The Testament of Jessie Lamb (10 page)

‘But what's the use of that? Isn't everyone in the world already infected?'

‘It can be used to vaccinate embryos.'

‘Embryos?'

‘There are hundreds of thousands of embryos stored around the world–millions, that predate Maternal Death Syndrome. Pristine, healthy, disease-free embryos, stacked in freezers.'

‘Why?'

‘In IVF treatment, a woman is given drugs to make her super-ovulate, so you can harvest quite a few eggs at once. You can't freeze eggs so we fertilise them all and pop one or two embryos back inside her. The others, if they look good, get frozen. They're backup in case the implanted one fails, or to get a sibling.'

‘OK.'

‘Since most women only used a couple of their embryos, fertility clinics have freezers full of them. Which haven't been touched since MDS.'

‘So now you vaccinate these embryos.'

‘Bingo! There are only two possible ways for them to contract MDS, either through the placenta, or once they start breathing: and we prevent both by early vaccination.'

‘Then why was Mum saying it was no good?'

‘Oh, she's imagining all sorts of arguments and complications, but they'll certainly want to try it at the clinic and I would imagine at a lot of other places round the world.'

‘The women who have these babies–the first ones–'

‘Yes, they already have MDS. At least they'll die in a good cause. And there are all sorts of other possibilities; the frozen embryos could be gestated in artificial wombs, or in animals–all these alternatives become much more interesting, once we know we can vaccinate the embryos.'

‘What are artificial wombs?'

‘Incubators. Machines babies can grow in.'

I thought it sounded disgusting.

‘More porridge for the nut brown maid?' He shared the remains between our two bowls.
He
was happy. I was the one who couldn't see it in a good light. It's true, he was happy about it from the start off. All I could think was that the scientists were meddling more and more. If there was going to be a cure I didn't want it to be like this, with frozen vaccinated embryos and artificial wombs or even worse, animals. I thought they'd end up creating a race of half-human monsters for all we knew. What the FLAME women said flared up in my mind: the (male) scientists would always be in control, because they would be the only ones who could make it happen.

I wanted to talk to Sal about it, but she wasn't in college and when I texted her to find out why, it turned out she and her mum had gone down to Birmingham again. ‘Bad news' she put in her text, and I texted ‘?' But she sent back ‘L8r'. I was in a black clumsy furious mood. I couldn't see the good in what Dad told me, and I certainly couldn't see any good anywhere else. I hadn't spoken to Baz since the day after Sal's rape. I hadn't even told him I'd left YOFI too. I was waiting to see if he would get in touch with me, but he didn't.

Then coming home from college I took a shortcut through the car park in front of Blockbuster and noticed two youths staring at me. It was one of those moments where someone's watching you and you accidentally look them in the eye, and then they feel they have to do something. I'd got really good at avoiding weirdo demented men, but this time I just blew it. I told myself that if I kept walking steadily for twenty steps they'd go away. Before I'd done ten they were in front of me. They had long hair tied back, and the taller one had a backpack. ‘Wantae come wi' us?' he said.

‘No.'

‘There's lassies wi' us an all,' he said, nodding towards the bus station; and I could see there was a gang of thirty or more, standing in a huddle in one of the parking bays. The bus station was otherwise deserted, everyone had melted away.

‘No thanks, I'm going home.'

‘Och! She's goin' home, tha's nice. Gie us yer bag.'

‘There's nothing worth–'

He snatched it off my shoulder.

‘Please don't! there's Coursework in there–'

‘Coursework?' He unzipped the bag and tipped it upside-down. My History ring binder fell out and sprang open, and pages splayed across the ground. ‘She's studyin'!' he said in tones of amazement to the small one. ‘D'ye not know it's all over?' And he made a slicing gesture at his throat, with the side of his hand. Then he picked up my iPod and purse, stuffed them back in the bag, and slung it over his shoulder. He kicked at the ring binder so it went spinning through the air, shedding pages as it went. I must have shouted because he swung back round to me and put his face right close to mine, close enough for me to see the dirty pores at the sides of his nose, and he whispered, ‘Fuckin' stupid bitch!' and gave me a shove.

By the time I'd crawled to my feet they were gone. I had to go stooping round the car park trying to collect soggy pages of my work. I didn't realise I was crying till a woman came out of Blockbuster and put her arm around me. ‘Come and get cleaned up, love. The bloody police, we called them half an hour ago. They're never here when you need them.'

There were three staff in Blockbuster. I realised afterwards they must have seen the gang, and locked up and turned off the lights to make the place look closed. I think they felt guilty, because one of the women drove me home.

I was more scared afterwards than I had been when it was happening–I realised he could have had a knife. It was in the papers all the time, about girls getting abducted by gangs. It was one of the things the roadblocks were meant to stop–terrorists, suicide bombers, and gangs. But mainly they just stopped the traffic. Mum and Dad made a fuss of me, and I had a bath and tea, then watched telly with them and took a hot water bottle up to bed. But I had to leave the light on. I was thinking, how much worse can this get? I felt so futile, so absolutely powerless, it was as if I was transparent.

Sal rang me as I was lying there staring into space. She said things were bad there too.

‘Where are you?'

‘I'm still in Birmingham. My cousin Tom's been kidnapped.' Tom was the littlest, he was just 2. His dad–Sal's uncle–had gone to pick him up from crèche after work, but Tom had already been collected by someone else.

‘Who was it?'

‘We don't know. A young woman with red hair. She told them she was his father's girlfriend.'

‘But didn't they check?'

‘There's a password system. If you're not picking your kid up you have to get the day's password from nursery staff and tell it to the picker-up.'

‘And this woman had it?'

‘Yeah. Which makes it look pretty suspicious for the nursery. It's the second time it's happened.'

‘But why?'

‘Why? Why d'you think? People want babies!' She went raving on about how the police were questioning all the staff and going to search their homes, sounding more like her old self than she had for a while. I tried to say yes and no and I'm sorry in the right places, but I was filled with numbing tiredness, like someone had poured grey slushy ice water into me and filled me to my eyeballs, and it was freezing my body from the inside, out. I was tired. I was afraid. I was deathly cold.

I can still remember that feeling. I never want to feel it again. I never will feel it again: no matter what he does. Never again will I lose all hope, I swear. Never again will I feel there is nothing in my power to do.

Back then it was Dad who got me out of it. Here's the terrible joke of all this. What Dad said helped me to crawl out of that pit, and gave me the ray of light to follow. It was Dad who made me see there
was
hope.

He gave me freedom and now he wants to take it away. On a day like today when I'm not in a rage with him, I feel so sorry. I feel so sorry for him and Mum that tears spring to my eyes. But how can I let them know? Last time I tried with Dad it made him furious. Maybe that's the best I can do. If he's furious at least he's not sad. I admitted I hadn't got the right to be angry–well, I haven't. I'm the one doing the damage. The way he's reacted is only natural. But then he told me I was a pious brainwashed fool.

Today when he comes in I say again, ‘I'm sorry.'

‘What are you sorry for?'

‘All the upset I'm causing you and Mum.'

‘If you're sorry, don't do it.'

‘I'm sorry but I'm still going to do it.'

‘Then I shall keep you locked up.'

‘There's no point, but I understand why you're doing it. I forgive you.'

‘Forgive me? Who do you think you are? Jesus fucking Christ?'

‘What I mean is, I know you're doing this for good reasons so I shouldn't get mad at you. I'm sorry I bit you.'

‘Jess what is the point of this drivel? I'm sorry I tied you up–we're both sorry for everything we've done–but the point is, we've done it. Because every other method of resolving this difference of opinion has failed. We are reduced to violence, which is the last resort.'

I laugh. ‘You can't hold me captive all my life.'

‘I won't need to.'

Suddenly I see. He is actually contemplating keeping me here till I'm too old. ‘You can't do that.'

‘Why not?'

‘Keep me here a year?'

‘Why not?'

‘Because you can't.'

‘Watch me.'

There are things I can do. Hunger strike. Injuring myself so I need medical attention. But both of those involve a risk to my health, which is my one really vital asset. My mind is racing now, because I have to find a way of outwitting him. I can, I will, I don't feel any doubt about it. I will beat him, because what I'm doing is right, and what he's doing is only negative–blocking me, stopping me. It's like him trying to dam a river, trying to hold back the tide. The force is with me, because I'm in the right.

I shuffle my chair around so I am sitting with my back to him. He says ‘Jess?' I ignore him. After a minute I hear him moving to the door, he goes out and locks it.

Once I know he's gone I start wriggling my feet. They keep going to sleep, even though the plastic loops aren't tight. Last night when I was lying in the sleeping bag they felt enormous, and I sat up in a panic, thinking they must be swollen. They felt huge, and tender all over. But when I looked they were perfectly normal. I would have given anything for someone to rub and massage them. All I wanted in the world was a person to stroke my feet.

I keep thinking about my feet when there are more important things to concentrate on. But he doesn't know that. I won't let him know that any of it is getting to me. I'm strong and he's weak. That's the way round it is. And I'm not going to let him imagine he can ever break me.

What's funny is, back then
he
was trying to cheer
me
up. He was trying to cheer me up and he succeeded; what a pity he's not happy with the result.

He and Mum must have been as shocked about the gang as I was, because they became ridiculously protective, and offered me lifts all over the place, until it finally sank in to their heads that I had given up car travel. I knew I'd been attacked because I had stupidly walked straight into something; if I kept my eyes and ears open I could avoid trouble. I knew how to make myself almost invisible on the street. I felt as if I could actually control my own visibility, and when girls at college talked about the men calling out to them or following them I laughed in my heart and felt superior.

I asked Mum and Dad to respect
Buy Nothing Christmas
, and they agreed. I said I didn't want anything for my birthday either. Then Dad said but at least let's have an outing to celebrate, just the three of us–a proper outing, like in the old days. Wouldn't that cheer me up? Sal'd been to this fantastic aquarium in Birmingham, so I asked if we could go there.

I love aquariums. I love the brightly lit tanks like windows in a dark street, where you look in to the private strangeness of the fishes' homes. The
SeaLife
centre has one part that's a glass tunnel through a gigantic tank where sharks and turtles swim over your head, and shoals of fish dart past. It has creatures so strange you can't believe you're seeing them. Best of all, it has a special collection of sea horses.

With their dragon heads and fragile mermaid bodies, moving upright through the water, they look so brave! Dad and I watched them for ages, there's a whole wall of tanks with different species, like the Big Bellied Seahorse and the Spiny Seahorse and the Weedy Sea Dragon which looks just like a drifting piece of seaweed. In one there was a pregnant male who was due to release his babies any day, and in another a pair who were doing a courtship dance, their tails lovingly twisted together.

Dad and I wondered why the male carried the babies–I asked if that could be an evolutionary response to something that threatened them millions of years ago. Like maybe pregnant females got attacked or ill. Dad told me with the male seahorses it's not exactly pregnancy, because their eggs are fertilised externally, like most fish eggs. The father just keeps the babies in his pouch to grow. They must have a better chance of survival because of that.