Shine, Pamela! Shine! (Out of Line collection)

by Kate Atkinson

  Pamela had felt no sexual attraction to him at all—this was a man who wore his tie like a noose and possessed a badge machine, for heaven’s sake, yet on their first night in Florence, under the influence of a carafe of Chianti and an Italian moon, she led him into her (cramped) hotel room and was surprised to hear herself murmur, “Shall we?”

  “Goodness, Pam,” he said, disrobing himself of his old-fashioned short-sleeved shirt and hanging his trousers carefully over the back of a chair. “This is a surprise.”

  Afterward, he left her bed for his own, claiming that something in Pamela’s room was “bringing on my allergies.” The next morning at breakfast (a disappointingly dull continental affair) he didn’t sit at her table even though there was an empty chair right next to hers, and when she laughingly accosted him later in the Duomo (“You’re not avoiding me, are you?”), he muttered a feeble excuse and sloped off toward some ridiculously overornate side chapel.

  Pamela experienced a sudden aversion to Italian art, prancing and preening like the Whore of Babylon. Give me Protestant gloom any day, she thought, although she had been brought up without religion and had no great belief in anything beyond the natural world and trying to be nice to people. “Do as you would be done by” was her daily mantra—so much more difficult than it sounded, especially as it was so often not reciprocated.

  She had been quite prepared to pay lip service to religion at work (she would probably have lost her job otherwise), but outside of the school grounds she admitted to a cheerfully heathen soul. Yet the older Pamela grew the more she found herself lamenting not having something unbelievable to fall back on as a comfort in the long, dark hours of her solitary nights.

  The members of the book group perked up like meerkats at the sound of the front door opening and then crashing shut, closely followed by Nicholas slamming into the room as if he was pretending to lead a SWAT team. He flinched at the unexpected sight of a room full of middle-aged women—really he couldn’t have looked more horrified if he’d stumbled on a coven of naked witches sacrificing a goat on the fitted Axminster.

  “Book group, Nick,” Pamela said to him helpfully. It would have been nice if he could have managed even a rudimentary “Hi,” or shown at least a pretense at manners, but instead he muttered something that didn’t even try to be a sentence (“Don’t slouch! Speak clearly! Shine!”), before backing out of the room cautiously as if the book group might be about to follow him en masse and savage him out in the hallway. He left an intrusive scent of beer and cigarettes in his wake.

  The room was silent for a moment as everyone tried to think of something positive to say about Nicholas. Pamela had to resist the desire to fill the void with excuses. (“I did my best” might be top of her list.) Everyone else’s offspring were doing interesting things. “International law with a trade delegation to China. Charlotte speaks fluent Mandarin, of course.” Or, “Tom’s just got a job with the Scottish Office—bit late in the day but we’re thrilled.” And so on, ad nauseam.

  “Nick hasn’t really found out what he wants to do yet,” Pamela said.

  “Oh, I know,” Honor said, all earnest understanding. (“That dress!” Pamela thought.) “Ed’s taken forever. He’s helping to build a school in Botswana at the moment but he’s talking about politics when he returns.”

  This information was met with a murmur of approval. “Good for Ed,” Fiona said.

  Jolly, jolly good, Pamela thought and had to put her hand over her mouth to stop her sarcasm flying out into the room. “Wonderful!” she supplied instead.

  Alistair was irritatingly indifferent to his first son’s prospects, whereas the second son—Noah—already had “his name down for Gordonstoun. If it’s good enough for the royal family, it’s good enough for my son.” This didn’t seem like a very good recommendation to Pamela.

  “I don’t know why you’re complaining,” he said to Pamela, “you should be glad Nick’s working. God, Pamela, let’s be honest, neither of us ever imagined him with a job.” It seemed a shame that Nicholas didn’t have at least one parent who had harbored expectations for him, however small.

  “Of course Amy’s such a highflier,” Sheila said, as if Amy’s talents made up for Nicholas’s deficiencies. “Chalk and cheese, your Nicholas and Amy,” Sheila laughed. Pamela sighed. So many clichés, so little time.

  “Still, it must be nice having one of them still living at home,” Fiona said, wreathing herself in a pashmina as the members of the book group trooped into the hallway and started struggling into layers of outdoor clothes.

  “Well . . . ,” Pamela said as the smell of something illegal drifted down the stairs, “in some respects.”

  “They never leave anymore, do they?” Honor said brightly. “Goodness knows I couldn’t wait to leave home. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I can’t remember—did we agree on the McEwan for next time?”

  Once they had all left, Pamela ran a bath and lay in it imagining what it would be like to be in her coffin. Perhaps they wouldn’t bury her. Amy was more likely to choose cremation and it seemed unlikely that Nicholas would have any opinion on the matter. Perhaps she should make a preference clear to them now. Did she have a preference? Burn or rot? Which would be better?

  It was extraordinary how huge her belly looked in the bath, a great white mound of cottage cheese or a badly set blancmange. She’d plumped up a lot recently, like a cushion, like a turkey. Was she really this fat?

  “Christ, Mother, you’re really heifering up,” Amy said the last time she saw her. The blancmange belly wasn’t as soft as it looked. Something fluttered inside, a small trapped bird making a bid for flight. Perhaps she had a tumor? (“Cancer!”) Pamela imagined it growing inside her, pushing the other organs bullishly aside, like an assertive baby. That, at least, was impossible, thank God. She had entered the barren lands nearly ten years ago now.

  Squinting down at her body through the miasma of steam rising from the water, Pamela thought she could make out her belly rippling and erupting like a mud pool. Gas, probably, another unfortunate effect of aging. It looked as if something small and ferocious was trying to punch its way out. She thought of Alien and felt suddenly squeamish.

  “Jesus Christ, Mum,” Nicholas yelled at her from the other side of the bathroom door. “How long are you going to be in there? I need a crap.”

  “Thank you for sharing that, Nick.” If she had realized he was going to move back home, she would have put in a second bathroom. He left the toilet seat up every time and frequently forgot to flush away his smelly turds. (What did he eat?)

  “You never used to mind,” he said.

  “I always minded, Nicholas. Believe me.”

  It was part of a mother’s job to raise a son who would make a good husband. Although it was almost impossible to imagine Nicholas getting married, Pamela nonetheless felt guilty at the shoddy bill of goods she was handing on to some poor future woman. Or man, for that matter. (It wasn’t a topic that either of them broached with each other.)

  A foot. That was definitely a foot! What in God’s name? She gave a little cry and heaved herself abruptly out of the bath, dripping water like a great mythic sea creature rising from the deep.

  “Mum? Mum, what are you doing in there?”

  Immaculate conception. (Like a virgin!) If there had been an “annunciation,” it must have happened at a moment when she’d been distracted, sometime last September, probably, round about the time that she retired. It had been a difficult period, coming as it did on the back of a traumatic school inspection. There’d been a lot of stress at work, enough to take your mind off the Holy Ghost breathing into your ear, or whatever it was that a patriarchal religion did to avoid the horror of intimacy with a woman’s sexual organs (or indeed the woman they were attached to). Gabriel murmuring the Word of God, sending it to the womb via the heart instead of the vagina. Pamela had looked up a lot of this stuff online. Some of it was quite alarming.

  The Greeks, too, seemed to be again
st straightforward conception. Dionysus was born from Zeus’s thigh, Athena from his forehead. Aphrodite was born in the foam after Ouranos’s castrated testicles were thrown into the sea. (Yeugh.)

  And in the Convent of San Marco in Florence hadn’t there been a Filippo Lippi painting of the Annunciation where a dove was caught in the act of flying into the Virgin’s ear? What happened when it arrived? Did it enter the ear (distressing for both Virgin and dove, she imagined) or did it perch on the lobe and whisper sweet nothings to Mary?

  The nearest Pamela could get to her own notification of conception was when the schools inspector, a woman, touched her elbow lightly and said quietly, “Don’t worry, Mrs. Barker, you’re one of the good ones around here.” At the time Pamela thought she was referring to the standard of her teaching, but perhaps she was referring to Pamela’s suitability to bring forth someone who would save the world from the sins of mankind—or mass extinction, which was what the sins of mankind amounted to these days, in Pamela’s mind anyway.

  There were no rules, or at least none that Pamela had managed to discover, that dictated the second time around should be a replica of the first. Virgin births, wise men, shepherds, mangers, not to mention all the trappings of an agrarian culture—none of these were necessarily relevant. And why, she berated herself, was she presuming it was some kind of Judeo-Christian thing? Probably, she supposed, because of all those C of E morning assemblies with the children piping “Jesus bids us shine with a pure, clear light” or “All things bright and beautiful.” (“Don’t slouch! Sing clearly! Shine!”)

  Perhaps a different god appeared to her, perhaps disguised as an eagle, a bull, a shower of gold? Or a swan. Plenty of swans on Blackford Pond; Pamela frequently fed them. Perhaps one had snuck up on her when she was preoccupied with Nicholas’s incipient drug habit or Amy’s missing soul. Should she consider herself lucky that she had given birth to babies rather than laying eggs? (Although that would have been less messy.) And what about the Buddha or Hinduism or the prophet Muhammad or all the other thousand and one religions there were in the world—did they all have a built-in return in their credos?

  Whatever was growing miraculously inside her would probably have no religious connotations at all. After all, anyone with half a brain cell knew that the planet needed rescuing. (Plastic! Tigers!) The Second Coming was the herald of the end of the world, wasn’t it? So it would be appropriate seeing as the Earth was clearly on its last legs. (Orangutans! Sea turtles!)

  What about alien abduction? Should she consider that? Which was more likely—divine or alien impregnation? Both seemed equally improbable. It wasn’t as if she could ask anyone. She would find herself in a psychiatric ward in a heartbeat. Nicholas believed in aliens, but that in itself was evidence of his unsuitability to counsel her.

  If anything, it was like a fairy tale. A queen who wished for a daughter so much that she went to a witch to find a spell. Those stories always ended badly. Still, she would remember visiting a witch, wouldn’t she? And anyway a baby was the last thing Pamela wanted to have to deal with. And she was presuming it would be a human baby, but who was to say it wouldn’t be a litter of puppies? (Or, again, wouldn’t she remember that?)

  She didn’t tell anyone—how could she? She did consider involving Nicholas—they shared a house after all, and self-absorbed though he was, wouldn’t he notice? (Probably not.) And could she really face attending a doctor or a clinic? She supposed she could pretend she had gone to one of those countries where they were prepared to artificially inseminate older women. Or say that she’d adopted abroad from an orphanage. Romania, China. She could hardly say it was an immaculate conception (as before—psychiatric ward).

  No, she was going to have to go it alone. Do it herself. And why shouldn’t the light of the world be ushered in by a middle-aged, dispirited divorcée in the back bedroom of a house in the Edinburgh suburbs at the dog-end of a Western civilization? Stranger things had happened. Although not many.

  Easy. No complications. And on the winter solstice so refreshingly pagan in nature. Pamela thought of Donne for some reason. A little world made cunningly. The baby slipped out like a fish, nice and tidy, and gave a discreet cry. The afterbirth followed in the slipstream. Pamela chose not to eat it or freeze it or—as some did—throw a party for it. Yeugh.

  A girl. Not a puppy (Pamela admitted to a slight twinge of disappointment). Nor an alien, not noticeably so anyway. Not white either, which was interesting. The baby was defiantly dark, a shade that might have indicated Latin blood, possibly African, even Chinese, although it wasn’t as if Pamela was comparing her to the Farrow & Ball paint chart. She had worried at first about jaundice, but now the baby seemed healthy in every way and eventually her features settled into having a slight Asian cast as if to help to support Pamela’s story about adoption abroad.

  The baby showed no sign of having particularly messianic blood in her veins. She looked like every other baby, thank goodness. It would be easy to pass until the time came for her to reveal her true purpose. She’d have to get a move on, though—Pamela had recently read an article that said the world was about to cross the “threshold of catastrophe.” (Trees! Bees! Attenborough!)

  Pamela held the baby’s cocoon-body against her shoulder as she waltzed slowly around the room. She felt the soft weight of this unlooked-for gift in her arms, the silk-floss on the fragile eggshell of the head, the little shrimp fingers. There was a difficult road ahead to navigate. Would there be signs? How on earth was she going to manage? But if not her, then who? She was cradling the whole world in her arms. It was terrifying. “Come on, Pamela,” she murmured, “pull yourself together. Don’t slouch. Speak clearly. Time to shine!”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © Helen Clyne

  Kate Atkinson is an international bestselling novelist, as well as playwright and short story writer. She is the author of Life After Life; Transcription; Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a Whitbread Book of the Year winner; the story collection Not the End of the World; and five novels in the Jackson Brodie crime series, which was adapted into the BBC TV show Case Histories.