Life (41 page)

When she woke, the first thing she knew was that she felt horribly uncomfortable. She had fallen forward with her face over the side of the couch. There was a half-dried sticky murky patch on the rug; she realized with a shock of alarm and shame that she must have vomited. She tried to get up, felt the clogging weight in her pants, and recognized the stench of feces. She freed herself of the filled pants, and staggered across the room to close the curtains: it was dark outside. She dumped her underwear in the kitchen bin, crawled to the bathroom and cleaned herself up, impelled through the hideously effortful actions by an animal need to restore herself to order. It was only when she’d washed and put on a dressing gown that she saw her watch face and discovered with utmost terror that a day and a half had passed of which she knew nothing.

The half-decorated rooms were cold and silent. She ran up the stairs. Their bedroom smelled of shit, piss, and vomit. Spence was lying on his back, his beaky nose standing upright, his eye sockets and the skin around them darkened, his cheeks drawn and pasted with stubble, the corners of his mouth crusted. He stirred and opened his eyes.
What time is it,
he whispered. She didn’t answer. She ran to the baby’s room. He was lying in his cot, quite still, face down. He’d kicked off his blanket, and the room was cold. She took a step into the room. Jake rolled over and sat up. He stared at her, his eyes were huge and wild, she knew that he had passed through grief and terror into a hell of despair. He had cried and cried, and no one had come: he held out his arms, with a whimper of pleading, surely whatever he’d done they would forgive him now? Anna stumbled over and picked him up, his body warm, his arms clinging. He buried his face in her neck, with a deep sigh.

Rescue Werg the bear, who had fallen under the cot. Get Jake some water. Go back to Spence, leave them together in the warm soiled bed, bring a bottle of milk formula, more bottled water, clean bedding. Feed Jake, give Spence the water. Clean them both up, notice that the house was
really
cold; in fact there was gas but no electricity, was it the end of the world? Phone the group practice. When she finally got through to David, their doctor, he told her that if they were all now awake and warm, then the killing coma had spared them, they were going to be all right, and that he’d get an ambulance round as soon as possible.

The ambulance never turned up, but David had been right: the worst was over. It wasn’t the end of the world, the power came back the next day. Jake never showed any signs of getting sick. The three of them lived in that bed for the next many days, Anna and Spence taking it in turns, watch on/watch off, to be the nurse. Christmas was not much celebrated that year. The Ice Flu (or the Mammoth flu, because it froze people, or the White Storm, because of its swift and deadly passage around the northern hemisphere, before it plunged south) killed an acknowledged four hundred thousand people in Europe alone. Some of the estimates for the final toll reached a quarter of a billion. This was a news item that would be recorded in memory, even by Anna the oblivious, and would leave a scar on history that would take years to fade. But Anna’s mother and father, and Spence’s Mom, and Anna’s sister Maggie and her second husband (also the first, divorced one) and their children, and Frank N Furter and his current beautiful girlfriend, and Rosey McCarthy and Wol, and their families, and Marnie Choy, and Simon Gough and his family, and Ramone Holyrod and Lavinia Kent, and KM Nirmal, and Daz Avriti: they all survived. The disease burned itself out. Human life, in its vast numbers, closed over the gaps in the ranks, which meant nothing except to those who had lost faces they knew, and everything went on much as before.

Once, when Jake was going by the Salvation Army Citadel, he found a DRAGONFLY clinging to the railings. It was enormous, longer than Mummy’s hand, with huge eyes and glistening wings. He wanted to take it home and have it for a pet, but she said they couldn’t carry it around with them, it would get hurt, they didn’t have anything to keep it in. He went along with her to do the errands, thinking of nothing but his DRAGONFLY, so that there was no charm in the legos that you could play with in the Nationwide Bank, or the receipt from the money machine, or the lid that she gave him with his snack in the little house in the playground, or the picture-books in the library. He didn’t tell her what was wrong because he didn’t know that she’d forgotten, he thought she must be thinking of the DRAGONFLY too; so she didn’t hurry. They did everything at normal speed, except that Jake didn’t want to stay anywhere. When they got back to the railings, IT WAS STILL THERE. They took the DRAGONFLY home and transferred it to a leaf of the yellow flags that grew in the pond in their garden, and it lived there until it flew away, staying long enough to confirm in Jacob William Meade Senoz’s mind forever the certainty that good things happen. The first French word that he learned, after please and thank you, was
lalibellule,
the dragonfly.
Libellule, limace, escargot.
His mother taught him the names of these friendly creatures, with whom he lived nose to nose when they were camping in France, which was how they spent their holidays because it was cheap; and she told him, though their names were too long for him to learn, that he himself was made of tiny creatures, which lived in Jake as if he was a world, as if he was a meadow of grass: they fed on his food and air and turned it into Jake and into
puff
the way Thomas’s engine turned hot water into
puff
to make him go; and to help them do this they told each other stories the way Jake’s Daddy told him stories, about times gone by and things each of them needed to know.

In winter the creatures in his ears fought battles and did deals with his enemies, which caused Jake great discomfort and made him cry and stay awake all night. In the summer he traveled, over the narrow seas on a big boat like the one Mummy and Daddy used to have when they were pirates, and lived for weeks on the golden roads, with the slugs and the snails and the waterskaters and the dragonflies: in every city a cathedral, a museum, a river, an electricity station where they could feed the car, and a playground with swings and a sand pit. In Chartres, the car park wound in a snail spiral underground. In Rome he played splash with his mummy all around the fountains, including the Trevi where they bought their breakfast from a shop and Jake had a STUFFED TOMATO and ate it on a slippery blue seat, like a swimming pool: here mummy got in trouble for splashing someone and they had to run like rabbits. In Liguria he lost his Thomas Engine; in the Piano Grande in Norcia he collected sheep bones and saw a Humming Bird Moth; in the vastness of the Campo Santo at Santiago de Compostela Jake himself was lost. He cried, but he knew he would be all right. Someone would find him and take him home, and he’d be their little boy, like Thomas was now safe being somebody else’s engine, but what would his mummy and daddy do, how could they live without him? But a policeman found out who he was and brought him to his daddy, CONFIRMING that good things happen. He ventured onto the half built bridge at Avignon alone, while mummy and daddy watched from the barrier, because it was
daylight robbery,
he was annoyed because they were laughing but he came back dancing on his toes, because he had seen a tiny, a
tiny tiny tiny
little fish, in the river. In a place called Salamanca, his mummy told him something that made her very proud, it was where her granddad and grandma came from, Jake’s granddad in Manchester’s gone-to-heaven Daddy and Mummy. In Amsterdam, a disaster happened. They lost the world, the bag that came out with Jake whenever he left the house (or, when traveling, the car), which had held a changing kit in the time of nappies and still held everything Jake needed: his cars, his beaker, his bread and cheese, his lids, his felt-tips, his paper, his babywipes, his spare pants. Thank The God Who Makes Mistakes they had accidentally left Werg the Bear back in the yurt, their summer palace, or there would have been hell to pay, because the world, unlike Jake in Santiago, was never seen again and had to be recreated from nothingness.

Up in the Alps, on a long, long path enlivened by the best ever Shere Khan story, they gorged on wild raspberries and myrtilles and found a real glacier. Beside Lake Geneva mummy had to go to a conference. Daddy and Jake ate lonely ham sandwiches and fed the ducks that bounced on the white capped navy blue water, and Daddy told Jake part of someone else’s story about a poor sad monster that nobody loved… In every village an ancient church, a donjon tower, a fountain where Daddy and Mummy and Jake lay watching the wasps through an afternoon so hot that even wasps became harmless. In every town a
bar tabac
with
pressions pour mes gentils parents
and a peanut machine; on every mountain a ruined wall, a deserted shrine where the lizards basked, a place that was old under the sun, a place called Europe. On a red mesa above the town of Najara, where the storks nested, Jake had an epiphany. Let’s sit here, he said, for a little while, and think about how we are engines. Everything was very old, except for Jake and his mummy and daddy, and the road with the supermarket signs, the electricity stations, and the coke machines; the road that bound everything together, winter and summer, home and traveling.

Sometimes not-so-good things happened. On a path by the lake with the navy blue waves, near a campsite that was not the kind they liked, Jake’s Daddy and Mummy walked up and down while Jake played with his cars and watched them anxiously. It was a memory that would stay with him his life long, in the form of a deep disquiet woken by certain accidents of light on water, certain angles of sun and shadow. His mother was crying about her work, which Jake and his Daddy secretly hated, the thing that took her away from them.

“They’re forcing me off the road,” she wailed. “Either I back down and pay homage to the bastards, I say they’re right, or I don’t get to stay in the game at all. What makes me sick is to think I quit Parentis to clean up my act, so I would be fit to speak to the decent people—”

“You didn’t quit Parentis,” said Jake’s Daddy. “They dumped you. I mean, shed you, along with a lot of other people. You’ve never quit anything in your life, Anna.”

“Thanks for those kind words—”

“Sorry, I’m just trying—”

“I know what’s happening. I’m turning into Clare. Remember I used to say Clare Gresley was like an elf, fighting the long defeat; but a
bitter
elf, and that’s no good. I don’t want to be bitter. I hate the idea of clinging on,
bitter,
to an idea that no one wants. I’m going to pack it in. I will diminish and go into the west and remain—”

“NO YOU WILL NOT!” Jake’s Daddy grabbed Jake’s mummy by the shoulders, beside himself in his fury at her heartbreak.
“Fuck
that. If you diminish and go into the west you won’t remain my Anna. I won’t let you give up. You’ll do what you have to do, become a guerrilla, snipe from the sidelines: NEVER GIVE AN INCH.”

They went on talking then, pacing up and down in the small cage imposed by childcare. Jake knew that the crackling black lightning of misfortune had passed by, leaving his life unharmed. They came back smiling. He sat between them, holding his daddy’s hand and his mummy’s, understanding his grave responsibility. He was all they had to cling to and defend them from their enemies. He was the world.

“I want to stay here forever,” said Anna. “Living on the road in France, with my team.”

Forever and ever and ever.

ii

After their talk on Pasir Pancang beach Spence had confidently expected that Anna’s Transferred Y discovery would make them both famous. It didn’t happen. The paper that she published caused no stir at all. Maybe she’d pitched it wrong: Scientist Discovers Harmless Mutation in Sex Pair Chromosomes; not much of an attention grabber. The media storm never started. The life science and human genetics establishment didn’t ignore her, but they went straight from the position where Transferred Y was an outrage that could not possibly exist to yeah, TY exists, and so what? Cunning bastards. The wired world got more excited, but that was the Internet for you, always room for another cult. Anna wasn’t fazed, thank God. She was despondent for a while, but she recovered. It’s okay, she told him. I expected this. I have to build myself a rep, and I know how to do it.

So they set up house in Bournemouth, and it was good. Anna had contacts at Forest U, and in the dire straits of British Science, especially after the Ice Flu, there was a jolly blitz spirit, everyone in the same boat. She worked like a devil, borrowing lab time, trading teaching hours for tech support, while Spence looked after the baby and had a day a week to concentrate on his writing. He decided he wanted to be a tourist, do the stuff he’d never done in his Exchange Year, and carried his family off, whenever he got the chance, on a punctuated, shoestring Grand Tour. And that was fabulous, the ancient culture, the pictures and the landscapes, the stones and the cities, all that human history, so much fucking better for the soul than rubbernecking the road accidents of the present, in slum countries. Socially things were cool too. Their friends were pleased to see them in Holy Poverty mode, as pleased as when “Anna and Spence” had been glimpsed passing through London on their way from KL to Yucatan. Spence finished a novel and had it published (like Transferred Y,
Cesf
did not make much of a stir). Jake was the sweetest little guy, and Anna was happy, quietly carving a foothold in the respectable face of her science.