Billy lay in his clone’s bed, with his arms around his clone’s wife. He found that while he didn’t like applying the word to himself, he was more than happy to use it for William Evans. It was hard to pitch the pillow talk precisely. He was in the first flush of something new, while Thandie was basking in the pleasure of a love gone stale, now reignited. Also, she kept saying things like, ‘It’s like that time in Greece,’ to which he could only say, ‘Ah yes, Greece.’ And then she’d gaze at him with expectation in those huge eyes, and he’d have to come up with something else like, ‘Or that time after that thing,’ keeping it vague, but who hasn’t had a time after a thing? Especially after years of marriage. ‘That thing’ might even be referring to the wedding itself. But Thandie seemed satisfied. He guessed that she knew exactly which thing he was referring to, even if he didn’t.
In a way, he thought, he’d done William Evans a favour. He’d put in a great performance, maybe his best ever, and won Thandie back for him. It was selfless, actually. He was sure William Evans would see it that way.
But as for Thandie … Billy felt the stirrings of guilt in his stomach, a feeling he disliked intensely. He told himself that he had nothing to reproach himself for. He hadn’t meant to lie to Thandie. She’d been lied to enough, in his opinion. And if telling the truth had ever been an option, it wasn’t any more. Thandie was happy. She was radiant with it. She thought her husband loved her. What possible purpose would it serve to take that happiness away from her? Billy wondered what it would be like to be able to make a woman that happy for real. It must be the most wonderful feeling in the world. Anyway, lying about sleeping with someone behind your wife’s back is totally different from lying about being a secret Shakespeare clone who has been accidentally, and through no fault of his own, forced into impersonating the person-you-are-lying-to’s husband. His conscience could almost entirely be clear.
It was bliss to lie in this soft, comfortable bed – no sunken mattresses or broken springs poking into his back – with Thandie in his arms. He wished he could stay there forever. But given that that was impossible, it did make sense to treat this moment as an information-gathering opportunity. But how? The questions that presented themselves weren’t exactly ones that he could ask directly. For example:
• Does William Evans know that he is a clone of Shakespeare?
• Even if he does know, do you, Thandie, know it?
• Who is William Evans’s – and, by extension, my – father?
• Why weren’t we raised together?
• Why does William Evans have everything while I, William Anderson, have nothing?
Why do I have nothing? He felt the self-pity welling up, a feeling he far preferred to guilt. He snuggled in behind Thandie so that she could no longer see his face, his body fitting perfectly against hers – another, less pressing question could not stop itself from breaking through, which was what did they call spooning before the invention of spoons? – and he buried his face in her sweet-smelling neck.
‘How well do you think you know me?’ he asked her.
There was a long silence. Maybe he should have asked the question about the spoons. Then Thandie said, ‘If you’d asked me that yesterday, I would have said that I know you very well. Maybe even better than you know yourself. But today …’ She shook her head, her hair tickling his cheek. ‘It’s like you’re transformed. The way you’ve been looking at me. Like you actually really see me, for the first time in years. I don’t know. My friends would think I’m mad, welcoming you back in my bed after …’ There were obviously words that she didn’t want to say. ‘But you’re my husband. We’ve got work to do. But you’re still my husband.’
‘I am indeed your husband.’ And we’ll remain happily married as long as you never allude to this encounter ever having taken place.
Billy planted a row of kisses along Thandie’s shoulder blade. ‘Do you ever wonder if I would have turned out differently if I had been raised by my mother instead of my father?’ he said. This question was a risk. For all he knew, William Evans’s father had installed a fake mother – perhaps someone with more natural warmth than the icy Eleanor Anderson.
‘That’s one of those unanswerable questions,’ said Thandie. ‘Did you ever get a reply from that email you sent her?’
‘The … email …’
‘I would have thought she’d want to meet you,’ continued Thandie. ‘That she’d have some curiosity about you at least.’
‘Yes,’ said Billy. ‘I certainly would have thought that as well.’
‘Do you think …’ Thandie shifted a bit, causing her buttocks to graze his penis in an agonisingly delicious way. ‘Do you think that’s why you’ve been acting so strangely? All that dissociative stuff, the actor, um …’ She stopped, back in the danger zone. ‘And being so affectionate today. Are you having some kind of belated reaction to her abandonment of you? I still think maybe you should go and talk to somebody about it.’
‘Maybe,’ said Billy, ‘being abandoned by my mother is what makes me a writer. Unless you can think of any other reason that I might have become a writer. Any reason.’
‘Who can say why anyone becomes anything?’ said Thandie. ‘I’ve always found it surprising that, with both of your parents having a science background, neither you nor Sal have ever shown any interest in science at all.’
‘Yes, that is surprising.’
Billy tried to formulate a casual-sounding question about whether his scientific father had any interest in human cloning, but there is no casual-sounding question about human cloning, so he reluctantly abandoned that line of investigation.
He thought for a little longer. He stroked Thandie’s breasts while he thought, seeing as they were there. ‘Do you like my dad?’ he asked.
‘It’s a bit weird to be thinking about your dad while you’re doing that.’
With regret, Billy stopped moving his hand. ‘But do you?’
‘Of course. Everybody likes your dad.’
‘And nobody likes my mum.’
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Billy could have kicked himself, but Thandie said, ‘Well, that’s what he always says, but maybe he’s just bitter.’
‘Maybe.’ But probably not. Billy thought back to the last time he had seen Eleanor. It was her birthday and he’d got them tickets to see Hamlet. Billy would have preferred to have hated Shakespeare, but he had to settle for resenting him, because whenever he saw one of the plays, read one of the poems, his soul would come alive. Hamlet was Shakespeare’s masterpiece, in Billy’s opinion, and he thought that, in this case, his opinion counted for more than most. Every character in Hamlet is living their own tragedy. It could just as easily have been called Gertrude, Cordelia, Claudius, Laertes. Just like life, Billy thought. Life has no protagonist. For once, he was curious, truly curious, about Eleanor, about why she had done it.
After the show – terrible staging; it was impossible to ruin Hamlet, but goodness knows, directors kept trying – Billy had queued for almost half an hour in the theatre bar to buy two glasses of overpriced, sour white wine that at least had the dignity to be bitingly cold. Back at the table, he’d sat down opposite the mother with whom he had nothing in common except that they were both players in this bizarre game.
‘Puerile production,’ said Eleanor.
Broadly speaking Billy agreed, so maybe they had one thing in common, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of saying so.
‘Tell me something,’ he said instead, ‘was it worth it?’
‘Sitting through three and a half hours of that?’ said Eleanor.
‘The experiment. Making us. Was it worth it?’
‘Billy,’ said Eleanor, ‘one of the things that has never ceased to amaze me in all of these years is your almost total lack of vision. I have never met anybody less capable of looking beyond the accumulation of fluff in his own belly button. You want to know if it was worth it?’ She leaned towards him, lowering her voice to a hiss. ‘I made a human clone, and not just any clone. I could have cloned myself, that’s what a lesser scientist, a vainer scientist would have done. I cloned William Shakespeare, the greatest writer, possibly the greatest thinker the world has ever seen. I wasn’t content with the immense complexity of perfecting the science of human replication. I wasn’t content with exploring the conundrum of nature versus nurture. I attempted nothing less than to summon the presence of purest genius, to make lightning strike twice, to study it, to learn from it, to give it to the world. And I ended up with you. Was it worth it?’ She sat back in her seat. ‘Of course it wasn’t worth it. It’s obvious that whoever William Shakespeare was, he didn’t write the Complete Works of Shakespeare. I suppose I’ll have to go through the same rigmarole with the Earl of Oxford.’
Billy’s hand tightened on his plastic cup of wine.
‘And Sally?’ he said.
‘Oh, Sally. If you’d ever bothered to read Virginia Woolf, you’d be familiar with her question: What would have happened had Shakespeare had a sister? I dreamed I could come up with an answer. Woolf, of course, was imagining an incredibly gifted young woman, but, ever the scientist, I made the mistake of being too preoccupied with creating an ideal contrast to you, or what I thought you’d be, anyway. I shouldn’t have gone to the trouble. Sally was a waste of a test tube.’
Billy stood up and left without another word. The next day, he and Sally packed up everything they owned, got in his old Ford Fiesta – this was long before the Fiesta broke down for the last time on a B road just outside Glasgow – and drove to Liverpool. Billy didn’t know why he’d chosen Liverpool, but it had certain associations for him: a port, a place of coming and going, a place of creativity. They’d stayed two months before Billy decided that the pressure of trying to write in the home of the Beatles was too much for him. He may be William Shakespeare but he was no John Lennon.
In the moment that he’d left the theatre bar, he’d felt a sense of triumph, of rejecting everything his mother stood for, of buying into her actions so little that he wasn’t even going to show her that he cared enough to want answers, real answers, not just her sarcastic dismissal. Now he wished that he’d got those answers while he had the chance. Maybe he wouldn’t have wandered so long if he wasn’t looking for himself. Of course, he had no idea that he would literally find himself, and that he’d be living in a seaside town with a beautiful wife and a successful writing career. And a young traffic warden/actor for a boyfriend … Clearly, William Evans did not have all the answers either.
‘Would you say we’ve been happy in our marriage?’ Billy asked Thandie now.
Thandie rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. After a while, she said, ‘No.’
‘So why did we get married?’
‘Because we love each other. Or at least we did. But love and happiness are not the same thing. And you love your work more than you ever loved me. Nothing fulfils you the way that writing does. I come a very distant second.’
‘That can’t be true.’
‘Come on, Bill! You know it better than I do.’
‘I mean, I’m compelled to write, obviously. But surely no writer actually enjoys it?’
‘It’s everything to you! It’s so much a part of you, I can’t even imagine who you’d be without it. You’d be miserable, wouldn’t you? Always feeling like there was something missing, that you weren’t complete. You’d be pretty unbearable to be around.’
‘You really do know me very well,’ said Billy.
He took one last look at Thandie, the curling black hair, the sensual mouth, the soft, rounded body that had so recently bent and touched and held and opened to him. He knew he had fallen in love with her, and therefore that he had to get as far away from her as possible.
‘I need to go find Sally … Sal,’ he said. ‘We sent her off to the pub ages ago, she’ll be wondering where I am.’
‘Why don’t you call her … oh, yeah, I forgot, your phone was nicked. You can use mine if you like.’
‘No, I need to talk to her in person. She’s, ah, really upset about being out of work.’
‘Oh, of course. Give her a hug from me. Will you be home for dinner?’
Home, thought Billy.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. He leaned over and brushed a lock of hair away from Thandie’s forehead. ‘I’m sorry for everything. I really mean that. You’re far too good for me.’
Billy didn’t know whether he was speaking for William Evans or for himself.