How desperately I, Joanna May, tried to be myself, not Carl May’s wife. Even in exile, even divorced, I was married to him, linked to him. She married to him is so different from he married to her. She occupies a little space in his head; he surrounds her, encloses her, as a white leucocyte surrounds some invading cell: if he puts his penis in her it’s just to test the breeding warmth: he’s really there already. He can escape, she can’t. She is squeezed in there, in his head, without room to manoeuvre. Even in Isaac’s bed, his uncomfortable, lumpy-mattressed bed, his comfortable arms, I was Carl May’s wife, his employer’s wife, source of his funding: he was my illicit lover. Therein lay the excitement, the pleasure. I could understand Carl’s rage, I could understand my guilt, but not his jealousy. How could he be jealous when what I was doing could hardly be acting, could only be reacting? When Carl divorced me and Oliver climbed into my smooth, firm, clean and luxurious bed, Oliver was my comfort, my consolation, because Carl May had eased me out of his life, as the head’s squeezed out, eased out, of a pimple. If Carl May did it painlessly, it was for his own sake, not mine: he didn’t want any nasty, unsightly inflammation left behind.
When I acknowledged my sisters, my twins, my clones, my children, when I stood out against Carl May, I found myself: pop! I was out. He thought he would diminish me: he couldn’t: he made me. I acknowledged fear – what would they think of me? I recognized shame – I am old, so old. I faced my rage – how dare they exist. I felt desire, and a great swelling energy, a surging pleasure, the joy of being one of a million million, part of the life of the universe, in all its absurdity, its tremulous glory: I was part of a living landscape, and the function of that life was to worship and laud its maker, and the maker was not Carl May: he had not made me: wife I might be, but only part of me, for all of a sudden there was more of me left. The bugles had sounded, reinforcements came racing over the hill; Joanna May was now Alice, Julie, Gina, Jane as well. Absurd but wonderful!
Carl May could not go on. I let Angela know, who let Gerald know; a man may murder his wife’s lovers, but cannot be mad in charge of four nuclear power stations. I was no longer just a wife; I was a human being: I could see clearly now.
If thine eye offend me take a good look at yourself. If thine I offend thee, change it.
It’s not lies that kill the soul, it’s the effort to believe the lies, especially your own. Carl’s dead, white face on the TV screen alarmed me, and should have alarmed the world sooner than it did. The walking dead can’t be in charge. There is no room for zombies.
That day at the lido Gerald had a word with someone, who had a word with someone, who had a worker in the field, of course he did.
Sometimes accidents, or events as they are called, do occur without prompting in relation to the fuel rods of the old Magnox stations. Are bound to. The spent fuel rods – fissile uranium wrapped in magnesium – are removed from the pile when they’ve worn out their usefulness, are no longer capable, poor tired things, of sustaining a reaction. They’re taken out, in sequence, en bloc, as they went in – some thirty at a time. But sometimes rods which are not quite spent, may even have quite a vigour to them, get in with the others: they too get dumped in the cooling ponds – square concrete-sided pools, open to the air. Such events do happen – it hardly seems to matter much. No one’s going to swim in the pools, are they! What does it matter, if the dials do go round a second time, a third time, a tenth time, and no one notices – or in this particular case, cares to notice, gets paid not to notice; who’s to say what goes on, no skin off anyone’s nose, unless, that is, the owner of the nose is vain enough, proud enough, sufficient of a scorpion to sting himself to death. When it would be the scorpion’s fault, no one else’s. The old-fashioned dial readouts should have been converted to digital display long ago, but if management is mean, mean, whose fault is that? Management baying at the moon – snapping, howling: how dare you shine so bright! It doesn’t stop the moon.
Accidents will happen. No such thing as an accident.
I, Joanna May. Or perhaps now, just Joanna.