Falling Sideways (4 page)

Now that was a really good question, and the first answer that came into David's mind was ‘wake up'. One thing he was fairly sure he didn't want to do was to carry on with this lunatic scheme of cloning a dead witch. Unfortunately, he couldn't think offhand of a way of saying so without making a total and irrecoverable fool of himself.

‘You think you can do it, then?' he said.

Honest John shrugged. ‘Give it a go, anyway. I mean, the very worst that can happen is, you end up with a hundred and twenty quid's worth of green, slimy cat-food. You got a cat?'

Trying not to shudder too visibly, David said no, he hadn't.

‘I have,' replied Honest John. ‘I got
loads
of cats; like, you know how they leave their hairs all over everything? It'd cost a fortune feeding 'em, if it wasn't for the occasional – well, you know, in the end it all comes down to your quality control, doesn't it?'

David had already come to the conclusion that he didn't like Honest John terribly much. He hadn't liked his brother, either. The thought that even the best possible outcome to this escapade would result in these people being his in-laws was almost enough to give him the courage to run away.

‘Right,' said Honest John, picking the hair off the slide with his tweezers before David could say anything else. ‘Off we go, then. I'll heat up number six and we'll be away.'

So that was that: so little thought, so little consideration of the implications, before bringing another life into the world. Just allowing oneself to be carried away by a moment's impulse, the urge not to give offence by saying no, the irresistible force of a good idea at the time. In other words, pretty much normal behaviour, for a human being.

‘Um,' David said. ‘How long does it take, usually?'

‘Depends,' replied Honest John, as he fiddled with some controls. ‘I mean, there's all sorts of things, like your gel consistency, your pick-up speed and response time, your thread density. It can vary a hell of a lot.'

‘Ah.'

‘Could be as little as four and a half hours,' Honest John went on, ‘could be as long as seven, you just can't tell. Now then,' he added, pressing a button. The tank lit up, like a frogspawn-green light bulb. ‘There you go. Just got to wait and see.'

Now, David thought, would most definitely be a good time to wake up. Please?

‘So,' Honest John continued, ‘you can hang around here if you really want to, or you can bugger off somewhere and I'll let you know when it's done.'

David nodded. ‘I'll do that, then,' he said. ‘Um, do I pay you now, or . . .?'

Honest John picked up his mug, saw that it was empty and put it down again. ‘Half now,' he said, ‘half when we slop it out. Cash preferred,' he added.

‘Ah. I've just realised, I haven't got that much cash on me. I can give you a cheque—'

Honest John gave him a scornful look, as if David was standing on his doorstep at nine a.m. on a Sunday morning trying to interest him in The Gospel According to the Easter Bunny. ‘How much have you got on you, then?'

David pulled out his wallet. ‘Forty pounds,' he said. ‘Oh, just a moment, I've got some change . . .' Finally, counting in all the fivepences and tuppences and pennies, he was able to make up forty-six pounds, seventeen pence. Honest John wrote him a receipt on the back of a vintage Chinese takeaway rice-carton lid –
recd on a/c 1 cloan £46-17
, and the date, and a squiggle like the edited highlights of a tachograph chart. Clearly they didn't call him Honest John for nothing.

David took the rectangle of card and put it solemnly in his inside pocket. ‘Well,' he said, ‘thank you very much. It's been—'

‘Hang on,' Honest John interrupted. ‘What about your phone number, then? So I can let you know when she's done?'

‘Oh,' David said. ‘Sorry.'

Once again, here was an opportunity for escape: partial escape only, true enough, but if he wrote down a false phone number, how would Honest John ever find him again? He could just walk through the door into the night air, forget any of this had ever happened; it would still be his fault, but he probably wouldn't get the blame.

Someone else could probably have brought himself to do that – someone, for example, with half a brain, or ten per cent more backbone than a pint of custard – but not David. Telling lies is a bit like tiling bathrooms – if you don't know how to do it properly, it's best not to try. He pulled out the carton lid, wrote his number down on a corner, tore it off and handed it over. ‘I'll be hearing from you, then,' he said.

‘Yup.'

I'll just go home and wait, then, shall I? (he wanted to say). And when you phone, I'll drop by and collect my brand new artificially synthesised human being – actually, ‘human' is probably pushing it a bit, or at the very least it's a grey area; but that's OK. While I'm waiting I can watch a video, or maybe make a start on my quarterly VAT return—

‘Okay,' David said. ‘Well, thanks for everything.'

Honest John shrugged and turned a shoulder towards him, implying that he'd now become a slight nuisance and this wasn't a waiting room or a bus shelter. David smiled feebly, thought about waving, decided not to, and walked out.

Outside – in a way it was like waking up out of a dream, the moment when the screwy dream logic melts and falls away and you realise that none of that weird stuff could ever possibly have happened. He walked thirty yards down the street, stopped, and reached inside his jacket. Under the amber light of the street lamp, the writing on the carton lid still said
recd on a/c 1 cloan £4617
; and today's date, and a squiggle. He very much wanted to throw it away; but he came from a society and a culture that throws away receipts about as often as it drowns unwanted kittens in steaming cauldrons of mulled yoghurt. He put it back in his pocket and walked to the Tube station.

The train was unusually slow, both in arriving and in taking David home. He stopped at the Kentucky Fried Chicken place on his way back to the flat. On the doormat he found a bank statement, an invitation to join the Aerospace Design Book Club, a postcard of the Gettysburg battlefield from his friends Steven and Tamsin (he hadn't even realised they'd gone abroad) and a road fund licence-renewal form for the car he'd sold seven years ago. He put the bank statement in the shoebox marked ‘Bank Statements' and binned the rest.

There were six messages on his answering machine. Five of them were just clicks and buzzes. The sixth was from his unbearable cousin Alex, the lawyer, instructing David to meet him for lunch tomorrow. David sighed. He'd known and hated Alex since he was six and Alex was eight, and had been trying to get rid of him for as long as he could remember. But, for some reason, Alex seemed to like him and made a point of staying in touch, no matter how hard David tried to elude him. This tenacity always made him think of a cat his mother had owned at one stage, who had insisted on bringing its newly slain prey into the house and depositing the corpses in places where they'd be sure to be found eventually – behind sofa cushions or inside slippers. No amount of reasoning, yelling or violence had ever managed to persuade this cat that its contributions to the household economy were neither necessary nor welcome. What made it worse, of course, was that Alex was a successful, well-paid, highly respected lawyer with a junior partnership in a prestigious West End firm and parents who were proud of him, whereas David was still just a successful, well-paid, highly respected computer geek whose mother told her friends he stacked shelves in Safeways for a living because she couldn't bring herself to admit to the shameful reality. Alex was also blue-eyed, curly-haired, good-looking in a Hugh Grant sort of way, and a Tall Bastard. Everything else was forgivable, assuming a proper level of sincere contrition. The height thing, on the other hand, went way beyond casual thoughtlessness and into actual malice.

He switched off the machine and looked round. In a little over six hours, I could be bringing Philippa Levens back to this, he panicked. Welcome to the twenty-first century; things are a little different here. He hurried through into the kitchen and looked in the freezer; he could defrost her a Waitrose lasagne, or he could phone out for a pizza.

But of course that wasn't going to happen, because none of it had happened . . . He sat down on the sofa, fidgety and tense, feeling almost as if he'd just taken a life rather than bespoken one. (How about the other clone joints, the better-class ones? Did they deliver? Did they take Visa? Assuming Honest John was down at the opposite end of the spectrum, did that make him a clone shark? Which reminded him, he'd have to find a cash-point at some stage.) Sitting down proved to be torture, so he got up and paced, an activity that the architect who'd designed his home had left at the bottom of his list of priorities. Seven paces brought him up sharp against the kitchen sink. He stopped and turned round, monarch of what little he surveyed. On the very few occasions when he'd brought girls home to his flat, they'd appeared either disconcerted, amused or both (as if they'd broken down on a lonely road at night, and there'd been a blinding light in the sky, and suddenly they were on an alien ship, and the aliens had turned out to be the Teletubbies) and they hadn't stayed very long. Perhaps he should clean the kitchen floor. There'd be time.

He looked again. A clean kitchen floor probably wasn't going to solve his problems. The feeling of being about to be submerged up to the chin in very deep trouble closed in all around him. Perhaps, after all, the most sensible thing would be to read a book or watch something. Was that how people passed the time on Death Row, he wondered, when the point came when it no longer mattered? Strange way of thinking. He walked across to his desk. The obvious thing to do was work, but he knew he'd have no chance of concentrating to the level his kind of work required. He stood up again and put the kettle on. When all else fails, make tea.

What have I done? he asked himself, as the watched pot took its own sweet time coming to the boil. Everything was happening in deadly slow motion, even perfectly straightforward things like making a cup of tea. Not a good omen, really. Nothing had actually happened yet, and already he was stressed out, his mind chasing up and down strange avenues of thought, speculation and downright craziness. Were real expectant fathers as wound up and twitchy as this, he wondered?

At some point he must have sat down, just for a moment; because he woke up in his worn-out old armchair, and the phone was ringing. He jumped up like a cat, and tripped over his feet with a degree of athletic clumsiness that Charlie Chaplin could've learned a thing or two from, before reaching the phone and picking it up.

‘Hello?'

‘Hello, dear. So you're not dead or anything, then. Only it's been so long since you phoned, I was beginning to wonder.'

Oh, for God's sake. ‘Mum . . .'

‘Yes, I know, you can't talk now. Probably expecting a vitally important call any minute now, just like you always seem to be, though I can't really think of any vitally important people who're going to ring you this late in the evening – obviously
I
don't fit in that category, I'm only your mother . . .'

He closed his eyes, took the phone away from his ear and counted up to ten before putting it back.

‘ . . . At least he's got the decency to phone his mother from time to time, even if he is in prison and wears a ring through his upper lip. But you might as well be living on the Moon, actually that'd be better, at least I'd know where you were and what you're up to.'

‘Yes, Mum,' David said. ‘Look, this time I really am waiting for a very important—'

‘This time,' said his mother. ‘I see. So you admit that all those other times . . .'

Inspiration. When all else fails, tell the truth. Part of the truth, anyhow.

‘Actually,' he said, ‘there's this girl—'

‘Oh.' Two seconds of complete, golden silence. ‘So, what's she like? What's her name? Has she got hair? Only so many of the girls you see these days, either it's bright purple or they've shaved it all off right down to the scalp; sometimes I wonder if young people these days are even human. She's not one of those, is she?'

‘She's got lovely hair,' David replied accurately. ‘Sort of reddish auburn.'

‘Really? You sure it's not out of a bottle? Mind you, even that'd be better than shocking pink. Marcia Crebbins's daughter came home the other day with one side pink and the other side green. Marcia said she took one look at it and ran upstairs screaming, though of course she was always a bit hysterical. How old is she? I know you said ‘girl', but–'

‘I'm not sure, actually,' David replied slowly. Properly speaking, she's at least four hundred, but she was only nineteen when she died, he reminded himself. ‘Mid-twenties, probably. Look, I really don't want to be rude but she said she'd ring around now, and—'

‘All right, all right. Though you want to be careful, I mean, you're a bit old to be waiting by the phone like this, it's not like you're still a teenager. I wouldn't like to think of you going all to pieces just because . . .'

‘Yes, Mum. I'll call you back tomorrow, only—'

He knew it wouldn't be as easy as that. ‘So what's her name? Is she pretty?'

‘Philippa,' David replied. ‘And yes. Very.'

‘Really. Then – I'm not being nasty or anything, but you've got to think about these things – if she's so very young and pretty—'

‘What the hell does she see in me? Honestly, Mum. I haven't got a clue. My guess is, she's probably only around because of my money. Call you later. 'Bye.'

He put the receiver down, screwed his eyes shut and clenched his fists till they hurt. Usually, this alleviated the worst of the pain within five to eight seconds. This time, it took a little longer. He'd just got his breathing back under control when the phone went again.