The Man Who Sold His Son (Lanarkshire Strays) (4 page)

6

Alex sat in a surprisingly comfortable hospital armchair with his feet on the metal frame of Sarah’s bed, quietly reading to her from Ryan Bracha’s
Paul Carter’s A Dead Man
. It was one of the few books that they both agreed was a classic. She had her eyes closed but wasn’t sleeping. During a pause between paragraphs she opened her eyes and smiled at him. A real smile, for a change, which, given the circumstances, was unexpected. For a moment Alex saw the girl she’d once been.

“When are you going to get a Holo-Reader, Alex?”

Alex turned the battered paperback over. It was a little tatty, but then it had been printed over thirty years ago and read a dozen times at least. Spine creased, pages yellowed and soft, the paperback was an old friend to him and one he’d visited and re-visited often over the years, as he did with all of the books he loved, finding something new to admire each visit.

“Na.” He smiled back at her. “I like the smell of these.”

Sarah turned away from him and closed her eyes again.

“How’s Tommy?” she asked, without looking at him.

It had been two days since she’d choked on a piece of fruit whilst vaping and her young son had saved her life. Tommy had come to the hospital with her in the ambulance, and Alex had met them in the ER. But after he’d seen his mother sitting up and well again, following some quick surgery to remove the blockage and tidy Thomas’s makeshift tracheotomy, Sarah had forbidden the boy from visiting her, asking Alex’s mother to return to Scotland and take him to her place in Hamilton for a few days. Tommy loved his gran, so considering the way Sarah felt about children in hospitals, Alex was happy to have the boy stay there for a few days.

“He’s fine, Sarah. As fine as you’d expect, but he wants to see his mum.”

Sarah turned back to him. Her eyes had filled and the tears had begun to stream, making tracks along her cheeks. “I know. You know how I feel about kids in hospitals.”

Alex supressed the urge to point out to his wife that she hadn’t seemed so worried about their son’s feeling when she lay vaped out of her head and he was consigned to his room.

Instead, he nodded. “Aye. I know, Sarah.”

Still looking straight at him, she cried harder still and said, “I’m a useless mother, aren’t I?” It sounded less like a question and more like a statement.

Alex wanted to say,
Yes, but it’s not too late to do something about it yet.
Instead he squeezed her hand and told her, “It’s not your fault, love.”

To Sarah’s ears he might as well have said what he’d been thinking.

Having spent so much of their lives together, pretty much their whole lives, neither Sarah nor Alex had any real memory of a time when they didn’t have each other as the centre of their respective lives. From nursery to high school they’d grown together, closer as every month and year passed. Long summers filled with water fights, ice creams and thousands of hours lazing in Strathclyde Park. Winters hugged close against the cold on long walks. Autumn evenings planning their future together: a future apart was inconceivable.

They’d gone to university together, for a short time at least. At Glasgow University Alex studied medicine, Sarah pharmacology. Friends came and went, family came and went, but they had each other. They knew everything about each other, they hid nothing. As the years passed and the stages of their lives progressed from toddler to child and child to teen, they grew from being best friends to close as brother and sister, back to being best friends again and eventually to lovers.

He knew about her fears for her mother, her fear of her father, her dreams for a life in which she could make her own choices and escape the trap of guilt and fear and anxiety her family had become. She shared his joy in the relationship he had with his grandfather and his mother, and grieved when he did, lamenting the loss of a father he’d never known. They felt each other’s happiness and pain and held hands tightly as though their combined strength could see them through. And it did. They laughed, they danced, they ran, they made love and they supported one another; neither needing anyone else in the world.

Alex, as a clumsy buck-toothed ten-year-old, refused to leave and held his best friend’s hand as her mother breathed her last in the hospice, finally free of the cancer that’d eaten away at her strength, spirit and body for half a decade. A twelve–year-old Sarah had held Alex up at the Bellshill graveside of beloved Great-Uncle Alec, who’d come home to Scotland to be buried. Sarah’s arms curled around his waist whilst his mother cradled his head. Alec had been Granda Tom’s uncle. He’d brought Tom up from childhood after Tom had been orphaned. To Alex, Uncle Alec was his hero’s hero.

Sarah ran for help when Alex, aged eleven, fell from a tree and broke his leg. Alex punched an older boy who’d been grabbing at Sarah in the school playground. When a fourteen-year-old Sarah’s alcoholic father beat her, it was Alex’s mother who gave her a new home after Alex begged her to help Sarah.

It was Alex who visited Sarah’s father and spat threats at him to stay away from his Sarah, eyes blazing with a hatred he had only just prevented from exploding from him in a storm of violence.

They’d revised together and coached each other through exams neither thought they could have passed alone. They thought that nothing could come between them or would ever weaken them.
 

Until Thomas.

As soon as they realised that Sarah had fallen pregnant, she changed. Everything changed. The girl Alex had loved his whole life was virtually erased, showing herself only in rare glimpses. Sarah didn’t want to be a mother. She wanted to continue being a student, to graduate and become a pharmacist. Alex offered to give up his degree, but both of them knew that Alex’s future career would be the most lucrative. They knew they couldn’t both study. Sarah wanted an abortion.

It wasn’t just their age, or the loss of her or his future career. Their child would be a
random
, a freak. No one they knew had kids like that anymore. It felt shameful. Sarah couldn’t fathom how or why Alex would want to bring this complication into their lives.

 
Alex couldn’t begin to understand how she couldn’t want their baby. He begged and pleaded and accused and railed. He cast up every moment between them when they’d sacrificed something for each other, when they’d supported each other. Alex used every secret they shared and eventually wore her down and ultimately shamed her into having a child she didn’t want.

In little more than two years following Tommy’s birth, Sarah and he had become strangers. She couldn’t bond with the boy and he had started to resent her for it. Sometimes he hated her as much as she seemed to hate Thomas. For Alex, his son was the love of his life and the new centre, but Sarah had always relied on coming first for Alex. He had been the only person in her life who had loved her unconditionally, who did put her first and make her feel safe, but now Thomas was here.

She stopped taking an interest in herself or her family. She lost weight and cried and cried. She was badly depressed and Alex booked appointment after appointment with counsellors, support groups and other mums, which she’d promise to go to but never did. Finally, in her resentment of the father-son club she felt excluded from, she turned to vaping simply so she wouldn’t have to care about what she had lost. In the dark pit of depression, it never occurred to her how much she had gained.
 

A year later, in the depths of loneliness and fatigue and resentment, Alex had gone to an office Christmas party and had a drunken fling with a colleague. Sarah found out about it and felt betrayed all over again. This time she was justified in her feelings. Alex didn’t try to make excuses. He didn’t try to blame her isolation or her moods or her vaping. He just admitted what he’d done and asked her to forgive him. Months later, she said she had but the distance between them had grown further and the people who’d loved each other so very much were now banking resentments by the hour and flitting between glaring at or else avoiding each other

Each time Sarah ignored or neglected Tommy, Alex felt propelled further from the girl he’d loved his whole life. Each time Alex told her he loved her, Sarah would scowl; he’d broken that trust between them and, for her, the infallible unity they’d shared was forever shattered. Alex loved her so very much, even now, and blamed himself completely for her mental state. He sheltered Tommy from the worst of her illness and pounced upon days when her mood brightened and he could see her old self peeking through the dark skies.

For her part, she did her best to tolerate him and Tommy, although she trusted and wanted neither of them, but was unable to find the will or the strength to leave. She’d become an extension of a home and a husband and a son that she felt no part of. She wanted to escape her family every bit as badly as her ten-year-old self had wanted to. But she stayed. What else could she do? Who else could she be? She was worthless; she’d made sure of that over ten long years. How she wished Thomas hadn’t come home to find her choking.

Sarah turned to her husband once more, wiping the last of her tears away. Alex watched her eyes go dull again and she slipped back into the fog her mind was.

“I’m glad he’s ok. No one should have to watch their mother die. Even a mother as shitty as me.”

She drifted off; asleep or just gone, Alex didn’t know.

He closed his paperback, leant over her and kissed her softly, ignoring the saltiness of his own tears on her lips.

“I love you, Sarah.”

7

Gayle Robertson leaned forward in her chair, placing both elbows onto her desk. Removing her thickly-framed glasses with one hand and the bauble from her ash-blonde hair with the other, she shook her hair loose, enjoying the freedom. She pinched the corners of her eyes with thumb and forefinger to relieve some of the stress she’d been feeling. It’d been a hell of a week in the lab and today was no exception. The experiments she’d been running with the latest generation of Synthi-sperm had confirmed her fears for the on-going viability of the company’s stock.

Replacing her glasses, Gayle scanned the data one final time. Part of her hoped that in the few seconds since her eyes had last been on the screen, the results she’d collated and conclusions she had reached had magically corrected themselves into something less painful to pass on to her boss.

Gayle sighed, rose from her chair and removed her Howie lab coat.
Might as well get it over with.

Pressing her palm to the door scanner, she waited for the door to swoosh open, entered the airlock and tapped her foot whilst the decontamination filters did their work. After a few moments a second door, leading to her office, slid open.

Remaining standing, Gayle activated the wall panel and swiped the command that would link her through to her boss.

“Hi, Professor. You’re looking a little tense.” Mr Ennis was on his private jet on his way to Washington.

Gayle forced a smile.

“Yes. It’s been a rough week, sir.”

Her boss appeared as relaxed as ever. Gayle couldn’t recall a time when she’d seen the man looking anything but composed and in charge. At sixty-five and with neatly-cut dark hair greying at the temples, bright cobalt-blue eyes, a soft Irish lilt and a generous smile,
 
Mr Ennis was still single, and whilst not Gayle’s type, she could admit that he was very much still an attractive man. Gayle subconsciously shifted her feet as he spoke from the Holo-Screen.

“Has the latest result been following the trend that we predicted from the previous batch?”

Gayle nodded. “Yes, sir. The data suggests a far quicker deterioration than we’d initially feared.”

“How long are you predicting, Professor Robertson?”

Gayle answered immediately. There was no sense in sugar-coating it for him.

“Eighteen months. Maybe less, Mr Ennis.”

Gavin gave her a warm and unworried smile, causing Gayle to wonder momentarily if her boss completely understood the position that the company was now in. It was a ridiculous thought. Gavin Ennis was aware of and completely understood every development taking place in his company.

“Don’t worry, Gayle.” His blue eyes sparkled with warmth and confidence as he spoke. Not a trace of fear or stress affected the man. “Everything’s under control.”

With a gesture, Ennis flicked the Holo-Screen off leaving Gayle alone in her lab. She cleared her throat and listened to the sound echo off the sterile walls of the huge laboratory. Her eyes darted to the wall containing an array of professional and educational certificates.
How the hell did it come to this?

In her late fifties, Gayle had been a lifelong student and teacher of genetics and reproductive health. She’d spent the vast majority of those years travelling the world, lending her experience and insight to educational institutions and acting as a consultant to several large companies. Her education, experience and her career choices had equipped her with an exceptional skillset and enabled her to carve a unique position for herself in the genetics sector. Gayle had been due to embark on a year-long sabbatical when Gavin Ennis had arrived at her door.

She’d been working constantly since leaving school and felt that she deserved to finally reward herself for her dedication. Over the years, her passion for education and her career had propelled her along at break-neck speed through the decades. Old friends were long gone, new ones were difficult to make. Her family had scattered to other countries and had families of their own now. With the restrictions on travel tighter than ever, and her career on overdrive, visiting her siblings or their children had lost importance.

Five years ago, she’d opened her front door to find Ennis with a job offer he’d been adamant that only she was qualified to fill. Gayle had heard of Ennis of course; who hadn’t? But she hadn’t foreseen their circles overlapping, despite their respective strides in reproductive health. With two simple sentences, Gavin had convinced her to derail her plans to travel and join him at
Synthi-Co.

“Gayle, the synthetic sperm line is flawed. I need your help.”

Professor Robertson pushed all thoughts of the past away. Thinking of times past only brought memories of someone she did not want consuming her thoughts. She made her way to the small glass-walled room in the corner of her lab that served as her office. Scanning through the collated data from three months of experimentation made for grim viewing. Gayle had to admit that whatever the scientist’s equivalent to writer’s block was, she had it. All of her data was consistently telling her the same thing: the gametes that Synthi-Co had been producing for decades now were simply no longer viable. In eighteen months, maybe two years at a push, Ennis’s Synthi-sperm would be no longer able to serve its purpose.

An entire generation of people had been born as a result of IVF with Synthi-sperm, which had been eagerly designed by their prospective parents to eliminate undesirable character traits, such as anger, aggression and arrogance, or medical conditions, or other physical challenges. Now becoming parents themselves, the first generation of Synthi-sperm kids had possessed and had eliminated genes that no other generation in the history of humans had.

The selected genes had made the human race a little calmer, a little more predictable, but genes that also made them less likely to take risks, to possess any real ambition. In the next generation, those traits were amplified. Simply put, people were becoming too docile as a direct result of Synthi-sperm being the only method of reproduction available to the general populace. The choices people had made in selecting character and physical traits had resulted in a society comprised of ubiquitously uniform cowards and under-achievers. The problem was that the DNA stock was riddled with these types of genes as a result of the first generation’s choices. Synthi-Co needed to do what selective breeding programmes had been doing for centuries.

It was time to return to the ancestral wild type to retrieve genes that had been lost to the current crop.