Talissa rehearsed the words as the silent train headed south from Muswell Hill. She had met Seth – several years ago, admittedly, but she knew him to be an ordinary boy, if a little unusual. He was no freak, and there was consolation in that. Second, her work had increasingly revealed the mongrel nature of the world’s humans: one subspecies now, for sure, but with a pariah-dog pedigree. Perhaps that scientific fact would take the edge off what she had to say. But she was not lecturing people who already understood such things; she was dealing with Alaric and Mary, parents of an only son.
Alaric opened the door and fussed round her, offering coffee and warm cheese canapés left over from some function. Mary would apparently be back soon; Seth himself, it seemed, was still away.
‘What are his plans?’ said Talissa, as she sat down.
‘Seth doesn’t really do plans,’ said Alaric, putting down a cup of coffee on the table. ‘He started a postgrad course, but he didn’t like it. Did a couple of placements with big companies. Nothing’s stuck yet.’
‘I guess the world’s always going to need engineers,’ said Talissa.
‘I think so. But getting launched. It’s difficult. We don’t know whether to let him go his own way or try to help.’
‘What else is he interested in?’
‘Horses. I think maybe he’d like to breed them. An odd thing for a boy from Crystal Palace.’
‘Football?’ said Talissa, remembering her walk in the park with the schoolboy.
‘Yes, he does still follow it. But it’s too late for him to be a player. For a professional club, anyway. Even in a lower league.’
‘I guess university put an end to that.’
‘God, yes. The big clubs sign them up aged ten.’
As they chatted, Talissa remembered a piece of advice she had read somewhere long ago. If you have bad news to break, do it in stages.
When Mary was finally home, and was sitting down with them, she began.
‘It’s so great to see you guys again. But there’s something I think you need to know.’
‘We’re all ears,’ said Mary. ‘You’re not getting married, are you?’
‘No, no. The news is … not very good. I have a, like, suspicion … More than a suspicion. It’s to do with Seth.’
‘What about him?’ said Mary.
‘With these procedures, even with all the modern technology, there can be mistakes.’
‘But Seth’s a healthy and—’
‘To do with paternity. It’s a busy lab, so many samples and embryos and eggs and … incubators. Human error.’
‘Are you saying I’m not the father?’
Alaric’s voice was so plaintive that Talissa couldn’t meet his eye.
‘I’m saying we must all remember what a great kid he is.’
‘How do you know? After all this time?’
‘Has something suddenly come up?’ said Mary.
Talissa had decided it was best not to mention the DNA tests she’d organised back home. She stalled for a moment.
In the silence, Mary said, ‘If it turned out it was someone else’s sperm, we’d love him just the same. He’s who he is.’
‘Yes. That’s the important thing,’ said Talissa.
The quietness filled the room again, like fog. She could tell they knew there was more to come.
Alaric said, ‘I always thought … I always wondered … No, I didn’t! What am I saying? I’m making stuff up now. But are we sure? How do we know?’
They had reached the part of the conversation for which no amount of rehearsal could prepare them.
‘I don’t think anyone can know for sure who the actual father is,’ said Talissa.
‘We could do a DNA test,’ said Alaric. ‘I know it’s controversial these days, but I’d have thought the Parn could organise something. They’re still monitoring him, after all.’
‘That could rule you out, Al,’ said Mary, ‘but it wouldn’t tell us who the father is. Not that I care at all. As far as I’m concerned, Alaric is Seth’s dad. But how do we know, Talissa? What have you found out?’
‘Those people at the Parn,’ said Talissa. ‘I don’t think they were honest. Ever.’ Still breaking it by stages, she told herself.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not sure it was a mistake. I think someone switched a sample. Maybe no one knew which sample or which surrogate, so they could dress it up as science. Double-blind and all that.’
‘That nice embryologist,’ said Alaric. ‘The one who, you know, put in the … What was her name?’
‘Catrina? No. It wasn’t her. She was in the dark.’
Talissa felt the weight of her life’s choices bear down on her. This was the moment. She closed her eyes, then opened them and looked up at the ceiling of the square front room. She noticed for the first time a stuck-on cornice.
Still staring upwards, she said, ‘You know that Lukas Parn finances a lot of work in genetic research.’
‘Yes. I think so,’ said Mary.
‘And palaeoanthropology. Have you heard about a character called White Van Man?’
‘It was me who told you about that silly name,’ said Alaric. ‘In France that time.’
‘There’s been a rumour going round that someone created a clone of him.’
‘I saw that.’
‘But that’s not true. What does appear to be true is that there is a living hybrid. A cross of two human species. Not a clone, and not vannesiensis at all. But a mix of Sapiens and Neanderthal.’
Mary, who was leaning forward on the edge of the sofa, let out a cry. ‘Not … Not our …’
Talissa nodded.
Alaric stood up and said, ‘I knew it. I knew there was something. Those bastards. Those utter, fucking—’
Talissa held on to the edge of the chair. ‘Let me explain what I know,’ she said.
On the way back from Newmarket, Seth found his screen full of messages from someone called Clive Brewer. Why was this stranger urging him to get in touch? He turned off the handset.
A young woman in the carriage was looking at him, stealing glances over her book. She was wearing a kilt over black woollen tights. He caught her eye and the skin of her face coloured a little as she looked down, but not before she had given him a half-smile.
This sort of thing had started happening to him since he’d left university. Thirty-five-year-olds in business skirts, teenage girls in jeans, even people old enough to be his mother – they seemed to want to rest their eyes on him. If caught, they smiled in different but similar ways.
It was a nuisance. He felt he was missing out on something. But he couldn’t ask them what they wanted. There was no way for him to approach this woman in the kilt. It was not in his nature and it was possibly against the law.
He hadn’t slept with anyone since Rosalie Wright. That had all been easy, because Rosie knew what to do. She didn’t look away, she just told him what she’d like from him next, in his own time. Maybe he’d never again meet anyone like her.
The woman crossed her legs, causing the kilt to rise. Seth turned his head and gazed the other way, out of the window.
When he got home, he found his father pacing up and down in the small back garden.
‘Are you all right, Dad?’
‘I tried to call you.’
‘Sorry. I turned it off. I was being bombarded by some stranger.’
‘Come inside.’
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘She went to work. They have a dinner thing. In Holland Park.’
In the kitchen, Alaric went to a corner cupboard and took out an unopened bottle of whisky.
They sat opposite one another at the table. Alaric stared at Seth in a way that he hated himself for doing. He could still see a little of Mary there, as he had on the day of the birth. Now he also looked for evidence of another kind. The nostrils, wider than his own. A ridge above the eye sockets – not enormous, but, now he came to look at it, more pronounced than most. The legs that had given him a usefully low centre of gravity on the football pitch. He’d always been aware of these things, but never thought much about them. Feeling like a Nazi doctor, Alaric turned away and took his drink over to the window. None of these features were beyond the scope of an exchange of genes between two regular parents. Surely.
‘How are you doing?’
‘I’m fine, thanks. Why are we drinking whisky?’
‘Do you not like it?’
‘I’ve only had it once. With John Rockingham. When he was telling me about his uninhabited Scottish island. Trying to recreate the atmosphere. Would you like to go there with me one day?’
‘No fear,’ said Alaric. ‘I like towns. How was Newmarket?’
‘It was windy on the gallops. We saw some good horses, though. John wants to buy a share in one.’
‘We had a visitor today. Talissa. You remember her?’
‘Yes, of course. She took me to the park. When I was, like, twelve.’
‘Did you like her?’
‘Yes. She was … kind.’
Alaric found a smile had stolen up on him. Seth was still himself. ‘Did you trust her?’
‘Of course. She’s your friend. You and Mum. Right?’
‘Yes. I like her, too,’ said Alaric. ‘And I also trust her. She told us that after all this time some doubt has come up about your birth.’
‘What?’
‘It seems I may not be your father after all.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Maybe there was a mix-up at the clinic.’
Seth said nothing.
‘So,’ Alaric went on, ‘it’s probably worth clearing up. If you don’t mind, we’d like you to take a test. Talissa says the embryologist at the time, a woman called Catrina, can get it done in an ultra-modern place that tells you everything.’
Still Seth said nothing.
‘Seth?’
‘You painted the cupboard in Palace colours. You dressed up as Father Christmas at my first school when I didn’t know anyone. And I think it was you who sent those new football boots when I was at college. I couldn’t care less what any test says.’
‘Let’s have some more whisky then.’
Seth held out his glass.
When the result came back from a private laboratory, it followed the law in giving no details of the species composition of the subject, offering only statistics on ancestral habitats and disease susceptibility. The lab owed Catrina a favour, however, and after she had signed a confidentiality agreement they agreed to reveal more data. It confirmed what the New York test had found, that the subject was 51.5 per cent Neanderthal. She printed off the key part of the result and then, as she had agreed, double-deleted the file.
She read out the numbers to Talissa and they arranged to meet again at the Colney Bakery, their now agreed centre of operations. Over a toasted sandwich, they decided to form a two-person shield in front of the Pedersens. For the first time since We know what you did, Talissa felt an element of relief. She was no longer alone.
Catrina had offered the use of her flat near Marylebone High Street to Alaric, Mary and Seth and got them to re-route all incoming communications on their handsets to an end point that she and Talissa could also access. She herself had moved into a spare room with her younger son in Highgate.
‘Somehow,’ she told Talissa, ‘we have to control the process.’
‘We’ll be up against the Parn’s PR army.’
‘We have to work with them.’
‘I still have Parn’s private ID,’ said Talissa. ‘I can call him.’
The story rumbled on. In the absence of new facts, reporters turned to opinion and interview. There was a clip of a Professor Targett, head of London’s ‘prestigious Museum of Human History’, commenting, ‘This could reset our understanding of who we are and how we got here. But only if the individual agrees to co-operate.’
The next day there was an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Right Reverend Dr Penelope Farmiga, who seemed less excited than alarmed. ‘We must respect the individual in the eyes of God,’ she said, ‘and grant him dignity and privacy.’
‘But he’s not really a man, is he?’ said the interviewer. ‘He doesn’t have the same entitlements as you or me.’
‘He’s a human being, as I understand it,’ said Dr Farmiga.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said Catrina, pushing open the doors of the Colney Bakery.
The air was edgy with the coming of winter.
‘That was bad,’ said Talissa.
‘I know. I’m afraid it’s going to get very rough. I’ve had a lot of stuff coming in from someone called Clive Brewer, the Parn’s PR man. They want Seth to do an interview. A one-off thing. Probably with Flip Talk, and with syndication in America and worldwide. Then there’ll be some sort of privacy deal.’
‘Do you trust him?’
‘He warned me that the press’ll come after you as well.’
‘What do you mean, “come after”?’
‘Force you to talk. It’s what they always do. When someone has a problem, they pretend to be their friend. Get them to confide. Then they stitch them up.’
‘How do you know this? I thought you were a doctor.’
‘Anyone can see how it’s done.’
‘What do you think we should do?’
‘I think you should go home,’ said Catrina. ‘Then maybe find somewhere to hide for a time. Make sure no one but me can reach you on your handset.’
‘But I promised to stay and look after him. The shield, remember?’
‘I’ll manage,’ said Catrina. ‘I don’t think there’s anything you can do now, Talissa. You’ve done the hard bit by breaking it to the parents. To be honest, I think you’re more of a liability now. A way of getting to him. Or at him.’
‘But if I go back,’ said Talissa, ‘that’s my flight allowance used up. The federal government rations our long-distance trips.’
Talissa felt saddened by what Catrina had said. She’d need time to think about it, to talk it over – with Kavya, perhaps. But she also felt exhausted by the weight of what she had carried for so long.
They stopped at the gates down into the park, from which they could see the apartment building, converted from the old asylum.
‘That place,’ said Talissa. ‘It’s so, like … gigantic.’
‘I think it had to be,’ said Catrina.
‘Were Victorian Londoners that insane?’
‘I looked up the history after we first met here,’ said Catrina. ‘They say it took five hours to visit all the wards. The male corridor was a quarter of a mile long. With locked rooms every ten paces.’
‘Why did they shut it down?’ said Talissa.
‘It was the policy of the time,’ said Catrina. ‘Fifty or more years ago. Something called “care in the community”. They thought the patients would be better off outside.’
‘And were they?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure how much “care” they really got. Or how much of a community they found.’
‘I had a boyfriend once …’ Talissa trailed off.
‘And?’ said Catrina.
Talissa looked at the Italian bell tower, thrusting up into the sky.
‘Never mind.’