The three of us sit on the earth floor around the table where my daughter is laid out and have a macabre picnic.
‘I think she wanted to die. She missed my father and she was tired. She hated to think she’d be dependent on us all. My mother was a wonderful person but very proud; she couldn’t stand being pitied. By the way, I’m sorry if the children gave you a hard time. They are a bit wild.’
I almost choke on my soup at this understatement and glance at Jenny who sits beside me, cross-legged on the floor. She hasn’t touched her food or said a word since we entered the hut.
Gina touches her arm nervously. ‘I’m sorry, Grandma.’
Jenny reaches out for Gina’s hand and kisses it, staring hungrily at this dumpy, brown-eyed, middle-aged woman who vaguely resembles Abbie. As Jenny kisses the coarse red hand her tears begin. She and Gina embrace, and it looks as if Jenny is hugging her mother.
I go outside the hut, leaving them together. I have changed, but, really, family clinches are not my thing. I have my own way of mourning Abbie.
In the farmyard encampment to which my real-estate investment has dwindled, children and adults and pigs and cows and hens are settling down to sleep in huts and tents and treehouses. They go to bed with the sun like medieval peasants – my descendants are medieval peasants. Restlessly, I pick my way among the shelters, dung, vegetable patches and compost heaps to the top of the hill.
This new London shimmers in the light of a full moon that is surrounded by a rainbow-like halo. One of those tricks played by the intemperate skies of this planet – on Luna Minor we can choose the sky that suits our mood. Down here, now that there is no electricity, stars can be seen again; they have reclaimed the sky as plants and water and animals have reclaimed the streets. Reflected in the floodwater that surrounds the hill is the ragged silhouette of the new skyline: broken towers, bombed-out terraces, heaps of rubble. Although there is no traffic the night is full of cries and screams and yells that could be human or animal or both. I can smell shit and grass and – surely another sort of grass, as well?
A cough behind me makes me whirl around. A tall young man is standing on the concrete platform where the ack-ack guns stood during the Second World War. He’s pointing a gun that looks at least a hundred years old at me and smoking a joint. ‘Sorry, mate. Thought you was a looter.’
‘What do they loot?’
‘Food, animals. They call us the fat cats; everyone wants to live up here.’
‘Really,’ I reply sceptically. We stare at each other. He must be about the age I look, and the resemblance is absurd, except that he’s much darker-skinned than me.
He passes me the joint and nods amiably. ‘Ahmed. Dunno what to call you really. Grandma always said I looked just like you.’
‘Is Ahmed a common name now?’
‘Dad got gang-banged by one of them Muslim-Feminist mobs. Left him unconscious, and nine months later a baby was left at the bottom of the hill: me.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Not your fault. Well, of course, in a way it’s all your fault.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Well, it’s true, innit? All that messing about with staying young and buggering off to the moon and that. Not natural, is it?’
‘No, I’ve never wanted much to do with nature.’
‘Mind you, Grandma was way up there above the floods.’
‘Is that a compliment?’
‘She wouldn’t take no diss. Once when I was little I wouldn’t go to bed, and I bit her, and there was this sort of explosion, and it pushed me right through the wall of the hut. Still got a scar on my cheek. See? Special powers she had. Everyone said so.’
‘What about you? Do you have special powers?’
‘Don’t think so. I’m just ordinary. We heard about you, though. Flying and doing magic stuff.’
‘Do people still remember that?’ I ask, flattered.
‘All our bedtime stories was about you and Jenny. She’s still a bit of a looker. Must be going on for two hundred, innit?’
‘Oh yes. She’s a remarkable experiment.’
‘’Course, she’s Grandma’s mum. Can’t get my head round that. Doesn’t look like a mum, somehow.’
‘I think she feels like one tonight.’
‘I’ll miss the old bag.’
‘So will I.’
Later I return to the hut where Abbie is laid out. Jenny is lying on a heap of old blankets, her eyes wide open, still weeping. I lie beside her and take her in my arms. Our wake is wordless but the night seethes with memories of our daughter. At first light Jenny falls asleep.
I get up and wander back up the hill which is misty now, floating above the water and the shadowy blue ruins. I tap Ahmed on the shoulder. ‘You can go to bed now. I’ll take over.’
‘You sure? Fuckin’ animals, some of them looters. Wouldn’t want you to get hurt.’
‘It’s not likely. Go and get some sleep.’
‘Well – take care.’ He hands me the rusty old rifle and a half-smoked joint. ‘Earthkeeper’ll be here soon.’
It is pleasant to be alone as I watch the sun rise over the shattered breast of St Paul’s. The skyline is gilded with illusory prosperity and smoke rises as the morning begins. A little barefoot girl with huge black eyes and Jenny’s thick black curls runs up from the shanty town to give me a warm biscuit and a mug of herbal tea. Disconcerting, all these genetic mosaics. I dread being confronted with Abbie as she was when she was about seven. I love you, Daddy. Really, these memories are most disturbing, I shall have to talk to Pierre about editing them out.
Something squelches out of the water at the bottom of the hill and moves towards me. A tiny dark creature scurries up the hill. A child looter? I point the rifle and hope I won’t have to use it. As it comes closer I see the figure is old, of indeterminate sex, wrapped in soaking-wet brown robes. Out of a leathery walnut face sharp black eyes stare at me. ‘Good morning, Leo.’
‘Sibyl! What are you doing here?’
‘I might ask you that. I live here.’
‘You mean you stayed in London all these years? I always half expected you to turn up on Luna Minor. You should come. We have marvellous parties and entertainments up there. We have a beautiful house and garden – as we say up there, all the fruits of the earth without any of the worms. I’m sure you’d love it.’
‘I’d hate it.’ She folds her withered arms and glares up at me, blasting me with foul breath. Her robes are filthy, edged with green slime.
‘I see you’re determined to be organic.’
‘You think the earth is a fashion, to be abandoned when the whim takes you? I wouldn’t have bothered helping you and Jenny if I’d known how trivial-hearted you were. Narcissism burrows inwards, and yours has drilled right through you.’
‘There’s no need to be insulting. I have feelings.’
‘Not many.’
‘I hope you’re not going to come up with some obscure, depressing prophecy.’
‘I don’t do that any more. No riddles, no couches. These people have suffered terribly. They have to fight to survive, but they’re used to that – these are the people who fell through the bottom of the old society – and then, when they’ve finished fighting, they must die.’
‘Abbie has died.’
‘I know. That’s why I’m here.’
‘So you’re the Earthkeeper?’
‘One of my names.’
‘Well, I think I preferred you when you were Sibyl. It seems to me you’ve become very insensitive. Jenny and I are devastated by her death. Poor Jenny has been beside herself with grief all night.’
‘She’ll soon get over it, soon find another child.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can’t help knowing.’
‘So, what’s this earthkeeping you do?’
‘I give people hope when they’re desperate or sick or dying. I warn them against the old ideas and the old technology and try to teach the
m new ones. I try to stop them killing each other, and, when they do die, I take the bodies to the water and help the people who loved them to say goodbye.’
‘So you’re inventing a new religion. And you have the nerve to accuse me of hubris!’
‘People need ritual and hope. It doesn’t matter what you call them.’
I follow her down the hill where my descendants greet her warmly and lead her to the hut where Abbie lies. When I come from the sunlit hillside into the hut my eyes are at first dazzled. For a few seconds I think there is only one woman in there, an animated corpse with three heads, whispering in the dark. Then my eyes adjust and I see that Jenny and Sibyl are washing Abbie. Her body is old, scraggy, covered with wrinkles and moles and sagging pouches of grey skin. I mourn the beautiful princess she could have been. For ever.
Jenny seems calmer now, as if Sibyl has comforted her. The children spend the day weaving dry twigs into a stretcher, and the adults prepare food – it smells most unappetizing, but I suppose I’ll have to eat it. After years of eating clean food, grown indoors in giant bacteria baths, it disgusts me to think of vegetables being grown in the earth, in all its filthy debris of sewage and decomposed bodies.
At sunset we all gather and carry Abbie, on the stretcher, down the hill. There are about a hundred of us, and I can’t help feeling a glimmer of patriarchal pride as I glance at their faces. Many of them wear odd features of mine or Jenny’s, like beads in a kaleidoscope making unexpectedly interesting patterns. At first I thought them all ugly, but I’m getting used to their faces now.
It’s windy, the oil-dark water churns and billows as we kneel beside it, Jenny and I and Gina in front of the others, to lay Abbie’s corpse at the edge of the water. Each of us in turn kisses her or murmurs a few words. Some of the children tuck wild flowers and pebbles into her long white robes. There are no speeches or sermons. As the last rays of the sun disappear behind the shattered buildings and drown in the floodwater we launch her. There’s a burst of sound, a chanting, wailing song full of grief and pain. Jenny and I kneel side by side, silent. We don’t know the tune; we don’t know the words.
Sibyl melts away into the darkness, and the rest of us go back for the funeral feast, which is as unpalatable as I feared: nettle stew and burnt oatcakes. Yet these people do have qualities I like: they are robust and honest. An idea begins to form. Jenny and I sleep in the same hut, where the table is now horribly bare. Before we fall into exhausted sleep I whisper my plan to her.
Perhaps I should have said something to Gina before I gathered them all together to make my announcement this morning. ‘Dear descendants – no, friends. I’ve come to appreciate you during these days we’ve spent together, mourning my beloved daughter. The horror of death, so final, so unnecessary. Some of you perhaps thought that Jenny and I and our eternal delight in each other were legends, tales told to children at bedtime. But as you see we are as real as you are – although, frankly, a lot more attractive.
‘Soon our shuttle will return and take us back to Luna Minor. To our transparent dome, where delicious food and exquisite music can be summoned at the press of a button, where there are perfectly controlled gardens and fountains and pools – nothing so crude as weather. Others like us, the eternally young, talk and frolic and entertain themselves and each other. Sometimes we even look down on you, on your ghastly catalogue of disasters, and wish we could do more to help you.
‘Jenny and I have thought of something we can do. We want you to choose one of the children you breed so prolifically to be adopted by us. Of course, we’d love to take more than one, but, as you’ll appreciate, immigration has to be controlled rather strictly. The younger the better, as it will be easier to wipe out traumatic memories of life down here. Boy or girl, the choice is up to you. If it’s a boy we’ll call him Ulysses because this time he will have made the right decision, choosing to live without ageing or death on a magic island.’
I realize this last bit is above their heads and sit down. Silence. I glance at Jenny, who is staring hungrily at the tiny children playing in the dirt and clinging to their filthy mothers. They all gasp and mutter, and I think they are overwhelmed by my generosity.
Suddenly they erupt into a wild barbarous stampede, even worse than the riot when we arrived. Jenny and I cling to each other and gaze up at the sky, willing the shuttle to come and rescue us. I realize I was a fool to expect rational discourse.
Our last few minutes on earth are rather confused. Perhaps Jenny and I don’t behave as well as we might. We are both grief-stricken, after all, battered by days of unrefined emotion, discomfort, awful food and, now, terrified by the threat of actual violence.
They chase us to the top of the hill, screeching and pushing and spitting. For a moment I think they’re going to shove us over the edge. Of course, we’d just roll to the bottom, but, still, it would be most undignified. I have my arm around Jenny’s shoulder, but she’s stretching out her arms to our attackers, in supplication, I think. There’s a roar above our heads, and we get ready to return to civilization. The chute is lowered towards us, and there’s a rush of cold air as the vacuum prepares to rapture us up.
Jenny makes a lunge into the mob, grabs two-year-old Ella from Gina’s arms and runs with her back to the chute of the shuttle. I help her to bundle the screaming, wriggling child in. After a few seconds of grief the child will be immeasurably better off. For ever. I admit this is an impulsive gesture, imperfectly considered. A mistake, in other words. The Welcome Machine at the threshold sniffs doubtfully at the nature brat. Ella’s germs, dirt, tears and yells send the needles wild. They are designed to measure suitability for metalife, and as Jenny and I squeeze past into the cabin of the shuttle the Welcome Machine delivers its terrible judgement on Ella. Metal pincers reach out to force her back down the chute, out of the purified air, back into the arms of her grandmother.
Genetic Love
We made good time coming home. This time I was glad of the injection that allowed me to sleep dreamlessly throughout the journey. Long after it wore off I lay with my eyes shut, not wanting to face the curious eyes of the other passengers. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even you.
Home. I shall never go down there again. The gap between us is so much wider than when Abbie was alive. We use the pool for swimming, now. Nobody down there has a brain implant, one of many things that died with Abbie. I thought of offering one to Gina so that she could see and hear my virtual visits, but I don’t suppose she’d want to.
Since our return our little paradise seems different. I’m reminded of the period just after my sight was restored. For years I’d lived inside my head, among shapes that were imagined and guessed at and half remembered. I’d learnt to find my way around my head and to negotiate the outer world as well, tapping my stick. And when I first opened my sighted eyes again it was a terrible shock. I couldn’t distinguish the objects around me, the flat expanse of meaningless patches of darkness, light and colour. I kept falling over and bumping into furniture that wasn’t where my memory had placed it.
Now, again, I have that sense of displacement. The asteroid and meteor spectacles, the concerts and genetic art exhibitions at the Metaphysical Theatre, the dinner parties amid the fountains – somehow they’re not as marvellous as they were. I tell my therapist I’m mourning my daughter, and she offers to wipe out all memory of Abbie. But I want those memories, I say, as she smiles at me pityingly. You keep telling me to stop living in my past.
But there’s so much of it. I come out here alone to sit beside my pool. Up here they all despise the dead for dying, but I can’t help loving them and Abbie most of all. I even let myself remember the years when she didn’t love me at all – hated me probably.
Her disappearance was like a rehearsal for my bereavement now. So sudden, so brutal. As if I had to choose between you and Abbie, as if it was impossible for us all to live contentedly together. Of course, we had her tracked – there was a Metaphysical agent in Paraguay and others
in Kabul and Nairobi – tracked her movements but not her feelings. I still don’t know how much she resented me. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Parents have to be rejected – Sibyl would say – and children have to be loved. For fifteen years I followed every twist and turn of my daughter’s adolescent rebellion, and when we were reunited I never reproached her.
You come out and sit beside me. We dangle our long brown legs in the turquoise ripples of the pool and my finger traces the taut curve of your cheekbone beneath your clear, deep-blue eyes. Still young, like me. The artificial waves lap gently at our bare feet as we talk.
‘Still missing her?’
‘Of course. Don’t you?’
‘She was my daughter, too.’
‘I wish now we’d had more children. And taken the others up here so that we could keep them with us for ever.’
‘It’s not too late.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have a complete set of her genes.’
‘But that’s impossible!’
‘Not at all. When she was about nine, when we were living in Phillimore Gardens and I realized you were going to leave me, I got the Metaphysical surgeons to come round and extract genes from both of you. Something to remember you by.’
I remember my nightmare visions of figures in white surrounding Abbie’s bed and mine. ‘So you weren’t carrying out evil experiments, after all.’
‘Reports of my evil were always vastly exaggerated.’
‘But, Leo, after all you did …’
‘People change. That’s the marvellous thing about them … us. Now, what kind of baby would you like?’
‘A girl, like Abbie.’
‘Exactly like her?’ I shut my eyes and remember the feel of her in my arms that first morning, the tiny, waxen face with the eyes that prefigured her unique personality. I can’t speak.
‘You can have any kind of baby you like. Unnatural selection. I have your genes, too, of course, so she could have your hair, for instance.’ You stroke it. It’s made of extruded squirrels but feels very soft.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 37