Life (42 page)

Then Anna defended her D (something about how TY managed to home in on the same spot, every time), and KM Nirmal was invited to set up a Genetics Department for a brand new local coast-conurbation college called Poole University. The old lag, one of the smart ones, had extracted a tasty early retirement package from Parentis. He could afford to work for peanuts, which was as well because peanuts was all the private corporation was planning to pay. He wangled the second-in-command post for Anna, a point six, good benefits; all thoroughly nefarious, an inside job in defiance of Equal Opportunities and national advertising, but too bad for the other poor bastards, Anna was
owed
this.

So the gypsy-science-lecturer years were over, and this changed things. Still no money, but one of them had a real job. One of them was no longer living like an outlaw.

He thought he saw pity and unease growing in his wife’s eyes. Soon Jake would go to school, and neither of them wanted more babies: what would Spence do with himself? His agent, when it came to the second novel, had told him he should try something else. He’d taken her advice, but published his novel anyway, on his website, downloadable for the digitally inclined, running off perfect-bound paper copies that he touted around the stores, taking Jake along with him in the stroller. He spoke to Anna about getting into small press publishing. She tried to act supportive, but he knew what she was thinking. She was afraid he was turning into her father: the bright-eyed failure, good for nothing but piling up debts.

This was the state Spence was in, the summer before Jake started school, when his mother called and told him Cesf was sick. She was going on vacation to New York. Normally she would leave the cat in the charge of Mrs Meenahan next door, but this time it was too much to ask. Mom couldn’t afford to put him in the vet’s and anyway Cesf would hate that. What did Spence want her to do? The cat was dying, in other words. Spence’s Mom was running out on the old guy and wanted Spence’s permission to take him for the lethal injection. Frankly, he’d have been relieved if she’d done the deed and told him about it afterwards, but he could not make himself say the words she was trying to force him to say.

“Don’t do anything. I’ll come over.”

Spence went home, though the cost of the flight, lowest cattle-truck discount rate he could find, was a blow. He left Jake behind, and arrived, due to fixing the trip with minimum disruption for Anna’s work, the day after his mother had left. He found the house empty. As he was wandering around the yard, calling the cat’s name, half-hoping the demise of his old pal could be put off for another few years, Mrs Meenahan rose like a sounding whale on the other side of the fence, and informed him that Cesf had died in the night.

“Oh, um… What happened?”

“Well, I let myself in this morning and found him lying there, half out of the basket like he’d been trying to rise from his bed and fell back, dead.” She drew herself up, her large body contracting like a reefed sail, her eyes big with the importance of it all. “And you came all the way from
England,
that’s a real shame. Your Mom always said you really loved that cat.”

Mrs Meenahan was a phenomenon Spence had viewed with horror for many years, one of the genuine post-humans, what you actually
get
when you blend flesh and blood with instant gratification technology. Her plump fists clutched each other upon the swollen, folded bolster of her breasts. “You must be real upset,” she prompted, gazing into his face. He wondered if he hadn’t better just break down and sob like a baby, so she could feed and be satisfied. He thought, if I were a stranger, I would barely be able to tell them apart…

My Mom is a member of the post-human underclass.

“So, um, what did you do with the remains?”

“I didn’t know what-all to do, so I
buried
him. I hope I did the right thing.”

She came around and showed him the place, a lump in the grass in the middle of the yard. It must have been a big effort, for such a heavy woman. Spence thanked her profusely and obstinately waited until she went away. Then he knelt and peeled back the lump, and found his cat wrapped in a plastic refuse sack, the blue eyes slitted a little way open, the body stiff and ragged like a piece of roadkill. It was about time. Cesf was twenty years old. What was that Cavafy poem?
Those old sticks of furniture must still be knocking around somewhere.
Something about parting with your lover for a week, and it turns out to be forever?

The Afternoon Sun, yeah—

He fetched a shovel and dug a respectably deep hole in a flower border, where Mom had planted a few straggly rosebushes. He lined it with grass, went and fetched the blanket from the basket in the kitchen, laid the wrapped corpse in the hole, and shoveled the earth down on top. There you are, old boy. Sleep sound.

When he’d fit the turf that Mrs Meenahan had hacked out into place and cleared all traces of a sick old cat from the house, he sat on the back porch in the heat of the declining day. It was July. The white-walled house was quiet, standing four-square in its disheveled plot. The yard—which in England would be a fine big garden, unaccountably left open to the neighbors’ view—was heavy with the scent of the mock orange blossom that rambled along one boundary. When you’ve lived in Britain, the appearance of a lower-middle-class American burb takes on peculiar contradictions. There’s so much
space,
and yet the houses look like tatty cardboard boxes… I never want to come here again, he thought. We will keep on coming back unless Mom moves, or until she gets sick and goes into a nursing home and dies, but it will never be a homecoming again. When I step from the plane my heart will sink. He felt adrift, as if he’d lost sight of the bank of the river he’d left, while the other shore was far beyond his reach.

He thought of his long, faithful love for Anna, and of the career with Emerald City that he had abandoned after Lily Rose died. He didn’t want to go back and take the other path, become a hotshot software exec with a closet of suits and a record of infidelities a mile long. No doubt there were people in the world making easy money, and people in the world getting phenomenal supplies of wanton fuck: he didn’t envy them, not much. But he had come to a dead center, where all he knew was that he had lost the way. He realized that the idea of getting deeper into self-publishing filled him with disgust. He hated everything about that stupid scheme: the hustling, the smile-and-a-shoeshine, the bright-eyed failure… Long ago, here in the rank woodlands and empty horizons of Manankee County, Mr Acid at his side, he had solemnly sworn that he would live and be happy and have no other gods, because no other gods are worthy of any sacrifice or reverence. He would be different from anybody else… What had become of those vows? He had fallen from grace.

He wondered if Anna had known he was feeling like this, and was that why she’d instantly accepted that he had to derail their finances for a sick cat. Maybe. He knew she worried, and she wanted him to be happy—

She doesn’t need you.

The words came from nowhere and walked over his grave.

Mrs Meenahan came over at dusk with a dish of tuna casserole and half a gelatinous cherry pie. Spence called his Mom, who didn’t seem too cast down by the sad news. He could have tried to get a standby flight and gone straight home. Instead he stayed on, sleeping in his old room, which was full of boxes and smelled of damp and cat shit, and managed to gain several pounds, between moral cowardice and self-pity, before his mother returned and released him from this hiatus.

He came back from America, and his life felt like grubby, outgrown clothes. One day he was baking bread, one of his favorite househusband chores. Jake ran in, wanting a turn at squeezing the dough. Spence sent him off to wash his hands. He darted away crying “Okay Sir! I love you Sir!” …Spence blew up. Spence flew into a dreadful paddy. Spence yelled and made the baby cry.

They sorted it out. Spence apologized abjectly and explained that he was feeling bad because of Cesf. The bread dough was finished and put to proof. Spence and Jake cuddled together on the good old folded futon couch, recovering. Spence, his chin on Jake’s hair, ran the footage over, and this time managed to catch the spurt of agonizing rage, beat it down, and trace it to its source. I would be no one’s servant and no one’s master. I wanted to be a new creature and here I am, trapped, a Dad with no job. Life dragged me under while I wasn’t looking, and she doesn’t need me any more.

Jake covertly spread his hands and examined them, front and back. Snuggled against the hard warmth of daddy’s front, he felt safe again: but he was still looking for the dirt.

Anna arrived home late one evening to find Spence watching Ramone Holyrod on the tv, the same little color tv they’d bought in Sungai, now equipped with a many-To-many set-top box for access to the networlds. Ramone filled the jewel-clear screen, sprawled over a studio couch, talking a blue streak. “The schlock, the shit-blood-vomit-offal-serial-killer territory…that cover’s blown. Everybody knows it was a mere feeble imitation of the female birthright of extreme physical experience, of the unmatched violence and danger of human parturition—”

“Unmatched among mammals,” remarked Anna judiciously. “I s’pose that’s true.”

“So now we get the New Man novel: wimp out, winsome little lady-boy tales. You know, men don’t want to possess women; that’s the cover story. They want to BE women. We’re seeing them start to be out about that now. Well, okay, if there are men who want to become human, at this late date, I’ll buy it. Let them spend their winter in the reeds.” The pundit burst into a demoniac cackle. “If they come back with tits and bleeding once a month, maybe I’ll listen.”

“She’s quoting herself,” growled Spence. “That’s all she ever does, winds herself up and lets fly a page or two of the latest opus. I call it incitement to gender violence.”

“I don’t know why you watch this kind of stuff,” said Anna. “It only annoys you.” But the face on the screen drew from her an involuntary smile of greeting. “So that’s Ramone, now. She looks very well, doesn’t she.”

“I think she’s had her breasts reduced. They used to be real sloppy and too big. Remember how she always used to hide them under leathers and layers and droopy shawl-things?”

“Oh no,” said Anna firmly, “They weren’t sloppy.”

He wondered under what precise circumstances had his wife become so certain about the consistency of Ramone Holyrod’s breasts. He wasn’t going to ask.

“I’m going to bed.”

Spence stayed where he was, slumped and glowering.