by Brian Stableford
Meg came round, after a fashion, while they were lifting her into the ambulance, but she couldn’t quite get a grip on reality. It was as if her mind had gone limp, relaxing into a kind of exhausted passivity and refusing to take up any but the most elementary responsibilities of consciousness. She was aware of pain but it didn’t seem to be particularly terrible, and she didn’t give it any further thought. She couldn’t seem to further her thoughts at all.
“Hello,” said the ambulance-man who had sat down beside her. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Meg,” she said, without hesitation.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good. You’re going to be all right, Meg.” She felt a sudden surge of pain as he pronounced the words all right, and it made her gasp, but she still felt strangely detached, as though the pain wasn’t really hers. He placed something over her right eye, very gently. It wasn’t the pain of the contact which surprised her but the fact that the point of contact seemed to be so far away, as if her face were no longer where—or perhaps what—it had been before.
“What’s your full name, Meg?” the paramedic asked, when he’d fastened the dressing. His face seemed to be floating in mid-air at an odd angle. It was red and round. His hair had receded a very long way—almost as far as the tide went out in Swansea Bay, it seemed—and what was left was dappled grey.
“Hughes,” she said. “Margaret Leonie Hughes.” It was hard to formulate the syllables, and she realized that her lips were swollen and bleeding. Her front teeth weren’t all there.
“Good. That’s great. Address?”
“One-one-five Belmoredean Road.” The ambulance was pulling away now. juddering over the rough ground.
“Good’. Very good. Age?”
“Twenty-one,” she said, wondering what was so good about anything and everything she said. The ambulance jolted one last time as it went over the pavement and on to the road.
“Great. Rest now. Just rest. We’ll have you in hospital in no time. You’ll be fine. I’ll just put this over your mouth to help you breathe. Just a precaution. You’ll be fine.”
The oxygen-jet was cold. She didn’t think she needed it. She let herself relax completely, listening to the throaty roar of the engine and the plaintive wail of the siren. The combination of sounds was strangely absorbing and strangely comforting.
It wasn’t until the ambulance was drawing up at the hospital that she suddenly realized that she wasn’t twenty-one at all. She was twenty-two, and had been for at least a month. She had forgotten how old she was!
Hell’s bells, she thought, I’ve got amnesia! That was when it finally came home to her that she’d been hurt, perhaps badly, and that they were taking her to hospital in an ambulance because she was injured, and that the reason everything she said was good was that it was an achievement on her part to be able to say anything at all. She suddenly began to pay attention to the pain, to recognize it as her own, and to tick off its sources one by one.
Head. Eyebrow. Cheek. Mouth. Ribs. Oh shit. Oh shit....
She blacked out while they were hurrying the stretcher from the back of the vehicle, while she was still trying to remember what day it was and why she had been lying in the bushes: lying on the moist black soil whose earthy odor still clung to her hair and her naked, bloody legs.
* * * *
Meg didn’t have amnesia. It would have been better if I had, she thought, savagely when she finally had the opportunity to organize her thoughts and get the narrative of her life under way again. The more the better. Not just this but all of it. Far, far better if I could start over with a clean sheet...and maybe get it right this time.
She knew, of course, that she’d handled the rape all wrong, and was still handling it all wrong, but she didn’t seem able to do anything about it. She’d always been conscious of the danger—how could one not be conscious of such dangers in this day and age?— and she’d always told herself that if ever it happened to her, she’d get it right. She’d scream and she’d scream as loudly as she could, and she’d go for his eyes with her fingernails if she couldn’t reach his balls, and if the worst came to the worst, because he was too big and too well-armed and there was no help near, she’d just grit her teeth and bear it, and come out the other side, and tell herself that it was no big deal and just get on with her life....
But she hadn’t managed to do any of that. Not one damn thing. There was no excuse, not even the fact that he’d hit her far too hard far too quickly, more than once and more than he really needed to, for purely practical purposes. She hadn’t done anything, because she wasn’t the person she’d always tried to be, the person she’d always wanted to be, the person she’d determined to be in spite of everything....in spite of her failures, in spite of her incompetence, in spite of all the faults which her over-solicitous mother had always been so over-ambitious to correct by means of judicious over-criticism.
Even before it happened, she’d had the sense of only just hanging on to her self-respect by her fingernails, never quite being able to pull herself up and away from the brink of the abyss. Now....
Now, in spite of all she’d resolved to do and be, she was in free fall into the darkness and into the cold. Her brittle fingernails had shattered, and left her nothing to hang on with, and now her mind had collapsed, and life itself had become too much for her. She wanted to die. She wanted to be dead already. She wanted to be left alone, so that she could fall forever in peace, and vanish unmourned into the void.
Naturally enough, that wasn’t allowed. In this day and age, you couldn’t just be raped, you had to be a victim, and you had to follow the script that had been written in blood by doctors and feminists, policemen and psychiatrists, mothers and ladies from Victim Support. You couldn’t even play dead, because every time you so much as twitched an eyebrow somebody would be saying “Good, that’s good”, as if the very concept of badness had been banished beyond some invisible cordon sanitaire drawn around your bed.
It was only to be expected. They weren’t going to let her get away with lying down and dying, any more than they’d let her get away with all her other sins and all her other failures. You couldn’t ask to start over just because you’d fouled things up, could you? Life wasn’t like that. You had to take it as it came and live with all your mistakes. Nobody got second chances.
Mother had always told her all of that. Mother had always been very free with that sort of advice. Mother had always been a great one for picking at old saws and using them to make things bleed. Not that she ever meant to be unkind—not even when she turned up at the hospital while Meg was still spaced out, and lectured her at some length on the subject of pulling herself together, telling her that for once in her life she had to be tough, for everybody’s sake.
“Everybody” presumably meant Emily, but Mother wouldn’t bring Emily in to see her.
Actually, Meg thought she’d always been tough, until now. Tough-minded, anyway—you couldn’t really be tough in other ways when you were so small and thin. She had always been one of those people who told herself that it was better to know the truth, however horrible, than not to know. She had always been proud of being that sort of person, proud of her conviction that ignorance was anything but bliss. Until now....
Now, she found it quite impossible to be tough—especially when Mother explained, in the nicest possible way, that she hadn’t brought Emily to see Meg because it would upset Emily too much to see Meg lying there all messed up. That was particularly bad because Meg thought that Emily was the one person who might be able to bring her back from the void, the one person who might be able to ameliorate her misery. After all, Emily was the one real reason she had for not wanting to start over, for not wanting to have forgotten everything, for not wanting to be dead. It was okay to forget your parents, especially when their love was so cloying, so wounding, so prolific in the misery it caused, but you couldn’t want to forget your own kid. It simply wasn’t on, even for a complete failure like Meg. But they wouldn’t let Emily see her. Instead, she was confronted with an endless series of monstrous comforters, every one of them just as motherly as the next: the lady doctor, the lady from Victim Support, Mother herself....
Even the police, doubtless leaning over backwards to be sympathetic and diplomatic, sent a female officer to interrogate her, as soon as she could make a statement. The policewoman, whose name was WPC Lowther, told her she’d done very well indeed before recapitulating the description, checking off every single detail with the careful relish of a predator who already had the sense that this one wasn’t going to get away.
“Five foot six or seven. Stocky build. Fair hair; a two-month-old razor cut growing out. Nose crooked, probably broken at some time in the past. Pale skin; lots of acne scars; right cheek scratched. Pale blue eyes. About eighteen, no more than twenty. Black T-shirt with a silver motif half-flaked away, possibly a five-pointed star inside a circle with lettering underneath, too broken up to be legible. Blue jeans, black trainers. Is that everything?”
“That’s everything,” said Meg, more faintly and far less distinctly than she would have liked. She hadn’t yet been down to the orthodontist, and now that the stitched-up wounds around her eye had become infected that appointment was likely to be postponed for several more days.
“It’s good,” said the policewoman. “Very good.”
“Did you get any blood from under my fingernails?” Meg asked, lifting her hand so she could look at her newly-clipped and neatly-filed nails. Manicurists were not inconvenienced by infected facial wounds.
“I think the doctors got more than enough tissue samples to get a DNA-fingerprint,” WPC Lowther confirmed. “We also have a witness who saw him running away. We have a very good chance of tracking him down. These types that go berserk are the ones we almost invariably do catch—they don’t plan things, you see, and they don’t cover their tracks very well. Nothing’s certain, but he’ll need a miracle to slip through the net, and I don’t think he’s a likely candidate for one of those.”
The last remark didn’t make Meg feel as good as WPC Lowther had intended. Meg didn’t feel like a likely candidate for a miracle either. Mother, who still clung to the vestiges of her religion, had often pointed out to her that she couldn’t expect any favors from God, all things considered.
“In court....” Meg began, doubtfully. She stopped abruptly. The possibility of going to court was so remote as to be almost meaningless, and yet....
The WPC must have been used to dealing with this kind of case. “It’s okay, Meg,” she said, swiftly. “That’s a long way off yet. Don’t think about it. Let’s catch him first.” Her voice had a hint of unease about it, and she was quick to add: “You mustn’t worry about the court. He isn’t going to be able to say that you let him do it, is he? Thirteen stitches around your eye, three broken teeth and two broken ribs can hardly be the result of a misunderstanding, can it? We’ve got photographs of everything. If we catch him, he’ll go away. No doubt about that. Anyway, you’ll be a great witness. There aren’t many people who could have given me all this.” She raised her notebook triumphantly.
“But they’ll ask....they’ll ask about....other things.” Meg’s voice had shrunk to an awkward whisper, which sounded despicably feeble.
“About your sexual history?” The WPC shook her head vigorously. “Not relevant. Don’t believe what the tabloids say about the worst part of any rape case being the trial. The judge won’t let defending counsel take a line like that, given the violence that was used. The fact that you’re a single mother won’t make a shred of difference. Quite frankly, it wouldn’t matter if you were on the game....” Meg watched the WPC hesitate as doubt momentarily shadowed her thoughts, but she picked up the thread effortlessly enough. “It won’t be pleasant, of course, but, compared to the rape itself, it’ll be no sort of ordeal at all. You can stand in the witness-box and tell the absolute truth, knowing that every word you say will paint the bastard blacker. If the defense has any sense at all they’ll want you off the stage as soon as possible. They probably won’t cross-examine you at all. You mustn’t be afraid. You have to concentrate all your energy on getting better. That’s all that matters. You have to get your life back. You have to think positively. I think you’re tough enough to do it. I know you are.”
“I’ve always been tough,” Meg said, weakly, wishing the WPC wasn’t such an exact clone of her mother. “Five foot nothing and thin as a rake, but tough. Always.” She couldn’t convince herself. If I were tough, she told herself, sternly, I’d have handled it better. I’d be handling it better now. If I were tough, I wouldn‘t feel that I’d be better off dead.
“That’s right,” said the WPC, dutifully responding to the spoken word rather than the treasonous thought that it surely couldn’t have concealed. “You might have lost a battle, but you can win the war. Don’t worry about your little girl—your mother’s looking after her and everything’s fine. You’ve got to get past this for her sake as well as your own, and you can. You can put it behind you and start going forwards again.”
If only it were that easy, Meg thought. If only I’d been going forwards before.
* * * *
Meg knew the news was bad because her mother and the lady from Victim Support were moved carefully into place before the doctor arrived. She didn’t like to be so crowded. She felt embarrassed because the massive doses of antibiotic they were drip-feeding her to clear up the infection in the wounds around her eye had given her terrible diarrhea. It was nightmarish enough to have diarrhea while she was hooked up to a drip feed without being surrounded by people who weren’t nurses and weren’t immunized by experience against the effects of close proximity to the horrid and the degrading. Just as the infection was an obvious symbol of her failure to do things right and her failure to cope with having done things wrong, the diarrhea was a symbol of her inability to avoid giving offence to others, especially those who loved her most. Except, of course, that the infection would clear up, in time, and the diarrhea wouldn’t last forever....
“Emily’s perfectly fine,” her mother assured her, while they were waiting. “She’s longing to come to see you, but I knew you’d want to wait until you looked a little bit less like the Phantom of the Opera. She’s such a sensitive child, isn’t she?” Not like you, she implied, effortlessly, in spite of her sugar-sweet smile.
The doctor seemed uncomfortable, as if she too would have preferred to speak in private, without the crowd. Who, Meg wondered, had actually decided that her mother and the lady from Victim Support should be present? Who had the power to organize and orchestrate such things? Or did they just happen by coincidence, as a result of the unfortunate accumulation of a pathological superabundance of good will?
At least the doctor didn’t beat around the bush. She wanted to get it over with. “The test results have all come in now,” she said. “The ones we did here, that is—the police surgeon had the tissue-samples sent away. Everything’s satisfactory....except that you’re pregnant. I’m sorry.”
The doctor went on, but Meg didn’t hear what she said. She didn’t hear what anybody said for two full minutes. She just chewed her new teeth furiously, wishing they didn’t taste like something alien, something that didn’t belong inside her mouth. All of a sudden she seemed to be full of things that didn’t belong. She’d been invaded. This whole affair was an alien invasion; she was surrounded by body-snatchers, inside and out.
When Meg finally got around to paying attention again, the lady from Victim Support was talking to her mother about the abortion. “Of course it’s not a trivial matter,” she was saying. “No abortion ever is. But in cases like this, where it’s obviously for the best, there’s very little danger of long-term trauma.”
Her mother was nodding, in that worldly-wise and sensitive manner she had refined by long practice.
Meg didn’t want to talk shop with the lady from Victim Support. She didn’t want counseling, and she didn’t want reassurances about lack of long-term trauma. She just wanted to know when the alien invasion would be over, so she could have her own body back—so she could go back to being an ordinary common-or-garden human alien moving through the uncaring hostility of everyday society, instead of a victim and a host who had somehow begun to attract rapists and cuckoos and all manner of hateful monsters.
Some people, she knew, would have taken all of it in their stride. Some people would even have found things to like about it. Some people would have been glad of the attention, glad about all the worry being expended on their behalf, flattered by all the kindness and all the planning. If only she’d been someone else, she realized, this might have been a turning-point in her life. All her life she’d felt like an outsider, an also-ran in the human race, a bad girl, an incompetent in the everyday business of living, a person incapable of maintaining any normal or rewarding social relationship—but now, if only she’d had the right attitude, and the wit and determination to seize the opportunity, she could have put all that right. Being a victim could have been a way back in, a way of building bridges. But she wasn’t someone else. She was Meg, and for her the worst thing about being a victim was Victim Support—not the charity per se but everything the charity stood for.
If he’d only hit me a little hit harder, she thought, if my skull had been just a little thinner, I’d never have recovered consciousness, and I’d never have known anything about it. Perhaps that’s what really did happen, and all this is just a dream, a fantasy exploding in my head at the moment of death. Or maybe this is Hell. Maybe this is what I get for being a bad girl, for never being what Mum wanted me to be, for getting pregnant at school and having to leave, for going out dancing and drinking and taking drugs, for not being a good mother, for getting raped....
“You mustn’t worry,” the doctor told her, with a careful kindness that seemed almost macabre. “Everything will be all right. In ten days or so you’ll be able to have the abortion. After that, if there are no further complications, you can go home—to your mother, and your little girl. Just concentrate on getting back to normal. You’re doing very well. It’ll all be okay.”
“That’s right,” her mother said. “Once we get you home again we’ll soon have you back on your feet. You’ll feel better once you’re back where you belong. Everything will be fine.”
These are the fictions people live by, Meg thought. This is the way the world works. This is what I can’t do, and will never be able to. It must be me that’s odd, me that’s mad, me that’s bad, because they aren’t, are they?
“Thanks,” she said, out loud. “I’ll be okay. I really will.”
“By the way,” her mother said. “They’ve caught him. That nice WPC told me to pass the message on. They haven’t charged him yet because they’re waiting for the DNA-fingerprinting tests to be completed, but it’s definitely him.”
“Oh,” said Meg, helplessly. “Good. That’s good.” And she wondered why she was such an unnatural creature that the only thing she felt was sick.
* * * *
At first, when Miss Tomlinson introduced herself and sat down beside the bed, Meg didn’t think there could be anything to worry about—nothing serious, at any rate. After all, her mother wasn’t there, and the lady from Victim Support wasn’t there, and even the doctor wasn’t there. It only took her a few minutes, though, to realize that these might be indications that matters had reached a whole new level of seriousness, and that this might well be the point in time at which she realized the error of her assumption that things couldn’t get any worse.
“I’m afraid this is going to be difficult,” Miss Tomlinson said, ominously. “Very difficult indeed.”
At least she was making no attempt to be kind. She had the grace to look stern and stiff-lipped. She was about Mother’s age, but slightly better-preserved. Her hair was black and her eyes were very dark. She looked as if she could be quite fearsome if she got angry, but she wasn’t angry now. She explained, quickly and efficiently, what she wanted Meg to do.
“You want to transfer me to a private clinic?” Meg repeated, tackling the easy one first. “Two hundred miles away, in Sussex?”
“That’s right,” Miss Tomlinson said. “I know it’s asking a lot, but I have to ask. I have to ask you to trust us, completely—and I don’t have any way to demonstrate to you that we’re trustworthy. All I can tell you for the moment is that it’s very, very important.”
“I can’t,” Meg said, flatly. “Do you have any idea what my mother would say if I told her I was going to a private clinic in Sussex? I’ve got to go home as soon as possible, for Emily’s sake.”
“We can work out a way of bringing your daughter along,” Miss Tomlinson said. “Emily’s not a problem. But everyone else— not just your mother but the doctors here, and the police—have to be kept out of it. The police are easy to deal with because they know how to follow orders without asking questions or making a fuss, but the others might have to be handled more delicately if we’re to avoid awkward publicity. We’ll figure out a convincing pack of lies—but you’ll have to be a party to it. You have to be inside the curtain of secrecy. We’ll need your full co-operation.”
“Who exactly are you?” Meg asked, wondering whether someone whose face was as badly puffed up as hers still was could contrive to incorporate astonishment and suspicion into her expression.
“I work for the Home Office,” Miss Tomlinson told her, blandly. A civil serpent, Meg thought. Her father always called civil servants “civil serpents”. It was his idea of a joke.
“This is crazy,” Meg said. “It’s like something out of Kafka.” Meg had never read The Trial but she’d seen the Orson Welles film on TV, with Anthony Perkins pretending not to be Psycho. She’d watched a lot of films on TV since Emily had tied her to the house, forcing her to abandon her older and wilder ways.
Miss Tomlinson nodded. It was just a straightforward nod, without frills. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But we really don’t mean you any harm. If it would help at all, we’re perfectly happy to offer you money. I can guarantee that all your needs will be more than adequately met for the foreseeable future. You can have anything you want, within reason, if you’ll co-operate with us.”
“How long is the foreseeable future?” Meg wanted to know.
“A long time,” Miss Tomlinson told her, frankly. “This is going to be a long-term thing, I’m afraid. Months, at the very least. Perhaps years, if the situation warrants it and you decide you want to stay with it. It won’t be easy.”
Meg looked the older woman in the face, marveling at her laconic manner. Miss Tomlinson was so straightforward she seemed positively surreal. It was all surreal—as if the reality she’d only just got a grip on again was dissolving into a nightmare. She just begun to get the hang of being a victim, and now the Home Office wanted her to become....what, exactly? Oddly enough, though, the unknown didn’t seem quite as terrifying as it was cracked up to be.
“They’re not going to charge him, are they?” Meg said, knowing that she was guessing but knowing that there wasn’t much else that could necessitate forcing the police to follow orders whether they liked it or not. “You want to get me out of the way to make sure that the whole thing will die down and be forgotten. Why?”
Miss Tomlinson didn’t even raise an eyebrow. “That’s only part of the reason,” she said. “I’m sorry, but it’s necessary.”
“Who is he? Somebody’s son? Somebody’s spy?” Meg knew as she said it that there must be more to it. If it were just something like that, they wouldn’t have cancelled the abortion which had been scheduled for the following week. If it were something as banal as that, they’d surely have rushed the abortion through.
The civil serpent shook her head soberly. Meg was glad that the black-haired woman didn’t laugh at her, or try in any way to suggest that what she’d said was ridiculous.
“It’s more complicated than that,” Miss Tomlinson said. “Much more important. I’ll explain just as soon as I can, but in the meantime I can only give you my word that it’s important.”
“You’re not going to charge the rapist,” Meg said, still trying to make sense of it, “and you want me to have the baby. You really want me to have it, in spite of everything.” It’s not enough to have been invaded, she thought. It’s not even enough to have been invaded twice. It’s not enough to have your life laid waste, to have your last illusions shattered. Oh no...that’s not enough for Meg—not for little Nutmeg, the runt of the litter, who never got anything right. You don’t get off that easy, once you‘re damned to Hell.
“That’s right,” said Miss Tomlinson. “I really am sorry.”
“Suppose I say no,” Meg said, wishing that she could inject some venom into the words as she shaped them with her alien teeth and her still-rubbery lips. “Suppose I say go to hell, that I want the abortion and if the bastard isn’t charged I’ll squeal to the papers— and if the papers won’t listen, to the BBC or S4C or Amnesty International or MI5 or anyone at all who’ll take notice?”
“We’d very much rather you didn’t,” said Miss Tomlinson, mildly. “And I’m afraid that we’d have to stop you if you tried. I really am sorry, but that’s the way it is.” If repetition meant anything, she really was sorry.
“They sent you because they thought I’d take it better from a woman, didn’t they?” Meg said, trying her level best to sound vituperative. “In fact, they didn’t dare to send a man, did they? Because what you’re saying is that you’re going to rape me all over again, and the only fucking thing I can do is lie back and let it happen.”
Miss Tomlinson condescended to look faintly surprised, although it wasn’t altogether clear whether she was startled by Meg’s calculated rudeness or by her perspicacity. “No it isn’t,” she countered, smoothly. “You do have a choice—as much choice as we can give you. We don’t expect you to like it, and we’re prepared to compensate you as best we can. This really is an unprecedented matter, you know. If you wanted to, you could look at it as a ticket to adventure.” She pronounced the word adventure without any hint of embarrassment—which, Meg thought, was quite a feat in this day and age.
“Adventure!” Meg echoed, wondering why the syllables didn’l sound quite as contemptuous as she’d imagined or intended. “You must think....”
She stopped, realizing that she really didn’t know what they must think, and that the fact that she didn’t know, and couldn’t guess, was evidence that something was going on that really was very odd, and that maybe—just maybe—the situation might not be quite as horrid as it seemed.
After a long pause, Meg said: “What am I supposed to tell my mother?” It wasn’t until she had said it that she realized what a revealing question it was, and how much it said about her.
“Medical complications,” Miss Tomlinson said, as quick as a flash. “I think we can swing that with the doctor, without having to be too specific. We can tell her that the tests carried out at the police forensic labs turned up something puzzling and worrying—which, in fact, they did, or I wouldn’t be here. Without telling any outright lies we’d probably want to drop a hint or two about AIDS—which, I can assure you, is definitely not a problem. The same hints will excuse our taking the man who raped you out of police custody. These days, people are only too anxious to see the back of someone who might be carrying that kind of taint. You might want to be a little vaguer or a little more reassuring when you tell your mother, so as to save her any undue alarm.”
Might I? Meg thought. When was the last time she spared me any undue alarm? But that wasn’t fair, and she immediately felt guilty about it, as she’d been carefully trained to do. This is crazy, she thought, instead. Completely crazy. I’m the victim here. People are supposed to be helping me, not compounding the crime.
“This is crazy,” she said, aloud. “Completely crazy. Like something out of a horror film.”
“Yes it is,” Miss Tomlinson admitted. “But it’s intriguing, isn’t it? Mysteries are so fascinating—all the more so if they have just a little suspicion of the horrific about them.”
When the lady from the Home Office said that, Meg realized how cleverly she’d been weighed up, how competently she’d been judged, how safely she’d been hooked. Miss Tomlinson had known that she’d play along obediently, that she was as weak as that, as gullible as that, as habitually compliant as that—but Miss Tomlinson hadn’t once tried to tell her that everything would be all right, when it patently wasn’t and wouldn’t be, and Miss Tomlinson hadn’t once said “Good” or “That’s great.” On the other hand, she had said sorry.
I’m not going to get angry, Meg thought. I’m not going to be indignant. I’m not going to be terrified. For once in my life, I’m not going to behave like some TV cliche. I don’t have to do that, and the civil serpent not only doesn‘t expect me to, she actually expects me not to. It’s not an insult. It’s not another rape. It really is something important.
“What do I have to do?” she said.
* * * *
As things turned out, it wasn’t so hard to tell her mother, partly because her mother made the mistake of bringing Emily along with her—thus forsaking any chance of a narrow and intense confrontation—and partly because Meg was able to capitalize on her reputation for being stubborn, disputatious and downright perverse. This was one situation in which Mother couldn’t win.
“Well, if you absolutely insist on going,” her mother was eventually reduced to saying, “then I’m coming with you.”
“You can’t,” Meg told her, defiantly, while keeping her eyes focused on Emily—who was sitting on the bed, as good as gold. “It’ll be difficult enough finding accommodation for Emily. It’s not the kind of place where mothers can come too. Anyway, I’m twenty-two years old. I’m an adult.”
“Then I’ll stay in a hotel in Lewes—in Brighton, if I have to.”
“There’s no need,” Meg said. With calculated brutality she added: “You’d just be in the way.”
“I can look after Emily. You can’t—not properly, not, while you’re ill. Anyway, she’s supposed to be starting primary school in less than three weeks.”
“I might be back by then,” Meg said, although she had a very strong suspicion that she wouldn’t be. “And I can look after her perfectly well. I’m much better now that I’m finally off the antibiotics.”
Mrs. Hughes changed tack. “I don’t understand this at all,” she said, in the kind of aggrieved tone of one who felt that the right to understand was just as sacred as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of middle-class respectability. “I can’t get any sense out of the doctors. That monster still hasn’t been charged, you know. That WPC who was so helpful to begin with has gone all tight-lipped. She says that there are problems with the medical reports. I suppose he’s going to get off by claiming to be schizophrenic or something—as if that were some kind of excuse.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Meg said, playing with Emily’s fingers and smiling.
“Of course it matters! It matters that people don’t believe in evil any more—that everything is some kind of illness, so nobody has to take responsibility, as if everything were just chemistry and whatever people do they couldn’t help it. Time was when people knew that if they broke the law they’d be punished. Nowadays every evil-minded swine knows that the nastier he is, the easier it will be to plead insanity. It makes me sick.”
Once upon a time such tirades had fallen upon Meg’s head like showers of sharp stones, making her flinch and duck, but over the years she’d built up a shell. Now, the ideas didn’t even rattle as they bounced off.
“I thought you believed in the bad seed,” Meg said, maliciously. “I thought you believed that some people just went wrong, in spite of everything their long-suffering parents could do, that there was just something inside them that made them wicked and perverse.”
“I never said that,” her mother said, lying in her teeth. “Yes, of course some people have a perverse streak that always makes them want to do the opposite of what they’re told, of course some people are just naturally contrary, but that doesn’t mean they’re not responsible. It doesn’t mean they can’t help it.”
“Are we talking about the rapist or me?” Meg inquired, knowing perfectly well that she would get a dishonest answer.
“Don’t try to be clever, Meg,” Mrs. Hughes retorted. “I don’t know how you can sit there, looking like that, with some....”—she hesitated, mindful of Emily’s inhibiting presence, but plugged on gamely—”...some you-know-what inside you, just trying to make more trouble. You want to go to this place in Sussex, don’t you? You don’t even care enough about yourself to ask what these people are doing and why. You’re so selfish.”
Meg knew better than to charge her mother with inconsistency. “Sussex isn’t the other side of the world, Mum,” she said. “I’ll phone you. I’ll tell you what’s happening when I can. I’ll be fine. Everything will be all right.”
Well why not? she thought to herself. Everybody does it. Why the hell not?
“I don’t like it,” her mother said, bitterly, speaking the plain and simple truth for once. “I don’t like any of it. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.” But she finally calmed down, and hugged her daughter and her grand-daughter to remind them that she loved them very dearly, and only had their best interests at heart—which was true enough, in a way. In her perverse and contrary fashion, she really wanted nothing but the best for both of them.
* * * *
Meg studied herself in the hand-mirror. The last vestiges of the swelling had almost disappeared from the flesh around her eye. The stitches were long-gone and it was almost impossible to see where they had been. Her chest didn’t hurt much any more, although the damaged ribs were still bandaged and still let her know it if she breathed too deeply. She was almost back to normal—outwardly. As to what was happening inside, that was something Miss Tomlinson had yet to explain.
In preparation for their scheduled meeting, Meg had run through all the possible options. Perhaps she really was carrying some new venereal disease, even more exotic than AIDS. Perhaps, in spite of Miss Tomlinson’s continued denials, the rapist really did have influential relatives—important enough to require the whole thing to be hushed up and important in some strange way that required her to have the baby instead of getting rid of it. She often thought, even now—but had never begun to believe—that it was all just a continuation of some morbid fantasy which was unwinding in her brain as she lay comatose in the bushes where her attacker had dragged her, while her life slowly leaked away.
Meg dismissed all of these theories, on the grounds that they were either too simple or too fanciful. It had to be something more peculiar than any of them. She had begun to want it to be something so peculiar as to be hardly imaginable. What else could possibly justify and redeem everything that she’d been through, not just since the rape but since the moment she’d been born.
“We’ve done a few more tests,” Miss Tomlinson said, demonstrating that even she was not beyond the reach of tedious cliche, “and we’ve chased several other lines of enquiry to their conclusions. We have a better idea now what it’s all about.”
“It’s Rosemary’s Baby, isn’t it?” Meg said.
One of the older woman’s jet-black eyebrows twitched. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Not in the sense that it’s the Devil’s only-begotten son, of course,” Meg said, as casually as she could. “Just in the sense that you’re going to ask me to carry it, and give birth to it, and maybe even love it, in spite of the fact that there’s something seriously odd about it.”
Miss Tomlinson nodded, conceding the obvious.
“Okay,” Meg said, proud of her self-possession and her self-control. “So tell me—what’s so special about it? What’s it got that your average common-or-garden rapist’s brat hasn’t?”
“The rapist’s name is Gary Cordling,” Miss Tomlinson said, in a level tone. Meg didn’t mind that her question wasn’t being answered directly. She figured that the civil serpent would get there in the end, as all civil serpents invariably did. “He’s sixteen years old,” Miss Tomlinson continued, “although he looks older. He’s been in trouble before—quite often, as a matter of fact. He’s been in care since he was five. His mother just couldn’t handle him, even at that age. She said at the time that she’d tried her best, but that nothing seemed to be good enough.”
Meg felt slightly uncomfortable. Her own mother had told her a thousand times that she’d done her best. She didn’t want to have any aspects of her own situation linked to that of the man—the boy— who’d raped her. She didn’t want to be invited to sympathize, or to understand. She had a five-year-old child of her own, after all, and she would never have put her into care, however perverse and wicked she seemed.
“His mother was unmarried, of course,” Miss Tomlinson went on. “Her social worker at the time wasn’t surprised that she couldn’t cope—according to the reports on file, the only surprise was that she lasted so long before giving up on him. The social worker she had when the child was born had already registered a prediction that it wasn’t going to work out, on the basis of the mother’s unrelenting insistence that Gary didn’t have a father—that the conception had been some kind of freak, some kind of unnatural event. Gary’s mother never suggested that the Devil might have sired him, but she always called him unnatural. The social worker interpreted this as a neurotic attempt to disclaim responsibility—but even he recorded a comment that the mother was so very insistent on this point that some people might actually have believed her, if only the baby hadn’t turned out to be a boy. Do you understand why that ruled out the possibility of a virgin birth?”
Meg had sat GCSE Biology while she was pregnant. She had intended to do A level, maybe even a degree, but it hadn’t happened. “Boys have Y chromosomes,” she said. “Y chromosomes have to come from fathers. If virgin births ever happen, which they probably don’t, the babies would have to be girls.”
“Right. Except that Gary Cordling hasn’t got a Y chromosome,” Mr. Tomlinson said. “The mother was right. He really was unnatural—not conventionally natural, anyhow. But nobody knew that until the police forensic lab had to produce a DNA-analysis of his blood and semen, in order to compare it with the samples they obtained from you after the rape.”
“I don’t understand,” Meg said, more by way of punctuation than anything else.
“Nor do we. There are people, apparently, who are born with an unpaired X chromosome; it’s called Turner’s syndrome. Almost all the reported cases are outwardly female but there are one or two on record who had male sexual organs—non-functional, of course. In any case, Gary doesn’t have Turner’s syndrome. His case is spectacularly different.”
“How?”
“Every single one of Gary’s chromosome-pairs is aberrant, and he has four additional unpaired chromosomes, which don’t correspond to any of the familiar ones. There’s no way he ought to be alive, let alone reproductively-functional. Ordinarily, it only requires a single breakage in a chromosome, or a pairing error, to foul up the entire process of embryonic development. Gary Cordling was no ordinary freak—if you’ll pardon the expression. The baby you’re carrying is proof of that, if any more were needed. There’s nothing supernatural about it, but it’s something that will take some explaining. In terms of the calculus of probabilities, what’s happened here is some kind of miracle.”
“WPC Lowther didn’t think he was a likely candidate for one of those,” Meg observed, although she knew that Miss Tomlinson hadn’t meant the word to carry any religious connotations.
“It might not be as rare as we suppose, of course,” Miss Tomlinson said, “given that we’ve only just started doing these kinds of tests, but even if it’s not unique it’s the first time anything like this has ever been identified. So you see, Gary Cordling is a very interesting specimen—and so is his child.”
“He’s still a rapist,” Meg pointed out, “and the child is the product of a violent crime—something that was forced on me against my will.”
“I’m not offering any excuses for him,” Miss Tomlinson told her. “I haven’t the slightest idea whether his behavioral problems have anything to do with his abnormal genetic make-up, or whether he’d have been as nice as pie if his mother hadn’t been so convinced of his unnaturalness. Nor am I saying that the fact that he might be genetically unique puts him above the law. But this is something important—a problem that requires a unique solution. If we’re to investigate this properly, we need you, not just as a specimen but as a collaborator. It’s a hell of a way to get recruited, I know, but it happened. If you absolutely insist that you don’t want anything to do with it, we’ll understand—in which case we’ll transplant the fetus— but we really don’t want to take that risk unless we have to. We’d rather you carried it to term, and to be perfectly honest we’d like you to stick with us beyond that point....maybe for life.”
Meg looked at the woman from the Home Office very carefully. “I don’t suppose Gary will get much choice about helping you out,” she said.
“No, he won’t. But for that very reason, he might not be as helpful as you. His mother might be difficult too. But you’re brighter than they are, and tougher too. You can understand what’s at stake.”
Flattery, Meg thought, will get you almost anywhere, or so it’s said. “What about Emily?” she asked.
“We’re not planning to separate you,” Miss Tomlinson said. “You’ll raise her just as you would whatever job you were doing.”
“But she’ll be part of it, won’t she?” Meg pointed out. “Whatever I’m mother to, she’ll be sister to. She’ll be involved, almost as intimately as me.”
I can see why they don’t want me to tell my mother, she thought. By the way, Mum, I’ve taken this job in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, and your next grandchild is going to be a lovely little monster. Won’t that be fun? Even at her calmest, even at her most supremely reasonable, her mother would surely say: “They can’t do this to you. It isn’t fair.” And she’d be right. It wouldn’t be fair. The main difference between Meg and her mother was that Meg knew far better than to expect fairness, in people or in the wayward works of time and chance.
I’ve always been a bad girl, Meg reminded herself, always a misfit, always a failure as a respectable human being. Who could be better qualified to raise an alien child, and to love it cleverly and conscientiously, no matter where it came from?
“You mentioned compensation before,” Meg said, pleased with the evenness of her tone. “Anything within reason.”
“Yes I did,” Miss Tomlinson said, just as evenly. “You can name your price—anything within reason.”
Meg laughed briefly. “The policewoman said that this case was so straightforward it wouldn’t fall apart even if I were on the game,” she told the civil servant. “Looks like she was wrong about that too, doesn’t it?”
“It’s not like that,” the black-haired woman said, just a trifle primly.
“No,” said Meg, “it never is. It’s more like Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, isn’t it? The rape of all mankind, of the earth itself, of the holy empire of Gaia. Was Gary Cordling’s mother abducted by a flying saucer, do you think? They say it happens all the time.”
“No, she wasn’t,” said Miss Tomlinson. “As far as we can ascertain, she just liked swimming a lot. At present, we think that whatever got into her was probably in the sea....that’s our best guess, anyhow. Maybe it fell into the sea from above, maybe it came up from below—but we fear that, whatever it was and wherever it came from, it had been carefully designed by natural selection to do exactly what it did: latch on to the egg-cell of a totally unrelated species, and reproduce itself by causing the egg-cell to develop. One of our scientific advisers described it as a kind of super-virus, another as the ultimate venereal disease.”
So all my guesses were right, Meg thought, except the one about it all being a dream. And it really might be something incredibly odd, something from outside, from another planet, something authentically alien. I couldn’t just get raped, could I? Oh no. I had to go the whole hog...one small step for a girl, one giant leap for life on earth. Sod Kafka, this is....
But she couldn’t think of anything to compare it to.
Miss Tomlinson was still talking, sounding more ordinary and more conventional with every well-worn phrase she uttered. “We may never be sure about its origins,” she said, beginning to carve out her clichés on a wholesale basis, “but it’s the future that concerns us now. It’s what happens next that’s important. This is just the beginning.”
“You’d better ban swimming in Swansea Bay,” Meg advised, “in case it happens again. Maybe you could arrange for an oil spillage or something, to poison the entire coastline. Obviously the raw sewage isn’t an adequate deterrent.” That’s the whole trouble, she added, silently. We live in an age of inadequate deterrents. She was glad that she wasn’t mindlessly scared by the thought that there was something unnatural inside her, something perverse and maybe wicked: a bad seed. She was proud of herself for having that kind of courage.
Miss Tomlinson shook her head. “I know it all sounds like some bad B-movie,” she said, “but it isn’t really. It’s not Rosemary’s Baby and it’s not Invasion of the Body-Snatchers or I Married a Monster from Outer Space. As I said before, it’s better regarded as a kind of miracle: something rare and strange and infinitely precious. It might have taken a rape to reveal it, but that was just bad luck. We shouldn’t think of this as a violation of our precious species by some monstrous thing. We have to see it as an opportunity: a chance to learn, and a chance to discover something new.”
“That’s not how a lot of people would see it,” Meg pointed out. “Even if it didn’t actually drop out of the sky—even if it’s a product of some incredible mutational freak here at the surface—Cordling’s mother was right to call it unnatural, and calling it a super-virus or the ultimate venereal disease isn’t going to help its PR any. And it is an insidious predator of sorts. It’s something that can take over the genetic complement of a human egg-cell—maybe any kind of egg-cell—and produce a viable organism, which looks like others of its kind but isn’t really. Whatever the calculus of probability says, paranoia will say that it really did come from outside—that it’s some kind of spore adapted to the task of world-colonization. And paranoia will tell us that we don’t know how far it’s already spread. We know about Cordling, but we don’t know how many more like him there are, and we don’t know about the fish that aren’t really fish and the crabs that aren’t really crabs....in fact, the only thing we know for sure is that even poisoning the Bristol Channel might be locking the stable door long after most of the horses have bolted. You can practice your uplifting speeches all you want, but you aren’t ever going to convince people like my mother to be glad that this thing’s popped up out of nowhere.”
“You might be right,” Miss Tomlinson agreed, uneasily—and not without a trace of admiration in the expression of her dark eyes, which Meg gladly drank in—”but you and I know that the paranoid way of looking at things isn’t the only way. You and I know that there are other analogies to be drawn, apart from invasions and takeovers and rapes. For the moment, at least, we have the choice of treating this as a miracle—or, if it really is a visitor from elsewhere, as an honored guest, extending the hand of friendship across the void; or as the basis of a whole new branch of biotechnology: a whole new set of biological systems to explore and domesticate and turn to our advantage.”
“So we do,” Meg said, lukewarmly. All of that, she realized, had been put together with the immediate aim of persuading her to play her part, willingly—but in time, the world at large would have to be persuaded too. She knew that if she did play her part, if she did throw in with Miss Tomlinson, she would have to stay with it for a long time. She would have to be more than tough. But she could see that even if Miss Tomlinson’s optimistic reassurances were just so much hot air and this really were phase one of the body-snatcher invasion—especially if this were phase one of the body-snatcher invasion—it had to be studied as carefully and as cleverly as possible.
Through the window of her nicely-decorated sick-room, Meg could see Emily poking around in the flower-beds with a stick she had picked up, concentrating fiercely on whatever she was stirring up. Emily, at least, was taking everything in her stride—as she always did. Emily was not yet old enough to be afraid of rape, to be afraid of life collapsing around her, to be afraid of life itself.
Serene, Meg thought. That’s what she is. Did I do that, or was it just the lottery of fate? Can I take the credit for her, or was she just thrown up haphazardly by life’s unfolding pattern? How will she turn out, when she‘s got an alien for a brother—and would she turn out any different if we went back Swansea, so that Mum could breathe down our necks all the time, hanging over us like some awful black shadow, trying to stifle us with tender loving care and her mistaken sense of certainty?
All of a sudden, despite the cloying warmth of the September afternoon, she shivered. She regretted having agreed to come here, having half-agreed to take all this on board and become a part of it. She should have known that there would be no comforting revelation to be obtained here, no healing abreaction. There were no final explanations here, no promises that everything was going to be all right, or even that she was doing really well. There was nothing here but brutally honest uncertainty, and something strange, something alien.
She raised a hand to touch the eyebrow that hid a faint but all-too-tangible scar. “I bet she didn’t feel a thing,” she said, meaning Gary Cordling’s mother. “She wasn’t that unlucky.”
“But she couldn’t cope,” said Miss Tomlinson, who was very quick on the uptake. “You can. At the end of the day, it’s better to know the truth than to be ignorant, and better to be tough than to be lucky.”
“The trouble is,” Meg said, “nobody actually has the choice.” But her mind was already made up. She was in, entirely and wholeheartedly—not necessarily for life, but for anything within reason.