‘HOW DO YOU KNOW anybody is really who you think they are?’
My feet backtracked. When I peered in the door, Simone was lying on her bed with the phone in her hand, pointing her toes at the ceiling with great seriousness as she mulled over the question of identity. She couldn’t see me but I quickly stepped out of sight anyway and stood listening.
‘I mean, take Muhammed, the guy who sells fruit at the corner shop … You know, the cute one with the intense eyes – what if he’s a spy for Al Qaeda?’
Young Muhammed is painfully shy, hardly the spy-material type.
She carried on as if she’d read my mind. ‘He’s just faking the shyness thing. I think he goes with rich older women. Maybe he’s going to plant a bomb somewhere in Camps Bay. He asked me if I wanted hashish the other day …’
He did?
‘You’re such a baby, Amber. Of course I didn’t accept. He was just chatting me up.’
There’s a long thoughtful pause before the bombshell I knew she’d been lining Amber up for.
‘I mean, who says your father is your real father? He wouldn’t even know if your mom slept around. Monica says that’s why there are so many problems between men and women, because women have the biological upper hand. I mean, you just have to face it – you don’t look like him at all …’
Amber’s disillusionment was an inexorable process. Simone’s superior voice grew more impassioned.
‘You’re so young, Amber, sometimes I don’t know why I bother with you. This is a theoretical discussion, for heaven’s sake. It’s not personal. I mean, I could have said – maybe Truschka is an alien from the future. It’s just like maybe, what if?’
Amber was actually a year older than Simone, but she seemed much younger, it was true. They were a mismatched pair – one tall, thin and blonde, the other short and dark with hurt oil-brown eyes and a plump-thigh walk, something about her like a stalwart dwarf that had come up from underground caverns. Like Dopey to Goldilocks. Crick and Crock, my father would have said – an ancient joke about two mismatched best friends. It was a new, puzzling friendship. My guess was Amber was a good listener, because, unlike Simone’s other friends, she was the studious, helpful type. Simone seemed fascinated by her because she had wrangled herself out of all physical activity due to a heart problem. Also, Amber’s father was a music producer, which meant she had all the latest CDs and DVDs before anybody else. That was probably it.
‘Maybe none of us is really who other people think we are …’ Simone intoned, spreading mischief in between giggles. ‘Hey, maybe you should ask your mom why you don’t look like anybody. Have you ever seen a picture of yourself as a baby in hospital? If not, you’re probably adopted …’ Her voice developed a thoughtful, factual tone. ‘Or you could be a DI baby.’
Simone emitted a shriek of laughter and then composed herself. ‘That’s DIA, dummy. I know your father’s not a soldier. Anyway, he’s not dead either, right? DI stands for Donor Insemination.’
When she walked into the kitchen, she was whistling the way she did when she was pleased with herself. She picked up random tunes the way other people picked up dull coins on the road and polished them in their pockets. I glanced at her as she spread peanut butter and syrup onto a thick slice of bread, uncertain of how to respond to this new development.
I had never talked to her about Daniel’s work with the clandestine organisation known as Real Man Inc., aka RMI, partly because I judged it to be an unsuitable topic for a young girl and partly because I was too deeply implicated.
RMI is how my author husband pays the bills. The organisation runs a consulting business that hires out superior men of proven physical and intellectual prowess to rich, powerful women who want to conceive superior babies in a natural way. It is possible to pay by the hour or by the day or night, whatever suits the client. The fees are astronomical, but the organisation not only guarantees absolute confidentiality and peerless service but clients have access to cutting-edge science with proven screening methods.
I know all this because I was once a client. I chose ‘Jack’ from the same files that all the other women looked at. I did the Russian-roulette dance of life with Jack twice, and nothing happened. I did not manage to change the future by throwing myself into the belly of the beast. I did not fall pregnant and I never even got close to finding my AWOL husband.
He’d said I should call him Jumping Jack Flash. I’d laughed and said Jack would do. We’d gone on from there. Jack had warned me about RMI …. In some faraway country a chauffeur will open the car door for her. Virginity is a rare commodity. And then he’d let me go.
That night, after Simone had gone to bed, I closed my bedroom door quietly behind me, sat down on the bed and opened my bedside table drawer. It held the items that I had kept there since my husband left never to return: the Florentine journal with its Dante and Beatrice embossed leather cover (given to teenage Paola by her father in lieu of an apology for wrecking her life) that held bits and pieces of poetry written out in Daniel’s own hand, and the open cigarette packet and box of matches that he left behind. I’d once assured myself that he’d be back before I finished smoking them. If I smoked one tonight there would be only two left. But how else would I face remembering how we were then?
I rose from the bed to open the windows wide so that Simone would suspect nothing in the morning. The salted sea air flooded in with its miasma of nocturnal odours, and triggered a memory. This was how I’d first read Lady Limbo, Daniel’s unpublished erotic thriller – lying in our bed, an icy salty wind transporting me away from the known and normal, a small boat on the perilous high seas.
With a lit cigarette in one hand, I flipped through the journal pages until I found it, the innocuous scrap cut out from a larger computer printout of the old days, faded narrow blue lines running across it … Breathe, Paola, breathe. Part of the record of events kept for posterity. Only you and I are left to remember that night, plumes of blue smoke surrounding us as I read the message aloud, later the three of us lying on Nicky’s bed in a state of inebriated contentment. How young we were then, my darling man.
17 May 1994. Hello. I am a 32-year-old single woman who wants to have a baby in the natural way. I have been told that Real Man Inc. provides a professional vetting service and an excellent list of potential candidates for copulation. Has anybody out there used the services of Real Man Inc.? Any information will be treated in strict confidence.
Lady Limbo (ladylimbo@aup.extramural.edu)
It seemed no less remarkable to me than the first time I read Lady Limbo’s message as a Psychology I student. I’d known instinctively even then − long before online pornography and suicide chat groups became commonplace − that the message, found on an online social bulletin board, came from a parallel dimension that other real people inhabited. I had envisaged it as a crack between worlds that I could control; instead, by gifting it to my boyfriend Nicky and his best friend Daniel, I had opened the door to a dark place of carnal knowledge. And now I wanted to bring him back and close that door.
As a scientist I knew that in some cases females of the animal species decided to go it alone. The phenomenon of ‘virgin births’, otherwise known as parthenogenesis, among sexually reproducing animals was rare but it happened. The reproduction cycle of the human female was more complex; virgin births were impossible. RMI had merely exploited a gap in the market – the exclusive services they offered permitted independent women to conduct the rites and rituals of procreation on their own terms.
There was the discerning Deputy Minister who wore Chanel, opting to have a baby alone without male interference. And there was shrewd Jasmine, seductive limbo dancer, who had aborted at least one baby and had debts to clear. Daniel, who was scouting for a high-paying overseas student vac job for himself and Nicky, replied to the ‘Lady Limbo’ message, and Jasmine sensed opportunity. During that hot Paris summer, Jasmine chose blond Nicky, heir to a financial empire, over impoverished Daniel.
Simone was the result of Jasmine’s plan to conceive a designer baby that she intended to sell. Given the consequences, Simone could never know the truth about her birth.