by Weldon, Fay
‘Why are you looking at your watch?’ she asked.
‘Because it’s the most expensive watch in the world,’ he said.
He wondered how Dr Holly was doing; how long he would hold out, when he would give in and return to the fold. Men within a whisper of a Nobel Prize do not easily turn their backs on glory, renown and the plaudits of their peers. If Holly didn’t, there were younger, smarter, more ambitious men in Holly’s own department upon whom Carl May had his eye, more than ready to do a favour or two. But Holly was the best, the most creative, the most imaginative: the younger generation of scientists were more concerned with their careers than the marvels of the universe. You had to pay them to get them to think. He would confront Holly with hard evidence on the absent-mindedness of professors of Egyptology: how they did indeed step out in front of cars: how they died young for reasons which were nothing to do with the Curse of the Pharaohs. Dr Holly would admit Carl May was right, would agree to put at least a section of his department to searching the gut cells of the ancients for living DNA, and get his grant back, and off they’d go again, Holly and May, May and Holly!
Unless of course Joanna was herself the Curse of the Pharaohs. The thought made Carl May laugh aloud.
‘Why are you laughing?’ Bethany asked.
‘Because you’re such an idiot,’ said Carl May, ‘and that’s the way I like it. I want you bright, I don’t want you clever.’
‘I may be cleverer than you suppose,’ said Bethany.
‘What great big teeth you have, Grandmama,’ he said, which was silly, she thought, because she had very little white even teeth of which she was very proud, having spent many years wearing a brace, about which her parents had been very particular, allowing her to take it off only when being kind to their lame ducks, their lonely sea-captains, their newly widowed majors. ‘One day you’ll be pleased,’ her father would say, when she moaned and groaned about the brace, and so she was.
Carl May looked at his watch again, and this time she didn’t ask him why. He had the bright eyes and flushed cheeks of a delinquent child; he was up to something; she knew it, and she thought it might be better, safer, not to know exactly what it was, and she was right.
The next day Carl May took part in a TV programme about the Chernobyl disaster and the question of the threat or otherwise of radiation, which seemed to so absorb the nation. He took an aggressive and positive line, as suited both his whim, his business interests and the future of the nuclear industry; all of these being pretty much the same.
He said he doubted very much the story of 2000 dead and large areas laid waste and desolate, never to grow a blade of grass again. He deplored the scare stories in the media that death was raining down from skies all over the world. He drank a glass of milk front of camera, and said there was more to fear from cholesterol than radioactivity. He said he thought the death toll would be more like thirty-five – very modest for a major industrial accident (though of course tragic for those concerned: families, etc.) and naturally there would be a statistically calculable increase in cancers in those countries subject to fallout but certainly no more than would be produced by atmospheric pollution consequent upon the continued burning off of fossil fuels. These things had to be balanced.
Look, Carl May said, this argument that we should all live as long as we possibly can is barmy: who wants to live an extra five years in a walking frame anyway? Better an earlier death, be it cancer or heart attack, than a later one. It was an old-fashioned sentiment which favoured length of life over way of life, quantity over quality. You found it the other end of the spectrum, when it came to how societies regarded birth: the old school, emotional, religious, said no contraception, no abortions, let the disabled live: the more life the better, regardless of quality of life. A younger, more reasonable, generation said no, let’s have quality not quantity. Freely available birth control, worldwide family planning, sterilizations, vasectomies on demand, terminations all but compulsory for those diagnosed before birth as handicapped, every child a wanted child – and so forth, Carl May said, while Friends of the Earth, a Bishop and the Minister of Energy tried to get a word in edgeways.
Friends of the Earth managed ‘What about childhood cancer? Leukaemia?’ and Carl May replied briskly if this nation really cares about the lives of its children it will stop driving about in cars – how many get killed a year on the roads! – and increase family allowances: if it cares about cancers in the old it will ban cigarette smoking and free hospitals for the potentially healthy and those who have not brought their troubles on themselves.
Now look, said Carl May, people will work themselves up into a state about anything, especially if it’s new. They thought the building of railway lines would destroy the nation, they thought TV would destroy its culture, they thought vaccination killed. (‘They were right, they were right,’ muttered the Bishop.) Nothing much to fear from radiation, compared to other dangers, compared to crossing the road, compared to smoking. A burst of intense radiation could kill you, sure. So could an overdose of aspirin. Nuclear power stations were, if you asked him, even more crippled by safety regulations than they were by the unions, and that was saying something. The unthinking and uninformed always fear an unseen enemy. From reds under the bed to radiation in the head, the public gets the wrong end of the stick, is ignorant and hysterical and impossible.
He stopped. Everyone in the studio was startled; even the camera crews were listening.
Next day Gerald Coustain called from the Department and said he thought Carl May had gone a little far in insulting the public so; it might not be a wise move considering the state of near-panic it appeared to be in. Let him at least appear to take the Chernobyl fallout seriously.
‘OΚ, OK,’ said Carl May. ‘I’ll bleat away in public if that’s what you want.’
‘We’ve now pulled together some very fine and modern instrumentation,’ said Gerald, ‘so we won’t be calling on Britnuc any more. I have to tell you that in some parts of Cumbria, it now seems, the needles had been going once round the dials and back again, and our technicians simply hadn’t noticed: they weren’t expecting it. Human error’s the real problem.’
‘It certainly is,’ said Carl May.
‘Still, we’ve got the problem solved now, I think. We may have to take lamb off the market, though.’
‘That’ll just panic people more,’ said Carl May. ‘If Cumbrian lamb is twice as radioactive as Sussex lamb, why don’t you ask people just to eat one Cumbrian lamb chop instead of their usual two? Or if they’re really hungry, buy Sussex.’
‘Because people’s minds don’t work like that,’ said Gerald.
‘I know,’ said Carl May. ‘That’s the trouble with them.’
22
The world turned upside down. I went to Carl’s office to have it out with him, but he had it out with me, and took some living cells from my neck, what’s more: the kind of good fresh bloodless tissue that’s rich in DNA: he could grow all kinds of me from that – he’s right. Ugly, headless, always miserable, always in pain: five-legged, three-headed, double-spined: every leg with perpetual cramp, all heads schizophrenic, and spina bifida twice over. If he wanted, if he could persuade them to do it, that is – and he is a Director of Martins Pharmaceuticals, isn’t he, and benefactor of this and that: an interesting experiment, he’d say, a favour. You do this for me and I’ll do that for you. Would they? Snip and snap, create a monster? Not if Carl May put it like that, probably not, but if he said, humbly, in the cause of knowledge, just let’s see if we can, just let’s see. Only the once, then never again. (For once is ethical, twice is not.) Then you never know. They might. But what should I care; what is it to do with me? ‘I’ wouldn’t suffer. The ‘you’s’ might. Poor distorted things.
I saw my husband run his hands through her hennaed hair, that’s what I remember, that’s what makes the ‘I’ suffer, become well and truly me, with a shock which got to my solar plexus. I know he despises her. I could tell.
Yet still he ran his fingers through her hair. Patronizing little bitch, little whore: in my home, bathing in my bath, her hairs blocking my plughole. I know. It was all in the blue-foldered report of the Maverick Enquiry Agency: there it stuck, a hennaed hair, long and silky, catching soap scum. Disgusting. Bethany! To be supplanted by a slut called Bethany: me, Joanna May. It would be easier if she was called Doris, or Betty, a name so ordinary it was deprived of resonance: became what I wanted it to be.
The world turned upside down: inside out, round and about; fire burn and cauldron bubble: bubbling vats of human cells, recombinant DNA surging and swelling, pulsing and heaving, multiplying by the million, the more the merrier: all the better, the more efficiently for biologists and their computers to work upon the structure of the living cell, the blueprints of our lives, decoding the DNA which is our inheritance. A snip here, a section there, excise this, insert that, slice and shuffle, find a marker, see what happens, what it grows: record it, collate it, work back and try again. Link up by computer to labs all over the world. Bang, goes Mr Nobel’s gun, and off they go, false starts and fouling, panting and straining, proud hearts bursting, to understand and so control, to know what marks what and which – and better it. This DNA, this double helix, this bare substance of our chromosomal being, source of our sameness, root of our difference – this section gives us eyes, that segment of this section blue eyes, take it away and presto, no eyes – laid bare the better to cure us and heal us, change us and help us, deliver us from AIDS and give us two heads. And all of it glugging and growing in a culture of E.Coli – the bacteria of the human colon, tough, fecund, welcoming, just waiting around all that time to do its stuff at our behest – toss it, turn it, warm it, start it; nothing stops it. Well why not? Let the brave new world be based upon E.Coli – the stuff that gives us healthy shit. If our purpose on this earth is to salvage goodness from a material universe gone somehow wrong (which was what Oliver maintained) how more appropriately should it be done than by starting with shit and building up: creating not out of nothing, where’s the glory in that, but forging miracles from debris, detritus. Now there’s an accomplishment!
The vats are filled with pale, thin, milky translucent fluid, life itself, remarkably reflective of colour; slip, slop, plop. If the lab ceiling’s green, then the culture shines green. Change the colour at will. Violet most impresses the visitors, but who wants a violet ceiling?
If you’ve got a good cow, don’t breed from it, just repeat it: two by two, out of the ark. Take out the nucleus, cow-and-bull, mix in a newly fertilized cell, reintroduce an all-cow nucleus and what do you get, with any luck? Little twin clones, cow plus repetitions! I, Joanna May, beautiful and intelligent in my prime, now past it, am a woman plus repetitions, taken at my prime. Carl’s fault, Carl’s doing.
I am horrified, I am terrified, I don’t know what to do with myself at all, whatever myself means now. I don’t want to meet myself, I’m sure. I would look at myself with critical eyes, confound myself. I would see what I don’t want to see, myself when young. I would see not immortality, but the inevitability of age and death. As I am, so they will become. Why bother? Why bother with them, why bother with me? What’s the point? I can’t bear it. I have to bear it. I can’t even kill myself – they will go on. Now night will never fall.
I have never felt so old: I am all but paralysed. The back of my neck hurts where the vampire bit it. My heart aches where he struck at it.
I should have stayed home, as Oliver suggested.
23
Gerald Coustain said to his wife Angela, ‘I don’t know what’s got into that fellow Carl May.’
Angela said, ‘Is he any worse than he usually is?’ They were eating fish and chips in a Chinese chippie with an eat-here section. With the meal, which included slices of white bread and butter, they drank sweet tea. This was their favourite food. They resented spending good money on food they liked less at expensive restaurants.
‘Yes he is,’ said Gerald. ‘He’s saying what he thinks on television. He’s usually much too discreet for that. There’ll be a public outcry. People can hear the sound of jackboots marching, the minute he opens his mouth.’
‘I expect it’s his new girlfriend,’ said Angela. ‘People who’re foolish in one direction become foolish in them all.’
‘What makes you think he has one?’
‘Joanna rang me up in a state. Something had set her off.’
‘That’s not very reasonable of her,’ he said, ‘if what you say is true, that she’s having it off with the gardener. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.’
‘Yes,’ said Angela, ‘but neither likes the other having any.’
‘Is he a good gardener?’ asked Gerald, when he had absorbed this.
‘She didn’t say. I expect so. She’s very fussy about that kind of thing. Always having her curtains cleaned and her wallpaper changed, and her kitchen units brought up to date.’
‘I’m a good gardener,’ said Gerald.
‘I know you are, my dear,’ she said. They each took a chip from the other’s plate, in a gesture of continuing love and trust.
‘Now she has a lover,’ said Gerald, hopefully, ‘we won’t have to ask her to the lido again, will we? We won’t have to be sorry for her.’
‘I rather liked her coming to the lido with us. I think she enjoyed it. She looks very good in a cossie, I must say. Didn’t you think so?’
‘I didn’t notice. She looked down her nose at me,’ said Gerald. ‘I had to stay wrapped in my towel. I didn’t want her to see my paunch. There was nothing I could do about my varicose leg. She stared at that. No wonder Carl May got rid of her.’
‘It would be a better idea,’ said Angela, ‘if you got rid of your paunch and your varicose veins. Eating here won’t help. If only something healthier was our favourite food. Do you think the fish is radioactive?’
‘Pretty well everything is,’ said Gerald, sadly, ‘if we’re to go by our new monitoring equipment. But I’m not sure if it’s been calibrated correctly. We’ll just have to hope for the best. You don’t mean to go round and see Joanna, I hope? You know my feelings about getting too close. All of us at the lido is obviously a good deed: you and her together smacks of a conspiracy.’
‘She’s my friend,’ said Angela. ‘I really do like her. She keeps saying things I don’t expect!’
‘If being her friend makes him your enemy, it isn’t safe. I’ve told you that. I always take care to be very polite to him.’
‘I think,’ said Angela, ‘they ought to get back together again. I think they still love each other in their hearts.’
He was pleased she thought so; a professor of Modern History both so wrong-headed and so romantic at heart; his wife, sharer of his chips.
24
Joanna May did not get back for many hours to her house on the banks of the Thames, where once a monarch had kept his vulgar mistress, and when she did she found Oliver dead. She’d wasted time talking to Angela, and then walking around Richmond Park to calm down. She found Oliver hanging by a rope around his ankles from a beam in the barn which was now a garage, swinging gently first this way, then that, his arms fastened gently across his chest as if he were an Egyptian mummy. His face was calm and not distressed, his eyes were open and everything he saw, if only the dead could see, was upside down. His bare young feet were smooth on top and rough-skinned underneath, but that was no surprise to Joanna May: she’d felt them often enough, and the nails were tough and horny and had earth beneath them as usual – the boots he liked the most to wear were not watertight. They stood neatly together in a corner of the garage, placed as if on guard. Who in the world would want them now, poor battered useless things? This way, that way, he swung. She sat down to adapt to a world deprived of this especial goodness, to recover from the shock. She grieved for his mother, and his friends, and the girl in Scotland he would never marry and the seedlings in the greenhouse which no one now would get round to planting out.
She grieved for herself, of course she did. Who now would fill her bed? She was old. She was old: surely the old could be spared the shock of losing a lover, of understanding that the body that inspires you, fills you, is frail, mortal, corruptible, as liable to stop on the instant as anything else. This way that way. Through the grief and shock ran a thread of relief: it was over, finished: sharply, quickly: now he would never decide it wouldn’t work: wouldn’t one day see her wrinkling skin in a clear light, or some aspect of her nature she could no longer hide and decide she wasn’t the one for him, and be off (in the fallow season, of course) to some other garden in need, some other divorced lady with excellent alimony and a waiting bed. The back of her neck hurt when she moved it. The graze smarted.
Her fault, of course, her fault: she wailed aloud, and a bird fluttered down from the eaves and out the open door. (She thought it carried Oliver’s soul with it, and now she was truly alone and he was truly gone.) His eyes had shut now, the lower eyelids drooping, as the flesh gave up its residual resilience. She was glad of that: he had seen more than enough upside down.
On the floor, beneath the hanging body, brushed by Oliver’s hair, lay a single card from the Tarot pack. It was the Hanged Man, from the Minor Arcana, that benign and peaceful fellow suspended by his feet. Above, below, to right and left were four more cards, the Queens of Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups.
She should never, as a wife, have tried to discuss the nature of reality with Carl: her fault. She should never have told him about the Fates, about there being more gods than one God, about the Tarot pack: fidget as he might over the Financial Times, he heard, he heard: he did not forgive and he did not forget. As an ex-wife she should have faded away, ceased to exist: not quite murdered, not quite unmurdered. Her fault. She should never have told Carl May about Oliver, boasting, denying the inevitability of her desolation, her non-existence; her fault: she should never have answered back: her fault. She should never have gone in the first place, but listened to Oliver. She should have come straight home to warn him: her fault: she should never have allowed him into her bed: her fault. She had, she had, and now Oliver was dead. Her fault. A little niggle of anger arose, swelled; she screamed and screamed. Not her fault, not her fault at all. Carl May’s fault. Carl May the murderer.
