Hugh shrugged. ‘Good, I suppose. Can’t say I’ve ever noticed any difference from other people’s, though.’
Geena smiled. ‘Like you said, it’s a hard problem. But there must be ways of objectively testing for that, and for other sensitivities – I suspect you may be able to see a bit into the ultraviolet, for example. In any case, you have a perfect get-out card to give your wife. She doesn’t have to take the fix, and she doesn’t need to plead conscience.’
‘But she doesn’t have the mutation.’
‘No, but you do, and your son does. Who’s to say the next baby won’t?’
‘Well, there’s one problem right there,’ said Hugh. ‘The chances are fifty-fifty the baby won’t have it, and I don’t see any way of proving it one way or the other without some kind of intrusive sampling, which I don’t think Hope would go for. In fact, you can take it from me, she wouldn’t. I think it’s her squick about that sort of thing that’s behind this whole objection she has to the fix.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Geena. ‘The wording of the provision is quite clear. It just has to be one of the parents, and therefore a possibility in the offspring.’
Hugh took a couple of steps back and rubbed his eyebrows, eyes closed tight behind his hand. Patches of false colour swirled and exploded like fireworks, behind a fading after-image of the big bay window. He wondered how much, if anything, to admit. It was only a week since he’d told it all to Hope. He didn’t feel like going through it all again with a total stranger. Come to think of it, he hadn’t told Hope everything… Maybe he should have. He felt guilty about that.
Then another point struck him with such force that he blurted it out.
‘Wait a minute!’ he said. ‘The gene’s recessive!’
‘What?’ Geena shook her head. ‘I didn’t say that. It must be a dominant allele, if it’s not in one parent but still shows up in the child.’ She frowned. ‘Do you know about this gene already?’
Hugh felt like kicking himself. He covered his confusion with a sheepish grin.
‘Sorry, just a conclusion I jumped to. I was thinking about sight, and – ah, forget it.’
‘No, no,’ Geena insisted, leaning forward on the stool. ‘What?’
‘It’s… kind of embarrassing.’
Geena made a show of peering around, hand cupped behind her ear. ‘Nobody’s listening, Mr Morrison. Except me, and I’m a scientist.’
‘That’s just it,’ said Hugh. ‘That’s why it’s embarrassing. It’s about a… superstition. Well, a traditional belief.’
‘I can cope with hearing about traditional beliefs, Mr Morrison.’
‘Well… where I come from, in the Highlands, there’s a traditional belief in second sight. It covers what the old parapsychologists used to call remote viewing and precognition. Except it’s pretty much involuntary. Maybe other things too, like, uh, seeing ghosts or… or the like.’ Hugh grimaced. ‘Runs in families, but in odd patterns. Skips generations, that sort of thing. When I was a callow lad, I sort of figured that the patterns were like those for a recessive gene. That’s all.’
‘Are you telling me you have this second sight?’ Geena sounded excited.
‘Not exactly, no.’ He shrugged. ‘Just… a speculation, is all.’
Geena slid off the stool and stepped towards him. Eyes bright, the short black hair that framed her face all aquiver.
‘Have you had any experiences that this might help explain?’
Hugh backed away, towards the door. ‘No!’
He could hear the lie himself, in the vehemence of his denial.
‘Why don’t you want to talk about it?’
‘Well, you know, it’s all hearsay. Old wives’ tales. Village rumours. Playground tittle-tattle. And it can be very damaging.’
‘Damaging? How?’
This was the bit he hadn’t even told to Hope. He nerved himself to spit it out.
‘It can lead to accusations of witchcraft.’
‘Witchcraft?’ Geena laughed in his face.
His forearms came up and his hands clawed, as if to grab her shoulders and shake her.
‘This is no laughing matter, dammit!’
He was almost shouting. He stepped back at the same moment as she recoiled from him. He took a deep breath and let his arms hang down. She looked scared.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Geena. ‘I had no idea you were so serious about it. Is it something to do with the churches up there… what do they call them, the Wee Frees or something?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s a bit of that and something else. The population of Lewis – that’s the island I’m from – has more or less doubled this century, after declining for a very long time. Mostly because of the wind farms and immigration, but that in itself helps to retain the native population, with jobs and opportunities and so on. And just when this turnaround was beginning – way before the wind farms, towards the end of the last century – a lot of the incomers were kind of New Age types, people who wanted to get away from the cities and open a wee craft business or start an organic farm or whatever. Some of them were hippies, pagans, that kind of thing. Big families, kids running wild, all that. One consequence was a child abuse scandal that got fuelled by local suspicions on the part of those Wee Frees you mentioned about anyone who wasn’t a good Christian, let alone people who openly called themselves pagans and witches. Whatever the details of the original case – it may have been open-and-shut for all I know, it was many years ago – that kind of thing can rankle for generations. Some people in the generation after those pagans and witches found a way of hitting back, and a very nasty, underhand way it was too. They kept an ear to the ground for rumours of the second sight, and passed anonymous tip-offs to social services about anyone who was said to have it. On the grounds, you see, that this was an occult practice and therefore a risk indicator for satanic child abuse. They witch-hunted the locals right back. And of course in wee close-knit communities like that, just getting investigated is a disgrace, even if there’s nothing in it.’
Geena was shaking her head slowly in amazement. ‘That’s appalling!’
‘Aye, it’s appalling. Now this was before my time, the last case like that was before I was born, but people have long memories in small communities. So when I first got curious about the second sight – I found the term in an old book on Highland folklore that was lying around in our house – I asked my pals at high school, and they sort of tapped their noses and talked behind their hands about certain folks in the locality, and next time I was home I asked my dad about it, like, “Dad, is it true that old Mrs Macdonald has the second sight?” I guess I was about, uh, thirteen or so, not a little kid, and for the first time in my life my dad takes me out the back, literally behind the woodshed – well, the peat shed – and gives me a clip on the back of the head. Not hard, not to hurt, but like a glancing blow, you know?’
Geena nodded. ‘Uh-huh. I’ve had a few myself.’
‘Right. It was enough of a shock to me, I can tell you. So now he’d got my attention, so to speak, he told me what I’ve just told you about what had gone on, the investigations and that. He said never to mention the subject again. And I didn’t. Until now.’
Hugh felt a pang as he said that. He hadn’t even told it to Hope.
Geena was giving him a very quizzical look.
‘Why did you get interested in the second sight in the first place?’
‘I was a curious lad,’ Hugh said.
Geena considered this.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘none of this really matters any more. The point is your wife now has a good case for not taking the fix, and maybe identifying this gene will clear up all the superstition about the second sight.’