by Simon Mawer
Hanging gardens? A literary allusion, gentle reader. Aldous Huxley again. A poem.
And all the time, there is just one thing in my mind, so much so that I muddle up the HoxA3 gene in mice (complex head and neck deformities) with the HoxA7 gene (ear and palate deformities), but no one notices—as I pontificate, all I think of is the eponymously named Miss Jean Piercey waiting in my shadowy basement flat. Slightly bruised, she lies, sleeping the sleep of the persecuted, on my bed. The bed is full size; I have a small chair and a lowered desk, but I sleep in the luxurious acres of a normal bed. Lest she awaken, I open the door (lowered handles) with care, and gaze unnoticed on her sleeping form. Her mousy hair is strewn across the pillow. Her mouth is half open and her breath (sour, tainted with fear) rasps gently between bruised lips. One hand cups her cheek, the other lies abandoned on the sheet. Miss Piercey. Snow Gray lying beneath the breathless gaze of her single, admiring dwarf. She has cast aside her dress and is wearing only a slip. Her legs are spread apart, almost as though she is caught in midstride running some desperate race, and her slip is caught up in all this silent rush so that the silken skin of one pale thigh gleams in the pallid afternoon light that filters down into the basement from the upper air. If I incline my head I can peer up into the scented shadows beneath the slip and glimpse pink flowers gathered there, a bouquet of sweet pea lain on a white cotton ground.
“Oh Christ, it’s you!”
A curious ejaculation, given the circumstances. Fright? Disappointment? Relief? Who can tell? “I must have been flat out,” she says, sitting up, arranging her skirts so that silken thighs are no longer exposed, but only the twin oysters of her patellae. Had she noticed the thoughtful and reverent inclination of my head, bowed as though before some idol? “God, how embarrassing.”
Is it? “I’ll make some tea,” I suggest hurriedly. “You want some tea? Then you can tell me all about it.”
But first? First, trapped by the exigencies of human physiology, I must repair to the bathroom and unzip my trousers and see again in my breathless memory those sheer thighs, that small cluster of flowers. “I’ll do the tea,” she calls through the door. I mumble some kind of reply. Nacreous, traitorous fluid lies in glutinous strings across the bidet. “If I can find the things,” she adds.
I emerge into a calmer, more relaxed world. There is time to hurry into the bedroom and consign Playmate and Stud to the bottom of a heap that also contains copies of Science and Trends in Genetics and offprints of my latest paper. In the kitchen Miss Piercey is apologizing, fussing over the teapot and a packet of plain chocolate digestive biscuits that she has found among the cornflakes and the pasta. “Do you have a special mug?” she is asking as she bends down to open a cupboard that for me lies at the correct height. “How did the lecture go? Gosh, you must be so nervous facing all those people and they all know so much, don’t they? Aren’t you afraid of being caught out?”
Nothing like as afraid of being caught out with you. A naturalist with a butterfly, the specimen settled on his hand, its wings opening and closing as though contemplating flight: a moth, a miller, flexing its wings and inducing a tornado in a distant, foreign land.
“Sit down and relax,” I command her. “Just relax.”
She does as she is bidden, suddenly and without argument. “I’ll be fine after a nice cuppa,” she assures me. “Just fine. And then I’ll be out of your hair. I don’t want to give you any trouble. It’s awfully good of you to do this for me, but …”
“Where will you go?”
“To my aunt back home, I suppose. I can’t go back, not to him.”
“What happened?”
She shakes her head.
“Tell me about it,” I suggest.
She shrugs. “It’s not as easy as all that. Not that I don’t want to. I mean, I need to get it off my chest to someone, but it’s not that easy to explain.”
“But he hit you. That’s fairly straightforward, isn’t it?”
“He does hit me, sometimes. Slaps. This was maybe worse than usual, I don’t know. But he does.” Another shrug. The gesture is important in Jean Piercey’s life. It signifies all those things you can’t do anything about, and they are legion. I shrug often enough, I suppose. But I prefer a bleak and humorless smile.
“Why don’t you go to the police?”
“He’d go mad.”
“He seems to go mad enough as it is. What’s his reason?”
“Reason?” Another shrug. She stares into her mug of tea, as though maybe there’s a reason in there. “Hates me, I suppose. Just fed up with me.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Six years.”
“And no children?”
“Hugo says it’s my fault.”
“And then he hits you?”
She didn’t answer directly. “Silly thing is, he’s no bigger than me. You’ve met him. He’s no bigger than me.”
E. B. Ford, Fellow of All Souls and Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, sometime Emeritus Professor of Ecological Genetics at Oxford University, known as Henry to generations of undergraduates:
“… the XYY type tends to be ill-adjusted, being aggressive in a way which often leads to crimes of violence, so that such people find their way into prisons. Here we have an instance of the widely established fact that intelligence and psychology are under genetic control.”1
Here we have an instance of the widely established fact that experts are frequently stupid and prejudiced and usually have their heads stuffed firmly up their arses. By the time the good Henry wrote those words it had been established in the United States (Pyeritz et al., 1977) that a maximum of one percent of XYY males may spend part of their lives in mental-penal institutions.
That leaves a minimum of ninety-nine percent who won’t.
I wonder what the percentage is of Emeritus Professors of Ecological Genetics who ought to spend part of their lives in mental institutions? Does All Souls count?
I feel obliged to report that in the course of my own research, I, Benedict Lambert of the Royal Institute for Genetics, have discovered an inherited factor that is a certain causative agent in criminal behavior. It is particularly closely correlated with criminal behavior of a violent nature. There is no doubt about this. The figures are incontrovertible. I am talking about 99.9 percent confidence limits. Perhaps my name should be given to this factor, in the way that discoverers so often become eponymous. Think of Down and his syndrome; think of Huntington and his chorea. Perhaps this one ought to be the Benny factor. I suppose I’d be accused of flippancy.
Ninety-five percent of the total British prison population possess the Benny factor; the proportion goes up to ninety-seven percent when you consider violent crime. With sex crime the correlation between the Benny factor and the crime is virtually total, complete, one hundred percent. Thus, to follow the argument of the good E. B. Ford and others to the logical conclusion, all we have to do is identify people who possess this factor (a trivial task, let me assure you; anyone with a modicum of intelligence can be trained to do it) and isolate them from the rest of the population. Perhaps we could get them to wear some kind of distinguishing mark on their clothes; possibly we could introduce some kind of preventive detention, camps where carriers may be kept under careful supervision. Clearly there would be unfortunate ramifications of such a policy, but the advantages to society will far outweigh the disadvantages, for with this genetic marker identified and crime banished from the streets, who will care that these people will be shunned by all decent citizens, discriminated against in the workplace, refused insurance or mortgages? Who will worry that their credit rating will be zero, that people will stare at them in the street and children will throw stones? The world will be a safer place without them.
Later, when the general population is used to the situation, we might even consider a … final solution.
You’ve guessed, haven’t you? The Benny factor is the Y chromosome. Not the possession of an extra Y chromosome, bu
t the possession of just one. It is the simple fact of being male. Whenever the biological determinists, the eugenicists, the E. B. Fords of this world, start mouthing their rubbish, remember that: lock up all the males and violence will disappear from the streets.
“You’re staying here,” I told Jean.
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
“What’ll people say?” She wept silently, her face patchy and ugly. “What’ll they say?”
“For God’s sake, what do you think they’ll say? They won’t imagine there’s anything between us, will they? For Christ’s sake, they won’t imagine that!”
The tears dried. She looked at me with a strange sadness. “You shouldn’t say that kind of thing.”
I laughed. “My dear Mrs. Miller, I’ve been saying that kind of thing all my life. I don’t aim to stop now. I offer you some kind of refuge from your foul husband—incidentally, I thought he was quite revolting—”
“He’s not really like that—”
“Oh, for God’s sake! I offer you refuge, and it is entirely your own affair whether you accept my offer or not. But don’t try to get me to pretend I’m not what I am. Or that he isn’t what he is, come to that.”
“But you must—”
I held up my hand, my small, pudgy hand that probes into the intimate secrets of the human genome. “I’m not going to argue about anything. You just stay safely with me for as long as you like.”
She did feel safe, of course, for she knew that what I said was true: there was no danger. No danger from me, I mean. So she stayed for supper and we chatted a bit afterwards, and then she went to sleep in my bed and I went into the sitting room and made some kind of bed on the sofa; and when she was fast asleep I crept softly back into my room to look at her.
She was in no danger. I merely coveted the sight of her crushed face on my pillow, the mousy hair sprayed carelessly across the cotton. As I stood there looking at her she stirred gently, entirely oblivious of my presence. I am in the mood for confession. While she slept I cautiously extracted her underwear from the neatly folded pile of clothes on the chair—pants, brassiere, tights, the whole delicious, fragrant bundle—and tiptoed out to the sanctuary of the bathroom. I sorted through my trophies in an agony of tumescence and expectation. The bra was 34A. The knickers bore the name of the patron saint of Judeo-Christian commerce, Saint Michael, and were decorated with pink and red and yellow blooms. Sweet pea? At the gusset there was a faint mark like a brushstroke of pollen—a delicate suggestion of nether, perhaps equally bruised, lips. I pressed the scrap of cotton to my face and drew in her sharp, sour, sweet, secret scent and knew things about Miss Piercey that I had only imagined …
Coming into the tiny kitchen the next morning she had a rueful smile on her rather less bruised lips. “You washed my under-things.”
“I thought you’d want them clean.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“A labor of love.”
She smiled the kind of smile that warns you not to be silly. Perhaps she knew. I had never granted her much in the way of understanding, but perhaps she understood. “I don’t normally do this, you know,” she observed as she sipped her breakfast coffee.
“Do what?”
“Stay the night with other men.” She even giggled.
That morning we went to work together, going up the steps of the Institute together, calling a “Good morning” to the receptionist together, and climbing the grandiose stairs side by side to the first floor. She had to go slowly to let me keep up with her. The librarian looked askance as she went in.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get in yesterday, Mr. Blackwall,” she said. “I wasn’t well.”
The man sniffed disapprovingly. “There’s been a phone call for you. Your husband. Wants you to call him as soon as you get in.”
I watched her expression. I saw fear. I know fear well. I’ve grown used to it. Fear for me is a matter of existence. I walk among giants and I know fear. I stood, abject with terror, in the bike shed at school and watched bare and grimy knees advance on me, and I knew fear. I probe with small, plump fingers among the molecules of inheritance and I know fear. The mere act of existence for me is an act of fear. I feel fear merely by being; but none of this is the fear that I saw in Jean’s expression as she went into the library office to phone Hugo Miller.
“Go back if you think you must,” I told her over a flabby meat pie in The Pig and Poke. Her husband had wept on the other end of the phone, wept and pleaded for her to come back, begged for forgiveness, swore devotion, all the usual things. He needed her more than he needed anything else in the world.
She thought about it hard. She wasn’t stupid, Jean Piercey wasn’t. Wasn’t, isn’t. She is just one of those people who have been educated to be stupid, that’s all. Failed the eleven-plus. Cannon fodder. Someone’s got to stamp the cards, someone’s got to sweep the streets and empty the bins, someone’s got to lick the stamps and check that the forms are filled in properly. Someone’s got to say “yes, sir; no, sir.” Someone has got to have narrow horizons.
“The second time you leave, it won’t come as such a shock,” I warned. “You don’t want to lose the advantage.”
I didn’t want to lose the prize.
“I can’t stay. I haven’t got any things.”
“Go and get them. When does he finish work? Go and get them. Now.”
She giggled. The word giggle has a bad press. Children giggle, schoolgirls giggle, giggling is what you do round the back of the bike sheds when they take their dicks out to show you. Jean Piercey’s giggle bubbled with something else—genuine amusement, the rich, dark, unexpected amusement of anarchy. “That’d teach the bastard, wouldn’t it?” she said.
Bastard? Not mousy Miss Piercey at all.
So I drove her out to Ruislip. We left the Institute at three o’clock and I drove her out to Galton Avenue and I waited in the car on the other side of the road outside number 35, while she crept up to her own front door like a housebreaker. She took only a few minutes inside, and then she was out again and hurrying down the drive with a small suitcase in her hand.
“Did you see the curtains?” she asked breathlessly as we drove away. “Did you see?”
“Which curtains?”
“Next door, of course. Twitching. This is net-curtain country. They see everything, they know everything. They’ve got me labeled now. Tart. Going off with …” I noted the pause, “… a strange man. Just you see.”
“What’ll he do when he finds out?”
“Stew in his own juice.”
We went out to dinner that evening at a little place in the Old Brompton Road. To celebrate the escape from Colditz. That’s what she called it. “Isn’t that where they locked everyone up? I saw it on the telly ages ago.” She insisted on truite aux almandes as the only thing she could recognize on the menu. I offered to translate the rest, but she appeared happy with the choice. “Hugo always says French food is a load of pretentious nonsense. Normally we eat Indian. Or Chinese. Do you like Chinese?”
I agreed that I did like Chinese. “Chinky nosh,” she said with relish. “We used to have one every Friday, Hugo and me. It used to be fun.” She raised flakes of white meat to her mouth. “We never had trout.”
Trout Hatcheries
In trout hatcheries you don’t want males. Males are inconvenient. Quite apart from the fact that they don’t produce babies, they mature earlier than females and once mature they show aggressive tendencies, particularly at high population densities. In a normal trout population (50:50 male and female), half the population is therefore a potential danger to the other half. So why not do away with the males?
But you need males to breed, I hear you cry. Your tone is a little desperate, I must admit, because I suspect that you realize that, with all the sperm a male trout produces (or a male human, come to that), you don’t need very many; but you do need one or two.
A short, and I hope unnecessa
ry, biology lesson:
Male trout, just as male humans, are XY; that is, in every body cell there is one X and one Y chromosome. It is that fact which makes them male (and, as in humans, gives them criminal tendencies). Females, on the other hand, are XX. This means that the sperm cells from each male may either carry an X or a Y chromosome; whereas all the eggs from a female will carry an X. When a Y chromosome sperm cell fertilizes an egg, the result is an XY baby—a male. When an X sperm does the job you get an XX female. So, just as with humans, fifty percent of trout are male and fifty percent are female. And your next generation has fifty percent nonproducers, fifty percent that are nothing more than bags of sperm, fifty percent with criminal tendencies.
It’s that damned Y chromosome again.
So this, in trout hatcheries at least, is how it’s done:
You rear some female trout (XX, of course), but you dose them with male sex hormone. This turns them into males of a kind. They produce sperm, for example. But genetically they remain XX, and so every sperm cell produced carries an X chromosome. Using these “males” as a source of sperm, every fertilization will be by an X sperm with an X egg. Every baby trout that these “males” father (if you’ll forgive the expression) will turn out a female.
“I think that’s disgusting,” Miss Piercey said, but it didn’t stop her eating the fish. I ordered a bottle of white Burgundy, and then another. She ate and drank with abandon, and her laughter sounded loud in the land. We drank a toast to freedom and the death of bullies. “I always thought Burgundy was red,” Jean said, eyeing her fifth or sixth glass with suspicion. “I’ve got a burgundy coat at home. That’s red.”