Whatever curious transformation was underway seemed not only to regard stamina and strength—she could now carry two bags of wood at a time to the log burner—whose increase she casually ascribed to being a bit more demanding of herself, and thus resisting the temptation in old age to reflexively rely on others. If you believed you could open the marmalade jar, it was amazing how by applying a tad extra determination the seal would break. She also evidenced a subtle shift in temperament, which was harder to explain away. A year previous when harvesting their fig tree, she’d never have risen on tiptoe on the ladder’s penultimate step and leant so far over the party wall that the ladder began to topple, all for two pieces of ripe fruit—which if she wanted so badly they could always buy. That sort of lousy risk–benefit analysis was for kids, and Kay was old and wise.
She did seem to get more done lately. With fervid apologies for having abandoned the job halfway through, she returned to doing up Glenda’s ground floor, going decisively with a hint of the Victorian that her best friend was sure to prefer to modern minimalism. Dispatching the makeover took half as much time as she’d expected. In preference to retiring altogether, she solicited still more design work; they needed the money. Finally accepting that she’d always hated the ungainly extra-terrestrial plant with blooms like eyeballs on sticks, she ripped out their deep-rooted fatsia in an afternoon. She reorganized the tool shed so that it no longer took half an hour to locate a screwdriver. Befuddled as to why the straightforward project had ever inspired such procrastination, she attacked her wardrobe and culled the clothes she never wore.
About to bundle the discards into a bin bag for Oxfam, she had a sudden change of heart. The frock atop the pile certainly didn’t pass the standard test of having been worn at least once in the previous year. In a canary-yellow dotted Swiss, the dress was a peasant design, with puffed sleeves, a full skirt, a gathered neckline, and a black bodice that laced in a criss-cross pattern down the front. She’d looked quite fetching in the thing back in the day, like a cowherd in the Alps, but had firmly slid the garment down the rail because there was nothing more embarrassing than women who didn’t dress their age, and the styling was simply too girlish. But on a whim, she decided to wear it that evening.
“Bloody hell,” Cyril said when she swanned downstairs to start dinner. “Gotta say, bab. It’s not that you don’t always look young for your age. But tonight . . . You look smashing.”
She went to glance with satisfaction in the mirror of the downstairs loo. It was surely due to a fluke effect of the waning sun, but those harsh lines from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth did seem to have grown less pronounced; why, from this angle they appeared to have vanished. Likewise smoothed away were the pleats on either side of her philtrum that had made her lips look permanently pursed, previously imparting an unappealing schoolmarm disapproval. When she smiled, for once her face didn’t look like a crumpled paper bag.
“I think eating more healthily has a perceptible knock-on effect on one’s appearance,” she said zestfully, whisking back into the kitchen and going at the courgettes, slicing three at a time. “During the hoarding of the coronavirus outbreak, you remember, we couldn’t get green vegetables for love nor money.”
“Yes . . .” he said, staring at his wife with unnerving intensity. “There’s nothing like the tonic of vitamin C . . .”
“Also,” she added, top-and-tailing the onions, “lately I seem to have embraced a more positive attitude. For a while there, I may have been a bit traumatized by our last-minute abortion of ‘D-day.’ At our age, being on the very cusp of disappearing from the universe, and then pulling back from the brink—well, it gives one psychic whiplash. From which it seems I’ve officially recovered.”
They both seemed to notice it at once. Although Kay’s swift, precise slicing of slender, uniform onion wedges was neither here nor there, it was extraordinary, not to mention dangerous, that she was not wearing her glasses—without which she couldn’t tell the difference between a root vegetable and her left hand. Casually, so as not to be detected, she slid her gaze slyly to the open copy of The Week a foot from the cutting board. She could not only make out the headline but the text, including the tiny italicized authorial identification in the far bottom corner. It hit her at the same time that she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d worn her hearing aids, yet Cyril’s conversation was clear and crisp, as was the early evening birdsong on the other side of the closed patio door. As a former registered nurse, she was well aware that the stiffening of the corneas starting in midlife was a one-way process, and presbycusis did not improve.
“And, well, furthermore . . .” she said, faltering, and again unsettled by the piercing look in her husband’s eyes. “It makes a big difference, to me anyway, not to be living under that sword of Damocles all the time. In retrospect, I think it took a dreadful toll on me for years, knowing that I’d committed to this . . . hard-and-fast . . . non-negotiable . . . you know. So release from all that stress, and darkness, and foreboding . . . It’s made me feel better, and maybe even look better.”
She finally raised her eyes from the board and met her husband’s gaze.
“You could pass for thirty-five,” he said accusingly. “I do not say that to flatter you. I’m saying that as a fact. What. Is going on?”
That was when she broke down and told him about the drug trial.
* * *
The medication was fast-tracked and available on prescription three years later. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence was sceptical at first, for so long as the drug was still under patent, the price of approving it for NHS purchase was prohibitive. But once the results across the ageing population were modelled, the regulatory body concluded that the cost of the prophylaxis would be overwhelmingly compensated by the money saved on treating the chronic conditions to which the elderly were prone. Besides, once the cat was out of the media bag, denying the British citizenry access to Retrogeritox would have led to widespread rioting.
According to rumour, which the subsequent longevity of a certain someone bore out, one of the first beneficiaries of the new restorative was the UK’s official head of state, who, it was said, began discreetly popping the pills along with her nightly G&T whilst the drug trial, showing such early promise, was still underway. Consequently, the poor, inhumanly patient Charles, Prince of Wales, was unlikely ever to ascend to the throne after all; when the secret finally leaked, the Princess-Consort-in-waiting Camilla Parker-Bowles was livid. The country at large, however, was delighted. With the wildly popular Queen Elizabeth II installed in perpetuity, the monarchy was safe, a thriving British tourism industry guaranteed.
The wholesale transformation of the social landscape was gradual at first. A surprisingly considerable segment of Kay and Cyril’s cohort was suspicious of fads, or resistant to taking experimental medication, or stuck irretrievably in their understanding of life, the world, and most of all themselves—they were old and their time was nigh—and it was fascinating how much some people were willing to sacrifice just to keep their version of reality from turning topsy-turvy. But the puristic hold-outs, well, obviously—in relatively short order, they died.
Little by little, the vista along the average high street included fewer and fewer pensioners—or at least pensioners who looked like pensioners. You didn’t see many mobility scooters any more, until at length most of them were repurposed as go-carts for children. No one had to impatiently make their way round old ladies with walking frames when rushing for the bus. Meanwhile, care homes closed—including the appalling Close of Day Cottages, subject to a scathing exposé in the Evening Standard. Now notorious, the greedy, self-dealing director Mimi Mewshaw had deliberately withheld Retrogeritox from her wards, who had been imprisoned in an information vacuum and had never even heard of the revolutionary cure for ageing until they were freed.
Certain business sectors suffered. Demand for a variety of products and services shrank or evaporated: cream
s for the amelioration of spots, wrinkles, and eye bags; reading glasses and corrective lenses; hearing aids; in-home caretaking; walk-in bathtubs, shower-stall rails, transfer discs, and electric stair lifts; wheelchairs, canes, and walkers; a panoply of pharmaceuticals that treated the cancers, hypertension, heart disease, and strokes that soon grew exceedingly rare; artificial hips and knees; pacemakers and stents; pension fund management; the writing of wills and the settlement of estates. The confidence artist trade suffered a punishing contraction, with no more addled, credulous oldsters to prey upon. But the modest damage to the economy was more than made up for by the explosion of the working population, whose taxes now largely supported dependents who were under eighteen. Indeed, for the first time in its history, the fiscally insatiable NHS had its budget cut, and even the Labour Party didn’t squawk.
Naturally, at first the ground-breaking therapy was largely available in richer countries, which gave horrifying new meaning to the “inequality” that had obsessed progressives for decades: now only the poor would get old. Talk about seriously unfair. But the UK soon devoted its entire aid budget to supplying the drug to Africa and other emerging markets; meanwhile, the patent expired, and the generic was dirt-cheap. Besides, after patients took the standard two-year course, the transformation of cell duplication turned out to be permanent, so the benevolence was a one-off. Best of all, parents who’d both drunk this contemporary Kool-Aid passed immunity to decay to their offspring. A whole new generation was born that would never see visibly elderly humans, save in archival photos and films—which terrified children, who perceived decrepit men and women with big hairy moles, bent backs, craggy faces, and crinkled, papery skin as monsters.
Inevitably, a demographic transformation on such a scale produced its share of doom-mongering naysayers—who in this instance had a point. Humanity continued to reproduce, but almost no one died. Of course, even sceptics were obliged to preface their cynical forecasts with assurances about how wonderful it was to have beaten death itself, now hailed as our species’ crowning achievement. Nevertheless, were this situation to carry on, the population of the planet would go through the roof, thereby triggering a cascade of calamity: water and food shortages, horrific urban crowding, property prices unaffordable for all but the rich, and wars over territory and finite resources.
This argument was beginning to gain substantial traction when something happened. It was disagreeable. It was immediate—that is, not precisely overnight, but close enough, and far too rapid for any effectual social policy response or medical palliative to be formulated. In its mercilessness, it was almost kind (though no one said so at the time). The cataclysm’s mathematical tidiness and uncanny uniformity of result across the globe suggested design. Like the stopped clock accurate twice a day, for once the conspiracy theorists were probably right.
The coronavirus panic of 2020 was, it transpired, a mere drill. Half the world’s population died. Whatever it was that hit them, the half that remained were immune. Thereafter, an anonymous advert ran in all the major papers worldwide on the same day: I HAVE BOUGHT YOU SOME TIME TO GET WITH THE PROGRAMME. YOU CAN HAVE ETERNAL LIFE, OR YOU CAN HAVE FAMILIES, BUT YOU CANNOT HAVE BOTH. Together the American FBI and MI6 finally traced the advert to a cantankerous, misanthropic rogue demographer named Calvin Piper, who objected on his arrest that he had saved humanity from itself, “not that it especially deserved saving,” and rather than be put on trial, he “should have a building on the Washington Mall named after him.” Perversely, the villain who became far more notorious than Stalin or Hitler had refused to take Retrogeritox, for not only was he in his late nineties, but he looked in his late nineties—making history’s most fiendish mass murderer appear uniquely and conveniently grotesque.
No one ever said so at dinner parties. Yet behind closed doors, more than one academic concurred that Calvin Piper’s wicked pathogen—christened “Pachyderm,” for it was derived from a virus that leapt the species barrier from elephants—achieved exactly what it was meant to. World population grew somewhat, until it gradually registered globally that procreation wasn’t in the larger social interest if present generations weren’t planning to leave the building any time soon, or possibly ever. In every country, pregnancy soon required a licence, only a handful of which were issued per year.
* * *
But back to Lambeth.
As the years had advanced since their wedding, Kay had unavoidably watched the dashing, energetic, idealistic young man she fell in love with metamorphose into what others would perceive as a grizzled crank. A once “slender” figure appeared closer to “scrawny.” Stenosis crimped the ramrod posture. Soft chestnut locks turned the colour of lead. In their early days together, Cyril’s absentmindedly allowing his hair to shag over his ears had been endearing; in later decades the same inattention to grooming made him look unkempt or even crazed. By about seventy, he developed a permanent scowl that, she teased in the twenty-teens, made him look like Jeremy Corbyn. Scraggled in due course with single long, coarse hairs that didn’t belong there, the smooth, firm chest on which she’d first laid her head as a bride inevitably began to droop. Meanwhile, her husband’s keen features subtly lost definition, as if a Renaissance statue in Carrara marble had been eroded by acid rain. In accommodating these losses, Kay had been obliged to draw upon a mature sense of perspective, a more profound understanding of what a person is than she’d ever enjoyed when she married, a mournful resignation to the fleeting nature of beauty, a sense of humour, and a bottomless well of tenderness. (All frightfully character-building, though Kay had still been on borrowed time herself, and it had been difficult to see the use of continuing to build a character that would soon get thrown away.)
Witnessing the same transformation in reverse proved ever so much more palatable.
Oh, Cyril was still a fanatic. He was still inflexible. He was still an absolutist, and he still passed unequivocal judgements that could make him seem harsh. But all these curmudgeonly qualities were easier to take in a physically buoyant man whose occasional frowns instantly evanesced, whose posture was pillar-straight, whose pectorals once again resembled Italian marble, and whose lush chestnut hair had resprouted its disarming cowlick. Cyril looked twenty-five. Pretty much everyone looked twenty-five.
For a while, if only because they were still financially underwater after having spent down their assets in preparation for throwing in the mortal towel (what a dreadful mistake that would have been!), Cyril returned to the NHS as a GP. At that time, there were still pregnancies to look after, and people still injured themselves—though tending patients who healed so quickly was a joy. Cancers had always been depressing, and he was glad to see the back of malign cell production altogether. Colds and flus continued to come and go, but this newly resilient population bounced right back. In the old days, GPs were often overwhelmed, allowed only ten minutes per appointment, whilst many patients had complained that it was impossible even to get one. After the Retrogeritox revolution, Cyril went hours at a go with nothing to do.
By contrast, Kay had loads of interior design work, because everyone suddenly had so much energy, and in looking youthful they naturally assumed youth’s impatience and appetite for novelty. The escalating demand for aesthetic variation displayed a trace of mania, which meant something, though in the first few years Kay wasn’t sure what.
The fact that all the generations of their family now looked the same age had repercussions—neither good nor bad exactly, but interesting. Abstractly, in bygone times most children had made some effort to appreciate that their parents had once been young, but by and large this exercise of the imagination was half-hearted. Children didn’t really want to picture their parents as contemporaries, and children didn’t really want to think of their parents as regular people. Yet when a parent appeared a peer, no imagination was required. For Hayley in particular, the subjective experience of meeting her parents before she was born seemed uncomfortable, if not faintly obscene. She might have b
een irked that, of the two, by any objective standard her own mother was now by miles the more attractive. Although loath to compete with her daughter, Kay had merely to enter the same room for Hayley to glower in resentment. There was nothing for it. Kay wasn’t about to live eternal life in a sack.
The sudden levelling of the generations exposed a chronic sense of superiority on both parties’ parts. In the past, parents had always felt a trace of condescension towards their children, however warmly disguised. They’d already experienced what the kids were going through for the first time, and they knew better. But the condescension worked both ways: always more “modern,” an upcoming generation also knew better. Even if they didn’t yet enjoy position and wealth, the young had every other advantage: strength, looks, health, a future. It was their role, kindly or brutally, to discard and replace.
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