The Testament of Jessie Lamb (7 page)

What I loved was that Ursula decided she wanted to save her baby, and she made it happen. She chose what to do. By then they had some Sleeping Beauties at my Dad's clinic and I asked him if they were like Ursula. He said he didn't know, it's the doctors who deal with them, he only does technical stuff. Then he grinned and admitted that two of their babies might be going to be delivered soon.

And in the days after Baby Johnson there were new babies delivered all around the world. At my Dad's clinic, baby Jill was born one week later, though the other one who was due at the same time, who they called Jack, died. Dad was saying there wouldn't be many more pregnancies after this wave, because these babies were all like Baby Johnson, conceived before girls knew the consequences of MDS. ‘Since then, everyone's taken care not to get pregnant. We've hardly got any other pregnant women coming through. Our ward's nearly empty.'

The sadness attached to these wonderful new babies was that they had MDS just like the rest of us. It was in their cells from their parents. In the papers there was a flood of statistics calculating the future population. To keep it stable, every woman has to have 2.1 children, which means 10 women should have 21 babies between them. But now a woman dies to produce just one baby. And obviously, since pregnancy is death, most women would choose not to have a baby at all. Experts said the population would shrink to nothing.

Dad was wrong, though, about there being no more pregnancies after this batch. Because once it was proved that babies really could be delivered from the Sleeping Beauties, and that they were healthy except for dormant MDS which everyone had anyway, a stream of girls started to volunteer. You could see why they did, even then. They were following Ursula Johnson's example. They did it for their husbands, or their families, or their religions. They did it for the future. What better single thing could a person do with her life?

But naturally people fussed and objected like they always do when someone tries to do something positive. ‘The girls who volunteer are too young to know their own minds, blah blah blah.' Or, ‘the programme is too expensive, families should pay for the life support of a Sleeping Beauty'. Or, just for a change, the opposite; the family should get compensation for their girl's sacrifice, and no girl should volunteer until that's agreed. OK there are bad things, like the Chinese who sold their daughters to clinics–
OK
–but because there are bad things does it mean nothing new should happen? That nothing can be done?

It was like a wave of energy washing over the whole world, the way babies could be born again–even when it was bad, it was good. I knew the world would be different when they grew up, because the population would be so much smaller. Everything really could be better. I began setting my alarm for 5.30 so I could get more done. We were trying to persuade more kids to join us–I had this dream that we might get everyone, one day, everyone under 20–and simply root out all the bad old ways of consuming and spoiling and wasting. The world was changing so quickly no one could guess what would happen next!

After the Manchester rally YOFI was offered a big old pub, the
Rising Sun
, to turn into a centre where Lisa and Gabe and other motherless kids could live. I went along to help clear it out. Lisa and Gabe had their sleeping bags spread in one of the bedrooms, and were working on the room next to it, which would be theirs when it was finished. Other kids were stripping walls downstairs and ripping out the seats. They had music on and it was noisy down there, with people shouting across the room. I asked Lisa if I could help her upstairs and she gave me a pot of white paint and asked me to start on the woodwork. It was all stained dark tobacco brown. The floor was covered in shrivellings of paper they'd scraped from the walls. I crawled round sweeping a clear path by the skirting boards.

‘You and Gabe here permanently now?' I asked.

She nodded.

‘What does your dad say?'

‘My dad's an alcoholic,' said Lisa.

‘Oh.'

‘He's not fit to look after children, and the joke is he knows that himself.
I
was looking after
him
.' Neither of us said anything for a bit, there was just the sound of our brushes slopping and swishing, and the music and hollow voices from downstairs.

‘I did feel bad at first,' she said suddenly. ‘Leaving him on his own. But Gabe and me have to survive. And now I just think, you're sick. Lots of adults are. I mean, if they don't drink they take drugs or medicine, or they're addicted to some crappy routine. They're like those horses in the olden days that used to walk round in a circle to turn a mill wheel. They keep on walking in a circle even when the mill wheel's gone. That's why so many of them are killing themselves. They don't know how to change.'

I thought about Mum and Dad and their package holidays. ‘They're all mad, our parents' generation.'

‘Mad and useless. The world will be a better place without them.'

‘But it's hard for you, if you have to look after Gabe as well.'

‘Gabe can look after himself. Anyway, looking after people is easy.'

‘I guess I've never had to.'

‘Taking responsibility for things is easy. That's how they infantilise us. They make us think that if you decide to do something and take responsibility for your decision, you'll have a really tough time. But it's not true. What's hard is being in someone
else's
power.'

‘Aren't you ever frightened?'

‘Look, we don't have to be trapped in our parents' lives. How will we know what we can do unless we try?'

Lisa's right. You can choose to do something and plan your own destiny. It's never as hard as you fear. You can make yourself free, you can be responsible for yourself. The only difficulty is other people. And I don't just mean Mum and Dad.

The difficulty is also other people like Baz. In the beginning I went along to the meetings because of him. He and I did some really good things together there. The YOFI website, for example; I wrote the content and Baz created the site. We'd sit side by side together at that big desk in the office, trying different versions, making it more user friendly, putting in the links, selecting graphics. We'd work on it till everyone else had gone home, and it was quiet and peaceful in the building. We turned off the light to cut the glare, and sat muttering to each other and making suggestions, both sets of our eyes fixed on the bright screen. I could feel the warmth of him next to me. Once he looked up and said, ‘Why're you smiling?' and I pointed to his jiggling leg. He jumped as if it didn't belong to him, then after a couple of minutes the jiggling started up again. We didn't
do
anything, we didn't
say
anything, but it was a lovely feeling, that it was all in reserve. I thought we were both waiting till the urgent business of getting YOFI to a point where it could really make a difference, was achieved, and then–then there would be the time for the two of us.

But instead of growing and blossoming into what I had hoped, everything went wrong. YOFI was already going wrong, with people bickering endlessly about priorities, and about what we should do next. The airport protest became a nightmare. People had to buy their own tickets–obviously. It would have been a bit of a giveaway if the airport noticed one purchaser buying tickets for 60 consecutive flights. We agreed to reimburse them from the donations that came in after the Manchester rally. Some people didn't have enough cash so Mary gave them the money up front, but then they didn't buy tickets right away. Some who had agreed to participate dropped out after their flights and times had been agreed, so there were time gaps: they realised you have to give your details when you book, which meant they could be traced by the police. Since the point of the whole thing was anti-flight publicity, and YOFI was going to claim it at the end of the day, I couldn't see the problem. It got into more and more of a mess–a scattering of tickets bought, too much money handed out, recriminations. Iain said he'd help me sort it out.

He began to notice me more and more. At meetings I didn't have to keep trying to interrupt the boys, he'd glance at me and raise his eyebrows to see if I had anything to say, and if I nodded he'd tell them to shut up. He used to put his rucksack on the next chair in the circle and when I came in he'd lift it off and indicate the seat was for me. I liked it at first; it made me feel important. But it all went pear-shaped.

We'd been painting banners and everyone else had left. Iain was in the office emailing publicity to other groups. I was finishing off the tidying up. The banners were on sheets spread on the floor and I didn't want to move them till the paint was dry. I was in the little kitchen washing the brushes when Iain came in. I knew it was him so I didn't turn round. I just said, ‘All done?' and he said, ‘Yes,' surprisingly close behind me. Then he took another step and I could feel his breath on my neck. I turned the tap off. I kept my eyes on the brushes I was washing, slowly rubbing my fingers through the bristles to get them clean, staring at the little clouds of faint red that came puffing out of them into the water. He was right against me, I could feel the heat of his body. I twisted my neck to try and see his face and he took a tiny step back so I could turn round. Then he was pressing me against the sink and kissing me and my heart was galloping with the surprise of it. I noticed his hands. He was holding his hands out to the sides–holding his hands away from me as if I might burn him. The weight of him was squashing me against the sink. I jerked my head away and he opened his eyes then straightened up and moved back. There was a little gap between us and I could breathe.

‘No,' he said. ‘Not a good idea.'

He turned and went into the office and shut the door. I got my things as quickly as I could and let myself out, leaving him to roll up the banners. My heart kept pounding madly all the way home. I hadn't thought of him like that. For a moment, for that moment when he was squashing me against the sink–I was scared. But then how contradictory can a person be? There was a strand of my mind that kept going back to that moment by the sink, imagining; if I hadn't jerked my head back. If he'd put his hands on my hips. If.... It was a hot shameful excited feeling.

Nobody else knew what had happened but it made things different between me and Iain. We were hyper-aware of each other. I could feel myself blushing whenever he came near. And Baz picked up on it. He fell into step beside me as I was heading for the bus stop and asked me how I was getting on with Iain.

‘OK.'

‘You like him.'

‘I didn't say I liked him. I said he was OK. He's good at keeping meetings in order.'

‘Nat's group are managing without him. Without some
adult
telling them what to do.' He was fidgeting about with a stick he'd picked up, twitching it from side to side.

‘You in touch with Nat? What's he doing?'

‘There's an animal research lab near Chester that they're trying to infiltrate. They've already targeted some of the scientists.'

‘You're not–'

‘I might join them. I'm not really interested in all this bickering, or in recycling.'

‘But what about the website?'

‘It's done, isn't it.'

‘But will you go to Chester too? What about piano?'

He didn't reply.

‘Baz? You still playing?'

‘For what it's worth. I'm entering for a scholarship.'

‘Where to?'

‘Salzburg. There's an under 17's piano scholarship.'

‘You'd go to Austria? When?'

‘January. If I get it. Which I won't.' There was a silence then he suddenly said, ‘Has Iain kissed you?'

And like an idiot I blurted, ‘Yes.'

‘Uh huh,' said Baz. ‘Uh huh, uh huh,' and he began to run the stick along the railings, backwards and forwards, making it into a demented rhythm.

I started to say ‘It wasn't important' and at the same time he quickly said, ‘My dad's lost his job.'

‘Why?'

‘The Noahs. People from his church have joined the Noahs. Now they're going to all these happy-clappy the-lord-will-save-us meetings.'

I wanted to explain about Iain but it seemed as if it would be making it more important than it was. ‘Wasn't your dad helping the bereaved?'

‘He had a fight with some high ups in the church. About what to do about the Noahs. He fell out with everybody and he told them to get stuffed.'

A laugh burst out of me, it was embarrassment as much as anything. Baz carried on with his tapping. He said he was sick of YOFI, he was leaving.

I sit on the floor beneath the window, looking up at the sky as it begins to get light. The days are getting longer now–it's earlier every day. The purplish-blue patch I can see looks clear, maybe the sun will shine. Last night I heard him on the phone for ages, I guess to Mum. Maybe she reasoned with him, because when he came upstairs he untied my arms. Neither of us said anything, he went straight out again and locked the door. I crawled over to the radiator and sat against it while my clothes dried. I almost like the smell, now.