Perfect People (20 page)

‘The epidural block isn’t high enough,’ the anaesthetist said. Then his assistant suddenly called out, in alarm, ‘Sixty!’

There was an air of panic in the room.

‘I can’t wait,’ the surgeon said.

The anaesthetist raised his voice almost to a shout, ‘I have to get her asleep! Give me a minute!’

John looked at both men in horror as the obstetrician imperiously said, ‘Goddammit man, the baby is already hypoxic!’

The anaesthetist was struggling with a needle in a vial.

‘I’m going to have to start if we want to save the baby!’ Holbein shouted, with desperation in his voice.

‘Wait, for God’s sake, let me get her intubated and paralysed.’

The obstetrician, dripping with sweat, lifted the green sheets, and folded them back, exposing all of her tummy. ‘How long will it take you?’

‘A couple of minutes.’

‘We don’t have a couple of minutes.’ He walked back up to Naomi. ‘I’m afraid if you want to save the baby this is going to hurt a little. Are you OK with that?’

‘Don’t hurt Naomi,’ John said. ‘Please – it’s – much more important—’

‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘Do what you have to do to save the baby, please, I’ll be OK.’

‘I don’t want you to hurt her,’ John said.

‘I really do think it would be better if you went outside,’ the surgeon said.

The anaesthetist spritzed the needle, then swabbed Naomi’s arm and injected her.

John stared in horror as, seconds later, transfixed, he watched the surgeon insert the scalpel upside down into her abdomen, and with one steady upward sweep, trailed by a ribbon of bright red blood, he cut from just above where her pubic hairline had ended, right up to her umbilicus.

Naomi screamed in pain, her fingernails cutting into the palm of John’s hand. She screamed again, then again. John stood, stunned, open-jawed, helpless, feeling blood draining away inside him, his head swimming. He took a deep breath.

The anaesthetist snapped a line onto the cannula in Naomi’s wrist, and instantly she began calming down. Seconds later, she appeared to have stopped breathing altogether, with her eyes wide open, staring glassily.

Instantly the anaesthetist took the airline from his assistant and tried to intubate her. But he was having problems getting the clear plastic tube down her throat. ‘Can’t get it in,’ he said. Perspiring heavily, he pulled it out, tried again, then pulled it out again, with all the elegance of a fisherman trying to get a hook out of the gullet of a pike.

John fainted.

It felt like he had a meat cleaver embedded in his head. John was aware he was lying down and that something cold was pressing against his right eye. He opened his left eye and all he could see for a moment was a blur. The light hurt and he closed it again.

A cheery female voice said, ‘How are you feeling?’

He opened his eye again and focused. A face. A young woman he vaguely recognized. She had wavy blonde hair and was pretty. The junior midwife; her name was Lisa, he remembered, suddenly.

And then he remembered everything else.

In panic he tried to sit upright. ‘My God, what’s happened?’

‘Just lie back down and rest, I want to try to keep the swelling down.’

He stared at her. She was holding what looked like a surgical glove packed with ice in her hand. ‘My wife – what’s happened? Is she all right?’

Cheerily, Lisa said, ‘She is absolutely fine. And both your babies are out and fine – they’re all doing really well.’

‘They are? Where are – is—?’

For an instant he felt giddy with relief and excitement. The room swam; then, as if the blade of the cleaver was twisting in his skull, the pain in his head suddenly got so bad that John felt sick. He desperately wanted to stand, tried for an instant to lever himself up, but that made him feel worse. All he could do was close his eyes and lie back. Moments later, he felt the ice-packed glove over his eye. It was like soothing balm.

‘Your wife’s in the recovery room at the moment. She’s been fully anaesthetized and it will take a few hours before she’s completely recovered. Your babies are asleep in the Special Baby Care Unit.’

‘It was a boy? The second one?’

‘A lovely little boy.’

He tried to sit up again but the pressure against his eye was too strong. ‘And my wife’s really all right?’

The junior midwife nodded vigorously.

John felt relief flooding through him. He heard a door open and a moment later heard the voice of the consultant obstetrician.

‘Well, you’re going to have a nice shiner there, Dr Klaesson!’ he said cheerily.

He came into John’s line of vision, clogs slapping on the floor, hat and mask removed, gown slack. ‘Four stitches in your head and a black eye – still, you’ll be able to tell everyone in years to come that at least you didn’t let your wife suffer alone during childbirth!’

John managed a thin smile. ‘I’m really – I—’

‘No, listen, old chap, I’m sorry about the kerfuffle, but your wife is doing well, and the babies are absolutely fine. How are you feeling?’

‘A little rough.’

‘I’m sorry you had to go through that but there was no alternative – and your wife supported me. The second baby was definitely starting to suffer from lack of oxygen and I had to deliver him quickly otherwise we’d have lost him for sure.’

‘Can I see them?’

‘You’ve taken quite a crack on your head – you caught the edge of the table and the anaesthetics machine as you went down. They’re going to take you for an X-ray just to make sure everything’s tickety-boo inside. By the time you’ve done that, Naomi will be all tidied up in her bed, ready for you to come down and see her and the babies.’

Aware that his voice was sounding a little strange, slurred, as if he had been drinking, John said, ‘Special Care unit – did you say?’

The surgeon nodded.

Edgy now, John said, ‘Wh-why?’

‘Perfectly normal for any premature baby. Your little girl weighs two point six five kilograms and your boy weighs two point four three – both around five and a half pounds in old measurements. That’s a good weight for twins at thirty-six weeks. They seem jolly healthy – in fact, remarkably robust – and they’re breathing on their own. We’ve been lucky the toxaemia hasn’t affected them.’

He gave John a knowing smile, and John, uneasy suddenly, wondered if Holbein knew, if he’d seen a piece in an English newspaper and remembered their names or faces.

Then the consultant turned and walked from his line of vision. ‘I’m afraid I’m due back in theatre. I’ll pop by later on this evening and see how Naomi’s doing.’

John heard the door close.

‘You’re not the first person to have passed out,’ Lisa said.

‘It was the brutality – I – I couldn’t believe—’

‘At least your wife is all right, and the babies are fine. That’s the main thing, isn’t it?’ the young nurse said.

John took a long while to answer. He was thinking about how, up to this point, none of this had seemed totally real. Of course Naomi had been suffering for months, but all the time the babies had been inside her, he could imagine they might wake up one morning and find her bump had gone, that it was all a misdiagnosis, just a phantom pregnancy, that was all.

Now, through his aching brain, the true reality of it all was finally dawning. The irreversibility. They had brought two human beings into the world whose genes might have been tampered with by Dettore in ways they had not wanted, and there was not a thing they could do about it, except pray that they were going to be fine.

He looked back at the cheery young nurse and, in answer to her question, nodded uncertainly.

His head throbbing, John stared through the glass, watching Luke and Phoebe asleep on their backs, swathed in white bedding and intubated. They were even smaller than he’d imagined, more wrinkled, more pink, with tiny little hands like starfish.

More beautiful.

Utterly, utterly, incredible!

He was choked, close to tears with emotion as he watched these tiny people, these miniature copies of Naomi and himself, encased in clear Perspex, dwarfed by the high-tech equipment all around them.

Even in their scrunched-up faces he could see the likenesses. There were distinctive characteristics of Naomi in Luke. And he could see himself in Phoebe. Logically, it ought to be the other way around, he thought, but it didn’t matter; there was only one thing that was important, and it was plain to see it in their faces:

Absolute confirmation that their worst fears were unfounded. These
were
their children, his and Naomi’s, without question.

He closed his eyes in relief. For months this had been his biggest fear. Naomi’s, too, despite all he had said to try to reassure her.

Now they faced another worry – just what other mistakes might Dettore have made? Or what other deliberate alterations had he done to their genes that he had not told them about?

But at least they were healthy! Strong.
Remarkably robust
, the obstetrician had said.

His thoughts went back to Halley, to the awesome sense of responsibility he had felt when Halley had been born, and all the hopes he’d held for his son, long before he knew anything of the time bomb inside him. He felt even more responsibility for these two, now, bringing them into the world knowing the risks he and Naomi faced. Just hoping and praying Dettore hadn’t messed up with the one gene that mattered.

Phoebe, eyes shut, raised her starfish hand a little, opened out her fingers, then closed them again. Moments later, Luke did the same. Almost as if they were waving at him, acknowledging him.

Hi Dad! Hi Dad!

He smiled. ‘Welcome to the world, Luke and Phoebe, my little darlings. You’re our future, your mum’s and mine. We’re going to love you more than any parents ever loved any child,’ he whispered.

Once more, in their sleep, first Phoebe then Luke’s little hands raised a few inches, opened out their fingers and closed them again.

John went back to Naomi’s room, to sit with her until she was sufficiently awake to be wheeled up to see them herself.

Mountain air is different to any other kind of air that you can find on this planet. Mountain air doesn’t have all that shit that you have to breathe in.

Down below it is just one big sewer, my friend, and I’m not just talking about the air.

Hasn’t always been that way, of course. And one day it’s going to be all back to how it was. You’ll be able to walk the streets of cities and smell flowers.

Seriously, when was the last time you smelled flowers in a city?

Maybe in a park, but only if the park was big and the flowers had a strong enough scent. And to have a strong enough scent they’d probably been genetically modified.

We can’t keep our hands off anything, can we? I tell you something, you walk in one of those supermarket places, they’ve got berries the size of apples, apples the size of melons, and those tomatoes, you know the ones I mean, those like big, mutant things – they have pig genes in them, to give them their colour, to keep them riper longer, but you don’t see that on the label.

I tell you, my friend, you step down off this mountain and you walk in the sewers of the valleys and plains, you’re stepping into a world you think you might know, but you don’t, trust me, you do not know any of it. Like, get this – there’s a big burger chain, a national chain and they’re mixing polyester into the bread in their buns – to make them puff out. They’re making you eat polyester and all the time you are thinking, hey, bread that looks this good must be doing me good!

That’s how cynical scientists are, my friend.

You know what science is really about? Scientists pretend it is about knowledge, but the truth is that it is partially about power and about death, but mostly it is about vanity and greed. People don’t invent things for the greater good. They invent them to satisfy their egos.

Everyone is being seduced by science. All the world leaders. They’re hoping science will find a cure for AIDS, forgetting science caused it in the first place. Scientists cured bubonic plague and smallpox, but what did that do for the human race? Overpopulation.

The Lord has his own way of dealing with overpopulation. He had the balance of nature just fine, until scientists came along and messed it all up.

And think about this, my friend, next time you take a walk down there in the sewers and feel your lungs getting all choked up. Who is responsible? God or scientists?

Just remember the words of St Paul to Timothy. ‘Guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from Godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith.’

Here endeth the 17th Tract of the 4th Level of the Law of the Disciples of the Third Millennium.