adopting. With Enrico the whole thing was a fucking disaster—" Her lip curled, in savage scorn. . . A door banged. They heard Wol's familiar, absurdly plummy voice: a diffident, precariously controlled yodel. "Hi Rosey? Upstairs or downstairs?" The snarl vanished. The matriarch's whole demeanor became warm and relaxed and bright. "We're down here, love!"

  * * *

  The train home was slow, plagued by mysterious halts and lame excuses. She had papers to read but found it impossible to concentrate. Swathes of new housing rolled by, sparsely interrupted by patches of fields and woods. A generation of little girls like Maggie Senoz had grown up and were living in the country, the way they'd always dreamed, with the natural consequence that there was not much countryside left. But it didn't stop them. All the light-green families, like Anna and Spence and Jake, were digging their allotments, doctoring the cars they couldn't bear to give up, under-occupying their big old houses. They knew they were making sod-all difference. But it didn't stop them.

  She thought of Marnie Choy in hospital: sitting by her bed, brightly smiling, a little over-made-up, saying cheerfully, "At least I won't outlive Pongo and Bastie." They were her cats. "I hated the thought of that." They'd laughed and joked, the way you must, and then Marnie had said, suddenly, "Anna, I don't know whether to face up to death now, or then, I mean, when it really starts happening."

  "I'd go for then," said Anna, wondering if Marnie knew how close "then" was, and cravenly not daring to ask.

  Marnie wasn't going to be one of the many doomed victims whose survival had worried Lavinia Kent years ago. She had been karyotyped, and the results had been the worst possible: no gene-tinkering immunotherapy treatment was going to work. Nothing left to try but the harsh, ineffectual armory of the twentieth century. . . Marnie Choy would die, in months, maybe within weeks, the first of them to leave. It was a foretaste of the future. The dreaded phone calls that must come, one by one. This would be Anna's role, to greet bad news with her mother's voice, to visit the sick, to wonder when it was decent to give up the hopeful lying. This was the beginning of the down slope, when youth and strength must fail. Here is the turning point, and what have I achieved?

  She thought of her father—foot soldier in the Volunteer Army, backbone of the nation—her father who had never known the luxury of a paying job since the day his business failed. She'd been in Manchester on the way to her conference and had spent an hour with him in the Oxfam shop, which he loved her to do. Often he put things aside for her. (Maggie was repulsed by the idea of second-hand clothes.) When they were little he had made their clothes; it was the way he could be a provider; and they had not been grateful. Little girls like to look the same as everyone else.

  He had brought out a battered pale cardboard box and showed her, lifting layers of tissue from a deep crimson pleated skirt and shimmering beaded bodice, the most fabulous cocktail dress. "Wow, Daddy, is that what I think it is. . .?" "Yeah," he breathed. "It's a Schiaparelli." Anna had thought the dress was one of his own, a rare original Richard Senoz, surfaced from lost time. She didn't confess this, she'd have hated him to know she could no longer tell one of the great designers from another. "How it ended up in an Oxfam collection bin is a mystery. It's a classic size 12, old money. It should fit you." His swift, expert glance had measured Anna regretfully: "It won't, not with those navvy shoulders: what do you young women want with them, you don't earn your living breaking stones, do you? You had a lovely figure when you were twenty."

  The Schiaparelli would go to auction, it would be sold and the money spent succoring the poor. . . But how Daddy's eyes had gleamed. She knew that shine, the love of the marvelous. She saw those eager, magpie eyes looking out of any mirror. The older you get, the easier it is to know yourself the present habitation of immortal, elemental spirits. So many subtle phrases of the DNA text pass unscathed through the mill of recombination. A turn of the head, a smile. . . She was father and mother and grandma Senoz, and all those others, further off. Her mother's voice, her father's eyes (and what nonsense this mingled inheritance makes of the battle of the sexes).

  But Daddy's bright-eyed lust for marvels was a warning. Watch out, Anna. Let that trait take over, you and Spence and Jake will be in the poverty pit for life. . . She must resist the siren call of Transferred Y. She must not think of talking to Nirmal. If there were any truth in Suri's results, someone else would have been shouting about it by now. Forget it, forget it. . .The slow train fueled that terrible feeling of urgency, of chances missed and doors shutting, that had started to haunt her, clutching at her heart, making her feel old.

  * * *

  The next morning, a Saturday morning, miraculously none of the three of them had anything to do. Anna and Spence lay sleepily talking until, since Jake was deep in Saturday morning tv and they were safe from interruption, they moved into doing sex. Anna's periods had been maliciously irregular since Jake was born. She was having some unscheduled bleeding and couldn't be arsed to take out her tampon, so they did without penetration, but it was good. Anna went to check her email. Spence made tea, delivered a mug to Anna and retired to bed with his tax docs (staying in bed was his way of rewarding himself for this drear activity). She came back and burrowed into the crackling nest.

  "How's the Amoldovar kid?" asked Spence dryly. "Still packing his six-gun for you?"

  "How did you know I had a message from Miguel?"

  "You always do. Hey, Anna, look at this. Shere Khan and the Coast of Coramandel has sold twenty thousand copies in the UK pre-publication."

  "Is that good? You have to allow for returns, don't you. Oh, I meant to tell you. Wol says, well, Rosey says that Wol says, that you are being mentioned at publishing parties."

  "My God. God bless the gallant captain and her crew!" His voice shook, between laughter and triumph. "I knew I was doing well. I hadn't figured it out, in case. . . Holy shit, Anna, I'm making a living! We're solvent! We can live without your salary this year, babe. Hey, hey, I'm the breadwinner! We are comfortably off!"

  She stared at him, the duvet up to her shoulders, in wide-eyed stillness. "Then I am free," says Anna, in such a strange tone you'd think she was about to spread wings and fly out of the window or disappear up the chimney like the king of the cats.

  * * *

  She made an appointment to see Nirmal. Although they worked together closely, this was still appropriate behavior. KM Nirmal's office was as private as it had ever been. The door might be ajar, but you did not pop in: if you dared, you could forget whatever you'd popped in about; it was dead meat. She was going to lay her cards on the table,
no tactics, no prevarication. The key is always frank. . . as Mr Frank N Furter used to say.

  * * *

  Poole University's lab-science buildings were, as it happened, leased units on the old science park on the Forest campus, where Anna would have been a post-grad if her first career hadn't been derailed. As she walked up that valley that would always smell of morning—though it was so changed, so little left of the beech trees and the lawns—she felt that she was folding back the years. After many mistakes, many stupid blunders, this time she would get it right.

  Anna didn't know what Nirmal thought about her Aether papers. He was very hands-off on that. He'd become in some ways more open and approachable since his wife died, but you still hit that core of absolute reserve pretty close to the surface. She had no idea how he would react to this even more way-out suggestion.

  At least the Aether was vague. This was getting down to cases.

  She produced the Sungai disks, and they studied Suri's projection together, almost in silence. Nirmal took off his eye wrap and spent some time going through the printed notes. She waited, strangely relaxed. As long as Anna Anaconda could be straightforward about things she was content, come what may. She watched Nirmal's calm, voracious concentration as he took possession of the material and felt at home with him. We be of one blood, thou and I.

  "Hmm!"

  Nirmal placed the papers neatly on the desk and leaned back. He took up his varifocals and applied the tip of one earpiece, gently, rhythmically, to the center of his thin lips. The capital-H grooves around his mouth had deepened, the bones of his face stood out even more, but apart from the new glasses nothing much in his appearance had changed. KM Nirmal did not age. He looked amused. "So! This is what was behind it all."

  Behind what? The nebulous Aether she supposed. She waited.

  "If this is true, if these results are genuine indicators, then there are two questions. Where are these new creatures, Anna, the epidemic of XX human males?"

  Anna nodded. "That's one question. What's the other?"

  "If they are among us, why has nobody else announced this discovery?"

  "Yes."

  "There should be clinical cases by now, many clinical cases, throughout the world. Where are they?"

  "I think," said Anna slowly, "that this isn't Brave New World. Babies aren't routinely genotyped. . .not anywhere. What Suri shows is that an exchange of genetic material, between the X and the Y chromosomes, triggered by the presence of the TY viroid, will lead to dramatic-looking change, in the chromosomes, on a stunning scale in the human population. That doesn't mean stunning numbers of clinical cases. If Suri's right, most of those affected might have no 'symptoms' at all. And, I think we are seeing an epidemic of XX males. We've been seeing an epidemic of XX males in fertility treatment for at least a decade. But the significance has been masked by the variety of the problems it's caused, by the fact that fertility is frequently unaffected, and by all the other candidates for blame, in the fall in male fertility. Plus, taken globally, vast numbers of people would never be referred to an infertility clinic even if they were in trouble."

  "Very true, very reasonable—if there were no such thing as human sex chromosome research, and if no one had yet drawn our attention to the TY viroid effect. But this is no longer a case of serendipity, Anna. Your own earlier results are known. You cannot tell me that no one has found out because nobody has been looking."

  "I sat on this for years," said Anna, "because SURISWATI's projection is so bizarre. I want to prove entrainment. I want to show a mechanism for lateral propagation of genetic variation, as the secret engine of 'evolution,' as something that makes 'evolution' different from the model we use now. I don't want this: it's too sensational and in totally the wrong way. Other people may have felt the same. Maybe they've noticed (she thought of Miguel) something weird, and they've decided not to go down that path. It wouldn't be the first time a whole science ignored experimental results, for. . . for all kinds of reasons. Think of Galileo."

  "You don't believe this is a mirage."

  She drew a deep breath. "I don't know what it is. I want to do the work. I want to re-examine Suri's evidence, and I need to conduct a survey. And try to keep what I'm doing quiet, until I know there's something there."

  Nirmal nodded, tapping the earpiece of his glasses to his lips again. "Just so. And you want to sow these dragon's teeth in my department, on my time."

  "Not without your advice and consent."

  "Hmm. I presume the KL SURISWATI, who or which would be your Suri's closest relative, knew nothing of your work?"

  "Nothing. The Sungai SURISWATI lived and died a stand-alone. If we could get any cooperation from Kuala Lumpur—" (Which was unlikely, in the present state of Southeast Asian politics. Nirmal nodded in acknowledgment.) "It would be useless. I couldn't confirm or deny without doing the work over again, and then we'd have to get her results independently verified. I'd rather work without an AI, just because of the verification problem. Virtual modeling isn't enough. We have to find the answers in real, living human cells."

  Nirmal replaced his glasses. He sheaved her papers together, put them back in their folder, ejected the XX projection from his machine, and handed the lot over the desk.

  "Then do it. But—"

  "In my tea breaks," said Anna.

  But her head was spinning, because there was more. She could see it in his eyes. She had seen the gleam that lit him up inside when she spoke of the secret engine of evolution—

  "No," said Nirmal, precisely. "Now we both have two jobs, because the Department must not suffer. Let's see what you and I can do together."

  He stood, and came around the desk to see her to the door, a courtesy that he had omitted the first time they had spoken on the subject of TY and on the subject of what Anna should or should not do on KM Nirmal's time. She still didn't know what was going through his head. As he opened the door for her he smiled, that beautiful rare illuminating smile. "Well, Anna," he said. "What a long strange trip it's been."

  * * *

  Jake's mummy taught him the names of trees and the parts of flowers, how to dance the Okey Kokey, how to blow a dandelion clock, how to cook a hedgehog, what to say to snowfall, who Guy Fawkes was, and a rhyme about magpies. Jake's daddy didn't know these things because he didn't come from England, but he knew everything about Steven Spielberg, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Lara Croft, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Mario the plumber. He knew who had written all the songs on Top of the Pops, when they were first invented. Jake believed his father must once have been mighty in the land. In the winter they went to Jumble Sales at the Salvation Army Citadel, for old sakes' sake, though they were not poor any longer. In the summer they walked in the New Forest and visited village fetes where they bought plants (that died) and ate strange homemade cakes from pleated paper cases. In ancient little churches they sniffed the cool and beeswax air, and Jake always wrote the same thing in the Visitors' Book: Very beautiful.

  They had no time for long holidays, but once on a short break, at the beach in France, beside the creamy diamond breakers of the Atlantic, Jake asked his mummy, how do you be a scientist? Anna scooped up a handful of sand. She dug out a beach-tennis bat, laid it flat and tipped her handful onto the black surface.

  "Count them."

  "Count what?"

  "The grains of sand. Look, I'll show you." She flattened the heap with her palm, squared it off and divided it with the edge of a shell into twelve roughly equal patches. "Count the grains in one of those patches. Then choose another patch, and count again. When you've done that, we'll add the two results together, divide the result by two, multiply it by twelve, and you'll know approximately how many grains in one mummy's handful. It will be different from how many there would be in a Jake's handful: that doesn't matter, so long as we bear it in mind. We're going to assume, for now, that you have a representative number of unusually big and little grains, overall. When you've done that bit, we'll talk about how to figure
out how many mummy's handfuls make a beach. It won't be easy. The beach is big, it is changing all the time, and you and I may not agree on where the edges are. But we'll have a go."

  Spence came up from the water with his bodyboard, and found the child enslaved.

  "What's going on here?"

  "Science!" breathed Jake. "I'm counting the sand."

  "You're a rotten bitch," said Spence to his wife. "Has he been driving you that crazy?"

  Anna lay back behind her sunglasses and picked up her book. "He asked me what it was like to be a scientist," she explained, implacably. "So I told him."

  She was counting the sand. The days were not long enough; the nights were white pits of fall. She worked like one possessed and couldn't sleep. Her voice shook, her hands shook. She tried to remember to be kind and helpful to her teammates, because that is essential, the life-blood of good work; but she had the greatest of difficulty in recalling their names. It was strange to know that her boss saw this as a straight line progression. He had seen her talent, he had nurtured her, she had gone off to have her babies (as women must). Now she was back, and he was grooming her for stardom: the discovery he had seen in germ plasm, in that first Transferred Y paper, come to fruition. They were struggling in a backwater, and secrecy was imperative, true. Otherwise, everything was as it should be. All Anna's cruel defeats and long sacrifices, Nirmal's past injustices, simply didn't exist. And she was happy to settle for this version, very happy. Hungering and thirsting for justice does not make the wheels go round. It just doesn't.

  She knew she was failing to keep her end up on the domestic front. It couldn't be helped, this was a crisis. Once, when she was putting away some clean washing, she found a fresh pack of condoms in Spence's underwear drawer. Anna and Spence hadn't used any protection since Spence had his vasectomy. Now that Shere Khan had become successful, it was Spence's turn to be the traveling executive: visiting bookshops and schools, staying in conference hotels. He was entitled to play away, if he liked. She sat on their bed, holding the packet and thinking, Oh well. Fair dos.