But the presence persisted. It was real enough, though invisible, and felt tied to Fel’s absence. I stared numbly at the empty half of our bed. Fel was not in the bedroom. I blinked, orientating myself.
The door was ajar. Light fanned in from the living room. I got up. The laminate flooring was cold and sticky against my feet. The French window was open, letting in distant traffic sounds, the city never quite sleeping. Fel was on the balcony. She glanced at me and smiled and the diamond set in her tooth and all the stones in her ear glittered in the moonlight.
She turned back and looked up at the sky. I followed her gaze. A half-moon was rising above the blocks of the estate. Where the Moon’s dark half should have blocked out the stars, there were lights. Just a few, very faint. Four or five of them. Six. Maybe seven. My eyes, adjusting, caught the hint of more, though I had to look to one side of the Moon to detect them. They were faint enough that they disappeared when looked at directly.
They hung in no particular pattern, and shone with the same modest brightness as the surrounding stars so that it appeared, after a few seconds, as though they were indeed stars, and the dark half of the Moon was entirely missing. A few seconds later, the illusion righted itself, and reason took hold again, and I was looking at the unlit half of the Moon. And there were lights. Lights on the Moon.
The Moon was inhabited. I’d read the papers. I knew the inhabitants were only machines. Diggers, cranes and drills. But still. Fires were burning. I had not seen this before. Not with the naked eye. I must have said something. It was quite a sight.
Here, however, memory breaks down. It fails me, and I can’t be sure which of us next spoke.
‘Fires are burning.’
Nonsense.
I took Fel by the hand. ‘Come to bed.’
8
Champions of the Process called Georgy Chernoy’s medicalised infants the ‘reborn’. Critics dubbed them the ‘undead’. To me they were just strange children. Their bodies, though growing at an accelerated rate, never quite managed to catch up with their impatient, adultish minds. I was never able to take them entirely seriously, not even when one of them was my own mother. Fel persuaded me to visit my new mum around the time she was three months old, and had started to use sign language. Fel was infatuated. Whenever the weather allowed she had been wheeling Betty around the memory parks of Medicine City, and the therapy was having the desired effect. ‘Betty knows who she is now,’ Fel assured me. ‘She’s been asking after you.’ As though this would encourage me. But Fel’s enthusiasm was winning, and my own curiosity was growing. What finally tipped the scales was Betty leaving the nursery. Stella took her back to her house in Islington to look after her, now that she no longer needed specialist care.
‘It’s just a matter of patience,’ Fel explained to me. ‘Your mum’s memories are all there. It’s just a question of encouraging her to work through her old life. She needs to call everything to mind. You should go and see her. You should talk to her. You should make the connection.’
I didn’t know about that. But I had lost too much of my mother already – to cancer, and to Stella – to ignore altogether this strange new chapter in her life. Though I was sceptical about who or what I would find rattling the gaily painted bars of Stella’s newly installed stairgate, I felt I had better stake an early interest.
I arrived to find Betty in Stella’s basement dining room, strapped in a high chair, splashing sickly, sweet-smelling rusk porridge all over the zinc dining table. Now Betty was out of Ladywell’s care, Stella had to rely on local shops for her supplies. Betty’s stiff plastic bib had a locomotive on it. Her sippy cup was embossed with cartoon giraffes.
‘Here she is,’ Stella said, tone cheery, eyes wide as she faced me and nervous as hell. I wondered if her mood was triggered by my arrival. It was just as likely that Betty herself was keeping her on a constant knife’s edge.
Her feeding, for a start, was painful to watch. An ordinary baby, knowing no better and anyway lacking coordination, will throw porridge around as a kind of wild experiment. The infant before me, however, already knew perfectly well what a spoon was, what a table was, what up and down were and what porridge was for. She just lacked the coordination to handle them. There was no joy in her movements at all – just incapacity. She looked to me to be exactly what she was: a shrunken adult struggling with a motor dysfunction. She glared up at me, her chin thrust belligerently forward and dripping with milky, greyish stuff. She dropped her wide-grip plastic spoon. It fell half into her bowl and toppled out onto the table. She weaved her stubby little arms in front of her face.
Stella translated: ‘She wants to know what took you so long.’
Fel was in the kitchen, wringing out a rag. She returned to wipe up the worst of the spills and detach Betty’s bib. Betty sat still throughout the clean-up. No actual baby would ever have done that. I tried hard not to show my discomfort, but I found it very difficult to watch. I felt I was confronted with something pretending to be a baby. Which, I suppose, was not far from the truth. The imposture was more than unsettling. It was disgusting. My whole body sang with tension. It occurred to me that it would be the most natural thing in the world for me to stove this thing’s head in with a pan. The shock was so intense, I mumbled an excuse, rushed into the kitchen and leaned over the sink. There was a glass on the drainer and I fumbled it under the tap and filled it. The drink helped. Thank God that’s over, I thought. My heart steadied. I came back in to find Fel wiping Betty’s face with a damp tissue, and it was all I could do not to rush in and save her, pulling her out of range of that dangerous, gummy mouth and those tiny, stubby, grasping hands.
They weaved about.
Stella, translating again, said: ‘She wants to know about your work.’
So I sat there sipping milky coffee, trying to control the trembling of my hands, trying to explain to my newborn mother how the kinds of technology that (among other things) made her possible were eating my career before my eyes. ‘They print buildings now, Mum. Draw and print. The machines do everything.’
Whatever sign-system Betty was using, it had to be tiring, and she was constantly trying to form words in the back of her throat, her immature tongue weaving around inside her gaping mouth like something trapped. I tried to ask her about herself, about what she was going through and how she felt. She waved these questions away impatiently. Replying to them with arm gestures would have been both difficult and exhausting – even assuming that Stella was up to translating them.
Fel steered away from us as we talked; over Betty’s head I could see her busying herself in the kitchen, sorting out piles of baby clothes. Georgy Chernoy was not at home. I wondered what he made of these novel domestic arrangements: about being confronted, at the end of every busy day, with a living, breathing, defecating example of his creation.
In the taxi back to the Barbican, Fel said, ‘What do you think about kids?’
‘She’s not a kid,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know what she is. Well, I do. I get it. She’s something new. Still, I don’t know how you do it. They grow up fast, don’t they? Faster than normal. That’s what I’ve read. I can’t imagine Dad coping with this. Not until she’s older, anyway. Not until she can speak, at very least. How long will we have to wait? A couple of months? She’s developing so fast.’
I looked across at Fel. She was looking out of the window, away from me. Her arms were folded.
‘What’s the matter?’