That was a year of strange events, some wonderful, some terrible: and there are stranger years ahead, no doubt. They don’t frighten me; even death has lost its sting. The future shouldn’t alarm us: how could it possibly be worse than what’s gone before? Little by little, wisdom replaces ignorance, self-knowledge overcomes stupidity, awareness gets the upper hand of cruelty. It is the past which is so terrifying, with its capacity to spoil and destroy the present. That can’t get better.
Little Carl runs round my feet. He’s three years old, an energetic, noisy little boy, with thick pale hair and bright red cheeks, interested in everything, bored by nothing. He can read and write already, and even recite nursery rhymes, which he loves to do, never getting them quite right. If I correct him he has a temper tantrum: he is beside himself with upset and indignation – I have failed to recognize the difficulties he has overcome, the achievement; so great a task for one so small – and his small frame cannot contain such passion. His whole body turns as red as his cheeks, he flails and kicks and beats the ground, the door, me, anything; and then I, hurt in mind and body, have to carry him, as best I can, to his room and shut him in until we both calm down and can begin again. I could beat him black and blue, and am still sometimes tempted to, to punish him for what he did to me, for the unlived life he gave me, so many years of it, the guilt he made me feel, the loss he made me endure, for the deaths of Isaac and of Oliver. Except this innocent has done nothing: I know he could, that’s all, and knowing what he could do also know what I could do, sufficiently provoked; and so I have to forgive him, both in retrospect and in advance.
Easier not to correct him, one way or another, to avoid the confrontation, to let the error go unchecked. ‘Spoiling,’ Gina calls it. Now she has given her children away, how quickly she has taken on Julie’s former role, and become censorious. But I’m older, I know better, I no longer fight for fairness, truth and justice. I just say, ‘That’s wonderful, Carl, how clever you are!’ We christened him Rex, Alice and I. King. Why not? But Julie was against it – a dog’s name, she said – and it soon drifted back to being Carl, little Carl.
Alice, of all of them, Queen of Cups, was the one who volunteered to give birth to little Carl, on condition she didn’t have to rear him. Dr Holly, back in the business, used his own tried and tested techniques of nuclei transfer to bring it about. Alice proved a good and dutiful birth mother: didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, watched her health and her moods – trained as she was in keeping her body well under control. She relinquished the baby to me at six weeks, without protest – glad of a decent night’s sleep, I daresay, and happy enough to let the simple pleasures of narcissism prevail over the more complicated snakes-and-ladders game of motherhood; anxious to get back to work; and knowing I’d bring up the child pretty much as she would. How could I not?
Julie, Queen of Pentacles, is happy bringing up Ben, and little Anthony too; Alec, their adoptive father, comes and goes. He is resigned to the noise, the mess, the constant upheaval; consoled by the sense of present and future, so long as he can fly off from time to time, leave it all behind and tread the clean and flattering corridors of world class hotels until such time as his strength returns and his self-esteem is restored.
Jane, Queen of Wands, no longer toys with the idea of working in film: she has settled happily and quite profitably as a journalist – the work suits her better, being more about facts, less about fantasy. She felt obliged to take Sue in because three was too much for Julie, and Alice had done her bit by actually giving birth to little Carl, and Gina wasn’t fit, and a child will take any clone, it seems, for a mother. The essential nature is the same, after all: only the frills are different. Sue then felt the lack of a resident father, so Jane, running comfortably on only a quarter guilt, finally consented to allow Tom to move in. Jane is always out and about so Tom does much of the childminding and cooking, grumbling the while, but the three of them, Jane, Tom, Sue, seem happy enough. Sue sees her birth mother from time to time, of course, but prefers the Jane rather than the Gina version, or at any rate, she’d rather have Tom for a father than Cliff.
Gina, Queen of Swords, now childless, is at medical school but back with Cliff. He still drinks, he still hits her, but not so much or so hard. Pain is indeed addictive, and perhaps the effort of curing it is hardly worth it, if there are no children about. If it’s pleasurable, why not? We’ve had so many oughts and shoulds, all of us, we’ve all but given up being critical of one another. Good for her, say we.
We would have been perfect people if we could, but our genes were against us. We would have been faithful, kind and true, but fate was against us. We are one woman split five ways, a hundred ways, a million million ways.
It’s autumn. I, Joanna May, am out in the garden, raking leaves. I keep things tidy, and growing, in memory of Oliver, and besides, I like to do it. Little Carl runs round my feet and all but trips me up, and falls headlong into a pile of leaves. ‘Careful,’ I say, ‘I’m not as young as I was,’ and I pick him up and set him straight, and he laughs cheerfully and rushes off to set to flight a flock of seagulls, rashly gathered on the lawn: and when the wicked deed is done, and the birds have risen crossly and unwillingly into the air, where they hang around to wheel and squawk their reproach, he stands stock still, amazed at what he’s done. I do love him. Never stopped.
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