Tomorrow’s World (19 page)

MARCH 9

It was the Scottish Parliament elections yesterday, and Mike and I stayed up late to watch the results come in. It was quite chilling. The biggest gainers were the Greens, which was good, but Scotland First was close behind, standing on a platform of pulling out of Europe and closing off the border with England. Mike hit the nail on the head when he said what was so loathsome about them: they appeal to our fears and bring out the worst in us, rather than inspiring us to be our best
—
and I've a feeling that in the years to come people will have to be at their best. I worry about things like that in a way I never used to. I worry about what sort of world the life growing inside me is going to be living in.

MARCH 27

Something horrible happened at the supermarket today. I slept longer than I meant to
—
it's getting uncomfortably hot already, although it isn't even April yet, and I lay awake until dawn and then slept until way past noon. Anyway, by the time I got to the supermarket the shelves were almost cleared. My bump is plain for all to see, but still somebody pushed me out of the way to get to the bread counter because there were only a few loaves left. I watched those loaves disappear in front of my eyes. One person took the last three, and the person who'd pushed me aside started arguing with them, saying it wasn't right that someone should take three loaves. Voices were raised and it came to blows, and by the time the security guards arrived to split them up they were fighting like animals, screaming and scratching and tearing at each other. The worst of it was, they were respectably dressed middle-aged women. What's happening to people? Is this what the future holds? Will we all have to get like that in order to survive?

APRIL 2

It's time for my three-month check-up. I'm keeping everything crossed, not just my fingers. I've not told Mike about the check-up, because he'll worry. As for myself, I'm not the worrying type. But this is different. Usually I find it easy to be optimistic, but this is too important, and I don't want to tempt fate.

“I'm getting a bad feeling for her,” I said, without knowing quite why.

Paula nodded, as if she understood exactly what I meant.

I turned to the next page.
APRIL 3
was blank, and so was
APRIL 4.

I turned to
APRIL 5.
The handwriting was noticeably less neat. It said:

I've been too upset to write anything for the last couple of days. After the doctor gave me the news, I phoned Mike at work. When he answered I wasn't able to speak. I burst into floods of tears. I think he must have guessed what was wrong before I got myself together enough to be able to tell him. He's trying to be strong for both of us, but I know that inside he's as broken up as me.

I can't believe God could be so cruel.

“She lost the baby,” Paula guessed, her voice little more than a whisper.

The next few pages were blank. Then, under
APRIL 8,
there was more writing:

We're going to see the doctor together. He said the sooner the better. I wouldn't have believed any decision could be so hard. Mike and I sat and talked about it until the early hours. We talked about the sort of life such a badly deformed child would have, and if we'd been talking about someone else's child it would be obvious that it wouldn't have much of a life at all. But when it's your child you ask yourself: Would it be better than no life at all? We talked around some things that are hard to say, hard even to write in a diary no one will ever read. And in the end we were more confused than we'd been in the beginning. We fell asleep on the sofa in each other's arms, which should have been romantic, but instead just left us stiff and weary come morning.

APRIL 9

Despite all the talking, in the end we asked the doctor what we should do. I don't mean we asked him to advise us; I mean we asked him to decide for us. We wanted him to play God, but he refused. Mike turned to me and said he'd go along with whatever I wanted. I'd like to think he was trying to be considerate, but I can't help feeling he was doing to me what the two of us had tried to do to the doctor
—
and I know I'll never feel quite the same about him again because of it.

Jesus, as if I didn't lose enough today.

More empty pages.

APRIL 16

I thought I was feeling about as low as I could get, then today… I'd had these horribly itchy spots for about a week. I'd assumed they were mosquito bites, but then this morning when I got up I went to scratch one of them on my back and felt something like a scab. It fell off onto my finger, and when I brought my hand back in front of me there was this disgusting thing that must be a bed bug. I feel sick just thinking about it. I know it's not my fault
—
with the water shortages there's no way to change the sheets more than once a fortnight, and in this heat you want to change them every day. Still, it makes me feel like a slatternly housewife, and indescribably loathsome. I'm too ashamed to tell Mike. We used to tell each other everything. Now we hardly speak at all, except to argue.

I tried consoling myself with the thought that this is no world to be bringing a child into. But then I considered all the other mothers with children, and that thought was no consolation at all.

I flicked through the rest of the diary but the pages were empty.

We just sat there, as if under a spell. I broke it by coughing as the bitterness of a tainted filter hit the back of my throat.

“We better get going,” I said.

It was no longer raining. We should have left whenever the downpour eased off—we were cutting it fine with our filters—but neither of us had noticed the storm passing.

“Aren't you forgetting something?” Paula asked as I headed for the door.

I looked at her, puzzled.

“What we came for, Ben.”

It was the first time she'd used my given name. I was taken aback, so Paula had to provide the answer to her rhetorical question:
“Lichens and Mosses of the World.”

She laughed at my forgetfulness, but there was nothing unkind about it.

We found the book quickly, and set off for the bridge.

Our filters were too tainted to wear by the time we got there, so we stopped to change them. As I was spitting the old one into my hand, I heard Paula say, “Damn!”

She'd dropped her fresh filtermask in a puddle. The filthy water must have been as toxic as it looked because the tissue disintegrated in front of our eyes, as if steeped in a bath of pure acid.

Taking out my last filtermask, I put it in the palm of my hand—and then, before Paula realized what I was about to do, I put my hand over her mouth and held it there long enough for the protective membrane to soften and become as much a part of my partner's face as her skin.

“Ben,” she said, when I took my hand away.

“It's okay,” I told her.

“But…”

“It's my fault you're out here in the first place,” I said.

But we both knew there was more than that behind what I'd just done.

W
HEN
P
AULA AND
I
GOT BACK TO THE COMMUNITY
we said a long goodbye of the kind that has few words but plenty meaningful looks—though I wasn't sure exactly what the looks meant, and I'm willing to bet she wasn't, either.

Saying goodbye to Paula meant all I took to bed was
Lichens and Mosses of the World.
The first thing I noticed when I opened the book was a musty smell that made me think conditions between its pages were ideal for the propagation of its subject matter.

I read every word on the first page but didn't get any clues, and didn't even get interested in lichens and mosses.

The prospect of reading another couple of hundred pages wasn't a particularly pleasant one, so I flicked through them and looked at the photos, hoping something besides a musty smell would leap out at me. It wouldn't have been quite so bad if the book was about plants that at least had leaves and flowers, but
lichens and mosses?
One picture looked pretty much like the next, and the captions underneath were mostly in Latin and meant even less to me than the photos.

The text itself might as well have been in Latin, I realized as I ploughed through the turgid prose. I had to read every second paragraph at least twice because my thoughts kept drifting off on a tangent. Occasionally the tangents took me to Doug MacDougall's flat and his daughter's classroom, but more often they took me to the Newport library.

After dozing off half a dozen times, waking with a start when the book fell out of my hands and clobbered me, I finally fell into a proper sleep on page 132.

I woke up at five in the morning after a dream like something from
Day of the Triffids,
with me as Howard Keel, and a heroine who kept changing. One moment she had Paula's face and Annie MacDougall's body, and the next moment it was the other way around. I don't know which version was most disconcerting. Then I remembered Jen had turned up in my dream, too. At least her head did. The rest of her was a penguin, and she was waddling over the bridge.

I was glad to get back to the book, which shows how messed up my dream was. Forcing myself to go back a dozen pages, because I'd been so sleepy when I read them I could have missed something of importance, I went from page 120 right through to the finish. For the sake of thoroughness, I even scanned the index.

When I put the book down at 6.30 a.m. I was no further forward than when I'd picked it up eight hours earlier. I knew a little more about lichens and mosses than I'd ever expected to, but I still knew a whole lot less about what lay behind the death of Doug MacDougall than I wanted to. I shouldn't have been disappointed, because there was no certainty that what he'd read had anything to do with why he was killed. Even if it did, there was no guarantee he'd read it in
Lichens and Mosses of the World.

But alongside my disappointment was a frustration which spoke volumes, and what it said was that deep down, in the place where intuition and experience give birth to hunches that are right more often than not, I still believed I was holding the key to a murder mystery in my hands, rather than a boring book on plants.

The thought of re-reading that book in an attempt to spot something I'd been too weary to notice first time around wasn't as appealing as the thought of getting Paula to pore over its pages and see if she spotted anything that had eluded me. Even more appealing than either of those thoughts was the thought of Paula. Since it was too early to get up for work, I lay there thinking about her and going over the events of the previous day. They would have seemed like figments of my overworked imagination if it hadn't been for the tattered book lying on the bed beside me, tangible evidence I'd actually visited the library on the other side of the river. I replayed every expression I'd seen in Paula's eyes, every word that betrayed an emotion I'd never believed she possessed…

And I wondered what it would be like when we met up in the station house an hour from now. Part of me couldn't wait to see her again; part of me was scared of what would happen when I did. I envisaged three likely scenarios: she'd pretend the previous day never happened, and we'd go back to the way we'd been before; she'd overcompensate for having opened up to me, and act even colder than usual; or we'd pick up where we left off the previous evening, when we'd exchanged smiles in the airlock of Haven Nine. The smiles had given way to a heart-stopping moment when each of us briefly considered kissing the other. Then we'd laughed at our embarrassment, and after the laughter died away she'd said, “Thanks, Ben.”

“What for?” I'd asked.

“For giving me your last filter… And for a day like no other.”

Then came our long goodbye, the one that was short on words but big on meaningful looks.

And now it was a new day. I was hoping it would be like yesterday, but feared it might be more like all the other days.

The moment I walked into the station house, I knew my fears had been a whole lot closer to the mark than my hopes. I gave Paula a smile like the one I'd given her the night before, and in return got nothing more than a curt nod of acknowledgement. Maybe she was worried about compromising our professional relationship, or maybe she was scared of getting hurt on a more personal level. Wanting to reassure her on both counts, I said, “Paula, about yesterday—”

She cut me off in mid-sentence—the way Numbers infuriatingly do when they're not interested in what you have to say—by asking, “Any progress?” She pointed to the copy of
Lichens and Mosses of the World
I carried under my arm.

I shook my head. Fixing her with my most deeply meaningful look, I said, “I suppose it was a long shot, and I feel a bit silly for thinking anything might have come of it.” I was talking about more than the book, and I'm sure she knew it. I waited for some sign: a softening of her expression, if not a reassuring word or two. But she went back to studying her screen as if she hadn't heard.

“Do you want to let things drop?” I asked. Again I was talking about more than the MacDougall case.

Paula hesitated. I like to think the pause reflected some inner conflict between head and heart, but maybe that was wishful thinking.

“That might be for the best,” she said. “I don't think it was going anywhere.”

Now I knew
she
was talking about more than the MacDougall case—and that she lacked conviction, because she didn't look me in the eye when she spoke. It was as if she was afraid I'd see something in her expression that belied her words.

“I think it'd be a shame not to find out and always to be left wondering,” I said. “I think that'd be worse than trying and failing.”