‘All that killing,’ she says, ‘just picture it.’ Her words are loud in his head as if she’s speaking inside him. Private words just for him. He stores the owl pellet in the drawer of his desk and goes to the lab to learn more about the machine.
When he gets home his wife isn’t there. Instead there’s a scrawled note propped up against the salt and pepper pots on the dining table – no doubt the traditional way of communicating these things in all those rubbishy books she reads – saying that she’s gone away for a few days and his dinner’s in the freezer. Even the shape of the writing manages to look accusing. It’s not the first time, but when he goes to check the freezer there are more frozen boxes than ever before. Ignoring the ranks of boxes, he makes himself beans on toast and goes to eat in the green-lit conservatory, where the two of them have never eaten.
The last time she was away for a week. The time before that, a couple of nights. He wonders where she goes, but he knows he doesn’t wonder enough and that’s part of the problem. He sleeps well that night and wakes, feeling almost good about it all.
Later that morning he figures out what happened with the flies. When he finds the paperwork in his filing cabinet, he realises he made a typo in the gene specification. Wrong name – wrong gene – wrong flies. No matter, but Lucy’s off sick now because she says the flies bit her. Seems unlikely, but he’ll let her have a few more days off even if it’s just nerves.
Then he remembers about the mouse traps. He hurries to inspect them. None of them contain any dead mice but, as he feared, there’s an awful lot of fruit flies laying eggs and gorging themselves on the bits of Mars bars. The escaped flies have found their promised land.
He’s dealing with the eggs that they’ve bought to replace the flies, decanting them into test tubes when the writer appears.
‘You can just buy mutant flies?’ She’s surprised.
‘Why not? You order the mutations you want, such as red eyes or curly wings, and the eggs arrive in the post.’
‘Sounds a bit like Brave New World. It can’t have always been like that, surely?’
‘No.’ And he tells her about Muller, ‘There was a scientist from America in the Thirties who worked on fruit flies, and he had to leave America in a hurry because he was a Communist so he got a job in Germany, but then the Nazis came to power, so he had to leave there too and he went to Russia, but Stalin took against him, so he decided to go to Spain and fight in the civil war there. But it got too dangerous so he stayed here in Edinburgh for a bit before going back to America. And everywhere he went, no matter what happened to him, he hung onto his suitcase of fruit flies. Because he’d bred them to have particular mutations.’ And he needed them, he thought. They were all he had after his first wife left him. Poor bastard. And for a moment he feels sorry for himself.
‘Like a travelling fly circus.’
He doesn’t like her flippant tone. ‘Not exactly. It was in aid of science. He sacrificed a lot to hang onto those flies.’ He’s finished with the eggs so he goes to start work on the machine. She follows him and they both peer inside it as it runs through its now-routine daily calibration. It’s doing a dance, he thinks, as the metal tips float move from left to right and up and down. An elegant dance that he has choreographed. There should be music.
‘What are the square things with all the little holes punched in them?’
‘The holes are called wells and the square things are the beds. And the shelves that they’re stored on – at the back – are called hotels.’ Ridiculously, he is blushing. And she’s smiling at his embarrassment. Perhaps she goes to hotels with other men and gets into bed with them. A wordless image of her and him appears in his mind.
Later that night after rejecting the frozen boxes again, he lies in bed and describes the image to himself. Like the barn owl, she’s swooping over him and he is naked beneath her, waiting for her to land. It is not a wholly pleasurable image, but he’s able to put a word to the feeling in his gut. Desire.
A week after owl-pellet day. He’s almost finished learning the ins and outs of the machine and she’s at the back of the lab writing in her notebook.
‘How would I go about having my genes sequenced?’
Her voice comes from behind him, her words float around him. He thinks for a moment. ‘We have a sequencer here but it’s just used for the flies and for a few other experiments. We’ve never used it for human DNA, it would take forever. You’d be better off going to one of those companies that only do a handful of genes. They’re not too expensive.’ He wonders why she wants this information.
‘I want to be read, I want the machine to read me.’ She has seen into his mind again.
He turns to look at her and is astonished to see tears slipping down her face.
‘Like a book,’ he tries to joke, but still her tears keep falling until she stumbles out of the lab, presumably in search of tissues. He walks over to the corner where she’s been sitting, and he picks up her notebook, thinking that it might give him some clue about her and what she’s just asked him. When he glances inside at the last page she’s written, at first it looks like a list scribbled in pencil with words crossed out here and there, but after a bit he starts to make it out. It’s so peculiar that he makes a photocopy to take home:
Go hunting
take the genes of vetch
of milkweed
of toadflax
of meadowsweet
of the common or garden weed
and splice with owl
to make a mutation woman
who flies through the night
and grasps you in her talons
I’m the viper at your wedding
waiting to bite the bride
I’m the strands unravelled by your death
I’m alphabet matter, coded vegetation
and I will form words to be your body language
He was a writer, and that’s why I fell for him. Plain and simple. He knew the difference between metaphor and simile, he could take a bleeding lump of raw emotion and slice thin elegant prose from it. And he predicted us, our affair was defined by his stories that had already been published. It was meant to be. I would text him to tell him what I wanted him to do and when we met in hotel bedrooms and on night trains, he would obey my words.
I killed my husband. He said I was so kind and so soft, but he used me as a pillow. He smothered himself in our marriage, and he suffocated.
Oh, there was no actual death, no funeral. It’s all in my mind. But the body of the man I married has mutated. The cells I fell in love with have all died and been replaced by daughter cells. Does this explain the seven year itch, the need to be unfaithful? Why we fall in love – and fall in love again? Because we are no longer the same person?
When I was in bed with the writer he said I smelt of flowers, of roses and meadowsweet. He made me into a garland and twisted me around his body, and honey poured forth.
I fear all men and desire them, and would do anything to stop my husband crying over me. I fear them because I desire them.
I want you to look down the microscope at me and read me.
read – bead – bend – bond – bone
letter – bitter – bite – bile – cell
He manages to hide away the photocopy before she comes back to the lab. Glancing at her, he’d never guess that she’s just been crying. Her face is as smooth as an egg, her eyes are clear. She looks wiped clean.
Shortly after that the owl pellet disappears, even though his desk drawer is usually locked and nobody else has the key. So all he has is the memory of finding it, and the images of her and the owl. He even keeps an eye out as he walks between the bus stop and the building each morning and evening but he never sees any owls. Perhaps they’re hiding in the trees nearby. Just biding their time and waiting for the mice.
At the weekend he decides to make a start on the roof. The ladder’s where he left it after the last aborted attempt, so he props it against the wall and climbs up
. If he works hard, maybe he’ll sleep and not lie in bed thinking those thoughts. Maybe the wife’ll come back and it’ll be ok this time.
The roof’s worse than ever, coated with a layer of green algae that resists his fingernails and clumps of moss that have settled along all the edges. He feels disheartened. It’ll take a fair amount of elbow grease to shift this lot. But he can imagine the wife’s delight when she notices the full moon through the sparkling clear roof above her as she sits – as they sit together – side by side. If you’re admiring a view, you don’t have to speak to each other. Nature can fill in the gaps. He’s seen enough couples sitting in their cars at the beach, facing the water. Some of them are old too, they’ve made it. They must have been silent together for a long time, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad. It gives him hope.
He manages to clear an area about a foot square. But it still isn’t great because now it looks worn and scratched. Perhaps his scrubbing has damaged it. When he peers down from the top of the ladder all he can see in the conservatory is a pile of beer cans and the remains of last night’s take away.
In contrast, the machine is shiny, its metal tips so elegant as they dance through the box of air inside the gleaming glass canopy. He likes to watch the liquids shoot out of the tips and straight into the wells. The machine always gets it right now. And it doesn’t need light, it has no eyes. So, one evening when everyone else has left, he turns the lab lights off, one by one, until the only way he can see his way back to the robot is from the glow of the console. He stands in the darkness touching its metal flank, and the smooth hum of its innards makes his hand tremble.
She tells him that she’s sent off a sample to one of those companies. It’s a crude process compared to what they can do with the sequencer in the lab, you only get a few hundred or so genes mapped out, but it’s enough to say whether you’re more than averagely susceptible to diabetes, whether you’ve got Viking heritage, and that type of thing.
A few weeks later she comes to him with the results printed on a sheet of paper which she hands over without speaking.
‘This is odd,’ he says, ‘they’ve got you down as 99% likely to have red hair and blue eyes.’ And you’re so dark, he wants to add, but he feels shy about commenting on her looks. ‘It must be wrong,’ he continues, ‘you should write and tell them they must have got your sample mixed up with someone else’s. I’m sure it happens sometimes. It’ll just be a mistake.’
‘There’s been no mistake,’ she replies.
He never mentioned any wife or girlfriend and he wasn’t gay. I invented that whole plotline about his wife walking out and him cleaning the greenhouse roof in penance. I wanted him to be single, that’s why in my story his wife leaves him. But he has to care a bit, because I don’t want him to be a monster. He’s a caring man. I know that, because I understand him. Better than I understand myself.
I’m an iceberg. Ninety percent of me is below the surface. Diving into the cold sea, I can explore the depths – and the wrecks.
Turquoise sea, turquoise dress. The dress I’m wearing matches my eyes, swishes around my legs. Summer’s just gone, and maybe it’s too cold now for bare legs, but I’m sticking with the dress. I perch on a bar stool and make notes. I never stop writing, even when I’m not physically writing. I narrate my own life in my head. It’s the way I am. I know that much about myself.
I spot the writer at the entrance and wave him over. Watch him walk across the bar, carefully avoiding each chair. It’s crowded in here, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen this place. Crowds are dangerous, there’s always the worry that we’ll bump into someone we know. Someone who knows we shouldn’t be meeting like this and looking so happy in each other’s company.
When he arrives at my stool, I tell him, ‘I was in a lab today. With fruit flies and owls and dead mice—’
He laughs. He knows how I work, how I weave animals and people out of words and letters.
‘Owls,’ he says as he looks around for the bar staff. ‘I saw an owl once. It flew right over me.’
‘Was that near Loch Tay?’ I ask him.
‘How long have we got?’ This is a few hours later. The bar is emptier, I’ve moved closer to him and am no longer afraid of touching his arm when I’m talking to him, just to emphasise a point. A friendly touch, nothing more. That’s what I want it to look like in case anyone sees us. But a small part of me knows that the alcohol’s made me uninhibited, that I’m capable of doing something stupid. I don’t know exactly what, until I do it.
He looks at his watch, ‘An hour or so.’
I smile. That’s enough time. There’s a park nearby, it’s a warm night and all I’m wearing is a dress.
Afterwards I cry bitterly. Back home I sob as I sponge myself in the shower. There is a word for this behaviour, I tell myself, and that word is betrayal. I promise myself I’ll never do it again. And I believe myself, because in fact it’s always better before or afterwards. Never during. The actual act is fraught with panic, always uncomfortable, hardly ever that satisfying. The anticipation beforehand is better, the memories are something to relive in my mind afterwards.
‘Your hair is too bright,’ he whispered earlier this evening as we leant against the park wall, ‘such red, red hair, my love. It shines in the moonlight.’ He buried his face in it and breathed deeply. ‘You smell of flowers, of roses and –’
‘Did you get my texts?’ I interrupted him.
‘Yes.’
‘Go on, then.’
So he knelt in front of me, pushing my dress up so that every part of me was exposed to the fresh night air. But I didn’t feel cold. Not until now, when I’m standing in the hot shower, having to wash my body everywhere he touched it. Like cleaning up after a scientific experiment that’s gone wrong. And I’m cold with shame and regret.
As usual the writer is sitting at the back of the lab, somewhere in the space behind him. They haven’t discussed her genetic test and he doesn’t know what she thinks about red hair or blue eyes. But now she starts to talk, so quietly that at first he doesn’t realise she’s talking to him.
‘Once upon a time there was a woman. She met a man and fell in love and they got married. She wanted to live happily ever after. But this is a story about what happens after the fairy tale ends. Her husband expected her to iron his shirts every day, and criticised her when she ironed creases into them by accident. And then she started ironing creases into them on purpose just for an excuse to argue with him.’
He turns round, ‘Is this a true story?’ he asks.
‘They’re all true stories. Even the made-up ones.’ She isn’t crying but her eyes look too shiny. ‘She was ironing her husband’s shirts, he had a lot of shirts and it was an endless task. He wore three shirts a day and she could only iron two because she had so much else to do. So, the shirts just piled up on every surface in the house and before long they couldn’t find anything else. At night time, they had to burrow into the mound of shirts on their bed, and go to sleep in them.
‘Her husband was a circus master. He had a flea circus and he kept it on a mouse. It was the easiest way. That’s how he moved around with his circus, he went travelling with this mouse. She was a very obliging creature and quite affectionate.
‘He used to go touring with his circus, it was rather famous. And of course, the transport costs were cheap. Just a small wooden box for the mouse, and some Mars bars to feed her. He’d go off for weeks at a time. His wife was pleased because it gave her an opportunity to catch up on the ironing. She’d never actually seen the flea circus in action, she told him it made her itch just thinking about it. That was one of the many things they argued about. And when he was away she’d sprinkle flea powder all over their house, and vacuum all the soft furnishings.
‘One day, disaster struck. He’d come home after a particularly long tour and he was lying down on the sofa having a nap with the mouse asleep, curled up on his chest. She used to get exhausted with all the travelling and the excite
ment of the circus. But the wife must have forgotten to vacuum up all the flea powder because when the man and his mouse woke up a few hours later, the fleas were all dead. Every single last one of them.
‘The man was furious. He cursed his wife and she shouted at him that she hadn’t married him to look after a menagerie of insects. In their anger they forgot about the mouse who had taken fright from all this noise and disappeared.
‘Well, the man managed to get hold of another mouse and some more fleas and he spent months training them, but it was never the same. He’d go off touring though, and when he was away, the woman met someone else. This man was a falconer and he had a merlin, a kestrel, a sparrow hawk and a tawny owl, and they each wore little hoods on their heads. The owl had a special hood. It was made of soft black suede and had a brass bell on it.
‘This man lived in a much larger house than the woman, perhaps there’s more money in falconry than in flea circuses. His birds were very popular, they were good at killing rodents and he used to take them to mice- or rat-infested houses and set them loose. They were much more efficient and cheaper than poison.
‘Well, the woman fell in love with this man and they had an affair while her husband was away. She would send him erotic texts and they would make love in the shed where he kept his birds. The birds couldn’t see what was going on because of the little hoods on their heads, so the woman thought they were safe. She’d forgotten about the mouse that had escaped.
‘One day the owl caught the mouse and ate it, and the falconer gave the resulting pellet as a sort of love token to the woman, who brought it home with her and put it in a drawer in the house. When her husband came back from his latest tour, exhausted and fed up because takings were right down, he found the pellet and recognised the remains of his old mouse. All hell broke loose and she ended up confessing to the affair.’
Silence in the lab. The Gaffer thinks for a moment, ‘Is that what my owl pellet was? A love token?’ He’s never thought of objects as representing emotions before. Certainly not regurgitated mice.
The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space Page 16