Mantrapped (27 page)

She felt she was thinking with unusual calm and clarity. Could this be the effect of having fallen out of love with Peter? She had to accept that she had, or at any rate that these emotions were in abeyance for the time being. At yesterday's dinner the thought of getting married to Peter had seemed even more alarming than that of having a baby. Perhaps love was an emotion which ruled out common sense and self-interest? Yesterday she had wanted only to get the despoiled dress out of her home as quickly as possible -today she was thinking of it as evidence.

There was another rather alarming possibility, of course, which was that mood swings were nothing to with hormones, but with a temporary switching of soul between one person and another. All women were really the one woman: the variations were in circumstance and IQ, not in essence. Religions which believed in reincarnation, that you got the body you deserved every time you changed, saw time as linear. You had to die before you moved on. But perhaps the body, whose memories were perceived as 'yours', housed forever changing souls, which were registered as changing moods? Like in the earthquake, the ground, believed to be steady, moved. You were the one who stayed still.

Her sister Claudette - that was her name, no matter how often her mother called her Claudia - always complained she was another person when pre-menstrual. Perhaps she was. She would have liked to have discussed this with Peter but he was too busy chattering away to Trisha about their physical states to be interested. She was afraid she rather slapped down rolls and butter in front of them, and did not provide a spoon for the lemon curd. They used their knives and the globby yellow substance in the jar was soon messy, and full of bits of butter and pastry flakes.

'I'm not against breasts in principle,' the Trisha body was saying, 'it is quite nice the way they go before like the prow of a ship, but they spoil one's balance. Or are you so used to it you don't notice? And there's a perpetual sense of unrest inside one, a feeling you ought to be doing something, not just sitting about. I feel guilty all the time, but what about? And this cyclical business, connected to the moon like the tides? It's unbelievable. No one talks about it.'

And the Peter body just said he felt great as a man. He loved flexing his muscles. He loved the straight up and down feel of his body, he loved the flatness of his belly, the way he could see sharply and clearly again. He loved the way his thing went twitch, twitch, if he thought of Kylie Minogue, how he had the sense of a future that went on and on as if in a straight line into eternity: as a woman looking ahead there was nothing but hills and bumps and the feeling that the other side of the next hill the road would run out altogether. 'Women expect to die,' he said. 'Men don't.'

It seemed to Doralee that they were becoming altogether too contented in their new shells. The Peter body had taken up the inside pages of the newspaper and was actually reading them. The Trisha body had decided to paint her toenails. Perhaps they were beginning to merge? She made notes. She took photographs when they weren't looking. She would trace the process, however it ended, with integrity and honesty, for a book which would make her millions and help others at the same time. It would be called
SoulSwitch
. She couldn't decide whether that should be one word or two.

She called Peter's office and got through to a colleague who said it might cause problems if Peter did not come in that day. There had been developments on the weapons of mass destruction story and Peter's expertise would be useful. It flashed through her mind that the Peter body could go along to the meeting and play dumb but realised almost at once that she would be wiser not to suggest it. As well send Polly Peachum along to pass judgement on Emmanuel Kant. It would be the family dinner party but worse by a hundred times. Her family were a pretty dozy lot but those in Peter's office were bright, inquisitive and quick. She did not want them breaking her story. She said she was sorry but it really was flu and she could send a doctor's note and he backed off.

She called
Oracle
and got through to her own extension. But it was Heaven who lifted up the receiver and said oh, poor Doralee, I guessed you must be ill, you're usually the one who's in first. Hurry up and get better. There's all this stuff come in on your e-mail about the new miracle drug, the one which cures wrinkles: I don't know why it came to you, I thought that was my area. So I'll just stay on your desk if you don't mind and deal with it. It's a big story. They want it for this month so it needs to go to press right away. You were really missed at Heather's baby shower but everyone knows how you loathe all this baby stuff: she went into labour this morning, so she's not in either. Did I tell you I was pregnant too?

Normally Doralee would have been straight round to the office to make sure Heaven didn't establish some sort of lien to her desk and e-mail - but how could she? She had to nursemaid the bodies. She had to write
SoulSwitch
.

She found the magazine
Spiritual News
on the Internet, looked up the Services columns and made appointments for the following day for them all to see a hypnotist and a medium, chosen more or less at random. She would do what she could to make things better; that was the least she could do, but after that it was each of them for themselves. If the worst came to the worst she would go to Australia and publish the book from there.

Doralee caught them mid-morning lifting their jumpers to study each other's navels, as if trying to discover the root of some mystery. It was a sexless curiosity, at least so far, as if two six-year-olds were examining each others bodies to compare differences. She wondered how long that would last. She feared it would not be for long. The thought of sex with the Peter body was somewhere she, for the moment, simply could not go. Kylie Minogue! It seemed as if the new Peter still contained Trisha's aesthetic sensibilities.

Trisha Perle, for all her lottery win, was a walking disaster area. It could do the Peter body no good at all to contain her. There had been a child, it seemed, but even that had apparently been given away: there'd been more than one husband, a series of unfaithful lovers, a lesbian interlude, too much drink and drugs, and she had managed to lose a fortune and end up working for the Kleene Machine. Translate that into male terms and what did you get? If the initial Trisha make-up had the X chromosome and not the Y in the womb, and been fed testosterone not oestrogen from the beginning, what then? A forty-year-old hippie with a pigtail, perhaps; a determinedly out of work actor with a drink problem and a couple of unsupported families to his name? She wondered if it would be possible to get pregnant by the new Peter: it probably would be but what would she produce? A hermaphrodite? Just because Heaven was now pregnant didn't mean she had to panic.

And as for the Peter soul, it might well have done better in a female body. It would have married a banker and been a brilliant dinner-party hostess and had a part-time job running an estate agency, like his mother. But so dull!

'If Jesus Christ,' said the Peter body now, sententiously, 'came down from heaven today he would be locked away as a madman.' A Trisha sentiment, thought Doralee, though spoken with a male voice to which the listener automatically granted more authority than had it been female. She must keep it steady in her mind that it was not the bodies which had switched, but the consciousnesses; what happened was that the bodies carried trace memories and hormonal tendencies. The Peter body was primarily Trisha, but with little bits of Peter still hanging around, like little scraps of mitochondria around the nucleus of an ovarian cell, of the kind which prevent even a clone from being an exact reproduction.

Of course the Peter body would retain trace memories of swirling skirts and choose to wear a kilt to visit the psychiatrist. Of course the Trisha body would enjoy bashing things up at Mrs Kovac's.

'I think you're wrong about Jesus,' Doralee responded, not without some bitterness. 'I think if there was a Second Coming people would be only too anxious to believe. Then they could go round giving all their worldly goods to the poor, leaving the State to support them.'

Strange things do happen

Last week I got a letter from a reader. 'I met you once,' she wrote. 'In a field in France, in 1971.' And so she had.

The Nineteen Seventies. The middle classes trooped off to France with their children and their tents for their holidays. Now they own real houses abroad, but I liked it the way it was, when like a snail you carried your house on your back. We took everything with us, pepper-grinders as well as sunscreen. 'When you are part of Europe,' as a French shopkeeper said to me, triumphantly, 'you English will all have to speak French.' We still try, but out of politeness, not necessity.

That year, like so many of our compatriots, we went off in our Volvo to the South, with Dan aged twelve, nephew Benj aged eight and Tom aged not yet one. It was hot, hot, hot, the beginning of the French holiday, the great August weekend; we circled and circled the Paris ring road as in a comic film, with its furious, unstable drivers, unable for hours to find a space to leave it. We ended up exhausted fifty miles out of Paris, in the middle of a great wheat plain, in a field used for overnight campers on their way South. A tiny shop, a tap, a smelly earthern loo, a brilliant, beautiful night sky. Ron got out of the car and lifted the tent from the roof rack and slipped a disc in his back and lay on the ground.

The baby howled, the children ran round looking for bats, Ron lay beside the car. I did not drive, I didn't know how, I had never learned. There were other overnight campers there: a whole bus load, even: a football team, their trainer. The trainer looked down at Ron and said, 'I am an ex-army doctor. You must lie where you are for two weeks and not get up and you will have no more trouble with your back. Otherwise this will plague you all your life.' So Ron lay there. The football team moved the car, put up the tent around him. The doctor was right; he never had back trouble again.

But it was so hot, and there was no telephone, just thunderstorms which frightened the wits out of me when the heavens clashed and crashed their vengeance for everything I had down wrong in my life; there was a wasp's nest in the tree overhanging the tent. How they buzzed. I guarded the children as best I could. The shop sold baked beans and Jaffa Cakes for the English tourists, and Coca-Cola, but what about the baby? He needed milk. And Ron demanded ratatouille and bouillabaisse and complained when I could not provide them. He was half mad with pain and the pills the overnight campers provided. I would beg for them; as their cars drew into the field I would be waiting: I would feed them into his open mouth, wash them down with the wine they'd generously given.

That year all the car radios played the same song. '
Chirpy chirpy cheep-cheep. Last night I woke and my momma was gone - oh! oh! Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep.''
By night the field was crowded. People from all over France, so far as I could see, came to visit the man on his back in the field, and his poor wife, and provide pills and baby milk. This was real fame, the kind that counted, nothing to do with writing. I managed an hour or two with my pad and my Pentel, while the baby slept and even Ron quietened in the noonday sun. That year I think the novel must have been
Remember Me. Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep
.

After ten days Ron got up and played a game of
boules
. And three decades on a letter from a reader who's just read
Auto da Fay
and told how she'd visited the field and remembered me and the baby and the children and pitied me, and was that me?

Nothing surprises me any more, not even Trisha and Peter switching, to Doralee's inconvenience, so she's put off having babies for fear of hermaphrodite births. Daniel as a child lived half in one world, half in another magic one. He bent spoons like Uri Geller; he watched the magician on TV one day, and within the week the cutlery drawer was full of forks and spoons bent so they could no longer be used. Not just the thin cheap ones, but really expensive heavy ones. Real silver too, from the shop, some of them. But silver is soft and easy to bend, so we didn't count those. He was nine there was an epidemic of spoon-bending amongst prepubescent males. Perhaps they could always do it, but why ever would they think of trying if it hadn't been for Uri Geller? Producers tried to show them do it on TV but when the cameras were rolling nothing happened. The cutlery stayed useable.

If Peter and Trisha switch why should I doubt it?

But people do doubt. Dan would rub the cutlery gently with his childish fingers - table spoons and carving forks would twist and turn and writhe. He did it once for Hetta Empson at the dinner table, put the spoon down, and we all watched the metal handle bend itself gracefully backwards of its own accord. I took a photograph of it on that occasion. Hetta denied that it had happened at all, refusing the evidence of her eyes. She just shut them and said it didn't happen, and shouldn't happen and would someone please remove the spoon before she opened her eyes. Dan found his school friends reacted in the same way. 'Didn't happen,' they said.

Then he took to his bed and wouldn't get up. Between the ages of ten and twelve he grew pale and thin. He got dreadful sore throats which would not go away, and which various doctors were convinced were psychosomatic - this being the favourite, and indeed the cheapest diagnosis at the time for any ailing child. They were in as much denial as Hetta when they looked in his throat and saw pink healthy tissue, not what he described as red, inflamed and sore. Taking out tonsils was seen at the time as something which belonged to a superstitious past, old-fashioned and unnecessary.

White as a sheet Daniel lay in bed, declining to get out of it. Friends were convinced it was because I had let him bend spoons. But I finally found a doctor to do the operation, for a fee - facing out the disapproval of friends and family, who thought privatised medicine was wicked - and once done, Dan leapt out of bed and started organising the students' union in his school. But he never bent spoons again and does not like to be reminded that once he did. Better safe than sorry. Should Trisha and Peter get out of their fix I don't suppose they'll cross other people on the stairs again. They'll be very careful.