My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  George and Sophie stayed on the moon. Trish heard about them on the news from time to time and had a three-minute phone call from George once a month. Whenever she looked up at the moon she had a thrill of wonder thinking that George was there. She missed him, and found the phone calls unsatisfying. But she would walk along the canal and look up at the silver disk and shake her head and marvel.

  A few weeks after Doug moved out, Trish was summoned out of a council meeting with an urgent message. “Your husband is in the Infirmary and needs you.”

  She finished the meeting and then went to the Infirmary. Mark had suffered a stroke. “He’s only fifty-four,” she said.

  He was paralyzed down one side and could not speak. “People do sometimes make a good recovery from this kind of stroke,” the doctor said. “But there may be another clot, and while we’re doing what we can, it doesn’t look good.”

  She called the children, pushing ten pences into the pay phone in the hospital corridor. Helen said she’d be there in half an hour. “Don’s setting up a big system in Torrisholme so he’s not here. I’ll drop Tamsin with Bethany if that’s all right.”

  “You do that. She’s at home with Alestra tonight. And tell her where I am and that I may be late and she shouldn’t worry.”

  Doug was in London, working on a new album. He refused to come. “Dad and I have always hated each other. There’s no point pretending anything different, Mum.”

  “I know you’ve always had a difficult relationship, but that might be a reason to try to reconcile now before it’s too late.”

  Doug blew a raspberry down the phone. “I’m sorry, Mum, but there’s no point, and I’m not buying into all that hypocrisy.”

  She left a message for George to be relayed to the moonbase when possible. “I know you won’t be able to come, and your father can’t speak, but if you send a message I’ll make sure to read it to him,” she said, after she had explained the situation.

  Cathy was out. Trish left a message with the nanny and said that she would call again later.

  Helen arrived as she was on her way back to the ward where Mark was. She was hugely pregnant and her walk was a waddle. “I could hardly fit behind the wheel of the car,” she said. “Tell me it’s not the same ward where they had Gran that time? I couldn’t stand the irony.”

  “It’s a men’s ward, but it’s very similar,” Trish admitted.

  Mark glared at them from the bed when they went in. Helen went over and took his good hand. “Are you all right, Dad?”

  Trish did not ask how he could possibly be considered to be all right. She saw the body in the bed as the shell of the man she had loved and hated and finally pitied. She pitied him even more now. She was trying to think what she was going to do if he did not die. If he recovered that was all well and good, but what if he continued to live in a state of paralysis, as so many people did after strokes? She did not want to have him at home, she shrank from the thought, but what else was there? She couldn’t cast the burden onto the children. He bellowed suddenly, making both of them jump and bringing in a nurse.

  “What does he want?” Helen asked the nurse.

  “No telling when they’re in this state,” the nurse said.

  Trish went to try Cathy again and this time caught her. “I can come, but it’s going to be very complicated,” Cathy said. “Should I bring Jamie? Dad’s only seen him once.”

  “Do whatever is easiest,” Trish said. “This might be a false alarm. He has had a stroke, but he could live for years.”

  “Or he could die tonight,” Cathy said. “But it’s so late now. I’ll come first thing in the morning, I should be there by lunch time.”

  Trish went back in. “Cathy’s coming tomorrow,” she said.

  “Good,” Helen said.

  Mark grimaced, or perhaps it was supposed to be a smile. A nurse came in and took his blood pressure and adjusted the drip in his arm. “I think I should go and collect Tamsin and get her home to bed,” Helen said. “It’s getting late.”

  “Yes, go and come back tomorrow,” the nurse said. “He’ll probably sleep now.”

  So Trish went home. Helen took Tamsin and went home, and she and Bethany sat in the kitchen and drank chamomile tea. “How is he really?” Bethany asked.

  Trish explained concisely. “Sometimes people live for years and years in that condition. He could die at any minute, and I think it would be a blessing if he did. What am I going to do if he doesn’t?”

  “It’s not your responsibility,” Bethany said. “You’re divorced. They shouldn’t even have called you really.”

  “I feel so sorry for him seeing him so helpless like that,” Trish said. “And I did say ‘in sickness and in health’.”

  “That doesn’t count after divorce,” Bethany said. “It gets cancelled out.”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Trish sighed.

  “Go to bed. And don’t feel responsible for him.”

  Trish went to bed, and was roused by the telephone in the small hours. She thought it must mean that Mark had died, but it was Don. “Helen wanted me to tell you that she has gone into labor. She’s gone to the Infirmary in the ambulance. I’m going to bring Tamsin to your place and then join her there.”

  “I’ll see you soon,” Trish said. She dressed and made tea and ate a handful of nuts and raisins. She wrote a quick note for Bethany: “Helen in labor. Tamsin will be asleep in her room. Please give her breakfast and take her to school! When Cathy comes if I am not back send her to the Infirmary to see Mark. Thanks, T.”

  Don arrived with a sleepy Tamsin. “Hi Gran. I might as well have gone to bed here earlier!”

  Trish hugged her. “Isn’t this exciting! You go up to bed. Bethany’s downstairs, and I’ve left her a note to wake you in the morning. This reminds me of that night nine years ago when you were born.”

  She pulled her coat on and hurried out into the night with Don. As they walked down the hill she thought what a strange world it was—Mark possibly dying while Helen’s new baby was being born. She couldn’t say that to Don, she didn’t know him well enough.

  “Have you thought about names?” she asked instead.

  Helen’s labor went easily, as it had with Tamsin. Don stayed in the room the whole time, which was the first time Trish had ever heard of a man being present at a birth. The baby was another girl. “Donna Rose,” Helen said, looking down at the red-faced bundle.

  “She’s perfect,” Don said, sounding awed.

  Trish went to look in on Mark. He was asleep, snoring. He looked helpless and diminished in size under the hospital covers.

  By the time Cathy arrived Trish was exhausted to the point where she could barely keep her eyes open. “We think your father’s going to pull through,” the doctor said to Cathy.

  Trish went home and slept. She was woken by the telephone again—this time George, calling from the moon to find out how Mark was. “They think he’s going to survive. But he’s paralyzed and he can’t speak,” she said.

  “What are you going to do?” George asked, his voice strange and full of echoes.

  “When he’s well enough to come out of hospital I think I’ll put him in his study.”

  “It shouldn’t all fall on you, Mum,” George said.

  “Who else is there?” Trish asked. She didn’t want Mark, but she felt she couldn’t just abandon him.

  Mark was released from hospital in October, by which time Trish had his study ready for an invalid. He still couldn’t speak, but he could make noises and call out. Doug, home for Christmas as usual, took one look at Mark and turned his back. “He’s like an animal.”

  “You’d feel sorry for him if he was an animal,” Trish said. As she had done with her mother, she found a woman to come in and take care of Mark while she was at work. This one was called Carol. She had been a nurse and stopped when she had children, and now did private nursing.

  Trish’s life settled into a routine again. She continued to teach at the scho
ol, and to teach her evening classes. Mark—paralyzed, incontinent, bellowing—was a burden she had to deal with. She tried not to let it grind her down. She didn’t know if he was alert and angry inside his head, or how much the stroke had wiped away. Was he trapped in inarticulacy, did he long to be sarcastic and unkind as he had always been? Or was he really the animal he seemed? She sat and read to him sometimes on evenings when she was at home, trying to convince herself he was quieter when she did that. She fed him and cleaned him up, like a huge baby.

  “I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Bethany said.

  “I couldn’t expect the children to do it. And those nursing homes are terrible places. I go sometimes to visit my old headmistress. The smell—disinfectant over stale urine. I couldn’t send him there. And a private home would be so expensive.”

  “He has his pension from the university. Or Doug could pay it without noticing. And George and Cathy are doing well.” Bethany shook her head. “You’re too nice.”

  “Maybe I want to have him in my power,” Trish joked, and then she wondered if it was true. But she didn’t feel as if the thing in the bed was really Mark; more that it was a shell Mark had left behind, a shell that needed tending. “He’s just another baby, but one who won’t grow up.”

  Bethany stayed downstairs, a tower of strength. On Trish’s suggestion she stood for the council, and won, which now gave the Preservationist Independents a bloc of six, which as they tended to caucus with the Greens gave them a reasonable say in what got done. The days when Trish could overhear the mayor saying that global warming meant it was a waste to put money into Morecambe were over. She found the work was often frustrating when established interests refused to consider things that she thought were good sense. There was a huge battle that year over moving the market. It had been on its present site since 1660, not long enough for it to be considered traditional, according to some of the council who wanted to sell the land for a mall. The Preservationists resisted them fiercely and won. The market was revamped and made fireproof and given ramps, but stayed where it was.

  Helen had another baby, a boy, Anthony, in September 1986. Cathy continued to be a banker and a single mother, but in 1986 she began dating another woman in her bank, Caroline. By winter they had moved in together and she brought her home for Christmas. Trish did not take to Caroline, who treated her as if she knew nothing about feminism and needed to be educated. She tried not to be relieved when she and Cathy broke up before the next Christmas.

  George and Sophie came home from the moon, and had a party to celebrate their wedding with their Earth friends in Sophie’s family home in Aberystwyth. Trish couldn’t make it because of Mark, so she held another party for them in Lancaster. They settled down in Cambridge and had twins, Rhodri and Bronwen, born in February 1988. “We didn’t want to risk having babies on the moon,” Sophie said. George went back into space soon after, to the big international space station, Hope. He was there for several months at a time, then back in Cambridge for a few months. Sophie was working in Cambridge on the Mars terraforming project and on hydroponics for the planned domes.

  “Will you go to Mars?” Trish asked, apprehensively.

  “Not on the first mission,” George said. “But maybe eventually. When the twins are big enough. Mars will be a proper home one day.”

  27

  Time’s Wingéd Chariot: Pat 1978–1985

  Philip went to the King’s College and worked seriously on his music. Pat and Michael began the Seven Wonders Foundation, which eventually grew entirely out of their control. Soon they had lists of seven wonders on each continent, though Pat never felt that any of the American ones could possibly really count. “New York’s skyline, indeed,” she muttered to Bee. “I’m glad to have anything protected, but how can that be considered artistic or historical?”

  “They’ll be moving all their weapons in there,” Bee warned.

  All the countries of United Europe and the USA and the USSR signed the Seven Wonders Pledge, along with Israel and Egypt and China and India, which made Pakistan the only nuclear power holding out, and Michael felt confident that the Shah of Iran would help put pressure on them.

  When they came home from Italy in the autumn of 1980 it was to terrible news from Lorna. “Thyroid cancer,” she said.

  They visited Lorna in hospital where she was starkly bald from chemotherapy and so thin her bones showed. “If only it did some good,” she said.

  “She’s only fifty-two,” Bee said, afterwards as she wheeled herself back to the car. “My age.”

  “Is it radiation?” Pat asked.

  “Maybe. It could just be one of those things. There have always been cancers. But thyroid—could be. Could well be. Not likely Delhi, but it could be Kiev. That was such a thoughtlessly placed bomb. Poor Lorna.”

  “She was the first lesbian I knew well,” Pat said.

  “Me too. The first lesbian I ever knowingly met. At one of your parties in that flat on Mill Road.” Bee levered herself into the driving seat.

  “She was the person I asked what women do together, when I first realized I was falling for you.” Pat wiped her eyes and heaved the wheelchair into the car.

  “Really? I never knew that. I didn’t ask anyone. I just sort of went on instinct.” Bee shook her head as Pat sat down and did up her seatbelt.

  “Poor Lorna. Well, she may pull through.”

  “No,” Bee said. “Not with anaplastic thyroid cancer. Don’t get your hopes up. We can cure AIDS and leukemia, but not this kind of cancer.”

  Lorna died before Christmas. They went to her funeral on a bitterly cold day. Although they hadn’t belonged to a choir in years, Lorna’s partner Sue asked Pat and Bee to sing “Gaudete.” “Lorna used to talk about you singing that at a party years ago,” Sue said. Pat sang it, and remembered the party, before Suez or the Cuban Exchange, before the children, when she and Bee had only just met. Bee’s voice was as powerful and true as ever. “We really did know Lorna for a long time,” she said to Bee on their way home.

  Bee’s mother also died that winter, at a great age. They all went up to Penrith for the funeral. There was a bit of trouble as Bee’s brother Donald tried to put Bee and Jinny in the first car and the rest of the family in their own car. Pat would have let it be, but Bee insisted fiercely that her family were staying together. In the end they drove their own car and left immediately from the graveside. “Why did he have to be like that?” Bee asked. “I hate it when people won’t acknowledge my family as real. All of us.”

  The girls took their A Levels that summer, 1981. Flora did well but not spectacularly and took up a place at Lancaster. She had grown out of the flower goddess phase and chose to study computer science. Jinny did brilliantly. She was accepted at Pat’s old college, St. Hilda’s, to read English, but in Italy that summer she changed her mind. “I want to study here,” she said. “My student loans are good for anywhere in Europe, aren’t they?”

  “They are,” Pat said. “But are you sure?”

  “What could be more blissful than studying sculpture in Florence?” Jinny asked. “Can I live in the house?”

  “There will be some students living here, but there should be room for you as well. Is sculpture your passion then, Jinny-Pat?”

  On the day of the Indo-Pak crisis Jinny had been a plump teenager with long black hair, and now she was a willowy girl with a short crop that curled over her ears, but the look she gave Pat was exactly the same. “I still don’t know. But it’s closer.”

  “We might all fly out for Christmas,” Bee said when they told her. “I’ve always wanted to do Christmas in Florence.”

  They did that, and discovered the lack of insulation in their house. “It was built to catch drafts,” Jinny said. “Thank you for bringing all my warm clothes!”

  In Italy, instead of presents being brought by St. Nicholas at Christmas they are brought by La Befana, the Epiphany witch. “More like Halloween than Christmas!” Philip said.


  Bee was enchanted with the tiny objects on sale for nativity sets. “Baskets of mushrooms!” she said. “Prosciutto!”

  “You’re buying all the toy food, and we don’t actually have a Nativity set,” Jinny said.

  “I’m going to give them to Flora,” Bee said. “Look, a tiny salami! And a wild boar!”

  Flora arrived on Christmas Eve and was enchanted with the miniature food. “They’d be wonderful for a doll’s house,” she said.

  “I knew you’d like them,” Bee said.

  “But it’s freezing! I had no idea it was cold in Italy in the winter!”

  “It’s one of Italy’s best-kept secrets,” Jinny said. “I suggest you sleep with two hot water bottles.”

  Michael, being Jewish, did not celebrate Christmas. When he visited in the middle of January he was delighted to eat Pat’s truffle pasta with the wild boar salami they had brought home. Philip at fifteen, the only child still at home, ate three helpings.

  “You’re looking tired,” Bee said to Michael when they had finished dessert. “Have you been working too hard?”

  “I’ve been feeling a bit run down. And I keep falling asleep. And I’ve had a sore throat that doesn’t seem to go away. I may see the doctor about it.”

  “You do that!” Pat said.

  Two weeks later when Pat came home from school she found Bee crying into her geraniums in the greenhouse. Pat crouched before the chair and put her arms around Bee. “What’s wrong?”

  “Michael has it.”

  “What?” Pat asked.