The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales - [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  “How long is the foreseeable future?” Meg wanted to know.

  “A long time,” Miss Tomlinson told her, frankly. “This is going to be a long-term thing, I’m afraid. Months, at the very least. Perhaps years, if the situation warrants it and you decide you want to stay with it. It won’t be easy.”

  Meg looked the older woman in the face, marveling at her laconic manner. Miss Tomlinson was so straightforward she seemed positively surreal. It was all surreal—as if the reality she’d only just got a grip on again was dissolving into a nightmare. She just begun to get the hang of being a victim, and now the Home Office wanted her to become....what, exactly? Oddly enough, though, the unknown didn’t seem quite as terrifying as it was cracked up to be.

  “They’re not going to charge him, are they?” Meg said, knowing that she was guessing but knowing that there wasn’t much else that could necessitate forcing the police to follow orders whether they liked it or not. “You want to get me out of the way to make sure that the whole thing will die down and be forgotten. Why?”

  Miss Tomlinson didn’t even raise an eyebrow. “That’s only part of the reason,” she said. “I’m sorry, but it’s necessary.”

  “Who is he? Somebody’s son? Somebody’s spy?” Meg knew as she said it that there must be more to it. If it were just something like that, they wouldn’t have cancelled the abortion which had been scheduled for the following week. If it were something as banal as that, they’d surely have rushed the abortion through.

  The civil serpent shook her head soberly. Meg was glad that the black-haired woman didn’t laugh at her, or try in any way to suggest that what she’d said was ridiculous.

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Miss Tomlinson said. “Much more important. I’ll explain just as soon as I can, but in the meantime I can only give you my word that it’s important.”

  “You’re not going to charge the rapist,” Meg said, still trying to make sense of it, “and you want me to have the baby. You really want me to have it, in spite of everything.” It’s not enough to have been invaded, she thought. It’s not even enough to have been invaded twice. It’s not enough to have your life laid waste, to have your last illusions shattered. Oh no...that’s not enough for Meg—not for little Nutmeg, the runt of the litter, who never got anything right. You don’t get off that easy, once you‘re damned to Hell.

  “That’s right,” said Miss Tomlinson. “I really am sorry.”

  “Suppose I say no,” Meg said, wishing that she could inject some venom into the words as she shaped them with her alien teeth and her still-rubbery lips. “Suppose I say go to hell, that I want the abortion and if the bastard isn’t charged I’ll squeal to the papers— and if the papers won’t listen, to the BBC or S4C or Amnesty International or MI5 or anyone at all who’ll take notice?”

  “We’d very much rather you didn’t,” said Miss Tomlinson, mildly. “And I’m afraid that we’d have to stop you if you tried. I really am sorry, but that’s the way it is.” If repetition meant anything, she really was sorry.

  “They sent you because they thought I’d take it better from a woman, didn’t they?” Meg said, trying her level best to sound vituperative. “In fact, they didn’t dare to send a man, did they? Because what you’re saying is that you’re going to rape me all over again, and the only fucking thing I can do is lie back and let it happen.”

  Miss Tomlinson condescended to look faintly surprised, although it wasn’t altogether clear whether she was startled by Meg’s calculated rudeness or by her perspicacity. “No it isn’t,” she countered, smoothly. “You do have a choice—as much choice as we can give you. We don’t expect you to like it, and we’re prepared to compensate you as best we can. This really is an unprecedented matter, you know. If you wanted to, you could look at it as a ticket to adventure.” She pronounced the word adventure without any hint of embarrassment—which, Meg thought, was quite a feat in this day and age.

  “Adventure!” Meg echoed, wondering why the syllables didn’l sound quite as contemptuous as she’d imagined or intended. “You must think....”

  She stopped, realizing that she really didn’t know what they must think, and that the fact that she didn’t know, and couldn’t guess, was evidence that something was going on that really was very odd, and that maybe—just maybe—the situation might not be quite as horrid as it seemed.

  After a long pause, Meg said: “What am I supposed to tell my mother?” It wasn’t until she had said it that she realized what a revealing question it was, and how much it said about her.

  “Medical complications,” Miss Tomlinson said, as quick as a flash. “I think we can swing that with the doctor, without having to be too specific. We can tell her that the tests carried out at the police forensic labs turned up something puzzling and worrying—which, in fact, they did, or I wouldn’t be here. Without telling any outright lies we’d probably want to drop a hint or two about AIDS—which, I can assure you, is definitely not a problem. The same hints will excuse our taking the man who raped you out of police custody. These days, people are only too anxious to see the back of someone who might be carrying that kind of taint. You might want to be a little vaguer or a little more reassuring when you tell your mother, so as to save her any undue alarm.”

  Might I? Meg thought. When was the last time she spared me any undue alarm? But that wasn’t fair, and she immediately felt guilty about it, as she’d been carefully trained to do. This is crazy, she thought, instead. Completely crazy. I’m the victim here. People are supposed to be helping me, not compounding the crime.

  “This is crazy,” she said, aloud. “Completely crazy. Like something out of a horror film.”

  “Yes it is,” Miss Tomlinson admitted. “But it’s intriguing, isn’t it? Mysteries are so fascinating—all the more so if they have just a little suspicion of the horrific about them.”

  When the lady from the Home Office said that, Meg realized how cleverly she’d been weighed up, how competently she’d been judged, how safely she’d been hooked. Miss Tomlinson had known that she’d play along obediently, that she was as weak as that, as gullible as that, as habitually compliant as that—but Miss Tomlinson hadn’t once tried to tell her that everything would be all right, when it patently wasn’t and wouldn’t be, and Miss Tomlinson hadn’t once said “Good” or “That’s great.” On the other hand, she had said sorry.

  I’m not going to get angry, Meg thought. I’m not going to be indignant. I’m not going to be terrified. For once in my life, I’m not going to behave like some TV cliche. I don’t have to do that, and the civil serpent not only doesn‘t expect me to, she actually expects me not to. It’s not an insult. It’s not another rape. It really is something important.

  “What do I have to do?” she said.

  * * * *

  As things turned out, it wasn’t so hard to tell her mother, partly because her mother made the mistake of bringing Emily along with her—thus forsaking any chance of a narrow and intense confrontation—and partly because Meg was able to capitalize on her reputation for being stubborn, disputatious and downright perverse. This was one situation in which Mother couldn’t win.

  “Well, if you absolutely insist on going,” her mother was eventually reduced to saying, “then I’m coming with you.”

  “You can’t,” Meg told her, defiantly, while keeping her eyes focused on Emily—who was sitting on the bed, as good as gold. “It’ll be difficult enough finding accommodation for Emily. It’s not the kind of place where mothers can come too. Anyway, I’m twenty-two years old. I’m an adult.”

  “Then I’ll stay in a hotel in Lewes—in Brighton, if I have to.”

  “There’s no need,” Meg said. With calculated brutality she added: “You’d just be in the way.”

  “I can look after Emily. You can’t—not properly, not, while you’re ill. Anyway, she’s supposed to be starting primary school in less than three weeks.”

  “I might be back by then,” Meg said, although sh
e had a very strong suspicion that she wouldn’t be. “And I can look after her perfectly well. I’m much better now that I’m finally off the antibiotics.”

  Mrs. Hughes changed tack. “I don’t understand this at all,” she said, in the kind of aggrieved tone of one who felt that the right to understand was just as sacred as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of middle-class respectability. “I can’t get any sense out of the doctors. That monster still hasn’t been charged, you know. That WPC who was so helpful to begin with has gone all tight-lipped. She says that there are problems with the medical reports. I suppose he’s going to get off by claiming to be schizophrenic or something—as if that were some kind of excuse.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Meg said, playing with Emily’s fingers and smiling.

  “Of course it matters! It matters that people don’t believe in evil any more—that everything is some kind of illness, so nobody has to take responsibility, as if everything were just chemistry and whatever people do they couldn’t help it. Time was when people knew that if they broke the law they’d be punished. Nowadays every evil-minded swine knows that the nastier he is, the easier it will be to plead insanity. It makes me sick.”

  Once upon a time such tirades had fallen upon Meg’s head like showers of sharp stones, making her flinch and duck, but over the years she’d built up a shell. Now, the ideas didn’t even rattle as they bounced off.

  “I thought you believed in the bad seed,” Meg said, maliciously. “I thought you believed that some people just went wrong, in spite of everything their long-suffering parents could do, that there was just something inside them that made them wicked and perverse.”

  “I never said that,” her mother said, lying in her teeth. “Yes, of course some people have a perverse streak that always makes them want to do the opposite of what they’re told, of course some people are just naturally contrary, but that doesn’t mean they’re not responsible. It doesn’t mean they can’t help it.”

  “Are we talking about the rapist or me?” Meg inquired, knowing perfectly well that she would get a dishonest answer.

  “Don’t try to be clever, Meg,” Mrs. Hughes retorted. “I don’t know how you can sit there, looking like that, with some....”—she hesitated, mindful of Emily’s inhibiting presence, but plugged on gamely—”...some you-know-what inside you, just trying to make more trouble. You want to go to this place in Sussex, don’t you? You don’t even care enough about yourself to ask what these people are doing and why. You’re so selfish.”

  Meg knew better than to charge her mother with inconsistency. “Sussex isn’t the other side of the world, Mum,” she said. “I’ll phone you. I’ll tell you what’s happening when I can. I’ll be fine. Everything will be all right.”

  Well why not? she thought to herself. Everybody does it. Why the hell not?

  “I don’t like it,” her mother said, bitterly, speaking the plain and simple truth for once. “I don’t like any of it. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.” But she finally calmed down, and hugged her daughter and her grand-daughter to remind them that she loved them very dearly, and only had their best interests at heart—which was true enough, in a way. In her perverse and contrary fashion, she really wanted nothing but the best for both of them.

  * * * *

  Meg studied herself in the hand-mirror. The last vestiges of the swelling had almost disappeared from the flesh around her eye. The stitches were long-gone and it was almost impossible to see where they had been. Her chest didn’t hurt much any more, although the damaged ribs were still bandaged and still let her know it if she breathed too deeply. She was almost back to normal—outwardly. As to what was happening inside, that was something Miss Tomlinson had yet to explain.

  In preparation for their scheduled meeting, Meg had run through all the possible options. Perhaps she really was carrying some new venereal disease, even more exotic than AIDS. Perhaps, in spite of Miss Tomlinson’s continued denials, the rapist really did have influential relatives—important enough to require the whole thing to be hushed up and important in some strange way that required her to have the baby instead of getting rid of it. She often thought, even now—but had never begun to believe—that it was all just a continuation of some morbid fantasy which was unwinding in her brain as she lay comatose in the bushes where her attacker had dragged her, while her life slowly leaked away.

  Meg dismissed all of these theories, on the grounds that they were either too simple or too fanciful. It had to be something more peculiar than any of them. She had begun to want it to be something so peculiar as to be hardly imaginable. What else could possibly justify and redeem everything that she’d been through, not just since the rape but since the moment she’d been born.

  “We’ve done a few more tests,” Miss Tomlinson said, demonstrating that even she was not beyond the reach of tedious cliche, “and we’ve chased several other lines of enquiry to their conclusions. We have a better idea now what it’s all about.”

  “It’s Rosemary’s Baby, isn’t it?” Meg said.

  One of the older woman’s jet-black eyebrows twitched. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Not in the sense that it’s the Devil’s only-begotten son, of course,” Meg said, as casually as she could. “Just in the sense that you’re going to ask me to carry it, and give birth to it, and maybe even love it, in spite of the fact that there’s something seriously odd about it.”

  Miss Tomlinson nodded, conceding the obvious.

  “Okay,” Meg said, proud of her self-possession and her self-control. “So tell me—what’s so special about it? What’s it got that your average common-or-garden rapist’s brat hasn’t?”

  “The rapist’s name is Gary Cordling,” Miss Tomlinson said, in a level tone. Meg didn’t mind that her question wasn’t being answered directly. She figured that the civil serpent would get there in the end, as all civil serpents invariably did. “He’s sixteen years old,” Miss Tomlinson continued, “although he looks older. He’s been in trouble before—quite often, as a matter of fact. He’s been in care since he was five. His mother just couldn’t handle him, even at that age. She said at the time that she’d tried her best, but that nothing seemed to be good enough.”

  Meg felt slightly uncomfortable. Her own mother had told her a thousand times that she’d done her best. She didn’t want to have any aspects of her own situation linked to that of the man—the boy— who’d raped her. She didn’t want to be invited to sympathize, or to understand. She had a five-year-old child of her own, after all, and she would never have put her into care, however perverse and wicked she seemed.

  “His mother was unmarried, of course,” Miss Tomlinson went on. “Her social worker at the time wasn’t surprised that she couldn’t cope—according to the reports on file, the only surprise was that she lasted so long before giving up on him. The social worker she had when the child was born had already registered a prediction that it wasn’t going to work out, on the basis of the mother’s unrelenting insistence that Gary didn’t have a father—that the conception had been some kind of freak, some kind of unnatural event. Gary’s mother never suggested that the Devil might have sired him, but she always called him unnatural. The social worker interpreted this as a neurotic attempt to disclaim responsibility—but even he recorded a comment that the mother was so very insistent on this point that some people might actually have believed her, if only the baby hadn’t turned out to be a boy. Do you understand why that ruled out the possibility of a virgin birth?”

  Meg had sat GCSE Biology while she was pregnant. She had intended to do A level, maybe even a degree, but it hadn’t happened. “Boys have Y chromosomes,” she said. “Y chromosomes have to come from fathers. If virgin births ever happen, which they probably don’t, the babies would have to be girls.”

  “Right. Except that Gary Cordling hasn’t got a Y chromosome,” Mr. Tomlinson said. “The mother was right. He really was unnatural—not conventionally natural, anyhow. But
nobody knew that until the police forensic lab had to produce a DNA-analysis of his blood and semen, in order to compare it with the samples they obtained from you after the rape.”

  “I don’t understand,” Meg said, more by way of punctuation than anything else.

  “Nor do we. There are people, apparently, who are born with an unpaired X chromosome; it’s called Turner’s syndrome. Almost all the reported cases are outwardly female but there are one or two on record who had male sexual organs—non-functional, of course. In any case, Gary doesn’t have Turner’s syndrome. His case is spectacularly different.”

  “How?”

  “Every single one of Gary’s chromosome-pairs is aberrant, and he has four additional unpaired chromosomes, which don’t correspond to any of the familiar ones. There’s no way he ought to be alive, let alone reproductively-functional. Ordinarily, it only requires a single breakage in a chromosome, or a pairing error, to foul up the entire process of embryonic development. Gary Cordling was no ordinary freak—if you’ll pardon the expression. The baby you’re carrying is proof of that, if any more were needed. There’s nothing supernatural about it, but it’s something that will take some explaining. In terms of the calculus of probabilities, what’s happened here is some kind of miracle.”