‘We’d better go in.’
Fel took my hand and led me across the street.
‘I didn’t expect anything that bad.’ I was quite shaken.
Fel said nothing, and I wondered if I was being naive.
Stella and Georgy were in the dining room with little Betty. Sprawled across a rug in the corner, she was painstakingly constructing a tower of brightly coloured wooden blocks. She had outgrown the game already, and she moved the blocks about dextrously in her chubby little hands more in the spirit of exercise than play. I wondered if she knew what had been happening, and if so, whether she had recouped enough of her old self to understand its significance. Her air of exaggerated seriousness aside, she looked to me like any child occupying itself while the grown-ups argue.
Stella was saying to Georgy, ‘If the BBC wants to interview you, you surely have an obligation to go.’ Stella had a producer’s belief in the moral as well as the material benefits of publicity.
Their familiarity with and love of the microphone had been one of the few bits of common ground Stella and Georgy shared. Today had wreaked a change: ‘I am sick and tired of explaining things,’ Georgy snapped – then, raising his hand, he revised his opinion. ‘No. I’m sick and tired of explaining new things. I’m sick and tired of being the voice of the fucking future. And the fact is, no one around here is interested in the future. They’re interested in old things. Aren’t they? The same old things. For two thousand years the same old things.’
So much for a drink of something and ‘congratulations on your degree’.
‘George, please—’
‘Go and read what’s on the fucking wall, woman!’
‘I’ve read what’s on the wall.’
‘And?’
‘It says “Yid”.’ Stella retorted. ‘It says “Yid scum”. I can read. I do know what you’re getting at. I’m not stupid.’
‘Actually,’ Fel said, ‘it says “Kill yid scum”. If there are points here for accuracy.’
Georgy, who up to this point had hardly marked our arrival, flew at his daughter: ‘You think this is a joke? This amuses you?’
‘I think,’ Fel replied, deadpan, ‘that you could do with calming down.’
Stella leapt in: ‘It’s the BBC. It’s a chance to explain—’
‘Do you think the oafs who daubed our wall listen to the fucking PM Programme?’
‘I just think it’s good for people to know what’s going on.’
‘I think,’ I said, ‘we all know what’s going on. Don’t we? Isn’t it obvious?’
Georgy watched me carefully.
I met his eye: ‘You’re smarter than us, less sentimental than us, more ambitious – whatever words you want to use. We used to write off our differences as cultural. As upbringing. Everyone’s different, we said. Just as everyone’s the same. What a wonderful, rich, diverse world we live in, and on and on. But you are different. Fel’s different.’
‘Thanks,’ said Fel.
‘Fel, listen. The difference between the Bund and the rest of us is getting bigger by the day. Once we began using the ray, some speciations were obvious from the start. Who thinks chickies are human? Who ever thought they were human? Was there ever a time? A few weeks after the irradiation of the Somme, maybe, but by their second generation? No chance. With you and us it’s different. The divergences haven’t been so great between us, or haven’t shown up so fast. So we cling to the idea that we’re supposed to be the same somehow, “underneath”. That’s why you’re getting called those names. The names are offensive, sure, but that’s not all they are. They’re also – you made the point yourself – they’re also old. They’re a way – clumsy, disgraceful, yes – but a way of clinging on to the idea of there being one humanity.’
‘Is your point,’ Georgy asked, acidly, ‘that these hooligans are trying to be affectionate?’
I felt a tug at my hand.
I looked down to find Betty looking up at me. ‘I want to go pee,’ she said.
I was confused. ‘Can’t you—?’
She tugged at her groin. ‘These bloody poppers are impossible.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I led her out of the room.
She ignored the bathroom and led me to the front door. ‘I can’t open this,’ she said.
‘You want to go outside?’
‘I want to get you outside.’
‘What have I done?’
‘Given vent to your advanced education. Open the bloody door.’
I turned the lock and followed her out. On the top step, she took my hand and turned me around. ‘Look.’
A six-pointed star had been daubed over the door in red paint. Since the door was painted red anyway, this didn’t look nearly as bad as it might have done.
‘They weren’t the brightest,’ said Betty. ‘I think they wanted it to look like blood.’ Her voice was thready and raw. Even the Process couldn’t tune immature vocal cords to adult use.
I had to ask: ‘What do you think brought this on?’
‘You mean, “What did we do wrong?”’
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
Betty shrugged: another oddly adult gesture. ‘Maybe someone spotted me. Maybe someone realised what I am and didn’t much like what they saw.’
I said nothing. What Betty was suggesting was certainly possible. Were feelings running so high against the world’s still pitifully few undead?
‘How’s James?’
Only Betty ever called Jim by his full name. It was one more proof that my mother really was residing in that crisp, fresh, infantile frame, and the realisation, as usual, dropped the temperature of my blood by a couple of degrees. I recalled how I’d felt when first confronted with her: the recidivist urge I’d had to get rid of this monstrous thing. This impostor. This ‘child’. If her son had felt that way, how could anyone be surprised if strangers, liquored up and fed fright stories by the cheap papers, felt the same way? Naive or not, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the anti-Semitism that agitated Georgy so was no more than a desperate and inept scrabbling for vocabulary, and that these hatreds were a new beast masquerading in old clothes.
‘We don’t hear from Jim much,’ I said.
Betty skipped down the steps, stopped at the gate, and skipped up them again. If this was her way of allaying the suspicions of passers-by – just a little girl playing on some steps, nothing to see here – then it was ill-judged. Physically she looked only about two years old.
‘No letters?’
‘Sometimes. I’m pretty sure they’re being dictated.’
Betty paused on the steps. ‘I wonder if James knows he’s picked a side.’
‘A side.’
‘In the war.’
‘Oh. The war. That.’ I said, with sledgehammer irony.
‘Oh, Stuart.’ Betty sighed and flopped onto the top step, exhausted by her game. ‘Do try and take your head out of your arse.’
I laughed, as who would not, barracked by a child? But Betty’s attention had been caught by three youths who had come to linger at the corner opposite the house. One leaned against park railings, watching us. The other two seemed to be paying us no mind. One was fighting to light his cigarette in the breeze. The other, with his back to us, had a baseball cap pulled low over his face.
I leaned towards Betty: ‘Is that them, do you think?’
Betty stood up, arms folded. ‘Let’s go in.’
We found Stella alone in the kitchen.
‘Where’s Fel?’
‘Upstairs with Georgy. No, don’t go up.’ Stella rattled the dishwasher shut. ‘He’s in one of his moods.’
‘Can I give you a hand?’