Wicked Women (22 page)

Grandmother laughed, and she seemed to fade out a bit, so Carrie could see the window through her body, and only the shape of her breasts and the two round nipples were apparent. But then she recoalesced, as it were, and sat there, bold as brass.

“We had a good strong marriage, your grandfather and me,” said this Christabel, “and I’m sure I felt like you do now at least once a week, but on average I reckon twice a week, for forty-five years, though rather more toward the beginning and rather less toward the end, he’d roll over me in bed or I’d roll over him and we’d forget our mistrust, and no doubt it will be the same for you.”

“In forty-five years,” said Carrie in horror, “he’ll be eighty-five.”

“And you’ll be seventy-one. So what?”

“The world will have ended before then,” said Carrie. “No such luck,” said the apparition smugly. And there was a kind of
click-click-click,
which might have been knitting needles, or a beetle in the beams of the old house thirty miles from London where Clive and Carrie lived. They had put the house on the market in order to raise some money and start afresh in a different home, but no one would buy it, thus making Carrie’s stepchildren, Chrissie and Harry, Clive’s children by Audrey, rejoice.

This house was where they’d always lived, and where their mother, Audrey, died. It was theirs. Forget Carrie.

“He only married me,” said Carrie, “to have a mother for his children, to make use of me.”

“If he’d wanted that,” said the apparition, settling in to the knitting of a long, long scarf that seemed to run in and out the centuries, “he’d have chosen someone more naturally attuned to domesticity, a more practical sort, not a natural nibbler from delicatessens, a weeper in bed through the long lonely nights.

“Look at it like this,” said the phantom, “nothing is ever perfect. The dangerous thing for a woman is to wait too long, so she ends with nothing. Time flows the wrong way, starts as a slow and mighty river, then it begins to race along, over shallows, narrower, faster; suddenly it disappears, dives underground and it’s gone and if you don’t look out you’re alone. No baby is ever perfectly timed, no man exactly right. If man and baby offer themselves, accept them. The things in life you regret most are not what you do, but what you don’t do. So you held your nose and jumped, Carrie, and good for you. You’ll learn to swim.

“I predict for you a good strong marriage in which there will never be peace—for who wants peace?—but much gratification: this is only the first of your children. It will be the kind of marriage that attracts both saboteurs and hangers-on. See that as the sign of its strength. Clive-and-Carrie, people will say, as once they said David-and-Christabel, and the very words will be bound together. David-and-Christabel, Jim-and-Kate, Clive-and-Carrie. Those are the generations. Audrey-and-Clive turned out to be a mere hors d’oeuvre—you’re the main course. That sometimes happens. But Jim-and-Kate became Jonathan and Kate and that was wrong, and you never forgave your mother for divorcing and remarrying, so she’s dead to you, and you to her, because the new names simply didn’t fit. You, Carrie, quite rightly, stayed loyal to the concept of Jim-and-Kate. As I daresay your stepchildren for the moment stay loyal to Audrey-and-Clive. But you’ll win, Carrie. You’re the second marriage, but it’s the strong one, the long one. Clive and Carrie, sturdy and central.”

“How do you know?” Carrie jeered.

“I know what I know,” said the grandmother, darkly, as befitted a messenger from the other side. “And if you take my advice, you’ll bring your mother, that naughty, selfish girl, back to life now that you’re having a baby of your own. You will need her. It might even be good for her to think about something other than herself.”

“I know everything I need to know about childbirth from books,” said Carrie. “New knowledge. Modern knowledge. Not mid-wives’ talk. What would you know?”

“Take my advice if you won’t take hers,” said the great-grandmother-to-be. “Just remember, nature kills. When it comes to the birth, go for least pain if you’re given a choice, and may God have mercy on mother and child.”

“It’s only five months,” said Carrie, “and already I don’t see how it’s ever going to get out.”

“Exactly,” said the grandmother.

The ghost of Christabel looked askance at the knitted scarf. “I don’t knit,” she said. “I swear I never knitted. My own grandmother Frances Mary knitted, and I hated the clacking, the clicking, while I lay awake at night, frightened of ghosts, wondering how babies ever got out.”

“Now see what’s happened,” said Carrie. “You’ve turned into a ghost yourself.”

“So will you,” said Christabel shortly. Then the knitting was gone, and the phone on the bedside rang. Christabel remained where she was, to Carrie’s surprise.

“So?” said Carrie snappily into the phone, assuming it was Clive.

“What happened?”

A woman’s voice replied. “Clive asked me to tell you he’s on his way home. He’d drunk so much I didn’t like to let him drive. I called a taxi and it took forever to come.”

“Who are you?” asked Carrie, rudely.

“I’m Andrea,” said the voice. “Tim and Andrea; we were Audrey and Clive’s best friends. But now Tim and I are divorced. It’s’ Tim and Valerie, and so far just Andrea and Andrea. Didn’t Clive tell you?”

“No,” said Carrie, pride forbidding more inquiry. “But thanks for not letting him drive.” She put the phone down.

“A saboteur,” said Christabel. “It’s a good sign. They cluster round at the beginning. They see the oak tree’s trunk thickening, swelling the graceful branches which mean children budding, just here, just so, and they don’t like it; they want to shake it to bits; they resent it; all good strong marriages attract the saboteur. Women will creep up on him, sly and beckoning. Men will slip up your stairs while he’s away. ‘Try me,’ they’ll say. ‘I’m better.’ And so they might be, so reason may tell you; but all they are in truth are saboteurs. Turn the peaceful ones into hangers-on; ask them to baby-sit. They will, if only from guilt.”

“What was he doing in this woman Andrea’s house?” asked Carrie, and she felt the baby weigh her down, or she’d have gotten out of bed and broken things, in spite of her grandmother’s presence. “I’ll divorce him,” she said, “that’s what I’ll do. I’ll leave now before he gets home. I’ll go and sleep on my friend Vera’s sofa. He doesn’t love me, his children hate me. I should never have done it. I must have been mad. I could have married anyone and I married a middle-aged alcoholic widower who can’t keep his productions under budget and will be fired any moment.”

“You’re not listening to what I’m saying,” said the apparition. “I suppose you will have to start from the beginning and work it all out for yourself, like everyone else. I’m wasting my time. I am your future as well as your past, and available for inspection, but try telling any young woman that. They would far rather weep, and shriek, and squirm in the present.” And she vanished, the semi-circled outline of her meagre breasts fading last, and Carrie went back to sleep, or had never woken out of it.

T
HE GIRL, MANDY MILLER
, aged twenty-three, had made an appointment to see Josie Toothpad, the well-known literary guru, at 11 a.m. But already it was six minutes past, and Mandy’s face had not yet flashed up on Josie’s screen. Six minutes late: six minutes’ worth of ungratefulness, adding to the burden of Josie’s day.

Mandy was privileged; Josie did not normally see aspiring writers: her time was considered better spent writing haikus. But the Authors’ Guild saw promise in the girl, whose writing profile peaked at
lyricism
and fell to a disastrous trough around
compromise,
in a decade where such profiles usually ran as straight and flat as the heart trace of someone newly dead. So Josie had been generous.

Josie filled in the waiting minutes playing solitaire. She hadn’t done that for ages. Click, click: cards flying, red and black slicing the screen. Then the familiar melancholy settled in, that stuffy sadness which so often accompanies any obsessional activity and in particular solitaire—so much chance, so little skill. Josie adjusted the dial of her drip feed as Dr. Owen her personal physician had so often asked her not, increasing the flow of uppers as opposed to downers. But now she just felt edgy. She stopped playing and put her drip feed back to normal. But the edginess wouldn’t go away: it was moving into anxiety, foreboding. Josie turned up the voltage of the muscle contractors, the ones designed to keep her limbs viable and strong, but for once the tingling sensation didn’t please her, but irritated. She turned the voltage down again. Personal monitors on the banks of screens around the room showed a steady, profound green. She should be in a state of tranquillity, but was not. The gap between what she felt and what the screen said she felt was unusually wide.

Josie punched in a query to Zelda, her personal therapist, and Zelda’s sweet, reassuring face appeared instantly on the main screen and softly asked Josie to profile her current emotions, choosing four appropriate adjectives from the available selection. None applied. Josie felt bored and closed Zelda, but Zelda wouldn’t be closed. Zelda just blanked out and reappeared before even a mouse had time to click. Zelda said, “I’ve been waiting for a call from you, Josie. It’s your birthday, and it’s your right and your privilege to consult me, as you come to terms with the downside of being 132 today.”

The pause between the one, the three and the two were minute but discernible. It was crass of Web Central, Josie thought, to thus remind Heaven-on-Earthers that Zelda was a machine. And Zelda had got it wrong: Josie’s birthday was six days past. What’s more, Zelda once closed had not stayed closed, which could only mean Zelda was now operated directly from Nex Control. Since last week’s acquisition of Web Central’s main shareholding, Nex Control could over-ride the Web Central computer. Which meant, Josie supposed, Nex Control could break into a transmission any time they liked, as an aircraft captain would choose to break into the sound track of a film you were watching, with warnings of turbulence. An archaic image, which almost made Josie laugh, for who went anywhere, physically, anymore? Space was in your head: vast quantities of it, as much as you wanted. You travelled the universe freely through the voices in your mind.

There was something wrong with the transmission: Zelda’s whole face flickered so that her smile looked like a smirk. Then Zelda blanked out mid-sentence.

At the time of the takeover Nex Control had promised there’d be no changes in management style. Promises, promises. Josie remembered enough about pre-Web life to know that the State was never to be trusted: States dealt in lies, as Nietzsche had pointed out; they spoke in all tongues of good and evil, and in the end what was Nex Control but another State, gobbling up smaller territories, grabbing up Web Central, asset stripping.

When in doubt, keep your head down, don’t make waves. Josie completed her mood profile, punching in “tranquil, reflective, industrious, confident.” Central records were kept. Web Central had been created by a consensus of newly young idealists; their computer’s mission, to keep Web Heaven non-political, pacific and angst-free for its subscribers. But that had been fifty years ago: language could have changed, the very words now have a different meaning.

Josie took off her helmet and at once felt less paranoic. She was both post-menopausal and pre-menstrual, that was the trouble. For a couple of days a month she suffered from both conditions. Today was one of the days. She knew too much and felt too much. She was an original Heaven-on-Earther. Sixty years ago a daily dose of Ecstasy 3, which reversed the ageing process and settled the body at around twenty-five years old, combined with good old-fashioned oestrogen, had become available to any female who could afford it. Josie could, and did. Ageing, for Heaven-on-Earthers, need no longer be a cause of death, but there were drawbacks: one’s personality remained cyclical.

Still no sign of Mandy: 11:12 a.m. Another of Josie’s screens leapt into life. Traders were ingenious; they found ways of appearing on screen no matter what.

“Just punch D O N U T: revo @ efil,” required the salesman. He was dressed like a butler, smiled like a fiend, and had a metronome—banned by Web Central as a hypnotic device, but perhaps Nex Control permitted them—ticking away in the background.

“Only punch and you will see

Something long denied and free

Stuffed with honey, fruit and rum

Down your food-chute swift will come.

DONUT!”

Some things never changed. Josie obediently punched up DONUT: revo @ efil. She’d been losing weight recently, but Dr. Owen didn’t seem worried. Her fingers looked just plain bony—but still pretty. She’d always liked her hands: loved their dextrous moving over keys, their flawless clicking of the mouse. If you liked yourself and loved being alive, what did your chronological age matter?

Josie steered her chair to the window and opened the blinds; she had to put her drip feed on hold to get so far. Alone of her friends, Josie still liked daylight, and a view. Down below the Underclass swarmed: the unfortunates who lived on earth, not in the space in their heads. Hardly anyone over twenty-five, the whole lot HIV positive, doomed to death ten years or so after their first sexual contact. So much noise, and dirt, and squalor. The Underclass lived their short lives intensely: they were even said to write naive poetry, novels, plays. Well, why not? Shelley, Keats: short lives, great poetry—for a moment Josie almost envied the wretched of the earth. The Underclass lived unobserved and uncounted, unnoticed, unfrightened: they’d make way only for the armed Delivery Squads who attended to the physical needs of an Overclass which lived decorously, individual unit by individual unit, stacked one above the other. AIDS-free. They had Zelda to keep them healthy in mind; Dr. Owen, healthy in body. Josie’s friend from way back, Honour, had once said there was now political unrest in the Underclass: there was a growing sense that computer literacy—a capital offence for them—was a human right. That was absurd. The Underclass was too physical, too little given to logic, ever to cope happily with computers.