The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

by Brian Stableford

  Even before it happened, she’d had the sense of only just hanging on to her self-respect by her fingernails, never quite being able to pull herself up and away from the brink of the abyss. Now....

  Now, in spite of all she’d resolved to do and be, she was in free fall into the darkness and into the cold. Her brittle fingernails had shattered, and left her nothing to hang on with, and now her mind had collapsed, and life itself had become too much for her. She wanted to die. She wanted to be dead already. She wanted to be left alone, so that she could fall forever in peace, and vanish unmourned into the void.

  Naturally enough, that wasn’t allowed. In this day and age, you couldn’t just be raped, you had to be a victim, and you had to follow the script that had been written in blood by doctors and feminists, policemen and psychiatrists, mothers and ladies from Victim Support. You couldn’t even play dead, because every time you so much as twitched an eyebrow somebody would be saying “Good, that’s good”, as if the very concept of badness had been banished beyond some invisible cordon sanitaire drawn around your bed.

  It was only to be expected. They weren’t going to let her get away with lying down and dying, any more than they’d let her get away with all her other sins and all her other failures. You couldn’t ask to start over just because you’d fouled things up, could you? Life wasn’t like that. You had to take it as it came and live with all your mistakes. Nobody got second chances.

  Mother had always told her all of that. Mother had always been very free with that sort of advice. Mother had always been a great one for picking at old saws and using them to make things bleed. Not that she ever meant to be unkind—not even when she turned up at the hospital while Meg was still spaced out, and lectured her at some length on the subject of pulling herself together, telling her that for once in her life she had to be tough, for everybody’s sake.

  “Everybody” presumably meant Emily, but Mother wouldn’t bring Emily in to see her.

  Actually, Meg thought she’d always been tough, until now. Tough-minded, anyway—you couldn’t really be tough in other ways when you were so small and thin. She had always been one of those people who told herself that it was better to know the truth, however horrible, than not to know. She had always been proud of being that sort of person, proud of her conviction that ignorance was anything but bliss. Until now....

  Now, she found it quite impossible to be tough—especially when Mother explained, in the nicest possible way, that she hadn’t brought Emily to see Meg because it would upset Emily too much to see Meg lying there all messed up. That was particularly bad because Meg thought that Emily was the one person who might be able to bring her back from the void, the one person who might be able to ameliorate her misery. After all, Emily was the one real reason she had for not wanting to start over, for not wanting to have forgotten everything, for not wanting to be dead. It was okay to forget your parents, especially when their love was so cloying, so wounding, so prolific in the misery it caused, but you couldn’t want to forget your own kid. It simply wasn’t on, even for a complete failure like Meg. But they wouldn’t let Emily see her. Instead, she was confronted with an endless series of monstrous comforters, every one of them just as motherly as the next: the lady doctor, the lady from Victim Support, Mother herself....

  Even the police, doubtless leaning over backwards to be sympathetic and diplomatic, sent a female officer to interrogate her, as soon as she could make a statement. The policewoman, whose name was WPC Lowther, told her she’d done very well indeed before recapitulating the description, checking off every single detail with the careful relish of a predator who already had the sense that this one wasn’t going to get away.

  “Five foot six or seven. Stocky build. Fair hair; a two-month-old razor cut growing out. Nose crooked, probably broken at some time in the past. Pale skin; lots of acne scars; right cheek scratched. Pale blue eyes. About eighteen, no more than twenty. Black T-shirt with a silver motif half-flaked away, possibly a five-pointed star inside a circle with lettering underneath, too broken up to be legible. Blue jeans, black trainers. Is that everything?”

  “That’s everything,” said Meg, more faintly and far less distinctly than she would have liked. She hadn’t yet been down to the orthodontist, and now that the stitched-up wounds around her eye had become infected that appointment was likely to be postponed for several more days.

  “It’s good,” said the policewoman. “Very good.”

  “Did you get any blood from under my fingernails?” Meg asked, lifting her hand so she could look at her newly-clipped and neatly-filed nails. Manicurists were not inconvenienced by infected facial wounds.

  “I think the doctors got more than enough tissue samples to get a DNA-fingerprint,” WPC Lowther confirmed. “We also have a witness who saw him running away. We have a very good chance of tracking him down. These types that go berserk are the ones we almost invariably do catch—they don’t plan things, you see, and they don’t cover their tracks very well. Nothing’s certain, but he’ll need a miracle to slip through the net, and I don’t think he’s a likely candidate for one of those.”

  The last remark didn’t make Meg feel as good as WPC Lowther had intended. Meg didn’t feel like a likely candidate for a miracle either. Mother, who still clung to the vestiges of her religion, had often pointed out to her that she couldn’t expect any favors from God, all things considered.

  “In court....” Meg began, doubtfully. She stopped abruptly. The possibility of going to court was so remote as to be almost meaningless, and yet....

  The WPC must have been used to dealing with this kind of case. “It’s okay, Meg,” she said, swiftly. “That’s a long way off yet. Don’t think about it. Let’s catch him first.” Her voice had a hint of unease about it, and she was quick to add: “You mustn’t worry about the court. He isn’t going to be able to say that you let him do it, is he? Thirteen stitches around your eye, three broken teeth and two broken ribs can hardly be the result of a misunderstanding, can it? We’ve got photographs of everything. If we catch him, he’ll go away. No doubt about that. Anyway, you’ll be a great witness. There aren’t many people who could have given me all this.” She raised her notebook triumphantly.

  “But they’ll ask....they’ll ask about....other things.” Meg’s voice had shrunk to an awkward whisper, which sounded despicably feeble.

  “About your sexual history?” The WPC shook her head vigorously. “Not relevant. Don’t believe what the tabloids say about the worst part of any rape case being the trial. The judge won’t let defending counsel take a line like that, given the violence that was used. The fact that you’re a single mother won’t make a shred of difference. Quite frankly, it wouldn’t matter if you were on the game....” Meg watched the WPC hesitate as doubt momentarily shadowed her thoughts, but she picked up the thread effortlessly enough. “It won’t be pleasant, of course, but, compared to the rape itself, it’ll be no sort of ordeal at all. You can stand in the witness-box and tell the absolute truth, knowing that every word you say will paint the bastard blacker. If the defense has any sense at all they’ll want you off the stage as soon as possible. They probably won’t cross-examine you at all. You mustn’t be afraid. You have to concentrate all your energy on getting better. That’s all that matters. You have to get your life back. You have to think positively. I think you’re tough enough to do it. I know you are.”

  “I’ve always been tough,” Meg said, weakly, wishing the WPC wasn’t such an exact clone of her mother. “Five foot nothing and thin as a rake, but tough. Always.” She couldn’t convince herself. If I were tough, she told herself, sternly, I’d have handled it better. I’d be handling it better now. If I were tough, I wouldn‘t feel that I’d be better off dead.

  “That’s right,” said the WPC, dutifully responding to the spoken word rather than the treasonous thought that it surely couldn’t have concealed. “You might have lost a battle, but you can win the war. Don’t worry about your little girl—your mot
her’s looking after her and everything’s fine. You’ve got to get past this for her sake as well as your own, and you can. You can put it behind you and start going forwards again.”

  If only it were that easy, Meg thought. If only I’d been going forwards before.

  * * * *

  Meg knew the news was bad because her mother and the lady from Victim Support were moved carefully into place before the doctor arrived. She didn’t like to be so crowded. She felt embarrassed because the massive doses of antibiotic they were drip-feeding her to clear up the infection in the wounds around her eye had given her terrible diarrhea. It was nightmarish enough to have diarrhea while she was hooked up to a drip feed without being surrounded by people who weren’t nurses and weren’t immunized by experience against the effects of close proximity to the horrid and the degrading. Just as the infection was an obvious symbol of her failure to do things right and her failure to cope with having done things wrong, the diarrhea was a symbol of her inability to avoid giving offence to others, especially those who loved her most. Except, of course, that the infection would clear up, in time, and the diarrhea wouldn’t last forever....

  “Emily’s perfectly fine,” her mother assured her, while they were waiting. “She’s longing to come to see you, but I knew you’d want to wait until you looked a little bit less like the Phantom of the Opera. She’s such a sensitive child, isn’t she?” Not like you, she implied, effortlessly, in spite of her sugar-sweet smile.

  The doctor seemed uncomfortable, as if she too would have preferred to speak in private, without the crowd. Who, Meg wondered, had actually decided that her mother and the lady from Victim Support should be present? Who had the power to organize and orchestrate such things? Or did they just happen by coincidence, as a result of the unfortunate accumulation of a pathological superabundance of good will?

  At least the doctor didn’t beat around the bush. She wanted to get it over with. “The test results have all come in now,” she said. “The ones we did here, that is—the police surgeon had the tissue-samples sent away. Everything’s satisfactory....except that you’re pregnant. I’m sorry.”

  The doctor went on, but Meg didn’t hear what she said. She didn’t hear what anybody said for two full minutes. She just chewed her new teeth furiously, wishing they didn’t taste like something alien, something that didn’t belong inside her mouth. All of a sudden she seemed to be full of things that didn’t belong. She’d been invaded. This whole affair was an alien invasion; she was surrounded by body-snatchers, inside and out.

  When Meg finally got around to paying attention again, the lady from Victim Support was talking to her mother about the abortion. “Of course it’s not a trivial matter,” she was saying. “No abortion ever is. But in cases like this, where it’s obviously for the best, there’s very little danger of long-term trauma.”

  Her mother was nodding, in that worldly-wise and sensitive manner she had refined by long practice.

  Meg didn’t want to talk shop with the lady from Victim Support. She didn’t want counseling, and she didn’t want reassurances about lack of long-term trauma. She just wanted to know when the alien invasion would be over, so she could have her own body back—so she could go back to being an ordinary common-or-garden human alien moving through the uncaring hostility of everyday society, instead of a victim and a host who had somehow begun to attract rapists and cuckoos and all manner of hateful monsters.

  Some people, she knew, would have taken all of it in their stride. Some people would even have found things to like about it. Some people would have been glad of the attention, glad about all the worry being expended on their behalf, flattered by all the kindness and all the planning. If only she’d been someone else, she realized, this might have been a turning-point in her life. All her life she’d felt like an outsider, an also-ran in the human race, a bad girl, an incompetent in the everyday business of living, a person incapable of maintaining any normal or rewarding social relationship—but now, if only she’d had the right attitude, and the wit and determination to seize the opportunity, she could have put all that right. Being a victim could have been a way back in, a way of building bridges. But she wasn’t someone else. She was Meg, and for her the worst thing about being a victim was Victim Support—not the charity per se but everything the charity stood for.

  If he’d only hit me a little hit harder, she thought, if my skull had been just a little thinner, I’d never have recovered consciousness, and I’d never have known anything about it. Perhaps that’s what really did happen, and all this is just a dream, a fantasy exploding in my head at the moment of death. Or maybe this is Hell. Maybe this is what I get for being a bad girl, for never being what Mum wanted me to be, for getting pregnant at school and having to leave, for going out dancing and drinking and taking drugs, for not being a good mother, for getting raped....

  “You mustn’t worry,” the doctor told her, with a careful kindness that seemed almost macabre. “Everything will be all right. In ten days or so you’ll be able to have the abortion. After that, if there are no further complications, you can go home—to your mother, and your little girl. Just concentrate on getting back to normal. You’re doing very well. It’ll all be okay.”

  “That’s right,” her mother said. “Once we get you home again we’ll soon have you back on your feet. You’ll feel better once you’re back where you belong. Everything will be fine.”

  These are the fictions people live by, Meg thought. This is the way the world works. This is what I can’t do, and will never be able to. It must be me that’s odd, me that’s mad, me that’s bad, because they aren’t, are they?

  “Thanks,” she said, out loud. “I’ll be okay. I really will.”

  “By the way,” her mother said. “They’ve caught him. That nice WPC told me to pass the message on. They haven’t charged him yet because they’re waiting for the DNA-fingerprinting tests to be completed, but it’s definitely him.”

  “Oh,” said Meg, helplessly. “Good. That’s good.” And she wondered why she was such an unnatural creature that the only thing she felt was sick.

  * * * *

  At first, when Miss Tomlinson introduced herself and sat down beside the bed, Meg didn’t think there could be anything to worry about—nothing serious, at any rate. After all, her mother wasn’t there, and the lady from Victim Support wasn’t there, and even the doctor wasn’t there. It only took her a few minutes, though, to realize that these might be indications that matters had reached a whole new level of seriousness, and that this might well be the point in time at which she realized the error of her assumption that things couldn’t get any worse.

  “I’m afraid this is going to be difficult,” Miss Tomlinson said, ominously. “Very difficult indeed.”

  At least she was making no attempt to be kind. She had the grace to look stern and stiff-lipped. She was about Mother’s age, but slightly better-preserved. Her hair was black and her eyes were very dark. She looked as if she could be quite fearsome if she got angry, but she wasn’t angry now. She explained, quickly and efficiently, what she wanted Meg to do.

  “You want to transfer me to a private clinic?” Meg repeated, tackling the easy one first. “Two hundred miles away, in Sussex?”

  “That’s right,” Miss Tomlinson said. “I know it’s asking a lot, but I have to ask. I have to ask you to trust us, completely—and I don’t have any way to demonstrate to you that we’re trustworthy. All I can tell you for the moment is that it’s very, very important.”

  “I can’t,” Meg said, flatly. “Do you have any idea what my mother would say if I told her I was going to a private clinic in Sussex? I’ve got to go home as soon as possible, for Emily’s sake.”

  “We can work out a way of bringing your daughter along,” Miss Tomlinson said. “Emily’s not a problem. But everyone else— not just your mother but the doctors here, and the police—have to be kept out of it. The police are easy to deal with because they know how to follow orders without
asking questions or making a fuss, but the others might have to be handled more delicately if we’re to avoid awkward publicity. We’ll figure out a convincing pack of lies—but you’ll have to be a party to it. You have to be inside the curtain of secrecy. We’ll need your full co-operation.”

  “Who exactly are you?” Meg asked, wondering whether someone whose face was as badly puffed up as hers still was could contrive to incorporate astonishment and suspicion into her expression.

  “I work for the Home Office,” Miss Tomlinson told her, blandly. A civil serpent, Meg thought. Her father always called civil servants “civil serpents”. It was his idea of a joke.

  “This is crazy,” Meg said. “It’s like something out of Kafka.” Meg had never read The Trial but she’d seen the Orson Welles film on TV, with Anthony Perkins pretending not to be Psycho. She’d watched a lot of films on TV since Emily had tied her to the house, forcing her to abandon her older and wilder ways.

  Miss Tomlinson nodded. It was just a straightforward nod, without frills. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But we really don’t mean you any harm. If it would help at all, we’re perfectly happy to offer you money. I can guarantee that all your needs will be more than adequately met for the foreseeable future. You can have anything you want, within reason, if you’ll co-operate with us.”