Mantrapped

by Fay Weldon

  She called Peter's office and got through to a colleague who said it might cause problems if Peter did not come in that day. There had been developments on the weapons of mass destruction story and Peter's expertise would be useful. It flashed through her mind that the Peter body could go along to the meeting and play dumb but realised almost at once that she would be wiser not to suggest it. As well send Polly Peachum along to pass judgement on Emmanuel Kant. It would be the family dinner party but worse by a hundred times. Her family were a pretty dozy lot but those in Peter's office were bright, inquisitive and quick. She did not want them breaking her story. She said she was sorry but it really was flu and she could send a doctor's note and he backed off.

  She called Oracle and got through to her own extension. But it was Heaven who lifted up the receiver and said oh, poor Doralee, I guessed you must be ill, you're usually the one who's in first. Hurry up and get better. There's all this stuff come in on your e-mail about the new miracle drug, the one which cures wrinkles: I don't know why it came to you, I thought that was my area. So I'll just stay on your desk if you don't mind and deal with it. It's a big story. They want it for this month so it needs to go to press right away. You were really missed at Heather's baby shower but everyone knows how you loathe all this baby stuff: she went into labour this morning, so she's not in either. Did I tell you I was pregnant too?

  Normally Doralee would have been straight round to the office to make sure Heaven didn't establish some sort of lien to her desk and e-mail - but how could she? She had to nursemaid the bodies. She had to write SoulSwitch.

  She found the magazine Spiritual News on the Internet, looked up the Services columns and made appointments for the following day for them all to see a hypnotist and a medium, chosen more or less at random. She would do what she could to make things better; that was the least she could do, but after that it was each of them for themselves. If the worst came to the worst she would go to Australia and publish the book from there.

  Doralee caught them mid-morning lifting their jumpers to study each other's navels, as if trying to discover the root of some mystery. It was a sexless curiosity, at least so far, as if two six-year-olds were examining each others bodies to compare differences. She wondered how long that would last. She feared it would not be for long. The thought of sex with the Peter body was somewhere she, for the moment, simply could not go. Kylie Minogue! It seemed as if the new Peter still contained Trisha's aesthetic sensibilities.

  Trisha Perle, for all her lottery win, was a walking disaster area. It could do the Peter body no good at all to contain her. There had been a child, it seemed, but even that had apparently been given away: there'd been more than one husband, a series of unfaithful lovers, a lesbian interlude, too much drink and drugs, and she had managed to lose a fortune and end up working for the Kleene Machine. Translate that into male terms and what did you get? If the initial Trisha make-up had the X chromosome and not the Y in the womb, and been fed testosterone not oestrogen from the beginning, what then? A forty-year-old hippie with a pigtail, perhaps; a determinedly out of work actor with a drink problem and a couple of unsupported families to his name? She wondered if it would be possible to get pregnant by the new Peter: it probably would be but what would she produce? A hermaphrodite? Just because Heaven was now pregnant didn't mean she had to panic.

  And as for the Peter soul, it might well have done better in a female body. It would have married a banker and been a brilliant dinner-party hostess and had a part-time job running an estate agency, like his mother. But so dull!

  'If Jesus Christ,' said the Peter body now, sententiously, 'came down from heaven today he would be locked away as a madman.' A Trisha sentiment, thought Doralee, though spoken with a male voice to which the listener automatically granted more authority than had it been female. She must keep it steady in her mind that it was not the bodies which had switched, but the consciousnesses; what happened was that the bodies carried trace memories and hormonal tendencies. The Peter body was primarily Trisha, but with little bits of Peter still hanging around, like little scraps of mitochondria around the nucleus of an ovarian cell, of the kind which prevent even a clone from being an exact reproduction.

  Of course the Peter body would retain trace memories of swirling skirts and choose to wear a kilt to visit the psychiatrist. Of course the Trisha body would enjoy bashing things up at Mrs Kovac's.

  'I think you're wrong about Jesus,' Doralee responded, not without some bitterness. 'I think if there was a Second Coming people would be only too anxious to believe. Then they could go round giving all their worldly goods to the poor, leaving the State to support them.'

  Strange things do happen

  Last week I got a letter from a reader. 'I met you once,' she wrote. 'In a field in France, in 1971.' And so she had.

  The Nineteen Seventies. The middle classes trooped off to France with their children and their tents for their holidays. Now they own real houses abroad, but I liked it the way it was, when like a snail you carried your house on your back. We took everything with us, pepper-grinders as well as sunscreen. 'When you are part of Europe,' as a French shopkeeper said to me, triumphantly, 'you English will all have to speak French.' We still try, but out of politeness, not necessity.

  That year, like so many of our compatriots, we went off in our Volvo to the South, with Dan aged twelve, nephew Benj aged eight and Tom aged not yet one. It was hot, hot, hot, the beginning of the French holiday, the great August weekend; we circled and circled the Paris ring road as in a comic film, with its furious, unstable drivers, unable for hours to find a space to leave it. We ended up exhausted fifty miles out of Paris, in the middle of a great wheat plain, in a field used for overnight campers on their way South. A tiny shop, a tap, a smelly earthern loo, a brilliant, beautiful night sky. Ron got out of the car and lifted the tent from the roof rack and slipped a disc in his back and lay on the ground.

  The baby howled, the children ran round looking for bats, Ron lay beside the car. I did not drive, I didn't know how, I had never learned. There were other overnight campers there: a whole bus load, even: a football team, their trainer. The trainer looked down at Ron and said, 'I am an ex-army doctor. You must lie where you are for two weeks and not get up and you will have no more trouble with your back. Otherwise this will plague you all your life.' So Ron lay there. The football team moved the car, put up the tent around him. The doctor was right; he never had back trouble again.

  But it was so hot, and there was no telephone, just thunderstorms which frightened the wits out of me when the heavens clashed and crashed their vengeance for everything I had down wrong in my life; there was a wasp's nest in the tree overhanging the tent. How they buzzed. I guarded the children as best I could. The shop sold baked beans and Jaffa Cakes for the English tourists, and Coca-Cola, but what about the baby? He needed milk. And Ron demanded ratatouille and bouillabaisse and complained when I could not provide them. He was half mad with pain and the pills the overnight campers provided. I would beg for them; as their cars drew into the field I would be waiting: I would feed them into his open mouth, wash them down with the wine they'd generously given.

  That year all the car radios played the same song. 'Chirpy chirpy cheep-cheep. Last night I woke and my momma was gone - oh! oh! Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep.'' By night the field was crowded. People from all over France, so far as I could see, came to visit the man on his back in the field, and his poor wife, and provide pills and baby milk. This was real fame, the kind that counted, nothing to do with writing. I managed an hour or two with my pad and my Pentel, while the baby slept and even Ron quietened in the noonday sun. That year I think the novel must have been Remember Me. Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep.

  After ten days Ron got up and played a game of boules. And three decades on a letter from a reader who's just read Auto da Fay and told how she'd visited the field and remembered me and the baby and the children and pitied me, and was that me?

  Nothing surprises me an
y more, not even Trisha and Peter switching, to Doralee's inconvenience, so she's put off having babies for fear of hermaphrodite births. Daniel as a child lived half in one world, half in another magic one. He bent spoons like Uri Geller; he watched the magician on TV one day, and within the week the cutlery drawer was full of forks and spoons bent so they could no longer be used. Not just the thin cheap ones, but really expensive heavy ones. Real silver too, from the shop, some of them. But silver is soft and easy to bend, so we didn't count those. He was nine there was an epidemic of spoon-bending amongst prepubescent males. Perhaps they could always do it, but why ever would they think of trying if it hadn't been for Uri Geller? Producers tried to show them do it on TV but when the cameras were rolling nothing happened. The cutlery stayed useable.

  If Peter and Trisha switch why should I doubt it?

  But people do doubt. Dan would rub the cutlery gently with his childish fingers - table spoons and carving forks would twist and turn and writhe. He did it once for Hetta Empson at the dinner table, put the spoon down, and we all watched the metal handle bend itself gracefully backwards of its own accord. I took a photograph of it on that occasion. Hetta denied that it had happened at all, refusing the evidence of her eyes. She just shut them and said it didn't happen, and shouldn't happen and would someone please remove the spoon before she opened her eyes. Dan found his school friends reacted in the same way. 'Didn't happen,' they said.

  Then he took to his bed and wouldn't get up. Between the ages of ten and twelve he grew pale and thin. He got dreadful sore throats which would not go away, and which various doctors were convinced were psychosomatic - this being the favourite, and indeed the cheapest diagnosis at the time for any ailing child. They were in as much denial as Hetta when they looked in his throat and saw pink healthy tissue, not what he described as red, inflamed and sore. Taking out tonsils was seen at the time as something which belonged to a superstitious past, old-fashioned and unnecessary.

  White as a sheet Daniel lay in bed, declining to get out of it. Friends were convinced it was because I had let him bend spoons. But I finally found a doctor to do the operation, for a fee - facing out the disapproval of friends and family, who thought privatised medicine was wicked - and once done, Dan leapt out of bed and started organising the students' union in his school. But he never bent spoons again and does not like to be reminded that once he did. Better safe than sorry. Should Trisha and Peter get out of their fix I don't suppose they'll cross other people on the stairs again. They'll be very careful.

  Mid-Seventies, and the city we knew seemed to be collapsing around us. We were not accustomed to foreigners, other than West Indians; suddenly the Middle East was with us, our institutions were being bought up, not to mention our race horses, and the West End bars were full of blondish girls for sale. The price of petrol went up to nearly fifty pence a gallon, and tights were available, even in Harrods, in only one choice of colour. The former much alarmed the men of Primrose Hill, and the latter the women. What, was even the privilege of the wealthy to be no more? Terrorists were active, bombs were going off in London, too close to home. They reached as near as next door, to No 1 Chalcot Crescent, where the Minister for Ireland, Lord Donaldson, now lived.

  Lord Donaldson was a cheerful man, who got very drunk with my husband the day they moved in to their new home. They drank whisky together and ended up dancing on our dining table - refectory, old and solid - and letting down their trousers, to the horror of his wife, a serious academic and historian, and the delight of all our children. Our relationship with the Donaldsons thereafter was distant if polite. And Ron never drank whisky again, only wine.

  The police asked for permission to run through our house and into the Donaldsons' back garden should there be reason to suspect an assassination attempt or a hostage-taking situation arose, and how could we refuse? There was a difficulty: the handle of our back door was missing. To get it open you had to use the end of a pair of scissors. The alarms next door would go off, our doorbell would ring, the police would rush in and pile up in our corridor like the Keystone Cops while I went to find the scissors. It was always a false alarm, mostly the cat, and if Lady Donaldson had vanished it was because she was round at the launderette, which she favoured above a washing machine. But it made you nervy.

  Dan, sitting in a local cafe, overheard a plot to blow his lordship up. We told the police who told the Bomb Squad. It turned out to be a conversation between off-duty security guards outlining scenarios of possible attack, but it was disconcerting. Dan could scarcely leave home without untoward events occurring. First spoon-bending, now this. When he got in a car with Ron the sturdy Volvo engine would start to fizz and blow out sparks. Dan would have to get out before it would behave normally. Clocks and watches would stop if he went near them. He was seldom home on time: there had been a bomb scare or someone had jumped under a train. He played the trumpet like an angel: he went to Pimlico Comprehensive, a tough school with a good music department. He stopped off the bus to watch the Norwegian Christmas tree go up in Trafalgar Square, left his trumpet behind, and went back to retrieve it. He found the Square cleared and cordoned off and the bomb squad about to blow up his trumpet case. They were not amused to discover it was his. No one was amused. We were all too frightened.

  I took Dan to a psychoanalyst, I remember - I must have been well into the grip of Freudian fervour - and asked him what to do. 'This child is event-prone,' he said. He was calm and wise and saintly. 'It is a recognisable condition. You are lucky. He could be accident-prone, and then you would be in real trouble. This kind of child attracts events in the same way some rare people attract lightning. They are catalysts for change: he will walk through clustering events without being touched himself. He will grow out of it, with puberty.'

  And so Dan did, by and large. But I never grew out of my belief that anything you can think of actually happens somewhere. I wrote a passage in a novel, The Hearts and Lives of Men, in which a three-year-old survives an air crash, because she is sitting in the tail and it floats rather than falls. Soon after in real life a three-year-old survives just such a crash over Chicago. The writer invents, real life follows suit. The world is so crowded with people that if you can think of it, someone, somewhere, is doing it. Somewhere in India, or Malaysia, or China or Mexico, even now, two people have crossed souls like Peter and Trisha: it's just when it happens in Wilkins Parade that denial sets in.

  Doralee is tired

  Even now that she understood better what was going on, trying to sort out Peter and Trisha was a nightmare: it was like umpiring at tennis - one makes a mistake, the other one gets a point: that one moves, yet that one speaks: it exhausted her. She wanted to be able to cuddle up to Peter for comfort and warmth and reassurance, as she was used to, but there was no proper Peter around. She was on her own. And then the Trisha body would turn and stare at Doralee with a kind of yearning which reminded Doralee of Peter so that she almost wanted to hug her. But she despised the Trisha body. Trisha was too fleshy and too soft and not young enough: the idea of too close contact with her breasts, especially her naked, floppy breasts, was horrible. Yet she was beginning to think about it as a possibility. She had had lesbian leanings towards other women - she had inner stirrings towards Heaven Arkwright, if the truth be known, alongside the antagonism. Heaven had a kind of lean, muscly, dark-skinned smoothness that called out to something in Doralee, who felt pathetically white and soft by contrast, a little mewling creature battering fists against something more significant than herself, but about to be swept up and enclosed, which she half wanted, and half didn't want. It was incorporation that she was after. Yet Doralee, in the same room as Heaven, always felt unentitled in some way, perhaps by reason of having a church-going mother and a father who worked for an NGO; or perhaps it was just because she'd done something she knew was wrong, reading Heaven's e-mails and snaffling a job from under her nose. Well, now she was punished.

  Doralee said she was going to lie down for a litt
le, yet still hovered by the door, while the Peter body and the Trisha body played Scrabble, and took no notice of her, Doralee. They had left her behind, and now used her to look after them: they saw that as natural. They were a more perfect form than she, who was a mere heterosexual. Like snails they carried both male and female inside them.

  She left the room and lay down on her and Peter's bed, and then found herself wondering what the Peter body might be like sexually when moved by Trisha's spirit. She, Doralee, was being offered the best of all worlds, surely. What was she doing, turning her back on experience? She was a journalist. It was her duty to find out. She slept.

  Selling up and moving on

  Come 1975 our front door too was sold, along with the other antiques. Ron wanted to live in the country: I could not see that it made any difference to me where I lived. One green field was much like another. I assumed he wanted me to come with him. In retrospect I am not so sure. The house was put on the market; a buyer came along, the deal was struck, and Ron put the contract under my nose and meekly I signed the papers. It was midwinter, and very cold. Now we had nowhere to live.

  The house was sold to a banking family - in the fifteen years we had been there the Crescent had gone up in the world. How could it not? Central, airy, just down the road from the zoo and Queen Mary's rose garden, pretty Georgian houses - of course it had. A dream of a London house. Yet I'm sure I complained about it at the time - too small for our needs, too narrow, too tall, too many stairs - yet how sorry I was when it was gone. I pass it sometimes now, and never without a pang of nostalgia for the past, for the days when the future seemed to go on for ever.