by Maggie Gee
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Let’s listen to him.’
The cartoon Dove and Dovelet had vanished, and the presenter became a little wildeyed, trying to explain the science and making a hopeless cockup of it. After a while I turned it off, and we looked at each other, exhilarated.
‘It is amazing,’ she said, slowly. It’s a quantum leap. It makes our old Dove look so out of date. I’d quite like to have one. Godknows why …’
Her eyes were still large, young, blue, but her hands as she stroked her neck were different, the little hands I had always loved now marked with a delicate delta of veins and a drift of faint brown stains like leaves. Could she be going through the menopause? – Those pills in her bag. I felt a twinge of pain.
‘I’ll buy you one,’ I said, ‘for your birthday. The old one was nothing compared to this. Let me buy you a Replicator.’
I hadn’t the slightest sense of danger.
We promise for the future, but time moves on, and when the future comes it’s different. She had a November birthday, of course, so I always think of her on Bonfire Night; I do even now, when nothing’s the same, when the wild boys choose which building to torch and the bodies come hurtling out and screaming, arcing out white from the thirtieth floor like so many flaming Roman candles, and it could be her against the night, I’ve no idea where she is now, for I hear the Southside is virtually deserted …
If she survives. My dear, my darling.
Things changed for the worse before her birthday came. Luke was spending the whole week in the Commune, and I found that instead of going to school he was being ‘home educated’ by the women, though it wasn’t his home, for heaven’s sake, and I can’t believe it was education. He was twelve years old. They were wasting his time.
Perhaps that’s unfair. He did sing divinely, and he’d started to do it in public, as well, though it mostly seemed to be at fundraising events for the weird new women’s collective, ‘Wicca’, an outgrowth from the Children’s Commune.
Wicca. I still shiver, remembering their name. I confess I occasionally browsed through Sarah’s study, when she was away for too long a stretch, just to be sure that her desk was all right, and I found a pamphlet that would have seemed farcical, if it had not included her name, high on the masthead with Juno Jakes’s. It was a ghastly amalgam of many things. First, a wacky female nature worship, centring on ‘the Hidden Goddess’, who apparently ‘gave suck’ to us all (count me out, I was bottlefed), ‘pentagrams’, ‘equinoxes’, ‘handfastings’; second, a ‘new biology’, starring a singlecelled female bacterium which, scientists had recently discovered, had given up sex three thousand years ago; third, a rigid, doctrinaire politics whose central premise was ‘separate development’ (for women. They didn’t mention men. These bitches were too stupid to remember apartheid). The nub of it was, they were through with men. They didn’t want us as lovers, or fathers, or friends. The ideas were banal, the logic nonexistent, the rhetoric feeble, laughable … And yet I was worried, until I saw that the top sheet was scored across by hand with the words ‘DRAFT ONLY – SARAH, WHAT DO YOU THINK? J.’ It was Juno, of course, with her humourless voice, her heavy black hand, her childish writing. My quicksilver Sarah would see it was rubbish. Revere the Goddess, and harm none … We are of the Earth, and of Nature … We’d have a jolly good laugh about it together.
But she never mentioned it, so I didn’t either, because if I hadn’t snooped I would never have seen it. I assumed it had gone into the dustbin of history. No sensible woman would swallow such nonsense. After a bit I forgot about it. And Sarah kept me at a distance from the Commune and Wicca and the whole damn thing, mostly because I was a man, I suppose. It embarrassed her greatly, being married.
There were a few occasions when some of the women – I admit I called them ‘the coven’, sometimes, mostly to my mates down at the Scientists, but occasionally to Sarah, too, and when she was in a good mood, she laughed, but the old good moods became rarer and rarer – called at the flat to pick up Luke or work through something on Sarah’s computer. Sarah usually warned me, and would ask me to go out or keep a low profile while they were there. But occasionally she forgot to warn me, occasionally I didn’t obey.
Then she treated me like a dog, for their benefit.
– Not like a dog, she treated me like a piece of wood, a stick, a stone, a broken chair, something she had no further use for. I think she hoped they would assume I was a man who’d come to fix the plumbing, since women hadn’t rushed to claim that profession, sticking their heads down stinking drains.
I suspect that few of them were fooled, in fact, because they probably had their own guilty secrets. Men hadn’t disappeared from the face of the earth just because women didn’t want to live with us. There was many a household where a man clung on in some dirty cupboard to what had been his home. I’d found that out at the Scientists, when the drinks flowed freely and the truth spilled out, and sometimes the men who seemed most staggish, the most determinedly gladtobegay, burst into tears and admitted they were trying to hang on to the remains of their family.
Some of those Wicca women must have seen through Sarah. One I suspected of pitying me, a beautiful young woman with cornstraight hair and a soft country accent – Devon, Somerset? – Briony Barnes. (But I didn’t want pity.) Luke made her sound like a sailor: ‘Briny’.
The first time I met Briony, she’d arrived early, just as we were sitting down to breakfast, and I had poured a pot of tea, which Sarah virtually snatched from my hand. ‘We’ll go in my study, Briony,’ she said. To me she said nothing at all, not a word, not ‘thank you’ or ‘goodbye’, and she didn’t introduce me, and the pot burnt my hand as she grabbed it from me, and besides, I was thirsty … I wanted respect in my own sodding home, but failing that, I wanted my tea.
It was all too much, and I went after them. ‘Are you sure the tea is enough for you, Sarah? Wouldn’t you like my toast as well?’
She glared at me in stifflipped fury and said ‘We’re busy. Go away. This is Briony Barnes, Wicca’s Weapons Officer.’ She obviously thought that would impress me, but I merely thought it ridiculous – how could someone so young and pretty handle weapons? – so instead of shaking Briony’s hand, I saluted, and Sarah lost her cool completely and yelled ‘Go, you fool!’ and actually stamped.
But the beautiful blonde girl caught my eye, and tried to make me like her with a sympathetic look, a selfdeprecating, rather humorous look that surely gave the lie to that ‘Weapons Officer’. (A Weapons Officer. What the hell did it mean? What was going on with these new scary women?)
Brave sweet Briony. I understood nothing.
Sarah was right; I was a fool. I could never distinguish between true and false, real and artificial, love and hate. And the ultimate folly, the final mistake was to buy her another Dove for her birthday.
She’d said she wanted one, but never mind. One of the very first Replicators.
Both Luke and Sarah were home on her birthday, which made me feel hopeful; a family birthday. I gave her champagne and orange juice for breakfast. Once she had kept our flat full of fresh flowers, but no longer, now she was there so rarely, so off we went to Regent’s Theme Park and I took them to the Rosegarden Museum. We pressed all the panels with their heavenly scents, and I called her over to sample one that really did smell of deep red roses and all the memories we shared of summer. ‘Red roses for love,’ I said to her. She smiled at Luke and patted my arm.
Present giving was to be before lunch. Luke was in on the secret, and tremendously excited. I suppose he thought it might make everything right, finally bring his parents together – or was that my problem, did I think that? She gasped and blushed when she first saw the box, and unwrapped it in a daze, pink and flustered. I suppose our first Dove was in my mind, which was such a success with her, in the beginning. (I’d given her one child, hadn’t I? Was it so foolish to want to give her another?)
The new arrival perched on the carpet. We looked at it. I
t was extremely pretty, a petrol blue with a slight rainbow sheen on its wings and feet, a fluffy blue head, shallow babybird beak. The detail was about a thousand times better than it had been on our earlier model. I could see Sarah waver between pleasure and guilt, and I said, ‘Don’t worry. I wanted to buy it. It’ll be your slave if I get tired. It will sit at your feet and adore you –’
And Luke, who was watching, suddenly put in, ‘Call it Dora, then. That’s a good name, Dora.’
‘I vaguely thought it was male,’ I said. ‘What do you think, Mummy?’ (I liked to call her Mummy. If she was Mummy, then I was Daddy, and we would always be a family)
‘Female,’ she said. ‘Definitely. Dora will do. Thanks. It’s – fine.’
There was obviously something worrying her, but I took it to be the size of the present.
She looked at Dora. Dora looked at the floor. Her head was covered with azure feathers. ‘The detail’s, well, amazing,’ Sarah said, but I could still hear there was something wrong.
‘Go on, switch on,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what she can do.’
There was a pause. She didn’t move. Then Luke said, ‘Mummy, why did Juno say it was wrong to have Doves? It’s not true, is it? Say it isn’t true, I like this Dove, I want us to keep it –’
She did try to shush him, but it was too late. Things went downhill with bewildering speed. I had been so desperately keen to please her. (My life sometimes felt like a funfair ride, soaring and dipping with nightmare speed. I was sometimes a little highlystrung, though Sarah was wrong to call me manic depressive and vow to get me certified – it was just that I wanted to be happy. I wanted to be happy, and she gave me grief.) I lost my temper, utterly, completely. I remember swearing – about Juno, and the Commune, and women in general, and Sarah in particular, and marriage, and birthdays, and fucking families. I kicked a chair, I threw a lamp – not at Sarah, of course, but at the wretched wall of the wretched flat where we were cooped up together.
It wasn’t the row that decided things, though she left with a tearful, anxious Luke without eating lunch or making it up, saying she had to go to a big dinner that her women friends were having in her honour.
They had changed their name now, the witches’ coven, they were no longer the Children’s Commune. They had taken the name of their political arm, and would henceforth be known as Wicca World, which she assured me meant ‘wise women of the world’, not ‘worldwide witches’, thank you, Saul.’
I really had thought that Dora would please her. I think in her heart she had been pleased, and would have liked to keep it, but her politics were stronger …
It was bullshit, all of it, looking back. No one gives a fig about politics now; we’re all too frightened of freezing to death. Animals have no politics, do they? When did we stop being animals?
That awful birthday. I’d so looked forward to it. After they left, I was ashamed and savage. (If I’d held my tongue, it might have been all right. Why were men and women doomed to fight one another?) The flat was too cold, it felt desolate – I switched on the Dove because I was lonely, and watched it stir and melt and flutter, its lids lifting, its big blue eyes …
I realised too late why I felt so angry. That foolish longing to give her a baby. A second baby, even better than the first one. So I bought her a nice baby, and she turned it down. And that, I suppose, was the end of that.
9
They stayed away for three months or more. I began to wonder if I’d see them again. I thought of contacting them at Wicca World. I practised the phone call many times, and rang sounding sensible and normal – more sensible, surely, than most of their callers – but perhaps they detected I was mad and lonely. I met with a series of fogs and baffles that left me in no doubt that Sarah was a leader. Perhaps the leader; it was mystifying.
I was stuck in the flat they’d abandoned, with Dora. I found myself getting close to her. I began to use the ‘Sleep’ option more rarely, so she was functioning most of the day. She became … I can only say, a companion. Be honest, go further – she was a friend. And she offered the consolations of words. I’d made sure Dora had Poetryquote, meaning to play love poems to Sarah, but Dora said them to me, instead; she read me Auden’s beautiful words – I mustn’t start snivelling, someone will notice. (Today I’m writing at the back of the Dovecote, pretending to tally up the stores, and Kit’s around somewhere, worrying, fussing. I pretend to sneeze, and wipe my eyes.)
She never lay with me again … In my arms till break of day/ Let the living creature lie … After that birthday, it was over.
Dora stayed up with me at night through the awful hours before I slept. I was smoking again, which I hadn’t done since Sarah’s affair with that bloody doctor – and when she came back, I gave up for her. Now I smoked again, and tobacco, this time, fullstrength tobacco, industrial strength, imported stuff which cost the earth since hardly anyone in England smoked tobacco – but I wasn’t going to mimsy around with bloody ‘green’ marijuana, which was one of Wicca’s ‘pothecary’ of ‘lifegiving plants’. I smoked tobacco till I pickled myself, snorted like a dragon, thinking grimly of cancer, I’d give myself cancer and she wouldn’t care … but then I’d die, and they would both mourn me, too late they would realise what a man I had been …
But being a man was the basic trouble. What hope was there, if my sex was all that mattered?
It didn’t matter a bit to Dora. I could have been a man, a fish, a clown. She didn’t mind if I smoked, or swore, or drank too much beer, or wept, or farted. She ambled about making faint wheezing noises as she cleaned, gently. (They got that right, the new models weren’t ferocious cleaners, whereas the first Doves were all too like Sarah, who couldn’t clean without screaming and banging about.) So many things were an improvement, though Dora still tended to topple over things and lie there cheeping, her feet in the air. It was worth it, though, for the pleasure you felt when you’d righted her, and she said ‘Thank you’. In fact, Dora said ‘Thank you. I love you’, which I would have thought embarrassing once, but felt quite worryingly touched by, now. (But I couldn’t help thinking – would Dora be unfaithful? Could I ever leave her alone with people? Wouldn’t she love anyone who picked her up? It was just a legacy from living with Sarah.)
Talking to Dora was very rewarding. They’d added some pleasing extra touches. She said ‘Good to see you’ if she came into a room and registered a living presence; when a conversation between us ended, she’d say, in a humble, grateful way, ‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you. Thanks.’ Once again, it was so different from living with Sarah, who hardly listened to me any more because, she said, conversation caused quarrels. If I tried subjects beyond Dora’s understanding (but, of course, she had no understanding: she had a programme – it’s not the same thing) she would say, in a respectful, apologetic way, ‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me. Try again, slowly,’ and when I tried again, if she did no better she’d say ‘I’m so sorry. I’m not up to this,’ and this secondstage response was so thrillingly lifelike that I gazed at her, for a second, enchanted, her big blue eyes, pupils permanently wide, expressing innocent affection, her soft adult voice in that cute baby body … (What would Sarah have said? The first time, ‘I don’t get you.’ Second time, ‘You’re talking balls.’)
That was the point; they were better than us. We wanted them human, but better than us, biddable wives, welltrained children, mothers who never got cross or tired.
And unlike us they would never die. Because of the little ‘Replicate’ panel. I had looked at it many times already, and felt the electric tingle in my fingers drawing me towards it, tempting me. Of course it was tempting to make another being, to see the miracle before my eyes …
But you were cautioned against careless use. It was ‘extremely demanding’ of resources. The Dove would ‘suspend normal functions for the duration of the replication process’. Some of her own material would be recycled for the use of her ‘child’; you were told to expect ‘some longterm lessening of functi
on, change in appearance etc.’ after she had replicated. ‘This does not indicate a malfunction but is part of the normal lifecycle.’
I looked at Dora, sitting on the floor. She looked so new, so adorable, her feathers gleaming, the down on her crown … I moved my finger away from the button. It wasn’t right. She was simply too young. She should enjoy herself a bit, she wasn’t ready for all that yet.
She suddenly chuckled. The ‘chuckle’ was delightful, one of her most appealing new functions, the irrepressible, bubbly, gleeful chuckle of a happy child, and the clever thing was that each time it happened it was slightly different, so it didn’t get boring. It was set on a random programme, so she could chuckle at any time she was switched on, and afterwards she would say, sweetly, ‘I just feel happy’, or ‘Isn’t life fun?’
I had never lived with anyone who I’d managed to make totally, completely happy. I have to admit that when Dora did that, with a little shuddery motion of her wings like a child’s shoulders shaking with laughter, I felt for the first time in many months that I was happy, that life was fun.
I suppose I began to depend on Dora. She wasn’t always Dora; her nickname was Dodo, which suited her somehow, less definitely female than Dora for one thing, more playful and loving, a good name for a bird. I switched her off ‘Sleep’ as soon as I got up in the morning, touched the ‘Follow’ and ‘Conversation’ spots, and she would come waddling into the kitchen and talk to me or play me music.
I started to worry about leaving her at home when I went to the nanolabs in the day. There had been a spate of dovetheft; it was the modish crime, for a while, partly because of the manufacturers’ cannily short runs of each new adaptation. This increased demand to the point where even quite respectable people turned a blind eye if they could get, say, a Culturevulture in decent condition for a favourite child’s birthday.
