Forever Shores (19 page)

‘Well, I've purchased some shares in some companies. One that makes televisions, one that makes telephones, and another that makes cameras.'

‘Bold moves, bold moves indeed. I like it.'

Frederick finished his beer and extended his hand.

‘It's been good to meet you, Barker. Good luck with the business.'

‘Thank you Frederick. Will you be coming back?'

‘Well, who can say?'

‘I mean, will I ever see you again?'

‘You've bought yourself a cinema, you say?'

‘Well, yes.'

‘Then you'll see me again, Barker. You'll see me again.'

The Isolation of the Deciding Factor
Carmel Bird

The Work of Hermione

‘There are many poisonous aconites growing in the fields, but the monkshood variety is wholesome and medicinal, and the flowers are large, hooded, pale yellow, with a pleasant smell. The root is tuberous, sometimes consisting of one lump or knob, sometimes of more. A decoction of the root is a good lotion to wash the parts bitten by venomous creatures. The flower should be kept out of the way of children, for there is therein a farina which is dangerous if blown in the eyes.' So wrote Hermione Uhu in her doctoral thesis, paraphrasing the words of Nicholas Culpeper. Hermione went on to say that, as a result of her research, she was confident that when combined with the juice of the common strawberry the farina of the monkshood, applied to the eye, offered positive results in the isolation of the Genetic Unconscious Deciding Factor (GUDF). It all seemed too much like simple old witchcraft, and was a long time before anybody would listen to Hermione, but you will be pleased to learn that in the end her research was deemed valid, lives were changed, and a certain kind of wisdom prevailed.

Hermione Uhu has certainly made a name for herself. She now leads the team of medical professionals who report to the IOSV, the International Office for Species Variation, whose area includes the Office for Environmental Wonders (OEW). Hermione, at the age of forty, is the top surgeon and researcher in the field of Variation, but—apart from the fact that she is pale and thin and wears her black hair in a pageboy, uses no make-up, lives with her father who is a professor of something like philosophy, drinks vodka mixed with Sirop de Violette, and is, like so many members of her profession, mildly addicted to morphine—I can't tell you very much about her that is personal. She has beautiful slender hands and feet; everybody comments on those.

Hermione's life intersected suddenly with the lives of the Tillyards quite early in the twenty-first century.

The Birth of Norma

Imagine the shock suffered by Belinda Tillyard when her fifth child, her first daughter, was born with the paws of a kitten. When the midwife said ‘It's—a—girl' the spaces between the words gave those words an ominous weight. Belinda reached in joy for her daughter's hands, as mothers do, to marvel at their perfection, to count the fingers, to kiss the tiny, angelic fingernails. Alas. Belinda took to her lips two sweet little front paws with pale pink pads, covered in pure white down. The back paws were larger and stronger, but of course similar.

Belinda, observed with alarm by her faithful husband Gustav, who in fact somehow missed the sighting of the little paws, lapsed at once into an hysterical faint, clawing at the crisp green edges of the counterpane, and when she was brought round, the child had disappeared. Belinda believed she had been hallucinating, affected by the labour, the epidural, the gas, the stress of joy, seeing and feeling a mother's worst fears. The image of the little paws hung in her recent memory. Belinda, it should be explained, detested cats.

The Fate of Daphne

As a child of eight Belinda, with her friend Daphne, had crept through the witch's garden, a riotous tangled place filled with an alphabet of plants from adder's tongue to mandrake to wormwood, to peer in the foggy window. There was Mrs Macbeth with her wild white hair and her tartan cloak, bent over a pot hanging on a hook over the fire.

‘That's the cauldron,' Daphne whispered.

‘Ssh, she'll hear us.'

The witch had a reputation for catching children and boiling them up in her potions. The smell of cooking flesh was known to emanate from the cottage at all hours of the night and day. Mrs Macbeth sold her concoctions at a roadside stall—in brown glass bottles with corks in the top, and with lists of herbs and ailments on the labels. Knapwort harshweed will cleanse the lungs of tartarous humours, and is indicated for the relief of asthma. The bruised herb is famous for removing black and blue marks from the skin. Ploughman's spikenard promotes the flow of menstrual blood. No mention of rendered child, but it was obvious really. From time to time a child, particularly a girl, would disappear, never to be found, and the locals knew that the child, after being subdued with opium, had gone into Mrs Macbeth's pot. But nothing was ever proved. The bones were used to fertilise the garden which was the most luxuriant and burgeoning place for miles around. Every district had its witch, and people accepted the fact that some children were born to fill the bubbling cauldron, and that was all there was to it. If you wanted magic potions, you had to pay the price, after all. And they did. People wanted three kinds of medicine in particular—the love potion, the fertility drug, and the abortifact. Those were, of course, the old days before exact and reliable science.

So, to get back to Belinda and Daphne, they go creeping through the comfrey and nettles until they reach the window, and they hold their breath and gaze in at the woman stirring the pot, a woman guarded by a small wolf lying on the hearth-rug, and surrounded by a dozen cats of all shapes and sizes. All goes well, and the girls stare in fascination as the witch stirs her stew, and the cats doze, and the wolf looks with its yellow eyes into the blue flickering of the flames. Then Belinda leans against the branch of an overhanging almond tree, and there is a little cracking sound. A small grey cat on the mat opens its eyes, and looks straight into the eyes of Daphne who springs back, slips on a rotting red fungus and slides to the ground, caught and tangled in a malicious serpentine vine. Belinda has already reached the road when the witch, in response to the commotion, appears in her doorway. She catches Daphne in her arms, and whisks her inside before you can say ‘owl on the craggy rock'.

Daphne was never seen again, and Belinda was too shocked, afraid to tell anyone what had happened. In fact she didn't really know what had happened. One minute there was Daphne in her brown velvet dress with the lace collar, and the next minute there was nothing, and Belinda was running down the road with her eyes starting out of her head. Raving. Fear took her over, and she was never the same. She almost lost the will to live, but her mother, at her wits' end bought (at great expense) a brown bottle of something from Mrs Macbeth, and Belinda was restored to a kind of sanity. People guessed or knew the truth about Daphne, but it was all rumour and speculation. A scarecrow wearing Daphne's dress appeared in a field of prodigious opium poppies next to Mrs Macbeth's house. There's very little you can do in these cases, really, when all's said and done. And so Belinda had to carry the guilt (I snapped the twig) forever, and she focused this guilt on her fear and hatred of the cat that looked at Daphne, and of all cats in general. ‘Pathological fear of feline species' they wrote on her reports.

The Marriage of Belinda

Because she was so strange and moody, people imagined that Belinda would never find a husband. However Belinda's mother was a determined woman and, having resorted to the remedies of Mrs Macbeth in one famous instance, was not slow to avail herself of another. And so it was that Belinda's mother baked her celebrated cinnamon cookies, mixing them with a decoction of lady's smock, knot weed and a powder strangely reminiscent of dried baby's blood, and offered them at Christmas time to all the young men of the district. Only one man was affected, but of course this was fortunate, as more than one could have given rise to complications, and there was really no time for that. So Gustav Tillyard fell in love with Belinda and they were married in the local Uniting Church on the corner under the peppercorn tree to great rejoicing, and for many years there was a feeling of happy-ever-after in the Tillyard home.

Let's now return to the moment of the birth of Belinda's fifth child.

The Concoctions of UNNXS

The child born to Belinda had in fact been placed in a special section of the hospital nursery, the part called UNNXS, signifying Unusual Neo-Nate-Cross-Species, where the mutations appearing at the time of the turn of the century were kept for observation and consideration. There had been babies with lizard tails, with dog faces, pig snouts, rat brains—babies with the tearless eyes of crocodiles, the fluttering umbrella wings of bats. Pussyfoot, as little baby Tillyard was labelled, was the first known example of her kind.

Hermione and her team made the decisions regarding the future of the babies in UNNXS. They were skilled and experienced in the business of manufacturing one whole child from several parts, and for assembling the leftovers into astonishing constructions in the Concoction Area. The Concoctions were raised under secret laboratory conditions until such time as they expired or became redundant for one reason or another. Or until they became useful. During the week of Pussyfoot's arrival, there was also in the nursery a boy with the bill of a duck and strangely deformed lungs which appeared to be composed of spongy fungal material resembling fly agaric. His little hands and feet were perfect. So the decision was made, after due process and consideration at the highest levels of the Department of Law and Prophets, that Ugly Duckling would provide the material for the extremities of Pussyfoot, and that her paws, and his remaining parts, would be put aside, possibly for the re-cycle, or perhaps for the re-dundant. A lifelike replica of a perfect dead baby boy was provided for mourning and funeral purposes, and the Ducklings were informed that their child's respiratory system had failed shortly after birth, a true statement, after all. After an agonising length of time during which Belinda and all the Tillyards were kept in the dark about their baby, they were able at last to rejoice in the news that although there had been some problems with ankles and wrists, requiring micro-surgery, their baby was a lovely healthy girl. Her little limbs were wrapped in bandages, and there were therapies to be followed for some months, but eventually, her hands and feet were free, and she was simply perfect. They called her, as you already know, Norma.

This name was chosen from a misleading book of babies' names where it is said that the meaning is ‘priestess'. It does mean that, in a way, but the life of the poor druid priestess Norma of ancient times was a particularly violent and unhappy one—filled with bloody sacrifice, as well as murder and suicide. Not that anyone in Norma Tillyard's family was aware that another child had to die that Norma might live. Poor little Ugly Duckling died that Norma Tillyard might live. The interesting thing is that in naming her, as her mother thought ‘Normal', they built into her life terrible notions of treachery, of murder, and of suicide.

The Ravaging of the Planet

Belinda never quite suppressed the hallucination she had experienced at the time of Norma's birth. She kept it as a special kind of secret deep within her heart, for the moment had been so vivid, the little paws so very real. Truth to tell, Belinda relegated this image to a place where that other awful memory, the disappearance of Daphne, had its dwelling. And Belinda developed a passionate interest in news stories concerning birth defects and deformities, scanning the television screen, the web, and such popular magazines as came her way for references to children born with the paws of kittens. The magazines were in fact very few and far between because of a temporary ban on the use of trees for the manufacture of paper. In any case, as far as Belinda could tell, no story of a feline mutant ever made itself public. Belinda grew accustomed to the idea that her vision had been nothing but an illusion, a gross and misleading image from the depths of her unconscious mind, a mind overheated by stress and drugs and whatnot.

However, in the various media there was no shortage of other strange and quite amazing events to report.

It was a time of swift, dramatic and bewildering change. The sea would rise up and sweep away coastlines; fires raged across forests and cities alike; wild winds uprooted skyscrapers; there were famines and plagues; water supplies were polluted by nuclear waste, by surgical waste, by mysterious viruses. Kind priests locked their congregations inside the churches and administered lethal doses of old-fashioned poisons in the communion wine and somebody had to come along and decide what to do with the dead bodies all over the glittering pictorial mosaic floor. Stars came spinning out of the sky, searing the tops of mountains as they rushed by. This was so spectacular. Scientists gazed in fear at old pictures of the Tunguska butterfly—was that the result of a visit by random meteor or evil enemy? It goes without saying that the planet was eroded by wars of all kinds, and that hopeless people roamed about stripped of all, of hearth, home—on the seas, in the deserts, in the mountains, and through the jagged silent stench of ruined cities. A child was born in Peru with the head of Socrates.

The Safety of the Tunnels

The Tillyards lived underground in The Tunnels, spending a certain amount of time by day in The Basin which was a secure park open to the sky, at the hub of The Tunnels. Air and sunshine and fresh raindrops could thus nourish and give pleasure to the people. At night The Basin remained open to the heavens, to the moon and the stars, and because it was patrolled by guards equipped with the latest weapons and security devices, it was classified as a ‘Lifesafe Area A'. In the event of an environmental, political, or other disturbance, The Basin would automatically close over, shutting out the moonlight and the stars, until the threat had passed.

Norma Tillyard was a delightful child who, far from suffering from a weakness in wrists and ankles, was very athletic, and fond of physical activity. At the age of six she took up ballet in a serious way and rose to be, at the youthful age of sixteen, the prima ballerina in The Enlightenment which was the ballet company in The Tunnels. Norma's hands and feet were abnormally large and powerful for a girl of her build, but this fact enhanced rather than impeded her career.

The Great-Grandmother's Words

Meanwhile, far, far behind the scenes of Norma's life, back at IOSV, the research—into the reasons and uses for, and the implications of, such birth variations as hers—was continuing. The human species was, as they said at IOSV, ‘throwing up'. That is, the species was offering so many unusual variations at a greater and greater rate that researchers such as Hermione Uhu were coming round to the notion that these things really must have a meaning. Could they hold a key to some sort of knowledge? Now it was Hermione who incubated the idea that perhaps instead of forever looking, looking, looking into the blood and the genes and the environment of subjects such as Norma, she might examine the thought material, in particular the unconscious content of the imaginations and dreams of the parents of the aberrant babies. On the wall of her father's study there was a small sampler depicting children digging in a cherry orchard. It had been embroidered by Hermione's great-grandmother, and the text read: You May Find the Answer if You Look in the Right Place.