Mischief (41 page)

‘What was your mood when it happened?’

‘Well, as I said, I was peeling potatoes. Impatient, bored, it had to be done but the sooner it was over the better. That sort of mood.’

‘But no sense of training the ring?’

‘No, I wasn’t thinking at all, just trying to find the bloody thing.’

‘Ted’s ring, or Robbie’s?’

‘Ted’s, of course.’ I was indignant – that got a circle round the squiggle. And so it went on. I was tiring. I accepted another Juve-and-hot-chocolate, or so I assumed it to be. It took more effort to tell lies than the truth. I had nothing to lose. Then the talking stopped, and we moved to the lab and the hospital scenario began.

The lab was wall-to-wall futuristic, monitor displays crouching dormant but alert, softly blinking lights, tiny little bleeps, medical instruments designed to analyse the state of any human body offered for their concern. And very, very hygenic. There were no corners, no firm lines: all was curved and cleanable: screens and lighting inset flat with walls; not a screw head visible, nothing to trap dust. I marvelled that I’d lived so long and so healthily at Dinton Grove, it being so full of the nooks and crannies of domestic life where bacteria multiplied unhindered, and I was surprised the professor had not been asked to shave off his beard; it was bushy and raggedy enough, I thought, to harbour an army of germs.

Technicians and nurses aplenty attended, all in hospital scrubs. There was a series of blood lettings – the automaton trolley hovered, came, received and went. Graphs flashed up on screens. There were internal examinations: I am perfectly sanguine about this kind of thing – once one’s had twins most ladylike sensibilities are gone for ever. I allowed my body and mind to pass into the care of others.

Only when I was required to lie in an MRI scanner in a lead-lined side-room did I feel nervous. Forty minutes, they told me. I hate the things. They strip one of all metal and one is enclosed, helpless, at the mercy of others while they try and deafen you in the name of science. Clang, clang, clang they go in your ear, driving all sense out of you. But I went like a sacrificial victim naked to the slaughter. My clothes were folded neatly on the chair beside the great hooded pink plastic cylinder. Red Beard made himself scarce. I was left with two technicians, Billy and Mo. They were very talkative:

Mo.... It’s a 7.5 Tesla. Most are only 1.5. This can see everything you’re made of. Really state of the art, so expensive there’s only one in the whole country; a magnetic resonance so strong it can pull the metal fillings out of your teeth. You’re our first patient. Aren’t you the lucky one!

He clucked and fussed around my naked body. He waxed enthusiastic with pride. I was happy to assure them that my fillings were all composite.

Billy....  We know that.

Me....     But what are you going to be looking at?

Mo....     Just taking a little peek at your conarium or epiphysis cerebri, in old-fashioned terms your pineal gland.

But that was my precious third eye! I felt protective of it at once. I remembered it well from my time with the Theosophists. What Billy and Mo planned to inspect was the invisible eye in the centre of my forehead in front of the pineal gland, the portal that leads to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness. My adoptive mother Marion became a member of the Theosophical Society when I was fifteen, and I would be sent off with the Young Theosophists to have apple juice and biscuits while the adults pondered on the Oneness of Everything. All talk was of the ‘atrophied third eye’ with which the ancients saw a higher range of reality. Mine was less atrophied than most, it seemed, and I was outed as ‘a seer’ after pretending to see the ghost of the recently deceased treasurer. I refused to go to meetings after that; it all seemed so silly. The biscuits were whole-wheat and home-made, the boys were pimply and the girls wore long scratchy hand-woven woollen skirts. Fortunately my adoptive mother was not averse to giving up the meetings either: there were some things we agreed on. She always preferred a glass of champagne to fizzy apple juice.

But I could see that today my third eye would have to look after itself. It would have been churlish to object; Billy and Mo were so excited about their new 7.5 Tesla toy. The pink plastic cylinder opened up like a mummy’s sarcophagus; they sedated me, put muffs over my ears, closed the lid down on my prostrate body and slid me into a dim pink void. Every claustrophobic nerve in my body cried out in alarm.

‘Don’t move,’ I’d been told, and sheer fear kept me immobile. I began to hear what the technicians were saying, through pink plastic walls, through ear muffs, and despite a strange clanging noise which grew progressively louder and sounded to me like hammering on the gates of Hell. There was no way I could actually hear what they were saying, yet I did: in the same way I could hear the thought voices of Ted’s relatives after he died. I had gone into telepathic mode. My pineal gland was being stimulated, no bloody doubt about that.

Mo....      Shit! Something hit me!

Billy....  Ferromagnetic projectile. Sodding shrapnel. Better note that for the records – what was it?

Mo....      She had a safety pin keeping her bra together.

Billy....    Idle slut.

Mo....      What’ s up with her pineal?

Billy....   God knows. Seat of extra-sensory perception. Hears voices? Sees things? They reckon this 7.5 will sort it. They’ll get a cell-by-cell picture.

Mo....      Resonance at this strength heats anything up. Everything inside is going to hop about like a box of frogs.

Billy....    If it doesn’t implode.

Mo....      This machine frightens me.

Billy....    But it’s state of the art.

Mo....      It’s already tried to kill me. Supposing she’d left the safety pin open? It could have got my jugular.

Billy....    Perils of modern life.

Mo....     Pretty girl though. Fit! You’d never have thought she’d had twins.

Then they stopped talking or I stopped hearing them, I’m not sure which. The banging got louder; and now I was through into the forest, where Ted was in the clearing, but now beginning to make headway through his normal impenetrable tangle of foliage. I began to help him, chopping away like him at the branches and creepers which stopped him getting through. We were making some progress: there was light at the end of a tunnel though it seemed to me we were going in the wrong direction, away from it not towards. I began to feel frightened. I shouldn’t be in here. Ted’s head, arms and shoulders were at last free. The twins were there too, busy, untangling vines with nimble fingers. They were for all the world like the young Norns of Norse mythology, weaving the fate of mankind from the entrails of dead warriors, deciding who would live and who would die. Ted’s right foot was free now, but his left foot was still trapped by a net of foliage, made up of little saplings like the one which had grown in our carpet last night. Perhaps Ted had visited me in a dream I’d not remembered, bringing with him a seed the same way he’d carried mud in on his shoe the night before – only that time he had brought something that was living and growing. I shouldn’t have taken a sleeping pill. They didn’t stop dreams happening, they just stopped one from remembering them?

We were through now to a place where trees grew more sparsely and Ted could move freely. Now the twins went into Cheshire-cat mode and faded away. Ted turned to me and said: ‘
The great juggernaut of progress is not easily held back. You have what you want,
’ and I thought: ‘
but you’re dead and I’m alive; what can you possibly know what I want?’
The dream world is nothing to do with ours, I realised, it is an alternative universe, and perhaps those that dwell there share it with the dead and they all don’t get on too well. Ted wrenched his foot free: he simply stepped out of the open sarcophagus into the lead-lined booth and walked off through the wall, leaving me trapped and immobile, prostrate in my hospital gown with the dreadful cacophony still attacking my ear drums, stopping all thought and all fear. Just when I thought I really couldn’t stand any more the clanging began to slow and quieten, and finally stopped altogether, and Billy and Mo slid me out blinking into the open.

Then there was a spell of general dazed blank dizziness until I was back on my chair in the consulting room and Robbie was shaking me saying, ‘Wake up, wake up!’: which was odd because I had assumed I was awake. I was dressed and decent, if without my bra. I supposed it had been listed and kept as evidence; just another case of a magneto-ferrous projectile. Robbie seemed agitated. The investigation was at an end, Red Beard was busy clearing away, wiping down, or whatever one did in a climate-controlled, vibration-protected, dust-free environment. Mostly it seemed to be feeding records into the shredder. He too seemed unduly agitated and kept stopping and patting his beard in the mirror to quieten it. The trolley was flitting to and fro, apparently without purpose. That seemed as spooky as anything.

‘Philly, you feel all right, darling?’ Now Robbie was easing the tension between my shoulderblades. I felt a surprising surge of sexual desire. But again this was hardly the time and place. I felt light-headed and cheerful.

‘They’ve asked you to come in for an interview. We must hurry. They’re already in session. We weren’t expecting this.’

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘The big guys,’ Robbie said. ‘The LIFLs and the ADFs who flew in and caused the lockdown. They’re conferring upstairs.’

‘I call ’em the Live Forever Lads and the After Death Freaks,’ said Red Beard.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Robbie said.

‘Why should I?’ I asked. ‘I have nothing to hide.’

‘When was that ever a reason not to worry,’ said Robbie, with a flash of shrewdness which reminded me of Ted. Did all husbands, in the end, merge into the one?

I asked what the acronyms really stood for. Robbie and Ben looked at one another as if wondering whether or not to trust me.

‘Tell her,’ said Ben. ‘She knows more than enough already. So much for security.’

They sighed, in unison: I was a mere five. I was reminded of the twins. It was as if the word ‘wife’ kept one out of important matters – decorative and useful for dull, practical matters, and for the satisfaction of lusts, but one was basically replaceable. If I’d been the one to die, not Ted, who would have replaced me? Cynara? Jill next door? Probably neither. Robbie would have explored new possibilities entirely: and the twins would have shed a tear and gone on to eat food cooked by the new wife and lie in sheets laundered by her and the waters would have closed over me, and Robbie and Ben would get on with their work lamenting the loss of one interesting guinea pig. As for Robbie, I now simply discounted him. All those nights of passion? Nothing, nothing: Doxy dreams, every one.

They explained. LIFLs were Life is for Living adherents, a movement whose ambition was to lengthen telomeres via stem-cell technology and with the aid of spare-part bioengineering, rattle hell’s foundations and conquer death’s domain so that humans could live forever – or at least those members of it who had money to pay, which would keep numbers down quite severely. The ADFs were a voluble splinter group, the After Death Friendship society, who felt death was inevitable, and it was important to reach out to ‘the other side’.

Frivolously, I asked whose side we were on.

‘The ADFs, of course,’ said Robbie. ‘They’re the ones who fund us.’

I tried to take them seriously, but it was difficult, and I giggled.

‘And the “big guys”?’ I asked at last. But I knew. The ones who rule our lives and know our secrets. What we buy and what we think, every passing whim and feeling categorised and turned into mega data to be algorithm-ised. The young ones sauntering about in California in the sun, who mean to live forever , or, plan B, swap universes and set up their palaces in Lethe. Red Beard was offering me a pill.

‘I think not,’ I said.

‘No worries,’ said Red Beard. ‘This is just ordinary caffeine to wake you up.’

I realised only then that that he was an Australian. That figured. He had the burly amiability yet stubbornness of a man whose beard would not be denied. I realised I was being swept with a wave of frivolity which would probably do me no good in an interview, whoever it was with: one should never joke with policemen, security guards or an interviewing committee. It is one of the rules of modern society that one does not joke with officials.

I accepted the pill. Really, I had little to lose, no secrets left. Waking up was certainly a good idea. Robbie seemed to have lost his normal languid composure. Both Red Beard and he were all of a flutter, competing for a view of themselves in the mirror, straightening ties and smoothing hair. They might have been biker girls waiting for the leader of the pack. They seemed to have forgotten me.

‘The Committee are holding a special convocation ahead of tonight’s AGM,’ said Robbie. He was breathless and babbling. ‘They opened up the cathedral the minute the analysis of the tree came through. The ADFs are using it as evidence.’

‘It’s fairly conclusive. Percholate of unknown origin, most likely other dimensional. Where a tree goes a revenant can follow.’ said Red Beard.

‘When was a committee ever rational? They might jump this way, might jump that. And Phyllis as a star witness—’ said Robbie.

‘I’ll say whatever you like,’ I said, feeling obliging again, but they didn’t seem to notice.

‘Someone patched through the lab results to them,’ said Robbie.

‘Fuck,’ said Red Beard. ‘The techs pushed the machine up to 6.5. I told them not to go past 6. The gradients were way too steep. Her epiphysis cerebri readings were all over the place. Something crook happened. “Stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back at you?”’

‘Or it could have been the sapling,’ said Robbie.

‘Pity it ever made it to the lab, then,’ said Red Beard. ‘Better if we’d deep-sixed it. Shit. Just when we were getting somewhere.’

‘A bit too fast for my liking, and possibly theirs.’ said Robbie. ‘Did you give Phil a Juve?’

‘Plenty,’ said Red Beard.