London was barely recognisable as the city Talissa had first visited. In a planned reversal of use, the silent buses drove down lanes kerbed off thirty years earlier for cyclists, while the rest of the roadway, once used by cars, was crammed with pedal bikes. It reminded her of a school history book with a photograph of ‘Old Beijing’. The only noise came from the thudding of the barges on the old Fleet river and other just uncovered waterways.
It had to be made, this visit, the first time she had seen Mary and Alaric since she had discovered the truth about Seth. She’d kept in touch and knew that Alaric was on a term-long sabbatical from his school and that Mary had changed job, leaving her sports club to work for a company that catered large events. Seth, she also knew, had graduated with a degree in engineering.
Talissa was dreading the moment. It was no consolation to think that she would be the first human being in history who had to deliver such news. Before leaving New York, she had also rung the private number Catrina Olsen had shared after leaving the Parn. They had agreed to fix a time to meet once Talissa was in town.
In Ashers End, Mary held open the front door at the end of the path. She stretched out her arms as Talissa approached, her head on one side.
‘You still haven’t changed! What is it with you? Look at me all grey. And you … Come inside and tell me your secret.’
‘Good genes, I guess,’ said Talissa, following her into the hall. ‘Sure can’t be the way I live.’
Seth was away, it turned out. He was visiting John Rockingham in Newmarket, Mary said, where they were sure to be talking about horses.
We know what you did … Talissa braced herself. It was better that Seth wasn’t there. She had to tell his parents before they found out from a less considerate source. I’ll do it now, she thought, before we get too comfortable.
But Mary had prepared a special dinner, whose herb and onion aromas were already in the air, while Alaric was opening some wine.
‘Where are you staying, Talissa?’ said Mary, putting the first of the dishes on the table.
‘With my friend Kavya.’
‘Is she the one who did so well out of PICs?’ said Mary.
‘Not really. Her son could cash in, but he refuses to use them.’
‘Refused,’ said Alaric. ‘Past tense. The new government’s dropped them. Quite right, too.’
‘Al’s cross because he scored so low,’ said Mary.
‘Nonsense,’ said Alaric. ‘I just thought there was a confusion, that’s all. Between important things and frivolous things.’
‘Go on,’ said Talissa.
‘Well.’ Alaric’s voice became teacherly as he poured some wine. ‘Slavery and the Holocaust were historic crimes against humanity. It’s not for us to say how long we have to try to make amends – with identity cards or anything else. It’s for the descendants of those who were wronged to decide. A murderer doesn’t set his own jail sentence. But a hundred and fifty years of slavery … What do you think? Maybe two thousand years of payback?’
‘I guess.’
‘They’re one thing, those crimes,’ said Alaric. ‘We have a sacred duty to remember. The other thing is quite different. Saying my grandfather had slightly redder hair than yours, therefore I’m entitled to a better job than you. That’s not sacred. That’s the narcissism of small differences.’
‘That’s a good phrase,’ said Talissa.
‘Yes, I read it somewhere,’ said Alaric. ‘Freud, I think. But what I mean is that people need to stop making an obsession of tiny variations in appearance that are the result of simple genetic drift. That was the thrust of the ADEPT thing.’
‘How do you know about genes all of a sudden?’ said Mary.
‘Rose Paxton explained it to me.’
‘And who’s Rose Paxton?’ said Talissa.
‘The head of science,’ said Mary. ‘Al was infatuated with her.’
‘No, I wasn’t!’
‘All right, you weren’t,’ said Mary. ‘I think the last straw for Al was when the PICs people gave Seth half a point because my family’s from Japan.’
‘Bloody insult,’ said Alaric. ‘If anything they should have deducted a point.’
Talissa found herself looking at her hostess. She hadn’t given Mary’s background much thought before; the Parn enquiries had been all about her own family history. Then she remembered, from their previous flat, a photograph of two older people posing in what could have been a Japanese interior.
‘Whereabouts?’ she said.
‘Two of my grandparents were from a small town near Osaka,’ said Mary. ‘One was from Hiroshima. I think that’s why Al fell in love with me. A hotline to history.’
‘And the fourth one?’
‘Paris. He was French. He met my grandmother when she came over as a student. But I was brought up in Brighton.’
‘That’s a cool family,’ said Talissa.
‘I thought so,’ said Alaric.
‘And we’ve ended up living next to the big Crystal Palace radio mast,’ said Mary. ‘The glamour.’
‘Our own Eiffel Tower,’ said Alaric. ‘In honour of Mary’s grand-père.’
‘And where’s your family from, Alaric?’ said Talissa.
‘Don’t! It’ll take for ever,’ said Mary. ‘With a lot of fjords and a surprising twist. There was a grandfather born in Nazareth.’
By the time dinner was finished at midnight, there was no longer any chance of confiding to Mary and Alaric the news that would change their lives. Jet-lagged yet relieved, Talissa promised she would visit them again in two days’ time.
As the night train headed north towards Muswell Hill, she leant her head against the window. She would deliver the message better when she was rested; she’d have time to prepare the exact words. She had forgotten how much she had become a part of the Pedersens’ lives. Alaric with his bean and sausage dish, Mary saying, ‘The woods are your friend’ … They had seldom met, yet they had been loyal to her for more than two decades. The look of delight on their faces when they caught sight of her after a break … And now in return she almost loved them.
She shifted in her seat and let her mind drift as the stations went by. She herself could have married, she thought, and lived a life like theirs. Maybe. Mark would probably have gone for it. She could have pushed Aron Landor into leaving his wife. Though without the thrill of subterfuge, was he someone you would really want to spend all your time with? Or Felix. She had loved him for sure, body and mind, one fine day. But she had messed it up. Through sheer … inexperience. How cruel that the crucial question had been asked of someone too young to get the answer right. Now it was too late to have a child, but she still felt susceptible to a passion that could reset her world; she was still open to love.
Susan had once assured her that the kind of man you met depended on the kind of man you wanted to meet. ‘You always set your satnav for Adventure, not for Home,’ she said.
‘Are you saying that if I’d gone out on the town in a settling-down frame of mind, I’d have met different guys?’ said Talissa.
‘Yes. Or at least, you would have chosen different guys, that’s the point.’
‘And what about you, Mrs Wiseacre?’
‘I set my satnav for Adventure every time. But it always landed me at Leon.’
Up in her old room in Muswell Hill, Talissa lay down among the batik-covered cushions on the bed. She wanted to clear her mind and sleep, but her brain kept asking questions. Was there a way in which giving birth to Seth had satisfied – or cauterised – any desire she must once have felt to be a mother to her own child? And without that urge, had she been drawn to a different kind of man and lived a life that was not truly hers?
She turned onto her side, her synapses firing on a surge of American time.
What would her father have thought of all the decisions she had made? He had told her to be brave, to try everything. That much she remembered of him – when he’d taken her to the park in winter, his hand crushing her smaller fingers in their woollen gloves, when he’d pushed her on the swing and urged her to go up on the climbing frame. But probably dads wanted their daughters to have children, didn’t they? Some urge beyond reason, not unkind.
Occasionally, at home in Harlem, she lit a berry-scented candle at her desk because she knew he’d loved the smell. When she inhaled it, she missed him with an ache in all her limbs. What she missed most was everything about him that she could never remember.
In the morning, Talissa sat at the familiar kitchen table. Kavya Gopal presented her with sliced banana with a squeeze of lime and told her to eat up while she cooked some chilli eggs.
A news alert came through on her handset. It was from the plausible FBC in New York. ‘Galatia, a fundamentalist Christian news organisation’ it reported, ‘is claiming that the so-called White Van Man is not a clone of Homo vannesiensis, as had been thought, but a hybrid of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. The individual is thought to be living somewhere in Europe. Our London correspondent, Todd Brown, has more.’
‘Are you all right?’ said Kavya.
Talissa put the handset away in her bag. She held her head between her hands and screamed.
She felt Kavya’s arm round her. ‘What is it? What is it? Tell me.’
Then it came out through moans and gasps and Kavya’s baffled interruptions, a torrent of confusion and fear, of bad choices, vanity and misplaced affections. Talissa felt as if the whole misbegotten venture of humanity was trying to find release through her exploding head. ‘What are we?’ she sobbed on Kavya’s shoulder. ‘What have we done?’
She pushed the older woman’s arm away, repelled by human touch, even at its kindest, wanting instead to feel the wood of the table against her cheek.
Then she stood up, pulled open the back door and ran down the side of the house into the street.
In Ashers End, Alaric was drying the glasses from the night before. When he’d put them away, he’d have the whole day clear to work on his book.
‘I’ll be back at five,’ said Mary. ‘I’ve got to make canapés for a party in town tonight.’
‘OK. Nice seeing Talissa, wasn’t it?’ said Alaric. ‘Though I thought she seemed a bit tense. Probably the jet lag.’
In Newmarket, Seth was at the gallops with John Rockingham, watching a two-year-old they’d heard good things about.
‘Beautiful creature,’ said John. ‘Lovely, easy action.’
‘Yes,’ said Seth, ‘but she seems to have a cough. Can you hear?’
‘She’s on the mend,’ said the trainer, coming alongside them. ‘And we’ve got six weeks yet.’
In Harlem, Susan Kovalenko was asleep, but she had caught some news the night before.
‘I must remember to tell Talissa about the white van man,’ she said.
‘It’s so her thing,’ said Leon. ‘How long is she in London?’
‘Just a week.’
‘So we get to keep Pelham for a bit longer.’
Felix was lying in his one-room apartment in Queens. There were four different medications on the nightstand. It could happen that he took them twice; other days, not at all. The yellow capsules were to stop the man upstairs from shouting. The blue one kept his own thoughts from escaping onto the street.
In Russell Square, Malik Wood had called an emergency meeting in his office.
‘I think we need to control the narrative,’ said Sheila Rahm, by video from New York. ‘This is going to be a London thing, so I’m getting on the next plane. Until then, you need to get yourself the best damage-control person you can find.’
‘Ahead of you there,’ said Malik Wood. ‘I’ve had plans in place since I met with Parn in Berlin. Say hello to Clive Brewer.’
He indicated a short man in a patterned suit, sitting on his sofa next to Delmore Redding. Brewer smiled and raised a hand.
‘What I suggest,’ said Sheila, ‘is that one of you needs to go and speak to the parents. Tell them whatever story you’ve prepared. It was all a mistake. Shit happens. It was an important experiment for the good of humankind. Whatever. Discuss how they break it to the kid. Presumably they’ll want to do that themselves. But speak to them first.’
‘I can do that,’ said Brewer.
‘Maybe not you,’ said Malik Wood. ‘No disrespect, but this needs someone who’s been involved all along.’
‘Where’s the surrogate?’ said Sheila.
‘In New York,’ said Wood.
‘The first thing to do,’ said Clive Brewer, ‘is to get the kid to go public. Let him own it. Find the biggest audience. Do a one-off interview.’
‘But he won’t want to be seen, will he?’ said Sheila.
‘They’ll use FAT. Face-altering technology,’ said Brewer. ‘It’s quite an old process, but it’s become much better in recent years. And it’s fail-safe. They’ve never had an identification.’
‘It’s too risky,’ said Wood. ‘I’ve had Parn in my ear all day stressing the need to protect the kid’s identity.’
‘I can get a deal with the broadcaster,’ said Brewer. ‘It’s a one-off exclusive. People see the kid, or a version of him. They understand his need for privacy and respect. They back off. I’ll get my VA to check the latest viewer figures.’
‘It would have been a natural for the old BBC,’ said Delmore Redding.
‘I still don’t like it,’ said Wood.
Brewer ignored him as he looked up from his handset. ‘OK. It’s Flip Talk. No surprise there. I’ll get on to Jade Johnson. She owes me plenty.’
‘Can we have an update on our legal position?’ said Sheila Rahm.
‘OK,’ said Malik Wood. ‘Lukas Parn was advised that it was not a criminal matter, but there might have been a breach of contract. A tort. The contract was not specific, but they could reasonably argue that a Sapiens father was implied.’
‘More than implied,’ said Sheila. ‘From what I understand, they were told that they were to become parents at last. Both of them. Personally. The fulfilment of their dream.’
‘The point is,’ said Malik, ‘that Parn believes he can take any hit. In damages. And if it came to a crime, they’d go for a deferred prosecution, so he could pay a large fine and promise to be good.’
‘We’ll need a team to present to the public,’ said Brewer. ‘Malik and Delmore, that’s fine. Good optics. But you need a woman.’
‘Catrina Olsen would have been ideal,’ said Malik.
‘Let’s get on to her,’ said Brewer. ‘See if you can persuade her.’
‘She won’t do it. She’s furious with us.’
‘Who else knew about the experiment?’
‘Only Lukas Parn,’ said Malik. ‘It was his idea. But he only does positive grandstanding. The breakthroughs.’
‘All right,’ said Brewer. ‘This is going to be a bumpy ride. Parn may have to get over his shyness and go public. Until then, let’s find someone caring and trustworthy to join the team. Preferably female.’
‘Well,’ said Sheila Rahm. ‘What about Ayesha Cross? She actually worked the manipulator, didn’t she? In the lab. Seems like a nice person, too. You look doubtful, Malik.’
By the time she had regained control of her emotions, Talissa no longer recognised her surroundings. She was in a street of small houses, a long way from Kavya’s. Once, there would have been cars parked along the kerb; now there were hefty garbage bins on wheels.
She called Catrina Olsen. ‘Can I come and see you? Now?’
‘You’ve heard?’ said Catrina. ‘It’s best if I come to you, I think. Where are you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Click on your “Locator”. OK, I’ve got it. What on earth are you doing up there?’
‘I don’t know. I just … walked till I collapsed. Can you come?’
‘Of course. Go to the café behind you, the Colney Bakery, on the main road. I’ll see you there in about half an hour.’
Talissa tried the door, but it was closed. On the other side of the main road was a park, visible through railings and a line of trees. Looking to kill some time, she walked along the pavement till she found some gates. At a slightly lower level was an enormous old brick building, hundreds of yards long, utilitarian but with a fancy bell tower. A uniformed porter sat in a wooden hut by a barrier at the top of the drive and she decided not to go any further.
By the time Catrina arrived, the café had opened. They were the only people in the glum interior, which smelled of disinfectant. A cleaner was mopping the floor, banging against the furniture.
Talissa took Catrina’s hand on top of the small table.
‘It’s good that you’re in London when this comes out,’ said Catrina. ‘You’ve at least got me to talk to. I presume you’ve still not told anyone at home?’
‘No. But when these Galatia people started sniffing around, I thought it would be only a matter of time. They’d clearly got a source. I thought I should tell the parents myself. Rather than have them called by some reporter.’
‘What made you sure?’ said Catrina.
‘I had a message from someone at Galatia.’
‘God.’
‘Yeah. I got Parn to give me his word he’d do everything to protect Seth’s identity, but even so …’
‘There’ll be a steady drip, drip, don’t you think?’ said Catrina. ‘Even if everyone acts in good faith, which is a big “if” with Parn. It’ll be very hard to keep it watertight.’
Talissa let go of Catrina’s hand. She sucked in some air over her teeth. ‘What the fuck have we done?’
‘Not much,’ said Catrina. ‘You and me. It’s what other people have done.’
They drank some coffee. Catrina stared at the tabletop as if an answer might be in the grain of the wood.
‘What are you doing now?’ said Talissa. ‘For work?’
‘I’m a consultant. I could retire, but I like the work. I prefer it to the Parn.’
‘What will happen to the people there?’
‘I hope they go to prison. But I wouldn’t bank on it. Lukas is bound to find a lawyer to get them off.’
Neither of them seemed able to talk about Seth.
‘How are your boys?’
‘Oh, quite grown-up now,’ said Catrina. ‘Ben’s a musician, Anders works for an IT company. They’re both happy in their way.’
Talissa saw a sparkle return for a moment to Catrina’s eyes.
‘I’m glad they’re OK. By the way, what’s that huge building on the other side of the road? In the park?’
‘It’s apartments, I think,’ said Catrina. ‘It was originally built as a lunatic asylum in the nineteenth century. Colney Hatch. It was famous in its day.’
‘It’s gigantic.’
‘I know. I think it grew too big to manage.’
There was a silence. Eventually, Catrina sat up straight. ‘My dear Talissa, we need a plan.’
‘I know. Let’s try to get through this together. If you’re up for that.’
‘I am,’ said Catrina.