Intrusion (2 page)

‘No, we could not,’ Hugh said, folding his arms. ‘I will not pretend to believe something just to get a conscience exemption. Because it would not be true, and because you would have to do more than claim. You would have to show evidence of practice, even if it was just muttering in front of crystals or something. And that would set a very bad example to the boy, if nothing else.’

‘I wasn’t being serious,’ said Hope, hastening to reassure.

‘I didn’t think you were,’ said Hugh. He opened his arms and smiled a little. ‘I don’t want to hear even jokes about that.’

‘All right,’ said Hope.

She knew that Hugh took religion very seriously, possibly just as seriously as had the Iranian couple whose case had brought about the whole new situation. And – all proportions guarded – for very much the same reason. He’d told her tales about the wind farms, in the wry tone of someone recounting things so absurd they were unlikely to be believed, but who insisted on their telling and their truth nonetheless. Neither old-time religion nor New Age woo-woo were, in his implacable view, deserving of any slack.

‘Damn it!’ said Hugh, vehement after a moment or two of pondering. ‘Last week we were so happy that you’re pregnant. Now we have to worry about this.’

He jumped up and prowled the carpet.

‘There’s plenty we can do,’ he said. ‘These parenting sites, there must be thousands of people in this position. There’s all the legal challenges, there’s civil-liberty groups and all that. It’s not like it’s all going to happen without a fuss. And it’ll take longer than nine months, that’s for sure.’

‘Nine months is long enough for a lot of things,’ said Hope.

‘It is and all,’ said Hugh.

Hope saw his gaze flicker to the whisky bottle on a shelf. She knew he wanted a dram, and knew he wouldn’t take one because she couldn’t. (Well, she could, but the monitor ring she wore on the same finger as her wedding band would log the violation with the health centre.) She wished she could persuade him, but knew from her earlier pregnancy that he would not be persuaded. For him it was a matter of honour, or maybe stubborn pride.

‘But you’re right,’ she said. ‘We can do lots of things.’

And there they left the question for the night.

Snow had fallen overnight, and likewise overnight the GenSip had worked its magic. Between them these phenomena made Nick eager for nursery. He didn’t even clutch Hope’s leg when she left him. She trudged home through another fall of snow, big wet soggy flakes that turned instantly to slush. She left her Mucks and cagoule to dry in the hall and padded in her mocs to the kitchen, where she tied on a floral-printed and ruffle-bordered pinafore apron in preparation for doing the housework. Hope had half a kitchen cupboard full of pinnies and half-aprons, most of them similarly retro regardless of their purpose or style or selling point: flirty, tarty, cheery, cheeky, Christmassy, shabby-chic, sophisticated, hostessy; pretty and practical; printed with flowers or sprigs or cupcakes or berries or heart shapes or vintage aeroplanes or Santa hats or polka dots or lipstick kisses or whatever.

The oldest of them, still there at the back, was a relatively plain floral-print Cath Kidston apron with matching oven gloves, which Hope’s mother had given her the day she went away to university and to live away from home for the first time. Hope still recalled the sheer disbelief and feigned gratitude with which she’d unwrapped the gift. For her mother, this sort of thing was ‘ironic’ (like that, with air-quotes). Her mother’s generation, Hope had often thought, had tried on and played dress-up in their grandmothers’ aprons as some kind of
postmodern fashion statement, and left their daughters to find themselves quite unexpectedly stuck in the things, all wrapped and tied up with a neat bow at the back.

Hope resented it sometimes. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her aprons, or the working in and from home of which they were both a practical part and a clichéd symbol, but that they’d come to stand in her mind for a larger failing of her mother’s cohort, who’d somehow let their guard down for a moment of post-feminist frivolity and found a whole shadow sexist establishment just waiting to pounce, to cry, ‘Ah! So that’s what you really wanted! We were right all along!’ and before you knew it, the tax advantages of having one parent stay at home were so significant it was more than it was worth not to do it unless you were something like a lawyer – like, for instance, all those lawyers who’d dreamed up all the ostensibly child-protective legislation that had put so many workplaces outside the home off limits for women of childbearing age whether they ever intended to have children or not, which meant that nine times out of ten the parent at home was the mother.

For a moment she stood, hands behind her waist, fingers gripping the loops of the knot just tightened, and fell into a dwam as she gazed at the space in front of her. The main part of the flat consisted of the living room and the kitchen, united decades ago by the then-fashionable knock-through, an opening about three times the width of a doorway. The living room was at the front, facing the wall across a gap of about a metre or so; the kitchen to the back, facing the garden (or, as Nick called it, the back grass). Enough light came from the windows – the upper third of
the front was level with the street – to give some cheering sunshine to the living room in the mornings and the kitchen in the afternoons. Today the light seemed paradoxically brighter because of the snow. At other times, and in the evenings, the flat always seemed to Hope darker than it should be, in the cold, dim light of energy-saving bulbs and tubes. The flicker of flame from behind the mica plate of the closed-system stove in the living room helped a little, lending a few cosy wavelengths of natural light to the scene.

Likewise cheering touches were added by the paintings and drawings from her student days that Hope had framed on the walls, the far larger number of Nick’s paintings from nursery tacked up all over the place; the tapestries and crochets, which Hope had made or bought, thrown over chairs and sofa, and the shelves and stacks of books: art history, cookery books, needlecraft books, textbooks from Hugh’s and Hope’s university days – more art history, engineering and science reference works – all decoration really, when you could summon their contents in an eye-blink, but good to have even if a pain to dust. You couldn’t sell them, anyway: the second-hand book trade had collapsed under the dangers of fourth-hand smoke, with most of the stock sealed in vaults or incinerated. Hope’s guitar, though also sadly gathering dust in the living-room corner where it stood propped, now and then lifted her spirits too, especially when she picked it up, blew the dust off it, and strummed a few bars or, on particularly bad or good days, sang at the top of her voice in the empty flat.

Hope washed the breakfast dishes, tidied Nick’s toys – which
got everywhere even in the hour between him getting up and going to nursery – and made the beds and tidied Nick’s room. Max the toy monkey followed her around, picking toys up and offering them for her to play with. After a while he started to say ‘Max hungry’, so she set him to sleep mode and stuck him on the recharger. She made a coffee, hung up her apron, sat down at the kitchen table, opened her glasses and started working in China but not in Chinese. She took a break at eleven and checked the BBC. The nature kids issue had been knocked right off the front screen by a truck-bomb blast at a motorway intersection outside Munich: scores dead, hundreds injured, toll expected to rise. The atrocity had been claimed by the Neues Rote Armee Fraktion, a hitherto unheard-from local affiliate of the transnational insurgent franchise that everyone called the Naxals. Hope stared at fallen flyovers and mangled cars for as long as she could bear to listen. Then she shuddered and flipped to ParentsNet, where the nature kids thread had more or less taken over.

No new light there. Hope decided to skip the crowd-sourced wisdom of pseudonymous strangers and consult some real people. She wrote an email and fired it off to six friends, then got back to work. By lunchtime she had four responses.

Sheila: Hi Hope, Good to hear from you! Yes this is outrageous but remember it will go to appeal. Also legal challenge to faith exemption (i.e. need to extend it to non-faith conscience cases) has good precedent all the way back to that climate-change guy. Look up humanism for example,
that’s explicitly covered. So not to worry and obviously has no personal bearing on you because the machinery won’t have ground out anything for a year at least. Best wishes re the pregnancy of course, you have morning sickness to look forward to ha-ha. xxx

Fatima: Yeah well, if you think ParentsNet has gone wild about this take a look at the British Persian sites!!! But seriously, have you thought about Nature Kids Network, it’s a community for parents like you? Some woo-woo and anti-vaccers but mostly quite level-headed. They’re the place to go for serious advice, and they’ve already got lawyers on board. Though to be honest Hope, I never did understand the objection, though I quite appreciate it’s up to you and if what you’re afraid of does come about I will be on the streets for you. Keep well.

James: Hi Hope, interesting points. Tricky one really. I understand your concern, but as a doctor, I see too many kids with congenital conditions or so-called childhood illnesses (which can have very nasty consequences even when minor) that could have been completely avoided had their parents agreed to the fix to be as gung-ho as you are about the parents’ so-called ‘rights’. It’s like the tobacco/alcohol ban in pregnancy – lots of problems with that if you pose it as a ‘rights’ or ‘freedom’ issue, and there was a lot of fuss about that before the ban, and it was predicted to be unenforceable and all that, but when it came in it was
complied with except for the usual chav element, and the medical benefits are plain in the stats and hard to argue with if you’ve ever seen a case of foetal alcohol syndrome (which I have, though not recently, I wonder why? No I don’t). Obviously I’m entirely sympathetic to you, don’t get me wrong, and I’ll stand by you if they come for you (which they won’t) but as a doctor and as a friend my advice to you is to change the problem by changing your mind and just taking the goddamn fix.

Must dash but let’s you and us meet up for dinner sometime. Regards to Hugh.

Deirdre: Lovely seeing you the other day, with you all the way on this one, let’s have a chat over drinks oops coffee soon. Bye 4 now!

What a great posse of friends I have, Hope thought. James in particular annoyed her, but she knew it was just the medicine talking. Doctors nearly always turned out like that.

She dismissed James from her mind, and mentally from her Christmas-card list, and followed up Sheila’s suggestion. A search on humanism and a quick scan of the results left her more despondent than before. For a start, the humanist organisations and most humanist thinkers seemed entirely in favour of the fix, though not at all for making it compulsory or even hard to avoid. But what depressed her more was that she didn’t even agree with humanism. That there was no God was a given, as far as Hope was concerned, and being nice to people
and making the most of your life struck her as a reasonable enough conclusion to draw from it, and in any case what she wanted to do. But beside the spires of theology and the watch-towers of ideology, it seemed a very shaky hut indeed, and not one that offered her much shelter or would stand up in court.

She couldn’t see a way to make her objection to the fix a deduction from any body of thought. It came from a body of flesh, her own, and that was enough for her. She doubted that this would be enough for anyone else.

One p.m. Back to China.

At the same moment, on the other side of town, another woman sat tapping a virtual keyboard. Unlike Hope, she was not working from home. She sat on a tall stool at a table in the corner of a laboratory on the tenth floor of the SynBioTech building in Hayes, Middlesex, where the EMI building had been. She was writing an article for
Memo
, the daily news site for people who read, if at all, on commutes. She was very pleased to be writing it, because she thought there was an important message to get across to the public (even the travelling public) and because it would earn her a hundred pounds.

Her name – her name can wait. What we are interested in, right now, is what she was writing. It was this.

Over the past ten years, synthetic biology – syn bio, as everyone in the trade calls it – has changed our lives in
many unexpected ways. Now, with the Kasrani case, it looks like changing it again – and unexpectedly, again!

But first – what is synthetic biology?

One way of putting it is that it’s like genetic engineering, but done by real engineers. Just as civil engineering doesn’t mean building a dam by bulldozing soil from the riverbanks into some convenient shallow, syn bio doesn’t take whatever happens to be there in the DNA and modify it. Instead, it builds new genes – and other biologically active molecules – from scratch, out of their basic components, and according to a detailed understanding of how they work.

The differences between this approach and the trial-and-error, suck-it-and-see methods of what used to be called ‘genetic engineering’ are immense. Synthetic biology has given us New Trees, which take up carbon dioxide twice as fast as natural trees, and endless varieties of other new plants, from the tough new woods to the ethanol fruits. Closest to home, it’s given us the fix, a complex of gene-correcting machinery made up into a simple tablet which when swallowed during pregnancy fixes errors in the baby’s genome, and confers immunity to almost all childhood ailments. Generations of animal testing and rigorous checking in software models run on the best supercomputers in the world have shown its safety and efficacy. For five years now, it’s been freely available to all mothers in the EU (and, by the way, made available without patents to companies in the developing world). None
of the major religions has any objection to it – no human material goes into it, and it doesn’t add or take away from the human genome: it just corrects existing errors. Its effects aren’t even hereditary – it’s carefully designed not to affect the sex cells. The amount of pain and heartbreak and suffering it has already prevented is beyond calculation – and beyond dispute.

So why do some people refuse it? Well, some religious minorities are against it, as is their right. But what motivates people like Mrs Kasrani? Sheer stubbornness? Some deep-rooted doubt about ‘going too far’ or ‘going against nature’? Or something else?

We don’t know, because she isn’t saying. But while anyone has a right to object to any medical intervention, however beneficial, the rest of us have a right to know why. That’s why the judge ruled against her.