For my father,
Dr Arnold Learner,
mathematician
(1934–1975)
‘As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.’
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
‘We still dream what Adam dreamt.’
Victor Hugo, ‘Horror’ from Les Contemplations
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s note:
Part One The Apple
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Part Two The Serpent
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
Part Three The Fall
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other books by Tobsha Learner
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s note:
This is a work of complete fiction written to entertain, inspire and intrigue and should be read as such—any similarity to a living person or institute is entirely coincidental.
PART ONE
The Apple
1
Ireland, 1849
THE HOUSEKEEPER HAD BROUGHT Lavinia to the remote place before, to this gully south of the village where the peat bog finished in a sharp edge, sliced away like a layer cake. The housekeeper’s sister had married a peatcutter whose stone and peat hut crouched resolute against the unforgiving elements. They were Catholics, now suffering under the great famine.
It was spring and the squares of turf sitting in piles on the new grass of the returning bog exuded a rich smell that was somehow exciting. The nine-year-old girl glanced back at the hut. The housekeeper, her wispy grey hair tucked firmly under a woollen bonnet, was in intense conversation with her sister, pushing the bound food parcels into her claw-like hands. Starvation had reduced the woman’s femininity to a series of sharp corners beneath her ragged dress.
Behind her, Lavinia heard the thud of a slean, then ringing as the iron turf-spade found a hidden rock. She knew it was the boy. He looked to be a good three or four years older than her, with a fudge of curling black hair over the wind-burnt oval of his solemn face. She’d noticed him as they were driving towards the small outpost: a skinny, shadowy parody of a man standing by the split peat, scowling at the approaching cart. Here was mystery, and Lavinia had felt her power as she caught him staring at her long loose hair, the ribbons of her bonnet, the extraordinary whiteness of her clean hands, her fresh face.
Without thinking, Lavinia ran towards him while the boy, feigning indifference, knelt to carve a rectangle with the slean.
‘Do you like it here?’ She kicked at the soil beside him.
Squinting up, he paused, watching the play of her fingers against the scarlet wool of her cloak.
‘It’s a living…but you wouldn’t know anything about that, a flash wee missy like yourself.’
She skipped around to the other side of his patch of peat, turning the word ‘flash’ around in her mind until she imagined she could taste it, like the sugar plums her father had brought her from Dublin for Christmas. The idea made her heart and stomach flutter.
‘You think me flash?’
‘Flash and pretty, like the sun, like a golden statue that belongs in church.’ He sat back, surprised at how the observation had suddenly made him feel demeaned, unclean. He knew her to be the daughter of a Protestant vicar, near gentry, and now he found that he resented the pristine naivety of the child, the plumpness of her forearms visible beyond the sleeves of her pinafore. It was almost as if he could eat the child herself.
Picking up a sod of peat, he threw it at a crow—the bird’s cawing scribbled across the pewter sky. Standing, the boy wiped his muddy hands across his thighs then looked back to where the two women were still engrossed in conversation.
‘If you like, I can show you some magic—an elvin’s cave.’
Lavinia hesitated. She knew it was wrong to walk off unescorted with a boy, but he looked harmless enough, his adolescent wrists dangling, his face as mournful as a donkey’s. Besides, she liked the burning feeling she had when he looked at her.
‘We cannot be long. Mrs O’Brien will worry if I am not in sight.’
But he was already leading her away from the field, his cutter swinging from a notch in his belt. She followed him, clambering down a hidden ravine beyond the bog.
Looking around, Lavinia panicked at their isolation. ‘Where is the cave?’
The boy walked across to a clump of low bush and pulled it aside to reveal the darkened mouth of a small burrow. Most likely an abandoned badger’s den, Lavinia thought, annoyed that he could believe her so gullible; but she still wanted to see it, just in case—against all the logic her father had taught her—elvins might really exist. Then, later, back at the vicarage, she would be able to tell the story to her whispering box, so that her mother could hear her up there in Paradise.
She hoisted her skirt above her knickerbockers and dropped to the spongy heather to crawl into the cave.
‘If you get closer you will see their wee purple eyes glinting in the dark.’
Lavinia peered into the darkness. Behind her, suddenly, she felt the strangeness of his hands under her petticoats, up between her legs. Kicking, she pushed herself back into the light as she tried to fight him off.
To her amazement, she was not so much afraid as surprised when he pinned her against the bracken. As he held her there he supported his weight with one hand while reaching down with the other to his breeches. The glint of his cutter hanging from his belt pulled at her consciousness. Before she had time to think, she’d grabbed it and, with a strange, soft tearing sound, plunged it into the boy’s thigh.
He screamed once like an animal. She rolled from under him and for a minute, they both stared down at the buried knife. Fascinated, Lavinia watched as blood began to well around the lip of the wound, staining his thin hessian breeches.
‘You have fallen on your own knife, understand?’ she said softly. Her cool demeanour sent a shiver through the injured boy. ‘If I hear mention of any other explanation, I shall have you whipped.’
Lavinia wa
ited until the boy nodded, his ruddy face now ashen. Then she ran, filled with a wild, thumping exhilaration that she intuitively knew she would have to keep secret, perhaps for her whole life.
2
Afghanistan, March 2002
THE GRANDEUR OF THE LOOMING mountains and the clear sky above contrasted sharply with the hillside where the Humvee wound its way up a dirt track.
The rotors of the Black Hawk helicopter beat the air above. As it swooped down, it reminded Julia of a huge angered wasp, a sinister danger glinting off the hardened cockpit window.
Two door gunners hung out of it, their M60 machine guns aimed straight down at the ground. Julia, sitting in the back of the Humvee, caught view of the soldiers squatting behind the gunners, their faces camouflaged—striped in green and black paint. One of them blew her a kiss.
The lieutenant escorting Julia followed her gaze.
‘Greenhorns,’ he said. ‘War’s one long glorious computer game until it’s like—oh wow, real blood, real death.’
The Humvee tilted as it took a corner. Julia grasped the strap of her seat belt; the flak jacket she wore under her sweater was a dead weight pressed against her breasts and chest, but it was comforting all the same.
‘Colonel told me you were on some kind of field trip, so I guess you’re not one of them bleeding heart journos?’ Yelling over the sound of the engine, he bent towards her, his breath acrid even in the cold air, and squinted at the name tag bouncing on her chest. ‘Professor Huntington,’ he read aloud. ‘You a medic?’
‘I’m a scientist. I’m out here testing adrenaline and hormonal levels immediately after conflict.’
‘They let you do that?’
‘Special clearance.’
He looked at her strangely then spat out the open window. ‘You think we like being here?’
She looked away. On the side of the road, two Afghani boys—their heads wrapped in traditional tribal scarfs, skinny ankles thrusting out of split Reeboks, old sweatshirts pulled over their kaftans—sat in a burnt-out BMW. Although they waved at the Humvee their eyes were hostile.
‘Some do, some don’t.’
It was true. Many soldiers secretly—or openly—enjoyed the adrenaline-fuelled challenge of a risky environment, even among those few who had endured the most brutal conflict. In actuality, an average of two out of every one hundred combat soldiers never suffered post-traumatic distress disorder—and it was this two per cent that fascinated Julia. The geneticist had spent the past three months in the Middle East on a research grant from Harvard, testing and interviewing such men: Israelis, Pakistanis, Americans and Brits. Julia didn’t take sides—her agenda was scientific not political. This was her last day; she was booked on a flight back to California the following morning.
The Humvee bounced over a pothole in the dirt track. Ahead, the hillside fell away to reveal a staggering view. They turned a sharp corner, only to be blocked by a flock of long-haired black goats being herded across the road by a wizened old man in a dusty, stained robe and a pale blue turban. He waved his staff at the bleating animals, seemingly impervious to the vehicle. Julia wondered why the driver didn’t blast his horn, then realised he was trying not to attract unnecessary attention. She sensed the driver and the soldier tensing up. Five miles from the combat zone, and theoretically inside friendly terrain, an ambush was still possible.
Her companion glanced at the driver who shrugged. ‘I hate this bullshit!’
Muttering darkly, the lieutenant clambered out of the Humvee and yelled at the goat herder. The old man’s wrinkled visage stared back at him without a glimmer of comprehension.
In an instant, the old man dropped to the ground. The lieutenant spun on his heels, looking around wildly for a possible sniper, but before he had a chance to react Julia heard the rhythmic pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire. The soldier’s body thudded against the Humvee, smearing blood as it slid down the window.
The driver accelerated straight towards the startled goats, which scattered, bleating, across the path. Julia ducked, huddled against the seat. Glass rained down as bullets shattered the front window and the tyres were shot out. Swerving wildly, the Humvee bumped across the stony ground and skidded to a halt.
Julia could hear the dying driver groaning. Then silence, filled only by the bleating goats and a bird cry Julia imagined to be an eagle. Suddenly there came the chanting of their assailant: Allahu akbar, Allah is great, Allah is all powerful. The Arabic words were defiant, hypnotic and horribly musical. Although her senses were taut with panic, Julia gleaned that there was one voice, one set of footsteps. She waited, amazed by the clarity with which she seemed to be functioning—her single objective, survival.
The Humvee door was wrenched open and a dark face materialised: brown eyes, beard, skin peppered with acne. There was the incongruous smell of chewing gum and, faintly, hashish. Grabbing her by the shoulder, he pulled her out of the car then wrapped one arm around her neck.
‘Scream and I kill you.’
Julia said nothing, her heart pounding now from anger not fear. Her legs scrabbled against the rocky ground as he dragged her backwards. He was smaller than she was, she estimated, about five foot six to her five foot ten, and slight, his arm bony and sharp around her neck.
In the corner of her vision she saw he carried a jambaya—the traditional Arabic knife, curved and embossed—in his belt. With a sudden sideways lurch, she forced him to trip and allowed her full weight to fall directly on top of him, pushing them both to the ground. She jabbed her fingers into his eyes. He screeched. The AK–47 he’d been holding rattled against the stony ground as it rolled away. In the split second he lay there stunned, his arm still circling her neck, Julia reached down and pulled out the jambaya, then plunged it deep into his side. It sank without resistance as his screaming battered her eardrums. Vaguely remembering a briefing on the mechanics of close combat, Julia tried to pull the knife up through his body. He groaned deeply, his grip on her neck slackening.
Julia rolled to the side and scrambled to her knees. The AK–47 lay on the ground beside her. The man clutched at the hilt of the knife in his side, his face already grey. She picked up the gun and pointed it at his torso. The calm voice of the briefing instructor returned to her in an instant: ‘Squeeze the trigger…don’t pull.’
She flicked the safety catch and fired directly into the man’s chest. Then she waited—what for she wasn’t sure. The precision with which she saw and heard everything around her stretched time and space with a razor sharp clarity. There was no thought; just the listening, and the smell of pine cones and goats’ dung, and now the faint metallic tinge of blood on the breeze rolling down from the mountains.
A clatter of stones falling down the slope of the hillside caused her to swing round, but the old goat herder was nowhere in sight.
Julia got to her feet, still holding the gun, and walked a few steps away from her dead assailant. Turning her back on him, she looked down across the ravine to the ancient pine trees still frosted with snow, indifferent and timeless. She was suddenly overtaken by nausea, a clutching at her womb—not delayed shock or disgust, but something else, something Julia had suspected ever since she’d bought a pregnancy test in Kabul. Watched by two doubtful goats, she doubled over and vomited.
Afterwards, she was horrified to discover that she felt relief but nothing more—no fear, no repulsion at her own actions. Above her, she could hear the rotating blades of the returning helicopter.
3
Los Angeles, 2002
AS SHE PUSHED THE TROLLEY loaded with her old leather suitcase, the battered rucksack covered with stickers from obscure hotels in obscure destinations, the steel case marked ‘Scientific Specimens’ balanced on top, Julia tried to control the growing excitement drumming at the pit of her stomach. There’s always that moment of apprehension, she thought, as you walk through the customs exit and onto the ramp leading to the arrivals lounge. Anticipation tainted with apprehension—will you recognise him?
Will you feel the same jolt of intimacy and love you’ve imagined night after night during the weeks apart? Or will estrangement betray you?
The spectators leaning over the rails came into sight. Children, their faces mobile with trepidation, clutching the long strings of silver helium balloons painted with hearts saying ‘I love you’; an aged father holding up a home-made sign painfully restrained in its controlled emotion—‘Welcome Emilio!’; a mother, dressed as if for a party, bright blue eye shadow folded into optimistic creases as she tried not to cry. These were the moments that made up the mythology of families, Julia observed—arrival, departure, birth, death. She wondered why she was always so uncomfortable at such events, as if her nature kept her one step apart, defined her as the commentator.
It was crowded at the bottom of the ramp. The flight had been delayed, security at customs unusually tight, and Julia sensed restlessness in the anxious spectators.
She scanned the crowd, looking for her husband. A large man, Klaus was always visible. She found him standing back, watching her looking for him. Their gaze fused and there it was, that jolt Julia was always so afraid would one day vanish. Abandoning the trolley, she ran into his arms.
‘Welcome home,’ he murmured into her hair.
At six foot five, Klaus was taller than Julia by almost a head and was the first man who had been able to envelop her entirely. Every other lover had made her feel ungainly and awkwardly unfeminine because of her height. This feeling of being cradled had been an unexpected revelation: a liberating sensation that made Julia—a woman who preferred to be in control—finally surrender.
She buried her face in his shoulder and breathed him in. Afghanistan had already started to recede as the normalcy of LA airport and her husband’s touch anchored her. There and then, she decided she would never tell him about the ambush and her reaction. Levelling her eyes with his, she kissed him.
‘I was going to ask you to marry me but I seem to vaguely remember we’re married already,’ she whispered. Forgetting they were in a public space, she slipped her hands in his trouser pocket to rub against the blind bulge of his penis: the lucky talisman of their love.
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