The Offset

by Calder Szewczak

  Jac pinches the bridge of her nose, trying to keep up. “I thought–”

  “She looks like she hasn’t been eating properly either,” Alix says quickly. “Or taking care of herself at all.”

  “Should I – can I speak to her?”

  A pause. “I already told you, she’s asleep.”

  “Yes, you did. Sorry. Probably just as well. She wouldn’t want to speak to me anyway.”

  “That’s not true–”

  “Does she sound as though she’s had a change of heart over the last two years?”

  Another pause. “We haven’t really had a chance to talk yet.”

  “But she didn’t ask after me?”

  “She was still half-sedated when I got to her. She didn’t say much at all. I’m glad you didn’t have to see her that way; it clean broke my heart. She could barely tell up from down.” Alix takes a breath. “I know she loves you, Jac. I know she does. She’s just still working through her problems, that’s all. You’re too hard on her.”

  “I know,” says Jac, a little testily. “It’s my fault.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “It’s true, Alix. You’re a brilliant mother. If it had been just you and Miri, maybe everything would have turned out differently.”

  “So you’ve said. And you know what I think of that. Miri needed you to be around more, not less, whatever you tell yourself.”

  Echoes of the old debates ring in Jac’s ears. Though she can’t deny Alix has a point, it’s still a hard one to accept when everything she tried to do only ever seemed to make things worse. Increasingly in the months before Miri left home, her every interaction with the girl had ended in tears and red-faced declarations of hatred.

  “I really did try to be there as much as possible,” Jac says at last. “We both did. But work–”

  Alix softens. “I know. Miri might not understand it now, but she will one day. She’ll know that everything you did, every decision you made, was for her benefit.”

  Jac chews her lip. The girl she remembers had always been resolutely unimpressed by her work, to the point where Jac sometimes thought Miri would prefer it if Project Salix failed and the world burned – to prove Jac wrong, if nothing else. “I didn’t think anti-natalists set much store by their parent’s wishes, however well-intentioned.”

  “Jac–”

  “It doesn’t matter, Alix. She can hate me forever, so long as she’s safe. I’m glad she’s with you. I know you’ll look after her.” Then, after a thought, she adds, “Don’t try to change her mind, Alix. She made her decision a long time ago. We should respect that.”

  Alix remains silent.

  “I never thought she’d come back,” continues Jac, “not after the way we left things… Maybe I should come home.” She sits up a little straighter. “What am I saying? Of course I should come home. I’m not sure when the next train is, but–”

  “Jac! Slow down for just a minute, would you? Let’s not be hasty here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is that not so long ago you were busy telling me that you had to go away for work, that you knew how awful the timing was but that it was still too important, that it couldn’t be avoided, that there was no one who could go in your place.”

  “Point being?”

  “I don’t see how Miri coming home changes any of that, much as I wish it would. Unless you were exaggerating about how serious things were?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, then…”

  Jac hesitates for a moment, and then something settles in her mind. “You’re right. I’m needed here. I have to set things straight. But I’ll be home tomorrow night, OK? Or sooner, if I can.” Then she adds, with urgency, “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” replies Alix, her voice thick with emotion, before hanging up the phone.

  Jac stares at the blank screen for several long minutes. Miri. For a moment, the girl’s face swims before her eyes, angry and tear-stained like on the day she left home. Miri’s back. She lets herself linger on the thought for a moment, feeling anew the ache of distance that lies between her and home, the long miles that stretch between Inbhir Nis and London.

  Pocketing the phone, she firmly redirects her mind to the matter in hand. She settles back against the headboard and, for what must be the hundredth time, she submerges herself in the document she brought from work, propping it up against her knees on the heavy lab book from her bag. Taking up the bottle of homebrew, she sips at it until it is empty and then cradles it in the crook of her arm.

  She reads through the report over and over, looping back through it until the early hours of the morning when, at long last, the numbers begin to blur and lace together so that she can no longer make head nor tail of them. When, finally, she sets the report and empty bottle aside and sinks down into her pillow, the warping figures are the only thing she sees against the black of her eyelids.

  She dreams of a rising tide of numbers. They mean to drown her; any minute now.

  05

  As soon as Alix puts down the phone, it takes hold: a spark that catches and spreads through her body like wildfire consuming dead bracken. Not now, she thinks. I can’t deal with this now. But she’s already burning like a furnace. Peeling away the thin cardigan she wears over her nightdress, she stumbles to the nearest window and hauls it open, even though she knows the humid night air will offer no relief. Gripping the sill with sweat-slicked palms, Alix breathes deep and tells herself that it will pass in a few minutes and that at least she is alone. She need not fret about the unsightly redness of her face nor the sweat pouring from her brow, she need not explain herself to some politely bewildered onlooker as she has on previous occasions. Small mercies.

  A few breaths more and it passes. As the heat subsides, Alix checks her watch and grunts. It’s the same time as always, the first episode of the night. They happen with an unerring regularity, as though her reproductive system is running its programme of self-destruction to a strict timetable. She should have been better prepared. Usually she would have thought to throw some gel packs in the fridge but tonight she clean forgot. Hardly surprising, she thinks.

  Miri lies asleep in the room directly above. Granted, the girl’s been knocked about, but now, at least, she is safe. Alix’s thoughts wander back down the same path they have been treading all night, circling the same question: Will she stay?

  As if in response, an uneasy vision crosses Alix’s mind of the day her daughter left: Miri alternately tearful and coldly distant, driven by some righteous anger that Alix could not grasp beyond registering – deep down – that this was their fault somehow, hers and Jac’s, that they had driven Miri away–

  Alix’s cheeks burn anew. It is as though a last, dying ember has been rekindled and the heat of shame is every bit as agonising as the hot flush. It’s still hard for Alix to think about those first days after she and Jac lost their daughter. She stored the memories away; nuclear waste in a shielded cylinder that must never be breached. It hadn’t occurred to her that she might need to confront them, least of all now with their Offset so close at hand. But with only days to spare, here Miri is, her reappearance the last thing either she or Jac was expecting, and disruption enough to bring those memories flooding back.

  Caught by a sudden irritation, Alix swipes at the back of her neck with a hand and her fingers come away shining with sweat. She leaves the drawing room and, painfully aware of her daughter’s sleeping presence, climbs the stairs on careful tiptoe, not trusting the thickly piled carpet or solidly built walls to muffle the noise of her passing. Once she reaches the safety of her room, she dries off with a clean towel from the en suite and then changes her nightdress. Bundling the drenched garment into the laundry basket, she wonders whether this is going to be one of the hell nights when she soaks the bedding through every couple of hours. If only Jac were home. When the night sweats hit hard, she fans Alix down and helps her change the sheets, countering Alix
’s mortification with easy humour. Sometimes they will stay up and brace themselves through it, stick a film on the overhead and chat until sunrise, Alix wrapped up in cold flannels like a living mummy.

  In truth, though, she only half-wishes that Jac were home tonight. Her absence gives Alix the chance she needs to make sure Miri knows what her nomination means, to make sure she understands the consequences her choice will have both for herself and for the planet. Alix saw the opportunity the moment the call came through from the Eye. And, to her relief, it hadn’t been hard to convince Jac to stay where she was in Inbhir Nis.

  It’s Miri’s decision, that’s what Jac always says. Alix doesn’t disagree with this. But she also knows their daughter. Miri has always been stubbornly short-sighted, prone to the most selfdestructive of passions. She has already proved herself capable of tearing apart their world. Alix cannot let it happen again. She won’t. Whatever Jac may think of it, Alix knows she needs to make Miri see sense, to help the girl shore up her resolve. There isn’t much time left.

  Opening the drawer of her bedside table, Alix withdraws a small, battered piece of paper, the words “Say no to life” emblazoned across the top. It is a flyer she found buried in Miri’s jeans when she helped the drugged girl into bed. Now, holding the flyer almost at arm’s length, Alix reads it again, as aghast as before.

  I saw the tears of the oppressed –

  and they have no comforter;

  power was on the side of their oppressors –

  and they have no comforter.

  And I declared that the dead,

  who had already died,

  are happier than the living,

  who are still alive.

  But better than both

  is the one who has never been born,

  who has not seen the evil

  that is done under the sun.

  Her face still as stone, Alix tucks the flyer back into the drawer. She wishes she knew where it came from; Miri’s hatred, Miri’s anger. Hadn’t she and Jac done everything they could for her? Given her every advantage? Sinking down to sit at the edge of the mattress, Alix reaches a hand across to the shallow imprint that marks where Jac’s body has lain beside hers for more than twenty years. She wonders if they will ever be forgiven.

  06

  It is morning before the tranquiliser completely wears off. Miri wakes early in her old bedroom and can’t help but wince at the sight of the brightly patterned bedsheets, the clutter of nail varnishes and rings littered on the dresser, the row of soft toys staring button-eyed across at her from a low shelf; the paraphernalia of her childhood and teenage years, all of which she was too dazed to take in properly the night before. There’s her guitar, leaning against the bookshelves in its scuffed case. Her old football jersey is slung over the desk chair; she can see where her name is embroidered on the back and the crude scribble where she tried to cross out the “Boltanski” part with marker pen. She rolls over and sees all her posters are still plastered around the bed. Peeling and faded now, most of them bear the faces of Octavia and the Butlers, her favourite band.

  Everything, she realises, is just as she left it two years ago. It feels alien to her now, as if the room belonged to someone else entirely. The only difference she can see is the patch of wall by the door where she once sketched a massive ouroboros in provocation of her mothers. It is blank now, painted over in block magnolia. She can just make out the faint lines of her drawing beneath the emulsion.

  With a rush of gladness, she sees that the white rat is curled in a neat ball on her bedside table, the ear on its back twisted in such a way that the sunken lobe nearly touches the top edge of the helix. Although the position looks deeply uncomfortable to her, she figures that it can’t be troubling the rat, for it remains fast asleep.

  Sitting up on the bed, she swings her feet down to the floor. As she catches sight of herself in the mirror on the dresser, she instinctively recoils. She doesn’t recognise herself in the thin, hard face that stares back from her reflection any more than she does in her memories of the girl that once inhabited this room. It is the first time she’s truly been able to see the change that the last two years have wrought on her; the effect is worse than she thought. Even she can see that she looks half dead. It’s a wonder that Alix knew her at all in the holding cell. How that boy managed to recognise her at the square, she cannot fathom.

  Reasoning that there isn’t much she can do about her looks now, she climbs out of bed with a sigh and peers around for her clothes. To her surprise, she finds the cable-knit jumper where she left it on the floor, still stiff with dirt and reeking of urine. Once, Alix would have almost certainly taken it away to wash or – more likely – bin, causing an almighty scene. Perhaps, Miri thinks, her mother has changed in the years she’s been gone. That, or maybe Alix is just more scared of her now she’s proven she won’t stick around and put up with being treated like a child.

  Leaving her room, she finds that her mothers’ home looks just as it ever did – at least at first glance. The décor is sophisticated, all muted tones with the occasional flash of colour: royal blue lampshades, modern stained-glass windows in one of the many bathrooms, bright flowers peering in from the balcony. On closer inspection, however, Miri sees the same tell-tale signs of decay that blight much of the city. The overhead lights in the hallway flicker intermittently, the paint is peeling away from the walls in several places and there are cracks in the ceiling. Miri even thinks she sees the first shoots of filterweed sprouting up from between the floorboards in the hall. She pauses, the sight of the red stalks inspiring a sudden dread that wells up beneath her breastbone. She vaguely recalls seeing a patch of filterweed in the holding cell but cannot say why the hazy image of it troubles her so. Then all at once she remembers. The struggling aphid. The leaf curled like an upright pitcher. With a shudder, she tries to shake the sensation away and presses on through the house.

  Miri finds her mother in the kitchen. Alix is sitting hunched over a counter, her flyaway hair wild about her face. Where it was once a vibrant strawberry-blonde, it is now streaked with grey and shorter than Miri remembers, cut level with her round shoulders. There are deep lines around her mouth and eyes, and there seem to be more freckles than ever scattered across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, and these have darkened with age and exposure to the sun. She wears a pair of square glasses – the lenses bound with a rim of gold and a thick top bar of glossy tortoiseshell – that are held on a fine chain which loops down around the back of her neck.

  As soon as she sees Miri, Alix drops what she’s doing, pushes her glasses up into her hair and hurries over to fold her into a warm hug. This time, Miri gives into it. She sinks gratefully into her mother’s arms and takes deep lungfuls of her wild rose and poppy scent. For all she might have told herself otherwise, there is no denying how much she’s missed her mother in the last two years.

  When they pull apart, Alix’s eyes are glistening. For a moment she looks broken, defeated; her brow is furrowed and her lips press together into a tight line that turns down at the corners. Then she recovers herself, snatching a quick breath and fixing her face into a smile. “You must be hungry,” she says.

  Miri doesn’t respond right away. She merely stands where she is, jaw slack, finger and thumb of her right hand circled around her bony left wrist. Then she gives a slow shake of her head. Alix frowns, but Miri ignores her. She doesn’t want to be forced to acknowledge aloud how thin she has become, even if she can see how much it’s frightening her mother. Right now, the thought of eating is too much.

  “There’s chopped fruit in the fridge,” says Alix, trying again.

  Once more, Miri shakes her head. Fighting the urge to lace finger over thumb, she stuffs her hands into her armpits. Her right leg begins to shake uncontrollably, her heel bouncing against the tiles.

  Seeing this, Alix throws up a conciliatory hand. “Alright,” she says. “We can come back to that later. For now, why don’t you just sit down and m
ake yourself comfortable?”

  That, at least, Miri thinks she can manage.

  There is a breakfast island in the middle of the kitchen with four tall stools around the edge. She draws one back, scraping the chrome feet across the tiles, and then heaves herself laboriously up onto the seat. With her toes, she finds the footrest and presses the balls of her feet onto the bar, which makes her right leg bounce more than ever.

  Alix regards her for a moment but says nothing. Then she pulls her glasses back down and turns her attention to what she was doing when Miri came in; darning a net that lies sprawled across the kitchen counter.

  “To keep the dragonflies off my sagittaria,” she says, apparently sensing the direction of Miri’s glance, even though her back is turned as she hunches over the counter to work. “This is the third one they’ve eaten through.”

  The net is gossamer-fine. There are large, ragged-edged holes in the mesh from where the dragonflies have laid their eggs and the hatching larvae have eaten away at the fibres. Like the filterweed, the neon hawker dragonflies are the legacy of yet another failed genetic-engineering project. Reconstructed from an extinct genus of Meganeura – an ancestor of the dragonfly from the Carboniferous era – the neon hawkers are instantly recognisable by their distinctive pink markings and their incredible size, some of the larger specimens having wingspans of up to seventy centimetres. Unlike the common dragonfly, the neon hawker is not quite so reliant on wetland environments and is a more effective predator, developed specifically to keep London’s swelling mosquito population in check. While they proved an effective measure against the mosquito, the neon hawkers bred rapidly and, having no natural predators of their own, quickly reached vast numbers. They are particularly attracted to the sagittaria and lilies that, Miri now recalls, grow in the water garden on her mother’s patio.