With such distracting macabre thoughts I sat silently with Seri while the birds made their strange noise overhead. It was still warm, but I noticed a gradual reduction in the intensity of sunlight on the trees above us. I was unused to being so far south as this, and the sudden twilights still surprised me.
“What time does it get dark?” I said.
Seri glanced at her wristwatch. “Not long. We ought to get back up to the road. There’s a bus in about half an hour.”
“If it hasn’t broken down again.”
“That’s if it has,” she said with a wry smile. We walked up through the little valley, then along the path to the bridge over the river. Lights were coming on in the village as we passed through, and by the time we had clambered up to the road it was almost dark. We sat down on one of the benches and listened to the evening sounds. Cicadas scraped for a while, but then there was a brief and lovely burst of birdsong, like the dawn chorus in the Faiandland countryside, transformed in the tropics. Below us, we heard music from the village, and the shallow river.
As the dark became absolute, the physical tension we had both been suppressing suddenly was released. Without either of us initiating it, or so it seemed, we were kissing passionately, leaving no doubts. But in a while, Seri drew back from me and said: “The bus won’t be coming now. It’s too late. Nothing’s allowed on the road past the airport after dark.”
I said: “You knew that before we came here.”
“Well, yes.” She kissed me.
“Can we stay somewhere in the village?”
“I think I know a place.”
We went slowly down the wooded path, stumbling on the steps, heading down to the village lights we could just see through the trees. Seri led me to a house set back slightly from the road, and spoke in patois to the woman who came to the door. Money changed hands, and we were taken up to a room tucked under the roof: black-painted wooden rafters sloped over the bed. We had said nothing on the way, suspending it all, but as soon as we were alone, Seri slipped out of her clothes and lay on the bed. I quickly joined her.
An hour or two later, drained of the tension but still not really knowing each other, we dressed and went across to the restaurant. There were no other visitors in the village, and the owner had closed for the night. Again, Seri spoke persuasively in patois, and gave the man some money. After a delay we were brought a simple meal of bacon and beans, served in rice.
I said, while we were eating: “I must give you some money.”
“Why? I can get all this back from the Lotterie.”
Under the table our knees were touching, hers slightly gripping mine. I said: “Do I have to give you back to the Lotterie?”
She shook her head. “I’m thinking of quitting the job. It’s time I changed islands.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been on Muriseay long enough. I want to find somewhere quieter.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“Part of it. I don’t get on too well with the manager in the office. And the job’s not quite what I expected.”
“What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you sometime.”
We did not want to return to the room immediately, so we walked up and down the village street, our arms around each other. It was getting cool.
We stopped by the souvenir shop and looked in at the lighted window display. It was full of petrified objects, bizarre and mundane at once.
Walking again, I said: “Tell me why you want to quit the job.”
“I thought I did.”
“You said it wasn’t what you expected.”
Seri said nothing at first. We crossed the wide lawn by the river, and stood on the bridge. We could hear the myrtaceous trees moving in the breeze. At last Seri said: “I can’t make up my mind about the prize. I’m full of contradictions about it. In the job I’ve got to help people, and encourage them to go on to the clinic and receive the treatment.”
“Do many of them need encouragement?” I said, thinking of course of my own doubts.
“No. A few are worried in case it’s dangerous. They just need someone to tell them it isn’t. But you see, everything I do is based on the assumption that the Lotterie is a good thing. I’m just not sure any more that it is.”
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing, you’re the youngest winner I’ve ever seen. Everyone else is at least forty or fifty, and some of them are extremely old. What it seems to mean is that the majority of people who buy the tickets are the same age. If you think about it, that means the Lotterie is just exploiting people’s fear of dying.”
“That’s understandable,” I said. “And surely athanasia itself was developed because of the same fear?”
“Yes…but the lottery system seems so indiscriminate. When I first started the job I thought the treatment should only go to people who are ill. Then I saw some of the mail we get. Every day, the office receives hundreds of letters from people in hospital, pleading for the treatment. The clinic simply couldn’t cope with even a fraction of them.”
“What do you do about the letters?”
“You’ll hate the answer.”
“Go on.”
“We send them a form letter, and a complimentary ticket for the next draw. And we only send a ticket if they write from a hospital for incurable diseases.”
“That must bring them comfort,” I said.
“I don’t like it any more than you do. No one at the office likes it. Eventually, I began to understand why it was necessary. Suppose we gave the treatment to anyone with cancer. Why is someone deserving of athanasia just because they’re ill? Thieves and swindlers and rapists get cancer just like anyone else.”
“But it would be humanitarian,” I said, thinking that thieves and rapists can also win lotteries.
“It’s unworkable, Peter. There’s a booklet in the office. I’ll let you read it if you want to. It’s the Lotterie’s argument against treating the sick. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of people suffering from cancer. The clinic can’t treat them all. The treatment’s too expensive, and it’s too slow. So they would have to be selective. They would have to go through case histories, look for people they consider deserving, narrow it down to a few hundred a year. And who sits in judgement? Who can decide that one person deserves to live while another deserves to die? It might conceivably work for a short time…but then there would be someone denied the treatment, someone in power or someone in the media. Perhaps they’d be given the treatment to keep them quiet, and at once the system is corrupted.”
I felt the skin on Seri’s arm as she pressed a hand on mine. She was cold, like me, so we started walking back towards the house. The mountains loomed black around us; everything was silent.
“You’ve talked me out of going to the clinic,” I said. “I don’t want anything more to do with this.”
“I think you should.”
“But why?”
“I told you I was full of contradictions.” She was shivering. “Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you.”
In the house the upstairs room felt as if it had been heated, after the unexpected freshness of the night mountain air. I touched one of the overhead beams, and it was still warm from the day’s sun.
We sat down on the edge of the bed, side by side, very chaste. Seri took my hand, teasing the palm with her fingers.
She said: “You’ve got to have the treatment because the lottery is run fairly, and the lottery is the only defence against corruption. Before I got the job I used to hear the stories. You know, the ones we’ve all heard, about people buying their way in. The first thing they tell you when you start the job is that this isn’t true. They show you what they call the proof…the total amount of drugs they can synthesize in a year, the maximum capacity of the equipment. It tallies exactly with the number of prize-winners every year. They’re very defensive about it, to the point where you suspect they’re covering something up.”
> “Are they?”
“They must be, Peter. What about Mankinova?”
Yosep Mankinova was the former prime minister of Bagonne, a country in the north with supposed non-aligned status. Because of its strategic importance—oil reserves, plus a geographical location commanding crucial sea-lanes—Bagonne exercised political and economic influence out of all proportion to its size. Mankinova, an extreme right-wing politician, had governed Bagonne in the years leading up to the war, but about twenty-five years ago had been forced to resign when evidence was found that he had corruptly received the athanasia treatment. No final proof was established. Lotterie-Collago had emphatically denied it, but shortly afterwards two of the investigating journalists died in mysterious circumstances. Events moved on, the scandal faded and Mankinova went into obscurity. But recently, a few months before I left Jethra, the story had been revived. A number of photographs appeared in newspapers, alleged to be of Mankinova. If this was so, they revealed that he looked no older than he had been at the time of his resignation. He was a man in his eighties who looked like a man in his fifties.
I said; “It would be naïve to think that that sort of thing doesn’t happen.”
“I’m not naïve. But the number of people they can treat is limited, and anyone who wins the prize and then turns it down simply makes it possible.”
“Now you’re supposing that I deserve to live, and someone else doesn’t.”
“No…that’s already been decided by the computer. You’re just a random winner. That’s why you must go on.”
I stared at the threadbare carpet, thinking that everything she said only deepened my doubts. I was of course tempted by the idea of living a long and healthy life, and the notion of refusing it was one which would require a strength I had never before possessed. I was not a Deloinne, highly principled, austerely moralistic. I was greedy for life, greedy even for living, as Deloinne had put it, and a part of me could never deny this. But it continued to feel wrong, in a way I understood only vaguely. It was not for me.
And I thought of Seri. So far we were casual lovers, two people who had recently met, who had already made love and who probably would again, yet who had no emotional commitment to each other. It was possible the relationship would develop, that we would continue to know each other, perhaps fall in love in the conventional sense. I tried to imagine what would happen if I took the treatment while she did not. She, or anyone I might become involved with, would grow steadily older and I would not. My friends, my family, would move on into biological future, while I would be fixed, or petrified.
Seri left the bed, stripped off her shirt and ran water for washing into the basin. I watched her curved back as she leaned down to wash her face and arms. She had a slim, ordinary body, very compact and supple. Bending down she looked at me around her shoulder, smiling invertedly.
“You’re staring,” she said.
“Why not?”
But I was only looking abstractedly. I was thinking about what decision, if any, I should make. I supposed that it was conflict between mind and heart. If I followed my instincts, my selfish greed, I should abandon my doubts and travel to Collago and become an athanasian; if I listened to my thoughts, I should not.
When we were in bed we made love again, less urgently than the first time but with an affection that had not been there before. I was wide awake afterwards, and I lay back in the crumpled sheets staring at the ceiling. Seri lay curled in my arm, her head against my neck, a hand lying on my chest.
“Are you going to go to Collago?” she said.
“I don’t know yet.”
“If you do, I’ll go with you.”
“Why?”
“I want to be with you. I told you, I’m quitting my job.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“I want to be sure—”
“That I’ll go through with it?”
“No…that if you do, then afterwards you’ll be all right. I can’t say why.” She moved suddenly, resting on an elbow and looking down at me. “Peter, there’s something about the treatment I don’t like. It frightens me.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“No, not dangerous. There’s no risk. It’s what happens afterwards. I’m not supposed to tell you.”
“But you will,” I said.
“Yes.” She kissed me briefly. “When you get to the clinic there are a few preliminaries. One of them is a complete medical check-over. Another is, you have to answer a questionnaire. It’s one of the conditions. In the office we call it the longest form in the world. It asks you everything about yourself.”
“I have to write my autobiography.”
“That’s what it amounts to, yes.”
“They told me this in Jethra,” I said. “They didn’t say it was a questionnaire, but that before the treatment I would have to write a complete account of myself.”
“Did they tell you why?”
“No. I just assumed it was part of the treatment.”
“It’s nothing to do with the treatment itself. It’s used in the rehabilitation afterwards. What they do to you, to make you athanasian, is clean out your system. They renew your body, but they wipe your mind. You’ll be amnesiac afterwards.”
I said nothing, looking back into her earnest eyes.
She said: “The questionnaire becomes the basis for your new life. You become what you wrote. Doesn’t that scare you?”
I remembered the long months in Colan’s villa in the hills near Jethra, my quest to tell the truth, the various devices I had used to discover that truth, the certainty that I had succeeded, and, finally, the sense of renewal I had felt when I finished. That manuscript, presently lying in my hotel room in Muriseay Town, contained my life as surely as words contained meaning. I had already become what I had written. I was defined by my work.
I said: “No, it doesn’t scare me.”
“It does me. That’s why I want to be there with you. I don’t believe what they claim, that the patients recover their identities.”
I hugged her, and although she resisted at first she soon relaxed and lay down beside me again.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet. But I think I’ll go to the island, and decide when I’m there.”
Seri said nothing, holding herself against me.
“I’ve got to find out for myself,” I said.
Her face buried in my side, Seri said: “Can I come with you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Talk to me, Peter. While we travel, tell me who you are. I want to know you.”
We drifted off into sleep soon after that. During the night I dreamed I was hanging on a rope beneath a waterfall, spinning and bobbing in the relentless torrent. Gradually my limbs became stiffer and my mind became frozen, until I shifted in my sleep and the dream died.
10
It was raining in Sheffield. I had been given the small front bed room in Felicity’s house, and when I was there I could be alone. I would sometimes stand for hours at the window looking across the roofs at the industrial scenery beyond. Sheffield was an ugly, functional city, fallen from its great days of steelworking, now an untidy urban mess that flowed up to the Pennine Hills in the west and blended under the arches of the motorway viaduct with the smaller town of Rotherham to the east. It was on this side of Sheffield that Felicity and James had their house.
Greenway Park was an island of clean middle-class houses and gardens, surrounded by the older and gloomier suburbs of the city. In the centre of the estate the planners had left an open space of about half an acre, in which young saplings had been planted, and into which the residents took their dogs to defecate. Felicity and James had a dog, and his name was Jasper or Jasper-boy, depending.
From the moment I arrived at the house, I entered a complicated, withdrawn state of mind. I acknowledged that Felicity was doing me a favour, that I had made a mess of my life in Edwin’s cottage, that the time had come for a form of recuperation, and so I became submissive
and compliant. I knew that my obsessive interest in my manuscript was responsible for my errors, so I tried to put it out of my mind. At the same time, I continued in the belief that the work I had been doing was crucial to my sense of identity, and that Felicity had dragged me away from it. I was therefore deeply resentful and angry, and I withdrew from her.
I became detached from life in her house, and was obsessed with trivia. I could not help but notice everything. I was critical of the house, their habits, their attitudes. I disliked their friends. I felt suffocated by their closeness, their normality. I watched the way James ate, the fact that he had a little paunch, that he went jogging. I noted the television programmes they watched, the sort of food Felicity cooked, the things they said to their children. These two, Alan and Tamsin, were for a time allies, because I too was treated like a child.
I suppressed my feelings. I tried to join in with their life, to show the gratitude that I knew I ought to feel, but Felicity and I had simply grown apart. Everything about her life grated on me.
Many weeks went by. Autumn passed and winter came; Christmas was a brief respite because the children became more important than me. But in general we were irritants for each other.
On alternate weekends all five of us would drive down in James’s Volvo to the house in Herefordshire. These were expeditions I dreaded, although Felicity and James seemed to look forward to them. It gave the children a taste for the countryside, Felicity said, and Jasper-boy enjoyed the exercise.
The house was shaping up well, James said, and often telephoned Edwin and Marge to give them what he called progress reports. I was always made to work in the garden, clearing the tangle of overgrown shrubs and making them into compost. James and Felicity and the children concentrated on the decorating. My white room, still intact until these visits, was the first to be done: magnolia emulsion made a tasteful background for the curtain material Marge had described on the phone to Felicity. James hired local electricians and plasterers, and soon the simple cottage was turned into just what Edwin and Marge wanted.