They seem to have forgotten about me, absorbed in this horrible life they have made without me. Down here is everything I’ve always despised and avoided: poverty, ugliness, discomfort, squalor. I feel a wave of nausea. Over the last five years I’ve so often imagined the triumphant moment when I find them. The next frame is a triple embrace, followed by their happy return to my flat. Of course, I realized that Abbie would be adolescent and Jenny – if she was alive at all – might be dangerously old and fragile, but it never once occurred to me that the embrace would be followed by separation, that they wouldn’t want to be rescued by me.
Superfluous in the doorway, I watch Abbie bustle around, still silent and apathetic, while Jenny sits on a lower bunk surrounded by children demanding hugs, stories, attention, love. What about me? I hug myself bleakly, cross my arms over my chest in an attempt to ward off the infection and misfortune that are in the air. At first the children ignore me, but after twenty minutes some of the bigger ones begin to give me threatening glances. I sidle over to where Jenny is sitting, trying to be invisible. But I’ve lost the knack. I feel enormous, looming over the maggots, my green corduroy suit far too smart. I grip my wallet firmly as I push through the swarming children and touch the hand of the old crone who was once my beautiful Jenny, the hand I’ve kissed and been stroked by and, occasionally, hit by. Memories flood in, a gallery of Jennies and Leos.
‘Still here?’ she asks coolly.
‘It’s taken me five years to find you.’ I hold the old root I remember as smooth intimate flesh. ‘I can’t just let go of you. I must see you again. We have to talk about Abbie.’
‘Yes, we do. I’ll meet you at eight in the subway where we met this morning.’
And the hideous old beggar woman dismisses me. Johnny stays behind with Abbie. They’ve collapsed together on to one of the bunks and appear to be asleep, the curly golden-brown idiot in the arms of the girl who used to be my daughter. As I shuffle back through the tunnels I feel abandoned, lonelier than ever. I miss the feel of the rough leather lead that connected me with Johnny.
I found them, I found them, I keep reminding myself, but I’m afraid of what I’ve found, afraid of their dark underworld. I return to the city of light and trees and crowds that know where they belong and where they’re going. The last short afternoon of the century is almost over, and the weather is mild, grey and still, as if London is holding her breath. People from all over the country are surging into the capital, and there’s a mood of collective euphoria I can feel but can’t share. My brain is muffled, and I can hardly walk.
I stagger into a café in the Edgware Road and order a coffee, then another. Four o’clock. Already, our meeting at lunchtime seems dream-like. I’m worried that Jenny won’t turn up, that I will lose her again. I wish I was alone in my flat so that I could lie down and give in to this wave of shock. But I have to stay upright at this table in this crowded café swirling with people preparing to throw themselves joyfully into the future. Like me, these millions of people on the streets have only one life, yet they seem to think the millennium matters, whereas I know it’s just another nought clocked up on the heartless dial of history.
The subway is horribly empty when I arrive at eight. At last I hear the tapping of a stick and the bizarre figure comes down the ramp towards me. I touch her arm and feel sick again at the stench that bounces off her. ‘Where’s Abbie?’
‘Still asleep.’ Jenny tells me about Abbie and Ben. At the end she says, ‘Of course, I know girls her age are reduced to idiocy by love. I was myself. But this is serious. She’s changed so much in the last few months. She has been really ill and now she’s like a zombie.’
‘Haven’t you taken her to the doctor?’
Jenny laughs bitterly. ‘Doctors don’t want to know about people like us. We’re homeless, hopeless, we’re not part of the nation so we don’t deserve the National Health. We live in the sewers and die in the gutter.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do?’
‘Are you her father?’
‘I don’t know. Neither does David. I asked him.’
A leathery blush floods the face opposite, clashing with her scarlet baseball cap. I’m furious. ‘Did you see him? How was he? Still married?’
‘Seemed to be.’
‘Did he mention me?’
‘We talked about nothing else.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Jenny, even if you live to be two hundred you’ll still be a vain old flirt. I thought you’d changed, sobered up.’
‘God knows I get few enough opportunities to flirt at the moment. We were supposed to be talking about Abbie.’
‘There’s only one person who can tell us who her real father is. Sibyl, the sibyl I should say.’
‘Not that repulsive old hag in the cave at Earls Court? I sometimes forget, I’m a repulsive old hag, too.’
‘So you did go and see her! She’s very good, you know.’
‘But she talks in gibberish.’
‘She can be a bit ambiguous.’
‘And how come she knows more about our family history than we do?’
‘It’s her job to know everything. Whether she wants to or not.’ I dial a number on my mobile. ‘Sibyl? It’s Leo. Well, yes, I was angry at the time but I’ve forgiven you … Oh, it’s wonderful. I stare at myself in the mirror every day and count my wrinkles and bags. I’m looking forward to my funeral immensely. But I’m really calling because I’ve found Jenny … Yes, both of them. Well, she’s not a little girl any more, that’s what we need to talk to you about … In an hour? Thanks … No, don’t beam us up to your consulting-room. No flashes or tricks, please. We’re feeling a bit fragile. We’ll get a taxi.’
In the taxi Jenny looks confused. ‘Are you all right?’ I keep asking her. Obviously she isn’t; she looks as if she might die at any minute, before I can use science to restore what magic once preserved. She sinks back in the shadowy seat, and I describe everything to her, where we’re going and why.
‘It’s so strange to be sitting opposite you again, to hear your voice. I’m lurching from memory to memory. I feel not so much travel sick as time sick, time weary. You’ve appointed yourself narrator, Leo, but I’m not sure I want my world to be interpreted by you again. Wasn’t that how all the trouble started?’
‘Interpret your own world, but at least let me help you.’
Getting her out of the taxi and up to Sibyl’s consulting-room is a long and painful process. At any minute she might fall, collapse, have a stroke or a heart attack, beat me to the finishing post of death. Then we stand, arm in arm, on the threshold of Sibyl’s room, and my hands are clasped by tiny, shrivelled fingers.
‘To see you together! My dears, come and sit on my couch. Jenny, you don’t look a day over a hundred. You could be his grandmother. Leo, you have a few lines and wrinkles now, you’ll soon catch up …’
Jenny says, ‘He won’t catch up because I’ll be dead. I could die any day now. I haven’t come so that you can tell us what a lovely couple we make. I know we don’t. I’ve come because my daughter has fallen in love with a boy who could be her half-brother, and we have to know if Leo is her father or not.’
Even when we both sit down Jenny and I are taller than Sibyl, who stands in front of us wearing her black trouser-suit, her face and hands like three strangely engraved leather bags, her bald head covered with a rather chic black wig.
‘Father? But, Leo, you must have been around when they brought in compulsory sterilization for immortals. Gods, angels, devils, the lot. Enough is enough, they said, no more half-and-half freaks; they make good stories but bad citizens.’
‘So he couldn’t possibly be Abbie’s father?’
‘Ah well, of course, as with all methods of contraception there are loopholes. At least I remember a few superstitions.’
‘Such as?’ I demand impatiently.
‘Well, the Witch of Endor, who ran one of the first abortion clinics, used to say that if an immortal
fell deeply in love with an ant – as we called them, being unable to distinguish between them – a child would be born. But I never heard of such a case.’
‘Can’t we have something a bit more scientific to go on?’
‘Science is only magic that works. Do you want me to use the old method? It’s rather messy: goats’ entrails, toads’ blood, virgins, you know the sort of thing.’
‘I don’t know where you’d find a virgin in Earls Court.’
‘Exactly. The only other thing I can suggest, my dears, is the flashback.’
‘Does it hurt?’ Leo asks.
‘Not physically. But as Jenny can’t see, and this is visual magic, you will have to describe it for her. When was Abbie born?’
‘Twenty-seventh of June 1984.’
‘Nine months takes us back to – now, tell me what you see.’
There’s a flash. On the red carpet in front of us a bed appears. ‘It’s our bedroom at Phillimore Gardens,’ I murmur to Jenny. ‘The walls are transparent and we’re making love – Sibyl, this is very explicit stuff.’
‘What you see is what you got, but so long ago that you have perhaps forgotten it. The flashback method,’ Sibyl continues in her driest voice, ‘selects the most intense moments of the subject’s past and replays them. This method is frequently therapeutic and cathartic. There is no soundtrack available, but the speed is variable.’
‘Slow that down a bit, could you?’ I say in a strangled voice. I thought I’d lost interest in sex. ‘I can’t believe we really – Jenny, you were amazing. We were both completely carried away. God, we were so young!’ I pause, unable to speak for a few moments.
Jenny says impatiently, ‘Yes, but what about Abbie?’
‘Well, I suppose there might be some connection.’ To my surprise, I feel a certain pride that there could have been a result to my millions of sexual experiments. ‘Oh, that’s incredible! Sibyl, how did you do that? They – or we – are transparent now, and I can see you close up, Jenny. What an exquisite body. Even your digestive tract is beautiful. Oh, Jenny, how could you … ? Ah well. Something’s happening inside you, a sort of fizzing – could you slow it down a bit more, please? Now all I can see is your internal ocean, tadpoles swimming up inside you, a race. Yes – one of them’s ahead – the winner gets through! Sibyl, how can we be sure that tadpole turned into Abbie?’
‘Do you want to see Jenny’s belly a few weeks later?’
‘A little walnut, crouching in your underwater cave.’ I reach out for Jenny’s filthy talon. ‘Then a fish, an alien, a blob, a caricature. Now I can see a baby sitting inside you …’
‘I remember the indigestion!’ Jenny says. ‘And wanting to pee all the time. Can you see her face?’
‘No, it still has no sex or identity. How vague and gentle a face looks with its eyes shut. Now there’s something of Abbie around the mouth. She’s kicking you! She’s yawning. Another bed – oh, Jenny, we’re at the hospital. I think we’ll fast-forward this bit. Oh! There she is! A little miracle shooting out of you – Sibyl, has something gone wrong with the speed? I’m sure we can’t have been rushing around like that.’
‘You asked me to fast-forward it.’
‘Yes, but not to Buster Keaton. This is the most extraordinary moment of my life – our lives – I want to linger over it. You’re laughing, Jenny. You’ve got Abbie in your arms, she’s searching for your nipple with her blind little mouth, and I’m sitting on the side of your bed hugging both of you. We were so happy.’
‘Do you want me to stop now while it’s still schmaltzy?’ Sibyl asks.
The figures on the carpet disappear, and I turn with a sigh back to the present. Beside me Jenny is silent.
‘Are you convinced?’ Sibyl asks briskly.
‘I am. I must always have been a closet human being. What shall we tell Abbie? Jenny?’
‘We’ll tell her you’re her father. She can have her lover, much good it’ll do her.’
‘And you’ll come back to me?’
‘I can’t leave the children. I’ll stay with them until I die, which won’t be long.’
‘Bring the children. We’ll buy a huge house, two huge houses, just say you’ll come. Into his habitation wheresoever …’
‘What? Listen, Leo, I don’t want any more of that crap about contracts.’
I kneel at the disintegrating shoes of the ancient, filthy, grim-faced woman. Sibyl watches enviously.
‘Is this supposed to be a happy ending? It’s too late, Leo. I’m too old and tired.’
‘Who said anything about ending?’
PART 3
An Island in the Moon
2075
‘Good evening, metamortals. This is your hourly feel-good update. Fighting, floods and plague continue to rage on earth. The city of Venice, Italy, was today covered by water just a few hours after historians completed the virtual replica. This week’s world president was assassinated this afternoon when rebels bombed the Washington Archipelago. Four million organicists died, but no metamortals were reported injured. The weather will be whatever you want it to be …’ I turn her off, the bland voice of compulsory joy. We have made our Utopia, and we must lie in it. Yet there are moments when honesty tugs at my heartstrings and I have to speak to my daughter.
In the courtyard of our house there’s a pool. During the day we swim at least a hundred lengths to keep our plastimuscles toned, and in the evenings we use our pool for virtual visiting. The synthetic blue-green waves make a beautiful frame to grim visions of the battered earth.
I walk through my English country garden in the artificial sunset, staged each evening to make us exiles from earth feel at home. Then I watch the planetary tantrum that precedes the purple night of Luna Minor, our exclusive retirement colony for metamortals, a cylinder city that orbits the moon. It’s always dark on the moon, but the lifestyle engineers who designed Luna Minor knew that we’d need light and views and so they have created them. I gaze out at a vast panorama of stars and planets, among them the one on which I was born.
Even now, years after my sight was restored, it still moves me very much to see Abbie, who is sitting in the shabby wooden hut that is all that remains of our mansion near Primrose Hill, above the flooded ruins of London. The house Leo bought so that we could all be together again. My two-year-old great-great-granddaughter Ella sits placidly on Abbie’s knee, and as she becomes aware that I’m watching her my daughter reaches up to smooth her coarse grey bun. Her wrinkled brown eyes are calm as she stares back at the masterpiece that is my face.
I do find these virtual visits a strain; I often wish she didn’t have eternity on her hands. From my window I can see the moon, which still looks poetic but is in fact completely colonized. I’m glad the journey is still too tedious to tempt my indefatigable mother very often.
‘You look tired, my darling. No more plagues?’
‘We heard rumours of an outbreak of radiation flu, but we’re OK.’
‘With all those small children around – why don’t you send them up here for a few months? We could get a special visa for Terrestrial Victims. We’d love to have them.’
‘I know you would, but they’d come back so lunified it would take them six months to adjust back to life here.’
‘And what are great-great-grandparents for if not to spoil children?’
‘You have to admit you and Leo are confusing for them. For a start, you look sixty years younger than me.’
‘There’s no need to sound so resentful. I’ve always told you, I’ll pay for you to have everything done. All you’d accept is that little brain implant …’
I sigh and touch the side of my head. I often wish I could tear out this bloody implant, which allows my mother to intrude whenever she wants to, so that I can’t avoid seeing her holographic image and hearing her voice. ‘You used to be so attractive, darling. And you could still leave here looking fabulous. It would probably give a new boost to your career.’
‘What career?
You know my voice has cracked, and anyway there aren’t any more theatres or concert halls. I just sing for friends and family sometimes.’
‘Well, up here science has caught up with mythology, and I think you’re crazy not to make the most of it.’
‘Let’s not start that again. Please. We want to live and die down here, naturally, that’s all.’
‘But there’s no need to die at all!’ Her reconstructed face, a marvel of smooth pale curves – as long as you don’t look too closely – peers anxiously, as if she expects to see an aggressive virus carry me off.
‘It’s no use looking at me like that. I don’t want to be like you two.’
She sighs. ‘How’s Ben?’
‘Old and tired, like me,’ I say with satisfaction. ‘And when we’re on our deathbeds I don’t want you sneaking down here injecting us with resurrection juice or whatever it is – oh, stop crying! All that glop you spray on your face instead of skin will congeal.’
‘Of course I’m crying. I dedicate myself to the pursuit of eternal happiness and you don’t want anything to do with it. You’re determined to break my heart by dying an anachronistic and unnecessary death. What about your children? Don’t you want to live for them?’
‘They’re all in their fifties and sixties, for God’s sake. They’ll miss me and Ben, I suppose. It’ll be sad. But there’s no room for us all, Mum. Only in your crazy little heaven. Down here there’s barely enough food, the floods come every spring, we’ve no real medicine since all the governments and multi-nationals abandoned the planet –’
‘Oh, don’t start lecturing me again about your heroic pioneer spirit.’
‘Pioneers start something, we’re in at the end. Pretty soon after Ben and I die people will either flee to other planets as refugees or choose to die with the poor old earth.’
‘London used to be such a fabulous city.’
‘There are lots of fables about it. But there are no theatres, shops, restaurants or parks now, Mum. Anyway, if you remember, our life here wasn’t always so fabulous.’
Loving Mephistopeles Page 34