neither,’ said Josie. ‘But I know who I am and I’m perfect.’ It was their mantra from way back.
‘You look about twelve,’ said Honour to Josie. ‘And I’m not much better. I guess what they’re saying is true.’
‘Go on, tell,’ said Josie. ‘What are they saying?’
‘Nex Control upped our Ecstasy 3 last week and our age reversal is now irreversible,’ said Honour. ‘We’re all growing younger exponentially. Give us another fifteen minutes and we’ll return to the womb and lapse into a coma; then we’ll drift into nothingness; we’ll be unconceived; we will not have existed. Funny thing is, I don’t mind one bit.’
Josie puzzled over Honour’s words.
‘You’re having me on,’ said Josie. ‘Why would they do a thing like that?’
Curiosity survived, when little else did. Josie felt her chest and it was flat, flat, flat. The breasts were gone. She wailed a thin high wail, but cut it short for politeness’ sake. The habit of politeness lasted as well, it seemed.
‘To make space for themselves,’ said Honour. ‘The young want their turn too. The underclass are tired of us. They hate us.’
Josie’s central screen leapt into life. A girl of about seven looked out at her. ‘Hi, everyone,’ she said. ‘I’m Eleanor at Web Central. I’m ever so sorry. I did my best, but they weren’t fair. They’re real meanies. I called the technicians in, but when they came they were just toddlers and pooing all over the place – it was disgusting. So I told them to go away. I did right, didn’t I?’
Eleanor’s place on screen was taken by an ugly young woman in her early twenties. ‘My name’s Mandy Miller,’ she said. ‘I am here to keep my appointment with you. I am the death you have all been expecting.’
Josie realised Mandy Miller wasn’t ugly at all, merely human. She, Josie, was so accustomed to seeing perfection on her screens she’d forgotten what unremedied people looked like. Appalling.
‘Our hypnotists at Nex Control have tried to make it easy for you,’ said Mandy Miller, ‘and given you time to adjust. For “DONUT” read “Don’t”, reverse “revo.efil” and get “Life Over”. Not perfect, but the best I could do. Nex Control is the political wing of the underclass. Time now for the young to march along the Web Highway, arm in arm, in unremedied glory.’
At least that was what Josie thought she heard. But how could she know? She only knew she was 132 because Zelda had said so, and perhaps Zelda had got the decimal point wrong and she was 1.32. Really one knew very little about anything. Words had begun to make little sense; now there were only shapes and sounds. Josie was conscious of a shattering brilliance all around, and of wanting to be in the shade; then there was a sudden welcoming dark at the end of the bright tunnel, and Josie travelled through it, quite suddenly, to warmth and peace, safety and silence.
GUP – or Falling in Love in Helsinki
You’ll never guess what happened to me in Helsinki. How my life changed, when I was there last October. Let me tell you! The trees in that much-islanded, much-forested Northern country – you’ve never seen so many islands, so much forest, so low and misty and large an autumn sun – were just on the turn; the rather boring universal green giving up and suddenly glowing into reds and yellows and browns. ‘Ruska’ is what the Finns call this annual triumph of variety over uniformity; something so dramatic they even have this special name for it. It is, I suppose, the last flaring surge of summer: like a woman of fifty who throws out the black shoes she’s worn all her life and shods herself in greens and pinks, feeling she’d better make the best of things while she can. Not that I’m fifty, in case you’re wondering, I’m twenty-nine; but twenty-nine can feel pretty old. Older, I imagine, than fifty, because around thirty the tick-tock of the biological clock can sound pretty loud in a woman’s ear.
My mother wants me to stay home, get married, have children.
‘Settle down, Jude,’ she’d plead. ‘It’s what I want for you.’
‘I can’t think why,’ I’d say. ‘You never did.’
‘That’s different,’ she’d say, and pour another whisky and light up her cigar. My mother is a professional golf coach, and has been ever since my father walked out twenty-five years ago. She had to do something to earn a living. She’s a healthy and athletic woman, though she must be over sixty, and men are still for ever knocking at her door, though she doesn’t often let them in. The whisky and cigar syndrome is no problem (or only to my sister Chris). I see it as just my mother’s rather old-fashioned way of saying to a man, ‘I’m as good as you. What do I want you for?’
‘Christ,’ I say to my sister, ‘Mother’s whisky is always well watered. The cigar goes out after ten seconds. What are you worrying about?’ But Chris is a nurse. She was seven when my father left. I was four.
My mother’s determination that I should settle down seems to me a fine example of GUP. What do I mean by GUP? It’s the Great Universal Paradox which rules our lives. See it at work in any obstetric ward, at the very beginning of things. There you’ll find a woman who only ever wanted a baby but hers was stillborn, and another who’s just had a living baby she doesn’t want, and someone in for a sterilisation and another for a termination, and another with a threatened miscarriage, and another resting up before sextuplets, having taken too much fertility drug – and all will be weeping. All want different things so passionately; and nature takes no notice at all of what they want. Nature just rumbles on insanely, refining the race.
What you want you can’t have: what you do have, you don’t want. That’s GUP.
When I arrived in Helsinki I was in love with Andreas Anders, who didn’t love me. And I was loved by Tony Schuster, whom I didn’t love. My loving of Andreas Anders loomed large in my life, and had done so for six years. Tony Schuster loving me, which he had for all of seven days, meant to me next to nothing; that’s the way GUP goes. Andreas Anders not loving me made me feel fat and stupid: so if Tony Schuster was capable of loving someone as fat and stupid as me, what did that make Tony Schuster? Some sort of wimp? In other words, as famously spoken by Marx (not Karl, but the third brother) tearing up the long-sought invitation to join – ‘Who wants to belong to a club of which I’m a member?’ GUP.
Finland is just across a strip of sea from the Soviet Union, though the government is of a rather different kind and in Finland women seem to run everything, whereas in Russia it’s the men. Finland is noble but Russia is exciting. Little Finnish children always look so healthy, bright-eyed, well-mittened and properly fed to keep out the cold. Yes, yes, I know. I’m broody. Bright, bright clothes they wear, in Helsinki. Terrifically fashionable. Lots of suede, so soft it looks and acts like linen.
We were in Helsinki to make a six-part thriller called Lenin in Love for BBC TV. Helsinki’s Great Square is the same period, same proportions, same size as Moscow’s Red Square, so it gets used by film companies a great deal. Filming in Red Square itself is always a hassle: there’s a lot of worried security men about and they like to read the script and object if it says anything detrimental about the Soviet Union – and the script usually does: that being the whole point of cold-war thrillers. Their wrongness, our tightness. The queue for Lenin’s tomb is always getting into shot, and you can hardly ask the punters to move on, when they’ve railed all the way in from Tashkent or Samarkand to be there. So off everyone goes to Helsinki to film the Moscow bits. Doctor Zhivago