Even now, I am questioning whether he actually did say those words, delivering such an earth shattering payload. He dropped a verbal H-bomb and smiled as he did it.
Bloody Hell! Is all this for real, or is everything in my head? Maybe I never actually survived the pox. I died, like everyone else, and all this is some kind of purgatory designed to test whether I should go upstairs or down? Shit - maybe isolation does drive you nuts.
Okay, so here it goes - writing it down now - Dr. Gregory Sayer is my FATHER.
He ran a DNA test on the saliva swab he took earlier. He explained it to me, though I was barely listening to what he was saying. I think I was in shock because I could see his lips moving but his voice sounded as if he was at the bottom of a well.
I tried to concentrate, and as far as I can remember he said that the test worked by comparing specific regions of DNA, which vary from individual to individual but are inherited from your parents. If some of the segments match, then it is statistically possible to calculate the odds that two random people would share those same genetic markers. The odds that two random people will have those same markers in common are tiny. It is like the odds of flipping a coin and having it turn out heads a thousand times in a row. That is how unlikely it is to happen.
Dr. Sayer ran the statistics on the results of our samples, and they indicate a 99.99% probability that he is my father. It could be a mistake, but he checked it three times, and he is a physicist, so I guess his Math skills are pretty good.
Dr. Greg and Ma? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see him with my mother. He is a Doctor, a flipping Oxbridge Astrophysicist for goodness sake, and Ma didn’t even finish high school. I think he sensed my scepticism, but it wasn’t only scepticism. I was suspicious. Why would he be trying to convince me that he was my father?
I went mute. Dr. Greg seemed uncomfortable. Shifting his weight, he shrugged as his eyes flicked to Nikki. Evidently, my reaction was not as expected. Did he really think I would be overjoyed to discover that he wanted to be my ‘daddy’?
Dr. Greg crouched down beside me, clearing his throat.
"Harper," he said, "can you tell me which high school your mother attended?"
"No," I said, "you tell me, where my mother went to high school."
Dr. Sayer’s lips twitched as his eyes smiled into mine, a modicum respect hidden in his expression. Though he has no reason to admire me for asking that question, I was merely being careful. It was pure common sense. If I told him where Ma went to school, it would have been easy for him to play me. All he would have to say was, “I went there too.”
But if Dr. Sayer was trying to play me, then he was playing like a maestro.
“When I was your age,” he said, “Your mother and I went to Park Grove High, in Chesterfield.”
Dr. Sayer had attended the same bloody school as Ma. He put his hand over mine as he asked his next question. I tensed.
“Harper, was your mother’s name Rachael McKenzie?”
My face must have said it all because Nikki looked from Dr. Sayer to me and instantly started to blubber. She left then, blurting out something about leaving us alone to get to know one another.
I didn’t want to get to know him. I was angry. I didn’t want to know the story of how the young Gregory Sayer fell for the once gorgeous young social butterfly that was Rachael McKenzie. I already knew all I needed to know about that. He got Ma pregnant and then deserted her. Then he let his parents ship him off to some fancy college so that he could avoid doing what was right. Ma rarely spoke about my father, but she had told me that much.
How had he known? Why had he run the test? Had he recognized my name, then, on hearing I had survived the pox, put two and two together?
I wanted to ask why he had deserted us, why he had not been there for Ma when her parents kicked her out for being pregnant. Why he had never attempted to contact us, even if it was just to find out if we were okay. I wanted to know all this and more.
Yet, all I could manage was: “You are my Father?” The words came out sounding like an accusation.
Letting out a sigh, Dr. Sayer got to his feet. I was looking at his shoes, but I could sense his eyes on me. He stepped back and began to stroll around the room contemplating his next assault.
“I understand why you are angry Harper,” he said “I should have done more. I wanted to do more, but I was young and…”
“Age is no excuse,” I said, “you were older than I am now. If I can cope with frigging Armageddon, then you should have been able to deal with being a father.”
“You’re right,” he said, after a moment's hesitation, “but it wasn’t as simple as that. Nothing ever is.”
He told me everything then. How his parents sent him away to an independent boarding school for boys in Edinburgh, Scotland. He explained how he tried to get in touch with Ma (he called her Rachael which felt really weird). Apparently, Ma’s parents - my grandparents - told him that they had no idea where she was. That was the truth. Ma never spoke to them again after they kicked her out.
He graduated from Oxford University with a first in the Physical Sciences and later a Ph.D. in Astrophysics. So he is the geek in me. I must get my brains from him, not to mention my lanky frame, thick brown hair, and defective eyesight. I could see so much of myself in this man that I knew he was telling the truth. He is my father. I never looked anything like Ma, I am his kid.
I was still in shock, though, and I couldn’t say a thing. Within the space of twenty-four hours, I have lost the best friend I ever had and found a father I never knew existed.
Shouldn't I feel happiness, relief, or at least something other than anger and confusion? I don’t need a father. I have managed fine without one until now. I would swap him in a heartbeat for my Sal.
All I want to do is to go back to Mona and see if Sal is there. If I can find one scrap of tangible evidence that she was real, it would be enough. At least I would know that I had been truly loved once in my life.
I looked down at Sal’s things lying on my bed.
“You miss your dog, don’t you?” Dr. Sayer picked up Sal's bone and brush and sat down next to me.
I nodded, and to my horror, my eyes filled. Awkwardly, he put an arm around my shoulders.
“We scientists like to think we know it all, and yet we understand virtually nothing about the mind and its perception of reality,” he said. “Do you know what Albert Einstein said about reality?”
I shook my head.
“He said: 'As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.'”
Absolutely no doubt whatsoever - this man is my father. 'The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree…'
7th August
Prodigal Daughter
I am a horrible person. I apologize for not writing for a while. You were my friend when I needed one most. I never missed a day, even when things were going terribly, you were there listening as I scrawled my list of woes. I have behaved like the worst type of friend, neglecting an old companion for my shiny new pals, I am sorry - you don’t deserve that.
I just got sucked into it all - seduced by the rare delights of small talk, board games, music, and humour. Having had no one to converse with for over a year, once I started, I found it impossible to stop. I have so much to tell you.
Firstly, and rather unexpectedly, I find that I am warming to the idea of having a father. The more time we spend together, the more I see what I have been missing all these years. Last night he took me outside to look at the stars with a telescope. He said that before finding me, the one good thing to come out of the pox was the lack of light pollution.
I can see what he meant, the nights are so black now, and the stars so numerous. It’s as if some divine toddler spilled an entire carton of glitter and scattered it over a dark velvet sky. Dr. Greg pointed out the Andromeda galaxy and the constellation Cassiopeia - the Queen. Cassiopeia is found high over Pol
aris, the North Star. It is shaped like a ‘W,' and one angle of the W acts as an arrow pointing to the Andromeda galaxy. Without the telescope, it just looks like a faint smudge of light. When you look through the telescope, though, it is a beautiful glowing spiral, teaming with billions of stars.
It seems I am not the only geek in the family to collect sayings. Do you think it is possible to inherit a propensity to collect memorable quotes? I doubt anyone will be doing the research on that theory any time soon. Maybe I am just super-sensitive to picking up similarities between my father and myself, but I have only spent a few days in his company, and already I have heard him reel off a heck of a lot of quotations. The latest was when we were looking at Andromeda, and it was from Stephen Hawking who said: “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
Those words made me feel important… significant. There are so few of us left behind to rebuild everything we have lost. Each one of us is even more precious than we were before. I added it to my collection of sayings.
However, if there is a God up there, choosing who lives and who dies, then he must have been playing one sick joke when he decided that Jess should be one of those special people. The boy is impossible. When he finally managed to string more than a couple of words together, it was to insult me. He has taken to calling me the ‘Prodigal Daughter.'
Pete asked him to show me how the communication centre and two-way radio worked. To be fair, he did a reasonably good job of that. The recorded message telling people how to get to us is played automatically twenty-four hours a day, on a loop, but the two-way radio, which uses a different wavelength is used separately, to communicate with the Norfolk group.
I would never describe Jess as friendly, but his attitude goes far beyond ‘unfriendly.' He was sullen and cold. He showed me how to use the radio.
“You got that?” He said.
I nodded, and he left.
I caught up with him this evening after dinner, and I tried to start up a conversation. Nikki and Pete have been trying to encourage us to become friends. As you know, I have never been big on the whole social thing, but I thought as there were just a handful of people left on the planet, we may as well try to get on.
I rested my hand on his arm and suggested that after dinner maybe we should sit down and get to know each other a bit. He looked down at my hand and pulled his arm away.
“Not interested,” his lips twisted into that sardonic grin of his as he got up to leave, “I would have thought that your time would be better invested in getting to know ‘daddy.'”
I called him an asshole, which only seemed to amuse him further.
“You got that right Proddy,” he said, letting the door slam behind him.
I caught a look on his face, milliseconds before the door closed behind him, a transient micro expression. It was a look I knew well. If you don’t let them in, they can't hurt you.
8th August
P.S. ~ I Miss You
The night tortures me. I have taken to sleeping with Sal’s things under my pillow. I don’t know why. It's not that it helps my sleep any, I still spend much of the time tossing and turning.
I dreamed about Ma again too. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her back to me. I was watching television in the sitting room, Ma was smoking a cigarette, and the ash was about to fall. I picked up the ashtray from the coffee table and took it over to her. When Ma turned around she had no eyes, just two gaping holes squirming with maggots.
I woke in a panic, dripping with sweat. Jess was standing in the doorway. He couldn't have looked any more embarrassed if he had stumbled into my room and seen me naked.
“Sorry,” he said, “Nikki thought she heard you shout out, she asked me to check on you - are you okay?”
“Bad dream,” I said.
I expected him to leave. Instead, he came into the room and plonked himself down next to me on the bed.
“These belong to your dog?” He picked up Sal’s hair brush off the bed. I had been so restless that my pillow was hanging off the edge of the mattress. I was holding Sal’s rubber bone tightly in my hand, like a sad little child with their comfort blanket. I nodded.
“I had a dog once,” he said, “I named him Jinx… it turned out to be an apt name. Pete reckons that yours is in your head, some sort of post traumatic stress thing. You think he’s wrong?”
I nodded again. He turned Sal's brush over in his hands as if he were some psychic attempting to pick up cosmic vibes.
“You want to go look for him today?” He asked.
I didn’t have to tell him yes, the look on my face must have said it for me. He gave me one of those half smiles he seems to do a lot.
“Great,” he said, “I reckon I can talk Pete into it. I’ll have to come with you of course. They won’t let you out there on your own. Get some clothes on and meet me in the Kitchen. I’ll go see what I can sort out.”
Could it be that Jess does have a heart after all? Contrary to my previous experience, it seems that he has at least discovered how to use words of more than one syllable. I wonder what made him suddenly decide to talk to me. What must I look like in his eyes?
I met Jess in the kitchen as we arranged and he and I told the others about our intentions. I assumed that they would say no, Ma's standard response. So, I was surprised when they seemed keen to let us go. Pete and Nikki were encouraging even. They exchanged a brief smile. Perhaps they were relieved that Jess and I finally appeared to be getting on.
Dr. Greg, however, was not so happy with the arrangement. He wandered into the kitchen as Pete was providing Jess with some reminders about the safe use of the weapon.
“Don’t worry about your aim.” Pete said, breaking open the rifle and handing Jess a box of ammunition, “getting a shot off is more important than putting a bullet in one animal's head. The blast should frighten off any others in the vicinity and give you plenty of time to get the hell out of there. Oh, and remember, no wasting ammunition on rats - no matter how big they are.”
“What’s going on?” My father looked as if he was witnessing someone smothering a puppy - his puppy.
Pete and Jess explained, and it took some convincing for him to let me go, but it was four against one. Finally, he said: “Well if you want to waste the day on a wild goose chase, go ahead.”
He slammed the door, rocking it on its hinges as he left.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” said Nikki, “look at it from his perspective. He only just found you. Can you really blame him for worrying about losing you?”
“I managed without him for fifteen years,” I said. Feeling instantly sorry I’d said it.
We left straight after breakfast, taking two bicycles, their saddlebags packed with water and food for our lunch. Jess rode with his butt hovering over the saddle, the thirty-two calibre rifle slung across the back of his shoulders. Riding up Whitehall, we cycled towards the west side of the Islington Tunnel where I had left Mona over a week ago. I hadn’t ridden a bike for years, and I had forgotten how much fun it was.
“I’ll take you on a tour of my city Proddy,” yelled Jess, as he raced ahead. A wide grin lit up his face, “show you the sights.”
We rode down the centre of some of London’s most iconic streets, completely deserted, but for the giant rats.
“We can go anywhere we want,” Jess said, as we cycled past the Houses of Parliament. “Just walk right in if we want to. I’ve done it loads of times. Buckingham Palace is still rather grand - pick up a tiara or two…”
What about me says ‘tiara’ I still can’t fathom.
Jess seemed to relish being outside. Lifting his face to the sun, he whooped as he cycled along the roads, weaving in and out of abandoned vehicles. I struggled to keep up with him.
The sun was high in the sky as we rode into Regents Park. It seemed a good place to stop, so we sat on a bench to eat our lunch. We even managed
to have a civil conversation.
We are not that different Jess and I, though he grew up in London. Jess lived in a high rise flat in Notting Hill until his stepfather kicked him out on his fifteenth birthday. I got the impression that his stepfather used to knock him about, though he didn’t go into detail. After he had left the flat, he slept rough for a while, getting in with the wrong crowd and eventually ending up in a young offender's institution.
When the pox hit, the authorities released all but the most dangerous prisoners on humanitarian grounds. Jess went home to find that his old block of flats had been demolished. He had no idea where his mother had gone, so Jess stayed with a mate from the YOI. When everyone around him started to fall ill, Jess volunteered to work with the body disposal squads.
The Last Girl Guide: Diary of a Survivor Page 9