GWYNETH JONES
Here’s a subtle but compelling look at a family on holiday who find themselves struggling to survive in a turbulent future Europe where just about everything, even the most basic of social conventions, is melting and changing and dissolving like an ice sculpture left out in the rain … .
British writer Gwyneth Jones was a co-winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for work exploring genre issues in SF with her 1991 novel White Queen; she’s also been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award an unprecedented four times. Her other books include the novels Divine Endurance, Escape Plans, North Wind, and Flowerdust, and a World Fantasy Award-winning collection of fairy stories, Seven Tales and a Fable. Her most recent book is a new novel, Phoenix Café. Her tooinfrequent short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Off Limits, and other magazines and anthologies, including our Fourteenth Annual Collection. She lives in Brighton, England, with her husband, her son, and a Burmese cat. She has a Web site at gopher://gopher.well.sf.ca.us:70/1/publications/authors/gwyn/. There comes a day when the road, the road that has served you so willingly and well, unfolding an endless absorbing game across the landscape, throwing up donjons on secret hills, meadows and forests, river beaches, sunbarred avenues that steadily rise and fall like the heartbeat of the summer, suddenly loses its charm. The baked verges sicken, the flowers have turned to straw, the air stinks of diesel fumes. The ribbon of grey flying ahead of you up hills and down dales is no longer magically empty, like a road in paradise. It is snarled with traffic: and even when you escape the traffic, everything seems spoiled and dead.
The cassette machine was playing one of Spence’s classic compilations. The machine was itself an aged relic, its repertoire growing smaller as the tapes decayed, sagged and snapped and could not be replaced. They’d been singing along to this one merrily, from Avignon to Haut Vienne. Now Anna endured in silence while Spence stared dead ahead, beating time on the steering wheel and defiantly muttering scraps of lyric under his breath. They hadn’t spoken to each other for hours. Jake lay in the back seat sweating, his bare and dirty feet thrust into a collapsed tower of camping gear. He was watching The Witches on his headband,
his soft little face disfigured by the glossy bar across his eyes; his lips moving as he repeated under his breath the Roald Dahl dialogue they all knew by heart. Anna watched him in her mirror. Eyeless, her child looked as if he were dead. Or like an inadequately protected witness, a disguised criminal giving evidence.
“Got one!” barked Spence.
They were looking for a campsite.
It was late afternoon, the grey and brassy August sky had begun to fade. Spence had been following minor roads at random since that incident, in the middle of the day, on the crowded route nationale, when Anna had been driving. They had escaped death, but the debriefing had been inadequate—corticosterone levels rising; the terrible underlying ever-present stress of being on the road had come up fighting, shredding through their myths and legends of vagabond ease. Spence, in his wife’s silence, swung the wheel around: circled the war memorial, cruised through a pretty village, passed the ancient church and the Norman keep, took the left turn by the piscine.
“Swimming!” piped up Jake, always easily pleased. He had emerged from TV heaven and was clutching the back of the driver’s seat.
But the site was full of gens de voyage, a polite French term for the armies of homeless persons with huge battered mobile homes, swarms of equally battered and despairing kids, and packs of savage dogs, who were becoming such a feature of rural holidays in La Belle France. They usually kept to their own interstices of the road-world: the cindered truck-stop lay-bys and the desolate service areas where they hung their washing between eviscerated domestic hardware and burned-out auto wrecks. But if a bunch of them decided to infest a tourist campsite, it seemed that nothing could be done. Spence completed a circuit and stopped the car by the entrance, just upwind of a bonfire of old tires.
“Well, it seems a popular neighborhood. Shall we move in?”
Some hours ago, Anna had vowed that she was sick to death of this pointless, endless driving. She had threatened to get out of the car and simply walk away if they didn’t stop at the next possible site. No matter what. She kept silent.
“They shouldn’t be here,” complained Jake. “They’re not on holiday, are they?”
“No, kid, I guess they’re not.”
Spence waited, maliciously.
“Do whatever you want,” she muttered.
Anna when angry turned extra-English, clipped and tart. In half-conscious, half-helpless retaliation, Spence reverted to the mid-west. He heard himself turning into that ersatz urban cowboy, someone Anna hated.
“Gee, I don’t know, babe. Frankly, right now I don’t care if I live or die.”
The bruised kids, and their older brothers, were gathering. Spence waited.
“Drive on,” she snapped, glowering in defeat.
So they drove on, to a drab little settlement about twenty klicks farther along, where they found a municipal campsite laid out under the eaves of a wood. It had no swimming pool, but there was a playground with a trapeze. Jake, who believed that all his parents’ sorrows on this extended holiday were occasioned by the lack of ponies, mini-golf, or a bar in some otherwise ideal setting, pointed this out with exaggerated joy. The huge rhino-jeep and trailer combo that they’d
been following for the last few miles had arrived just ahead of them. Otherwise there was no one about. Anna and Spence set up the yurt, each signaling by courteously functional remarks that if acceptable terms could be agreed, peace might be restored. Each of them tried to get Jake to go away and play. But the child believed that his reluctance to help with the chores was another great cause of sorrow, so, of course, he stayed. Formal negotiations, which would inevitably have broken up in rancor, were therefore unable to commence. Peace returned in silence, led home by solitude; by the lingering heat and dusty haze of evening and the intermittent song of a blackbird.
While they were setting up, a cat appeared. It squeezed its way through the branches of the beech hedge at the back of their pitch, announcing itself before it could be seen in a loud, querulous oriental voice. It was a long-haired cat with a round face, small ears, blue eyes, and the coloring of a seal-point Siamese, except that its four dark brown feet seemed to have been dipped in cream. Spence thought he knew cats. He pronounced it a Balinese, a long-haired Siamese variant well known in the States.
“No,” said Anna. “It’s a Birman, a Burmese Temple Cat. Look, see the white tips to its paws. They’re supposed to be descended from a breed of cats that were used as oracles in Burma, ages ago. Maybe it belongs to the people with the big trailer.”
The cat was insistently friendly, but distracted. Alternately it made up to them, purring and gabbing on in its raucous Siamese voice, then broke off to sit in the middle of their pitch, fluffy dark tail curled around its white toes, staring from side to side as if looking for someone.
Spence, Jake, and Anna went for a walk. They inspected the sanitaires, and saw the middle-aged couple from the trailer heading toward the little town, probably in search of somewhere to eat. They studied the interactive guide to their locality that had been installed beside the toilet block. As usual, the parents stood at gaze while the child poked and touched, finding everything that was clickable and obediently reading all the text. There was a utility room with a washer-drier, sinks, and a card-in-the-slot multimedia screen, so you could watch a movie or video-phone maman while your socks were going round. Everything was new, bare, and cheap. Everything was waiting for the inexorable tide of tourism to arrive even here, even on this empty shore.
“Since everywhere interesting is either horribly crowded or destroyed already,” said Anna, “obviously hordes of people will be driven to visit totally uninteresting places instead. One can see the logic.”
“The gens de voyage will move in first,” decided Spence.
Beyond the lower terrace of pitches, they found a small lake, the still surface of the water glazed peach-color by the sunset. Green wrought-iron benches stood beside a gravel path. Purple and yellow loosestrife grew in the long grass at the water’s edge; dragonflies hovered. The hayfields beyond had been cut down to sonorous insect-laden turf; and in the distance a little round windmill stood up against the red glistening orb of the sun.
“Well, hey: this isn’t so bad,” Spence felt the shredded fabric coming together. They would be happy again.
“Lost in France,” murmured Anna, smiling at last. “That’s all we ask.”
“What’s that silver stuff in the water?” wondered Jake.
“It’s just a reflection.”
When they came closer they saw that the water margin was bobbing with dead fish.
Jake made cheerful retching noises. “What a stink!”
They retreated to the wood, where they discovered before long a deep dell among the trees that had been turned into the town dump. Part of it was smoldering. A little stream ran out from under the garbage, prattling merrily as it tripped down to pollute the lake. The dim but pervasive stink of rot, smoke, and farm chemicals pursued them until the woodland path emerged at a cross-roads on the edge of town.
“Typical Gallic economy,” grumbled Spence, trying to see some humor in the situation. “Put the dump by the campsite. Why not? Those tourists are only passing through.”
Anna said nothing. But her smile had vanished.
The town was a miniature ribbon development, apparently without a center. There was no sign of life; the two bars and the single restaurant were firmly shuttered. So they turned back, keeping to the road this time. Spence put together a meal of pate and bread and wine; fatigue salad from lunch in a plastic box. Anna took Jake to play on the trapeze. Unable to decide who had won the short straw on this occasion, Spence moved about the beech-hedge pitch, fixing things the way he liked them and making friends with the exotic cat, which was still hanging around. He named it the Balinese Dancer, from an old Chuck Prophet song that was going around in his head, about a guy who had a Balinese dancer tattooed across his chest. He couldn’t remember what the point of the song was, probably something about having an amenable girlfriend who’d dance for you any time. But it gave him an excuse to restore his own name for the cat. Anna’s inexhaustible fund of general knowledge annoyed him. Why couldn’t she be ignorant, or even pretend to be ignorant, just once in a while? The cat was thin as a rail under the deceptive thickness of its coat, and though it obviously strove to keep up appearances, its fur was full of hidden burrs and tangles. He looked across the empty pitches to the playground and saw his wife hanging upside down on the trapeze, showing her white knickers: a lovely sight in the quiet evening. If only she could take things more easily, he thought. A few dead fish, what the hell. It doesn’t have to ruin your life. The middle-aged couple from the trailer were standing by their beefy hunk of four-wheel drive, heads together, talking hard. They looked as if they were saying things that they wouldn’t want anyone to overhear. Probably having a stinking fight, thought Spence with satisfaction. He meditated going over to improve their campingtrip hell by asking them why they didn’t take better care of their cat. But refrained.
The Balinese Dancer was still with him when Anna and Jake came back. It had reverted to its sentry duty, sitting alert and upright in the middle of the pitch.
“He’s a lost cat,” said Jake. “Can we keep him?”
“I thought we decided he belonged to those guys over there,” Spence pointed out.
“No he doesn’t.”
“It doesn’t,” Anna confirmed. “Jake asked them. They have no cat.”
“I think he was left behind. Did you notice, our pitch is the only one on this terrace that people have used recently? There was a caravan and a tent here. About a week ago by the look of the marks on the grass. They went and left without him. That’s what I think.”
Over his head, young Sherlock’s parents exchanged an agreement to block any further moves toward an adoption.
“No, I bet he comes from that place up on the road.” Spence pointed to a red-roofed ranchero that they could see over their hedge, the last house of the town. “He’s probably discovered that tourists are a soft touch, and comes here on the scrounge.”
“Can I go and ask them?”
“No!” snapped Anna and Spence together. Jake shrugged, and gave the cat some pate. It didn’t have the manners of a beggar. It ate a little, as if for politeness’ sake, and resumed its eager watchfulness.
The child was put to bed and finally slept, having failed to persuade the cat to join him inside the yurt. The parents stayed outside. The air was so still that Anna brought out candles, to save the big lamp. They lay wrapped in rugs, reading and talking softly, and made a list for the next hypermarche: where, it was to be hoped, there’d be cooking gas cylinders in stock again at last. And batteries for Jake’s headband TV, the single most necessary luxury in their lives. The cat came to visit them, peering sweetly into their faces and inviting them to play. It showed no sign of returning to the red-roofed ranch.
“You know,” said Anna, “Jake could be right. It’s weird for a fancy cat like that to be wandering around on the loose, like any old moggie. It’s a tom, did you notice?”
“I thought toms were supposed to roam.”
“Cat breeders keep their studs banged-up. They spend their lives in solitary, except when they’re on the job. An inferior male kitten sold for a pet gets castrated. Let’s take a closer look.”
The Burmese Temple Cat was a young entire male, very thin but otherwise in good health. He had once worn a collar. He now had no identifying marks. He suffered their examination with good-tempered patience, stayed to play for a little longer, and then resumed his vigil: staring hopefully into the night.
“He’s waiting for someone,” said Anna, finishing her wine. “Poor little bugger. He must have gone off exploring, and they left without him. Pity he’s not tattooed.”
“Libertarians are everywhere,” Spence reminded her. “That’s probably why he still has his balls, too. No castration for me, no castration for my cat. I can see that.”
“What can we do? I suppose we could leave a message at the gendarmerie, if there is one. Anyone who lost a cat like that’s bound to have reported him missing.”
“We can tell the gardienne in the morning, when she comes to collect the rent.”
Next day started slowly. After lunch, Spence and Jake walked into town to look for the post office. Spence needed to dispatch the proofs of The Coast of Coramandel, latest of the adventures of a renowned female pirate captain: who, with her dashing young mate Jake and the rest of the desperate crew, had been keeping Patrick Spencer Meade in gainful employment for some years. The postmistress greeted them with disdain and pity, as if tourists were an endangered species too far gone to be worth your sympathy. She examined his laptop, and refused to admit that her establishment possessed a phone jack that he could plug into. She told him he could use the telephone in a normal manner, but she was afraid that connections with England and the United States were impossible at present. She told him to go to Paris. Or Lyons.
Or just get the hell out of here.
Spence’s understanding of French was adequate but not subtle. He was always missing the point on small details. He’d learned to smile and nod and pass for normal; it had never failed so far. He accepted the woman’s hostility without complaint, and wondered what had caused the latest telecoms melt. Urban terrorism? Surprise right-wing coup brings down the Paris government? Whole population of the UK succumbs to food poisoning? It was almost enough to send him in search of an English language newspaper, or drive him to reconnect the wb receiver in the car. But not quite. They were on holiday. Lost in France, and planning to stay lost for as long as the market would bear.
He paid for a mass of stamps and handed over the package containing the printed copy, which his publishers routinely required to back up anything sent down the wire. Andrea would be happy. His editor was an elderly young lady with a deep contempt for all things cyberspatial. She’d have loved it if Spence turned in his books written in longhand on reams of parchment. He collected Jake from the philately counter, and they left.
They wandered on up the single street, which was hardly less deathly still than it had been the evening before. They bought bread and, for want of anything else to explore, went into the ugly yellow church that stood by the war memorial in a walled yard paved with gravestones.
The interior had a crumbling nineteenth-century mariolatory decor: sky-blue heavens, madonna lilies, silver ribbons. The structure was much older. Spence traced a course of ancient stone, revealed where a long chunk of painted plaster had fallen away. It was cool and damp to the touch, and still marked by the blows of its maker who had been dead for a thousand years. He sat on the front bench in the lady chapel, holding his laptop on his knees. Jake went to investigate a dusty Easter Garden in the children’s corner: Christ’s sepulcher done in papiermâché and florist’s moss; a matchwood cross draped in a swag of white.
Spence was glad of a chance to sit and stare; a chance to think about the situation. When Anna was angry, she always brought up his Americanness. His thick-skinned hardiness, his refusal to suffer. Could he undo that crime, become
one of those who didn’t escape? He imagined himself burned in his bed by the Cossacks in some Eastern European village, starving in the west of Ireland. Taken up from the nine-inch board in that stinking hold, extricated from his neighbors, his chains struck off. Over the side, a sack of spoiled meat. He saw himself fall into grace, loose limbs flapping: down into the green water, silver bubbles rising as the body slowly tumbles, into the deep, the very deep … . It was too late. Can’t turn back the hand of time. Spence lived, and would have to keep this defiant spirit, wherever it came from, that would not be mortified.
At least he could claim to be a permanent exile. Spence could never go home, not for more than a week or so at a time, not so long as his wife and his mother both lived. The whole United States wasn’t big enough to contain the iron-hard territoriality of those two females. This didn’t bother him. It only surprised him occasionally, when he realized how solidly his marriage had confirmed the choice he’d made for himself long before. He preferred America this way—preserved from one brief visit to the next in his voice, in his tastes, in his childhood memories. Yet displacement breeds displacement. They had traveled a great deal, in Europe and beyond, always going farther and staying away longer than other people. They’d have taken longer and wilder trips still, except for Anna’s commitment to her work.
Now Anna’s job was gone. There was nothing to go back for. No drag, no tie, no limit. They were no longer locked into that damned university laboratory academic year, miserable crowded August holidays. She’s mine now, he thought. She’s all mine. Instantly he was punished by a vision of Anna’s hands. Anna moving round a clothes shop like a blind woman, assessing the fabric as if she was reading Braille: smoothing a shoulder seam, judging the cut and the fall of the cloth with those animate fingers, those living creatures imbued with genius. Anna removing and cleaning her contact lenses, nights in the past, so smashed she could hardly breathe, the deft economy of her gestures serenely undisturbed. Those hands rendered useless, unable to practice the art that he only knew in its faint, mundane echoes? Oh no. He thought of Marie Curie, the exacting drudgery of women scientists; it comes naturally to them. Delicacy and endurance, backed by a brain the size of Jupiter. She can’t have lost all that … Recent memory, from those last extraordinary weeks in England, cast up a red-faced drunken old man at a publishers’ party, shouting “your wife has destroyed the fabric of society!” One of the more bizarre incidents in his career as a scientist’s spouse.
He could not take her disaster seriously, and therefore he was free to indulge his daydreams. Of course she’d get another job, but they didn’t have to go home yet. They could stay away for the whole of September, mellow empty September in the French countryside. Could go south again, over to Italy, move into hotels if the weather gives out (but they all three loved to live outdoors). We can afford it, he thought, glowing a little. Easy. I may be a mere kiddies’ entertainer, but I can put food on the family table. She practically had a breakdown, she’s still fragile and depressed, not herself: she needs space.
But what would it be like to live with Anna, without her career? What about sex? There’d be no more foreign conferences, no more jokes about oversexed sex
biologists. No more of those sparky professional friendships that had to make him suspicious, damn it, though he’d persistently denied it. He could be sure of her now … The idea made him uneasy. What would happen to desire, if the little goad of fear was removed? Spence had been trained by his wife to believe that animal behavior invariably has an end in view, however twisted, however bent out of shape. What if sex with his best beloved (since they weren’t making babies, and it was no longer the forever inadequate confirmation that she belonged to him) began to seem unnecessary, a pointless exercise, a meaningless pleasure? An awful pang, as if the loss was real and already irrevocable, broke him out of his reverie.
He stood up. “Let’s go, kid.”
Jake was reluctant to leave the empty tomb, which was surrounded by a phalanx of homemade fake sunflowers, each with a photograph of a child’s face in the center. He admired the whole ensemble greatly: because, Spence guessed, he could imagine doing something like that himself. The greatest art in Europe had left Jake unimpressed, since he felt he had no stake in the enterprise.
“Can we take a picture of it?”
“’Fraid not. We didn’t bring the camera.”
“Can we come back with the camera, later?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe means no,” muttered Jake under his breath. “Why not call a spade a spade?”
They went in search of the gardienne. She hadn’t turned up to claim their rent in the morning. The manager of a municipal campsite usually operated out of the town hall, but this one had a house near that crossroads where the path through the wood came out. They were permitted to enter a stiff, funereal parlor. The registration form was filled in, with immense labor, by the skinny old lady and a very fat man, either her husband or her son, who was squelched immovable into a wheelback armchair at the parlor table. Jake made friends with a little dog. Spence stared at a huge ornate clock that seemed on the point of plunging to its death from the top shelf of an oak dresser laden with ugly china.
She didn’t know anything about the Balinese Dancer. There was no such cat in the village. No such cat had been reported missing by any campers. She could not recall when pitch 16 had last been used, and rejected the suggestion that she might consult her records. She supposed he might report this lost cat to the police, but she saw no reason why he should give himself the trouble. The police here knew their business; they would not be interested in his story.
Spence began to get very strange vibes.
He changed the subject. They chatted a little about the political situation, always a safe topic for non-specific head-shaking and sighing. Spence paid for two nights’ camping and recovered his passport. “Let’s go back through the woods,” he said, when they were outside.
“We haven’t finished exploring.”
“Your Mom’s been alone long enough.”
Sitting on the floor in the sanitaires, Anna scrubbed her legs with an emery paper glove. She blew away a dust of powdered hair from the page of Ramone Holyrod’s essays, keeping the book open on the floor by holding the pages down with the balls of her feet.
… like the civil rights movement, feminism has achieved certain goals at a wholly destructive price. It has created an aspirational female middle class whose interests are at odds with the interests of the female masses, and with the original aim of the movement. Successful women trade on their femininity. They have no desire to see difference between the sexes eroded, they foster and elaborate that same difference which condemns millions of other women …
Anna was catching up. She’d once known Ramone personally, but she’d never had time to read books like this. She worked moisturizing lotion into the newly smooth bare skin and removed a vagrant drop, the color of melted chocolate ice cream, from the text. Feminist rage, she decided, had not changed much since she last looked. She turned Prefutural Tension face down and went to the mirror above the sinks, took her kohl pencil from the family washbag, stretched the skin of her left upper eyelid taut by applying a firm fingertip to the outer corner, and drew a fine solid line along the base of her lashes. Mirrors had begun to be haunted by the ghost of Anna’s middle age, by whispers from magazines saying don’t drink and go to bed early. But what good did it do if you couldn’t sleep? There was always something to prevent her. Last night, the faint smell of that dump …
The campsite was completely quiet. The couple with the big trailer had left at dawn. If they were intent on skipping the rent, they needn’t have bothered. The gardienne here obviously wasn’t the conscientious kind. Anna turned a soft brush in a palette of eyeshadow, a shade of yellow that was nearly gold, and dusted it across the whole area of her eyes: to lift and brighten the natural tone of her tanned skin, and correct the slightly too deep sockets.
Ramone had a nerve. A professional feminist, accusing other people of “trading on their feminine identity.” Maquillage, she thought (carefully stroking the mascara wand upward, under her lower lashes) is not a female trait, if you want to talk ethnic origins. I can give you chapter and verse on that, Ramone my dear. Codon by codon. It’s a male sexual gesture. As you well know. The public world is male, and to deal with it we all have to adopt male behavior. You and me both, Ramone, we have to display: strut our stuff or perish, publish or be damned. It’s not your fault or mine, sister. It’s simply a question of whose head is on the coin. You want to work for the company, you wear the uniform. Where do you get off, claiming that you can speak from some female parade ground, where competition and challenge are unknown? Balls to that.
She gazed at the face of Caesar in the mirror. Wide brow, pointed chin, black eyes, golden brown skin: Anna Senoz. Yes, I’m married. No, I didn’t change my name. Why didn’t you change your name? Because I didn’t want to. Next question … She thought of her ancestors, Spanish Jews, pragmatic converts to Christianity. Discreet, tolerated aliens. I should have strutted my two-fisted stuff more and used less eyeliner. Ramone’s right. Power dressing seems like the solution, if you’re moving in a male world. But sexual display in a female animal means
I submit. It has to be that way, it’s a safety guarantee of non-aggression that the male demands. So display is a male behavior, but if you’re a female, sexual showing-off rebounds on you, it doesn’t work right.
She had collected suitors, not vassals or allies. She had been envied, desired, but not feared. She had charmed her way along, never issuing challenges. Playing the pretty woman had made life so much easier, until it came to the crunch. It’s Spence’s fault, she thought. Before Spence I liked sex and I hoped I was attractive enough to get my share, but I had no more paranoia about my personal appearance than if I was Albert Einstein. He told me I was beautiful. He got me hooked on femininity, and it’s done me no good at all.
Anna had wanted to be a plant geneticist. She’d done her first research on jumping genes, transposons, in maize. She’d been sidelined early into Human Assisted Reproduction, because that was where the funding was. That was when she’d written her first paper on Transferred Y, suggesting that certain cases of chromosomal intrasexuality with unimpaired fertility (studied in the hope of finding a gene therapy fix for the stubbornly infertile), were the effect of a transposon. No one had been much interested. But Anna had felt that she was on the track of something fascinating. Transferred Y kept calling her back, tugging at her mind, like the child with whom you can never spend enough time when you’re a working parent. She had managed to make the time at last, managed to make this brainchild part of her job. And then, when she had the results, she’d written a paper—as restrained, modest and professional as the first one—suggesting that a benign donation of genetic material between the sexes was becoming established in the human genome.
The erosion of difference between the sexes, though it might not interest Ramone’s aspirational female middle class, had been a hot topic in Anna’s world for several years—at the molecular level. Anna had known that her team’s paper (along with the simultaneous presentation on superU-net) would be challenged, questioned; angrily dismissed in some quarters. She was not a professional feminist, but she wasn’t a political moron. She had known there would be trouble. She knew that they were making an extraordinary proposition. She’d even joked that the news might hit the tabloids. It had not occurred to her that she might lose her job.
She remembered the morning that she’d found out. Her boss had called her to a private meeting, “a chat” he’d called it, which they all knew was an ominous term, a warning. It was May time, but the sky was grey. Outside his floor-length windows, wet tassels of sycamore flower littered the Biology car-park. The fresh leaves on the copse of trees that obscured the Material Sciences Tower were shining in the rain. Anna had demonstrated that the future belongs neither to women nor to men, but to some new creature, now inexorably on its way. She had spoken this as fact, and waited to see how other scientists would treat her results. Suddenly, she found herself fighting for her professional life.
She could not understand what had gone wrong. But it isn’t a scare story, she heard herself protesting. What I’m saying is that this isn’t like global warming or holes in the ozone layer. It’s not a punishment, it’s not an awful threat. Something is happening, that’s all. It’s just evolution. She was floundering. She had prepared
the wrong script. She had been ready to win him over, to show him how this unexpected notoriety could work for the department. But he was furious, personally enraged. He was saying that she’d set out deliberately to raise a media storm, with her wild, offensive overstatements. What does it matter? she begged. It’s not as if anything’s going to change overnight. This is not something anyone will consciously experience. This will be like … coming down from the trees.
She had found herself staring over his shoulder at the green world outside, trying to hear the birds in the little wood. There would be blackbirds, robins, perhaps a wren. The chorus was sadly depleted. Did he say your views are not welcome in this department? I don’t have any “views,” protested Anna … Did he say will not be renewing your contract? She was thinking of the songthrush and the cuckoo, those sweet and homely voices forever stilled. She had started to cry. He’d given her a paper tissue from a box he kept in his desk drawer, and calmed down, satisfied. “I’m sorry,” he’d said. “I’m sorry, but …”
The door of the sanitaires creaked and in walked the lost cat. He glanced around, and came to question Anna with a diffident mrrrow? Anna wiped her eyes. Of course, I reacted as stupidly as possible. I was in shock and didn’t know it. But she remembered rage at the man’s pompous trivialities, rage that came out as tears, and knew that she’d been betrayed by her sex. Loss and shame had turned her into a stereotypical woman. It was still happening now. That’s why she was here, grooming herself for comfort, doing the domestic, while Spence went out in public to deal with the world. “I’ll be taking to the veil next,” she told the cat gloomily. And, indeed, there’d been times in the last few months when she’d have been glad to hide her head, to retire under a big thick blanket and never come out.
“What do I know about animal behavior, anyway?” she said aloud. “I’m a molecular biologist. Enough to impress Spence: that doesn’t take much.”
The yurt was too hot and the campsite outdoors was too empty. She took Ramone’s essays into the utility room, where their washing was still going round, and sat on the cool tiled floor. The Burmese Temple Cat came with her, but couldn’t settle. He paced and cried. “Poor thing,” Anna sympathized. “Poor thing. They let you down, didn’t they? They abandoned you, and you haven’t an idea what you did wrong. Never mind, maybe we’ll find them.”
But his grief disturbed her. It was too close to her own.
Spence and Jake walked through the woods. Spence was wondering what the hell is the approved Academie Française term for “modem,” anyhow? For God’s sake, even the Vatican accepts “modem.” If it’s good enough for the Pope … He’d have to ask Anna. But he wasn’t sure there had been any misunderstanding at the post office. It was possible the postmistress really had been telling him, don’t hang around. He was still getting very strange vibes from that conversation with the gardienne. Maybe something final and terrible had happened. France and England had declared war on each other, and tourists were liable to be rounded up as undesirable aliens. He wasn’t sure that war between two states of the European Union was technically possible. It would have to be a civil war.
No problem with that: a very popular global sport. In fact, he wouldn’t be a bit surprised. The only problem would be for the French and English governments to handle anything so organized. Have to get the telecoms to work again first …
They had reached the dump. That smell surrounded them. Crowds of flies hummed and muttered, and the surface of the wide, garbage-filled hollow drew Spence’s eyes. He was looking for something that he had seen last night in the twilight, seen and not quite registered. The flies buzzed. He had stopped walking. Jake was looking up at him, wrinkling his nose: puzzled that an adult could be so indifferent to the ripe stink.
He handed over his laptop. Jake was already carrying the bread.
“Go on back. I’ll be along in a minute. I want to check something.”
“But I want to see what you find!”
“I’m not going to find anything. I’m just going to take a leak.”
“I want a wee too.”
“No, you don’t. Get going. Tell Anna I won’t be long.”
Spence waited until he was sure the child wasn’t going to turn back. Then he went to investigate the buried wreckage. He found the remains of a caravan. It had been burned out, quite recently, having been stripped first (as far as he could tell) of identification. He crouched on the flank of a big plastic drum that had once contained fertilizer, and pondered. Someone had rolled a wrecked mobile home into this landfill, having removed the plates, and covered it over. What did that prove? It didn’t prove anything except that he was letting himself get spooked. “I’m overtired,” he said aloud, scowling. “Been on the road too long.” But the garbage had shifted when he was clambering over it, and the dump refused to let him cling to his innocence. He climbed down from his perch, and discovered that the suggestive-looking bunch of twigs that he’d spotted really was a human hand.
It had been a woman’s hand, not young. It was filthy, and the rats had been at it, but he could still see lumpy knuckles and the paler indentations left by her rings. He found a stick and pried at the surrounding layers of junk until he had uncovered her face. There wasn’t much left of that. He squatted, looking down: remembering Father Moynihan in his coffin, like something carved out of yellow wax. His own father too, but he had no memory of that dead body. He’d been too young: not allowed to look.
“What did you do?” he whispered. “Too rich, too funny-looking? Wrong kind of car? Did you support the wrong football team? Was it because you didn’t castrate your cat?”
The flies buzzed. Around him, beyond the thin woodland, stretched the great emptiness: all the parched, desolate, rural heartlands of Europe, where life was strained and desperate as in any foundering city. All the lost little towns starved of hope, where people turned into monsters without anything showing on the outside.
Anna groped for potatoes in the sack in the back of the car, brought out another that was too green to eat, and chucked it aside. He knows nothing. He hasn’t a
clue about the backbiting, the betrayals, all the internal politics. Spence admires my work in a romantic way, but in the end it’s just something that keeps me away from home. Maybe he’s my wife. She felt the descant of male to female, female to male, the slipping and sliding between identities that had been natural and accepted surely by most people, for years and years. It was Anna’s boss who was crazy. How could anyone be angry about an arrangement of chemicals? The sack was nearly empty. What’s happening to my French beans? The lettuces will be shot. She was pining for her garden. It was so difficult to get hold of good fresh vegetables on the road. The prepackaged stuff in the hypermarkets was an insult, but the farmers’ markets weren’t much better. Not when you were a stranger and didn’t know your way around. We’ll go home. I’ll pull myself together, start fighting my corner the way I should have done at the start. We’ll have to go back soon, she assured herself, knowing Spence’s silent resistance. Jake has to go to school.
She saw him come out of the wood. He went straight to the sanitaires, vanished for several minutes, and slowly came toward her. He sat on the rim of the hatchback. There were drops of water in his hair, and his hands were wet.
“Where’s Jake?”
“In the playground. What’s the matter? You look sick.”
“I found a body in the dump.”
They both stared at the distant figure of the child. He was climbing on the knotted rope, singing a song from a French TV commercial. Anna felt claws of ice dig into her spine, as if something expected but ridiculously forgotten had jumped out Boo! from behind a door.
“You mean a human body?”
“Yes. I could only find one, but I think there must be two.” He imagined a couple, a middle-aged early-retirement couple, modestly well-heeled, children, if any, long ago departed. Spending the summer en plein air, the way the French love to do: with their cat. “I covered it over again. I was afraid to root around, but there’s a caravan too. I’m not joking. It’s true.”
“You’d better show me.”
Spence gasped, and shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because we can’t let Jake see that, and we can’t leave him here alone.” Anna nodded. She went to the front of the car and started searching under the seats and in the door pockets.
“What are you looking for?”
“The camera.” She brought it out. “I’ll take pictures. Will it be easy for me to find?”
It was about the same time of day as it had been when they arrived. Shortly, Jake noticed that his father had returned and came running over. The Balinese Dancer ran along beside him.
“Where’s Mummy?”
“She’s gone to check something.”
Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Her too?” Spence had forgotten he’d used the exact
same words at the dump, when he sent the kid on alone. “Is it something about my cat?”
Balinese Dancer looked up. Spence had a terrible, irrational feeling that the cat knew. He knew what Spence had seen, and that there was no hope anymore.
“Don’t start getting ideas.”
For most of the time that Anna was away, it didn’t cross his mind that she was in danger. Then it did, and he spent a very unhappy quarter of an hour, playing Scrabble with Jake while racking his brains to recover every word he’d spoken in that town, especially in his rash interview with the gardienne: praying to God he’d said nothing to rouse anyone’s suspicions. They washed the potatoes. Spence cut them up, chopped an onion and some garlic, opened a can of tomatoes and one of chickpeas. He put olives in a bowl, and spread the picnic table-cloth. He didn’t light the stove until everything was ready, because they were running out of gas. At last, Anna came out of that grisly wood.
“Shall I start cooking?”
“I’m going to have a shower,” she said.
While Anna put Jake to bed, Spence washed the dishes, and stored away the almost untouched potato stew. He checked the car over and gathered a few stray belongings from the shriveled grass. Their camp was compact. One modest green hatchback, UK plates, anonymous middle-class brand. One mushroom-shaped tent dwelling. No bicycles, no surfboards. No TV aerial dish, no patio furniture. The sky was overcast, but blurred with moon silver in the east. How often had they camped like this beside some still and secret little town? That place in Italy on the hilltop, most certainly a haunt of vampires … .
The cat wove at his ankles and followed him indoors. Inside, the yurt was a single conical space that could be divided by cunning foldaway partitions. It was furnished with nomad simplicity and comfort: their bed, rugs, books; small useful items of gear. There was no mere decoration, no more than if they’d been traveling on the steppes with Genghis Khan. Spence set down the wine bottle, two glasses, and the rest of the bread. Anna stepped out of Jake’s section and sealed it behind her. They sat on the floor with the lamp turned low, and looked at the pictures she had taken. She’d uncovered the body further and taken several shots of the head and torso, the hands and wrists; and then the whole ensemble, the wrecked caravan. She had seen what she thought was the second corpse, burned to a black crisp inside the caravan, but hadn’t been able to get a clear picture of that.
“You think it was locals?” she asked.
Spence told her about the postmistress, and the gardienne. A one-street town wrapped in guilty silence: “I’m sure they know about it. Maybe someone had an accident. Someone ran into them and wrecked them, found they were dead and got scared …”
“And took the woman’s rings. And gouged out her eyes. And tied her up.”
Anna touched the preview screen, advancing from shot to shot until she found
the woman’s face. She moved it into close-up, but their camera was not equal to this kind of work. The image blurred into a drab Halloween mask: crumpled plastic; black eye holes.
“That other couple must have picked up on something,” she guessed. “That’s why they left so quickly.” She shivered.
“Well,” said Spence, “it’s been all around us. We finally managed to run right into it. The town that eats tourists. Of course, in the good old U.S. of A., we’re cool about this kind of thing. Vampire towns, ghoul towns, whole counties run by serial-killer aliens. We take it for granted. Poor Balinese Dancer, I’m afraid your people definitely aren’t coming back.”
“You can’t call him that,” she said. “He’s not a Balinese. He’s a Birman. Don’t you believe me? Hook up the CD-ROM, and we can look him up in Jake’s encyclopedia—”
“I believe you. But why can’t I call him Balinese?”
“Because you’re doing it to annoy me. And … we don’t need that.”
In the direct look she gave him, the hostilities that had rumbled under their un-negotiated peace finally came to an end. Spence sighed. “Oh, okay. I won’t.”
“Is there any wine left?” asked Anna. He handed her the bottle. She poured some into their glasses, broke a chunk of bread, and ate it.
“So what are we going to do? Report our finds to the gendarmes?”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Anna.
“Not here, definitely not. But in Lyons, maybe.”
“They wouldn’t do anything. You know they wouldn’t. City flics don’t come looking for trouble in the deserte rural.”
The rural desert. That was what the French called their prairie band. Mile upon mile of wheat and maize and sunflowers: all of it on death row as an economic activity, having lived just long enough to kill off most of the previous ecology. And destroy a lot of human lives.
“Okay, then we could stick around here and do a little investigation for ourselves.”
The cat was sitting diffidently outside the circle of lamplight, his eyes moving from face to face. Spence’s heart went out to him. “Try to find out who the cat’s folks were, where they came from, why this happened to them. Uncover some fetid tale or other, maybe get one or other of ourselves tortured and killed as well; or maybe Jake—”
Anna grimaced wryly. “No thanks.”
“Or we could do what they never do in the movies. Stop the thrilling plot before it starts. Walk on by.”
She switched off the camera and stayed for a long time staring at the grey floor of the yurt, elbows on her knees and chin in her hands. She had turned the dead face from side to side, without flinching from her task. This is the truth. It must be examined, described. But no one wanted to be told. There would be no assessment, no judgment.
“Spence, I have a terrible feeling. It’s about my paper. I started thinking this when I was looking at her, when I was recording her death. Suppose … suppose the tabloids aren’t loopy and my boss isn’t deranged? Suppose while we’ve been
away, while we’ve been cut off from all the news, the world has finally been going over the edge, because of what I said?”
“The whole place was going mad before you published, kid. The end of the world as we know it started a long time ago.”
“Yes, Spence dear. Exactly. That’s what my paper says.”
Spence took a slug from the wine bottle, neglecting the glass that was poured for him. That sweet tone of invincible intellectual superiority, when it was friendly, always made him go weak at the knees.
“Would you like to have sex?” he hazarded, across the tremulous lamplight.
“Like plague victims,” said Anna huskily. “Rutting in the streets, death all around.”
“Okay, but would you?”
Flash of white knickers in the twilight. Nothing’s sure. Every time could be the last.
“Yes.”
When they were both done, both satisfied, Spence managed to fall asleep. He dreamed that he was clinging to the side of a runaway train that was racing downhill in the dark. Anna was in his arms and Jake held between them. He knew that he had to leap from this train before it smashed, holding onto them both. But he was too terrified to let go.
They had pitched the yurt at dusk, in a service area campsite. The great road thundered by the scrubby expanse of red grit, where tents and trucks and vans stood cheek-by-jowl without a tree or a blade of grass in sight. The clientele was mixed. There were gens de voyage, with their pitches staked out in the traditional, aggressive washing lines; colorful New Age travelers trying to look like visitors from the stone age; respectable itinerant workers in their tidy camper vans; truck drivers asleep in their cabs. Among them were the tourists, people like Anna and Jake and Spence, turned back from the channel ports by the fishing-dispute blockade, who had wisely moved inland from the beaches.
Spence was removing the cassette player from the car, so he could refit the wide bandwidth receiver that would give them access to the great big world again. The dusk was no problem, as this campsite was lit by enormous gangling floodlights that seemed to have been bought secondhand from a football stadium. But the player had turned obstinate. He was lying on his back, legs in the yard and face squished in the leg space under the dashboard, struggling with some tiny recalcitrant screws. Chuck the cat, ever fascinated and helpful when there was work going on, was sitting on the passenger seat and patting the screws that had come out down into the crack at the back of the cushion.
Something thumped near Spence’s head. He wriggled out. Anna had returned from her mission with a lumpy burlap sack.
“What’s in there?”
“Potatoes, courgettes-I-mean-zucchini, and string beans. But the beans are pure string.”
“Still, that’s pretty good. What did you have to do?”
The channel tunnel had been down, so to speak, for most of the summer. This new interruption of the ferry services had compounded everyone’s problems. Hypermarches along the coast had turned traitor, closing their doors to all but the local population. The more enterprising of the stranded travelers were resorting to barter.
“Nothing too difficult. First aid. Dietary advice to an incipient diabetic, she needs an implant but diet will help; and I’m attending to a septic cut.”
“This is weird. You can’t practice medicine!”
Anna rubbed her bare brown shoulder, where the sack had galled her, and shrugged. “Let me see. First, do no harm. Well, I have no antibiotics, no antimalarials, no carrier viruses or steroids, so that’s all right. I have aspirin, I know how to reduce a fracture, and I wash my hands a lot. What more can you ask?”
“My God.” He groped for the screwdriver, which had escaped into campingtrip morass under the seat. “Could you give me some assistance for a moment? Since you’re here?”
“No, because I don’t want you to do that.”
“But I’m doing it anyway.”
“Good luck to you,” she said, without rancor. “It’s mostly pure noise, in my opinion.”
At bedtime, Anna listened while Jake read to her the story of the Burmese Temple Cat called Sinh, who was an oracle. He lived with a priest called Mun-Ha, and they were both very miserable because Burma was being invaded. When Mun-Ha died, the goddess Tsun-Kyankse transfused Mun-Ha’s spirit into Sinh. His eyes turned blue as sapphires, his nose and feet and tail turned dark as the sacred earth, and the rest of him turned gold, except for the tips of his paws—which were touching Mun-Ha’s white hair at the moment the holy priest died. Then Sinh transfused his power into the rest of the priests, and they went and saved Burma.
“Do you know what an oracle is?”
“Yeah,” he answered drowsily. “It’s a little boat.”
Coracle, oracle: a messenger from the gods and a little boat on a great big shoreless sea. Anna watched as the child fell deeper into sleep.
Spence finished his task and repaired to the bar. He ordered two pression and took them to a table by the doors that he already thought of as his and Anna’s table, because that was where they sat when they came in for a drink before setting up. The large, dimly lit room was crowded, but not oppressively stuffed. Foosball in the games room, pizzas and frites and sandwiches readily available; absolutely no pretensions. Yes, he thought. It’s our kind of joint. The clatter of conversation, mostly French, soon blended into a soothing, encompassing ocean roar: laughter or the clink of glassware springing up like spray.
We could live here, he decided. In this twilight. He imagined the blockade stretching into months and years; imagined that the actual no-kidding disintegration had begun—which of course was nonsense. Anna, armed with their home-medicine manual, could become a quack doctor. Maybe Spence could sell
information? He dallied with the idea of describing Anna as a wisewoman, but rejected it. Call a spade a spade. This is not the dawning of some magical, nurturing female future. It’s the same road we’ve been traveling for so long, going down into the dark … .
Chuck had followed him from the car and was sitting on the chair next to Spence, taking it all in with his usual assured and gentle gaze. The young woman from the bar came by with a tray of glasses. Spence had a moment’s anxiety. Chuck was respectably vaccinated and tattooed now. They’d managed to get this done in the same town where they’d dispatched (this was the compromise they’d reached) an anonymous tip-off, and prints of Anna’s photographs, to the police in the regional capital. But maybe he wasn’t welcome in the bar.
But she’d only stopped to admire. “What do you call him?” she asked. “Chuck Prophet.”
The girl laughed, effortlessly balancing her tray on one thin muscular arm, and bending to rub the Birman’s delectably soft, ruffled throat. “That’s an unusual name for a cat.”
“He’s an unusual cat,” explained Spence proudly.
She moved on. Chuck had accepted her caress the way he took any kind of attention: sweetly, but a little distracted, a little disappointed at the touch of a hand that was not the hand he waited for. The moment she was gone, he resumed his eager study of the crowd, his silver-blue eyes searching hopefully: ears alert for a voice and a step that he would never hear again. Still keeping the faith, still confident that normal service would be restored.