‘God’s last laugh,’ I said, ‘before he flew off,’ I, the original of the clones of Joanna May. I said it, of course, more for the sake of a neat phrase than anything else: my way of vaguely invoking the name of God whilst yet dismissing him. God was there once, I safely maintain, thus explaining away some intimation of immortality, some general notion we all have of ‘more to this than meets the eye’ whilst disposing of him, whoever he may be, for all practical purposes.
‘Joanna, define your terms!’ – Miss Watson, 1942. A certain Miss Watson taught me English language when I was a schoolgirl. She was in her eighties. Young women were at the time busy making explosives in factories to blow young men up: they had no time to teach their juniors anything. The old were brought out of retirement to be of some use, while the young finished each other off. No wonder the war was so popular with everyone. A long, violent, riotous, disgraceful party! Miss Watson died of a stroke on VE day; and quite right too – the party was over.
If I’m forced into a corner by the ghost of Miss Watson, who returns to me often in dreams, I would define God as the source of all identity: the one true, the only ‘I’ from which flow the myriad, myriad ‘you’s’. We acknowledge him in every ‘I’ we so presumptuously utter. Now what could be more all-pervasive than that?
Carl once told me God flew off the day Fat Boy was exploded in the Nevada Desert, when man entered the atomic age (though of course man – and woman – had in fact entered it long before, when Pierre and Marie Curie first started sieving and filtering their dusty mounds of pitchblende), leaving the field to the likes of my husband. But I prefer to think He flew off when the first flicker of television appeared upon the screen. He knew he was beaten. For Lucifer read John Logie Baird, inventor of TV, toppling the Ultimate Identity from his seat of power: spoiling the currency of ‘I’ forever. The ‘you’ that is the real ‘I’, the one perceived by others, the one understood by the child in that initial bright vision, now watches the ‘you’ that that you perceives. There is no end to it. Our little shard, our little divine shred of identity, so precariously held, is altogether lost as we join the oneness that is audience. My clones and I. After I found out about the clones I began to worry a lot about ‘I’.
As for evil – which everyone knows is the absence of God – what could it do when God took off but take up residence in the source of its trouble. The minute parents, those stoical folk, look away, evil creeps out of the TV set and settles in the wallpaper. The children ask for sneakers now, not proper shoes. Why? Because sneakers have long laces, long enough to hang a person by. And every year the laces get longer and tougher, the better to do it; to hang, to dangle yourself or others. Why bother to preserve the ‘I’? It’s seen too much of sights not fit for human eyes, it is not fit to live. It no longer believes in life: all it gets to see is corruption, seared, torn and melting flesh. There is no ‘I’ left for any of us. The great ‘I’ has fled, say the eyes in the wallpaper: only the clones remain, staring.
If the I offend thee pluck it out. Idopectomy.
My children who are myself pun too. Bloody clones. That was Carl’s doing.
On hearing the first news from Chernobyl, I sent Trevor the butler to the Post Office with a telegram to Carl May my ex-husband saying, ‘Yah boo sucks, signed Milly Molly Mandy’, but Trevor came back saying the Post Office now sent only greetings telegrams – Happy Birthday, Congratulations on your Wedding, and so forth – and I decided silence was the better policy. One must go with the flow of events. If waves slap against your face, turn back to shore.
The next day Carl made a statement to the press saying (or words to this effect), ‘It can’t happen here. Our reactors are constructed on a different principle from theirs. Children may safely drink milk though sheep may no longer safely graze on the uplands.’ His lies were soft and persuasive, as ever: and his face calm and handsome. It had the tranquillity of a death mask: as if someone had placed a waxed cloth over his corpse’s face – after it had been composed by the undertaker, of course – and moulded it into shape and propped body and mask up before the cameras and used puppet strings to work the mouth and eyelids. Carl was dead, pretending to be living. That is what a diet of lies does for you – and now I am no longer with him what else will Carl choose to eat but lies? There is no nourishment in them, the spongy junk food of the mind. The soul dies from malnutrition.
I longed to tell him so – yah, boo, told you so – to ease the itch of spited, spiteful love, watch the pale dead face suffuse with the living pink of rage, but I didn’t. Let him stay dead. It was what he chose when he threw me out: it is why he lived without a woman after I was gone.
I dedicated my life to Carl: I threw away the children I could have had, for his sake, to keep him happy. Isaac was nothing; a side-show, a weak man: he died and I scarcely noticed. Oliver is nothing either, when it comes to it: a pet which curls up alongside, by a warm fire, or on a forbidden bed, to be indulged. Better than nothing, that’s all, poor Oliver. Of course Carl is dead, dying: so am I, without him. But Carl is at least able to blow up the world while he waits. I’m not.