The Testament of Jessie Lamb (32 page)

‘Dad,' I said. ‘That's wrong.'

He shook his head.

‘Listen,' I said. ‘You know what was the perfect crime? MDS. Engineer a virus so it's deadly and airborne. You don't even have to be there, it travels all around the world on its own and kills millions of women, and there's nothing to link it to you. Remote mass murder. That's the perfect crime.'

‘Well that's true,' he said.

‘And what I'm doing is the perfect solution.'

He squeezed my shoulders. ‘An answer for everything, my Jess.'

‘Well I have got a Father of Wisdom.'

He faced me and I looked for the tiny beginning crinkle of a smile. But what he said was, ‘This is wrong, Jess. I wish you wouldn't do it.'

‘I know. But I'm going to.'

He let go of me, and sat in the chair again. ‘Right. Well what d'you want to talk about?' There was a pause then he said, ‘The weather?'

‘I want you to promise you and Mum will look after her.'

‘Her?'

‘Her, him, I don't know. I've been imagining a girl.'

‘If I said I wouldn't, would it stop you?'

‘No.'

‘Cath and I have to give up our own daughter and substitute the child of strangers. We have to go through every step of the past sixteen years that we've loved and lived with you, being reminded every day of what we've lost.'

‘She won't be a stranger's child.'

He stared at me.

‘The baby will be my half-sister, or brother. Mr Golding said it would be fine.'

There was a little pause. ‘That's no reason for you to expect us to agree.'

‘It
is
a reason for you to look after the baby.'

‘It's no reason. You don't need to do this. There will be other solutions.'

‘Dad–'

‘There will be, believe me. Please.' He knelt on the floor and put his arms around my legs. There was nothing I could do.

The security guard helped him up and took him away. Then Mum came in the afternoon and it was just as bad. I can't bear it and I can't change it and I can't help it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Well my dear one, now you are implanted. Now it's up to you, whether to live or not. I've written and written till my arm aches and a writer's bump has appeared on my middle finger. And now I've just been sitting by the window letting my mind go blank. Whatever I write now is me hanging onto your coat sleeve because I don't want to part. I should just say goodbye, shouldn't I ? Rosa and I have tried to guess at what your lives might be like–yours, Rae, and Zac's. We hope you'll be friends. But what it boils down to is this: I have to end for you to begin. Your life is after mine.

Rosa went down to the ward this morning and Dr Nichol has just told me her pregnancy is confirmed. They'll test me tomorrow. Now I've said my goodbyes I don't have to see anyone else. I'm enjoying being quiet, sitting by the window in my little room, staring out at the world. I'm enjoying the way it is receding, all worries becoming flimsy, as easy to brush away as cobwebs.

I like watching the main road from up here. Now they've cleared all the protestors the traffic is flowing again. I think about where the drivers are going. Maybe that one's heading home after working late. He'll open the door and call ‘Hello?' and go into the warmth of the kitchen, unbuttoning his coat. ‘At last!' his wife will say, ‘I'm starving.' She's taking the fish pie out of the oven. ‘Did you wait for me? That's nice,' he says, pulling up his chair to the table. ‘That smells good.'

Maybe that one is on his way to a meeting to discuss staging the closure of a nursery. When he arrives no one else is there yet, so he moves the chairs into a circle on the blue carpet and sits at one of the little desks to write an agenda. Maybe that one is looking for her lost cat, which is brown and white like an unripe conker. The motorist crawls along slowly, peering into the darkness.

Maybe that one is driving to the airport, meeting nobody, speaking to no-one. Silent and deadly, a little cotton-wool wrapped vial in a metal box in his briefcase. A new virus. He hates everyone, he's a perfect criminal. But as he accelerates away from the roundabout, a cat which is brown and white like an unripe conker darts in front of the oncoming car, which brakes and skids and comes crashing into his. His car flips and bursts into flames, killing him on the spot. The intense heat burns through his briefcase and melts the metal box into a sealed black blob, safely entombing that virus forever.

A man who stops to try and help rings the ambulance. As he drives slowly on to the all-night supermarket he is obsessing about the new formula which he and his colleague are convinced may be the first step towards a cure. He puts a jar of damson jam in his basket and has a sudden flash of inspiration. Excitedly he rings his colleague. She thinks he could be right, and they agree to adjust their research first thing in the morning.

Everyone is moving. We each follow our business as importantly as dogs trotting down the street. No one can tell who is special or who is not. All these stories must go on. On and on to their children's children.

Dad talked about fear. He doesn't understand why I'm not afraid. ‘Fear is like pain, it's the body's warning system. It teaches us to protect ourselves.' I told him I'm not afraid because I know what's going to happen. I'm going to have an injection and fall asleep. What's to be afraid of? ‘When people are executed they know exactly what's going to happen and most of them are terrified,' he replied. I told him, these people weren't choosing to die. Look at suicide bombers, they don't display fear. They have to concentrate on what they're doing, on putting themselves near the enemy and detonating their device without causing suspicion. They
really
have to be brave. All I have to do is be looked after, I don't have to worry about doing it wrong, messing up, getting caught. There's no need for fear.

What I'm doing has made him ill and old, he's gone smaller and the bags under his eyes sag right down his cheeks. And when I saw Mum's white face and red eyes I felt like a torturer. I know I've written bitchy things about them, and stupid kinds of childishness. But it's the only chance now of them ever understanding. So I'm writing them a note to go with this, saying they can read it too. I hope that's alright. Mum? Dad? Hello from Jessie! Imagine me leaning out of a train window, blowing you a great big kiss!

I've been thinking about going. I was thinking about fireworks. After a rocket explodes. What happens to its trajectory? Not the burnt stump and stick that fall to earth, but the trajectory of the rocket's rise? If you could take a pencil and draw a line on from where it explodes, keep going on and up and round, higher and higher, curving out into space. Or what happens at the end of a CD. When you've listened to the music and the music finishes. You know the sound you hear, the recorded silence at the end? Something still going on. Even though it's not the song.

Dearest Rae,

This really is the last, because it's 4 in the morning and today is my test and they'll keep me on the ward if it's all OK. They'll take me down at 8. I've been sitting here by the window and it's so beautiful, I have to tell you. The sky is clear and the moon is nearly full, just a couple of days off full, I'd guess. In the small hours there was no traffic and everything was perfectly calm and still. You can't see the stars because of the streetlamps, but you can see the moon up there alone in the sky. The bright deserted streets look mysterious and welcoming, waiting for everything to start again, waiting for the world to wake up.

I've been thinking about flying. I've moaned about Mum and Dad flying, but I should admit to you, I used to love it! I wonder if there will still be flights in your world? The one I was thinking about was the winter before MDS. I went with Mum and Dad on one of their bargain city breaks.

It was evening, already nearly dark at 5 o clock, and there were just a few small clouds in the sky. I was sitting by the window. As we took off and climbed higher I stared down at the lights. We were over the sprawl of greater Manchester, and I could see all the individual lights of houses, rows of lamp posts, vertical oblongs of high rise. I could see floodlit football pitches and a glowing misty blue-green rectangle which I thought might be a swimming pool. Then as we went higher the city gave way to country and the lights thinned out into single lines threaded across blackness. When we came to a town again I could make out moving lines of cars along a main road. And then right in the middle of the town's lights there was a sudden patch of blackness. I stared at it, wondering if it was a park, puzzling at the way the lights were not patterned around it but seemed to end all higgledy piggledy. As if there was a yawning black chasm and whole streets had fallen into it.

Then gradually at the top of my porthole there began to be a brightness. And this silvery brightness intensified until I could see it was coming from a great shining balloon a thousand times bigger and brighter than anything on the face of the earth. You know what it was, Rae? The moon! And with moonlight radiating all across the sky, I could see that there were black blobs of cloud hanging here and there, between us and the earth. They were dead patches in the light. As we moved the steady pinprick lights of earth glowed on and on, disappearing as our moving position set a cloud between us and them, and reappearing as we moved on far enough to gain another sightline.

I felt happy then, Ray. Tender towards the innocent, sleeping earth. The dark hills and valleys and reservoirs and seas were all in their positions, keeping the dots of light of one village so many miles from the next, holding each single glowing house steady on its own exact latitude and longitude. And I knew the moonlight was steady too, and the full moon would always rise and roll across the sky every month at the right time. Those clouds were nothing but dark wet air, and finally they would dribble away to nothing.

Then we were descending and my ears were filled by the roaring of the engines, and my eyes with the sudden close ground as we flew over the edge of the airfield, tilting down to landing. And I stopped thinking, because I was there.

I wish everything for you, my Ray, but most of all I wish you might one day feel the peace and happiness I feel now, in sending my love to you.

Xxx, a thousand kisses, Jessie.

JANE ROGERS
has published eight novels, including
Mr. Wroe's Virgins, Island
, and
The Voyage Home
. She has won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Book Award. A professor of writing at Sheffield Hallam University, she lives near Manchester, England.

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The Voyage Home

“The themes of faith and betrayal suffuse this spellbinding psychological thriller from critically acclaimed British writer Rogers.... Rogers is a master at blending gripping narrative and nuanced prose. Clear your schedule for this one: once you start, you won't want to let go.”

—Allison Block,
Booklist

“Rogers skillfully creates two distinct voices.... In evocative prose, [she] paints a complicated, psychologically insightful picture of a damaged woman's effort to move on with her life.”

—Susan Adams,
Washington Post Book World

“Rogers has a way of digging down deep with her writing, past the setups and the outlines and the characterizations to a place of human frailty that feels uncomfortably authentic.”

—
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Island

Long-listed, Orange Prize;
New York Times
Notable Book

“In this resonant novel … a daughter's hate leads to an island of revelation … a powerful story.”

—Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times

“An ambitious and important writer.... You can't help falling under her spell.”

—Bliss Broyard,
New York Times Book Review

“This brooding, furiously powerful tale … of a madness as terrifying as it is logical, simple, and classical in its tragic lines is also a complex rendering of sorts.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
, starred review

“The book feels distilled, like north country moonshine, and flavored with peat … with a primal, mythic quality. The pleasure is all in the journey, and the dark, briny, elemental world she creates. You can almost taste the salt on your lips.”

—Laura Miller, Salon.com

“A caustically memorable literary shocker … compelling.... Fans of Ian McEwan should relish this stylish, charismatic addition to Britain's gallery of antiheroes.”

—
Publishers Weekly

Mr. Wroe's Virgins

A
New York Times
Notable Book

“An engaging, serious, and gleefully ironic novel, one that leaps headlong into the most ambitious and risky territories: faith, love, and existential meaning.”