Page 68 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

“Taking your ovaries, using this revolutionary technique to make sure that every last one of the remaining eggs is, well, as ‘fresh’ as those of the young, well, younger, woman you once were… that’s pretty amazing…”

It wasn’t the insensitivity of “fresh eggs” that triggered the giggle either, even though the lawyer was herself an inoffensive looking woman who might in simpler times have been expected to catch the phrase and re-tool it before it completed its journey from her brain to her mouth. But these weren’t simpler times. If they were, the Girl thought, someone might have at least had the grace to call the fridge/centrifuge crossbreed something other than a “Host”. Maybe a “Hostess”. No, it was what the scientist then said, as if cleverly tag-teaming with the lawyer.

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t think of it as a personal loss: think of it like a harvest for the world.”

“A Harvest for the World”. Title of the R&B playlist she used to run to when Spotify was still up. The song had been one of her mother’s favourites, the dead mother who gave her her own love of R&B and disco, who insisted “We are Family” be played at every family gathering, even if it was just her and her brother dancing round the kitchen table in those long lost and still lamented “simpler times”. She was pretty sure the scientist hadn’t consciously been referencing The Isley Brothers, but the incongruity of his words made her snort.

The other thing that made her giggle was contrary and much darker. She was terrified. Because this was the moment she’d been fearing, the one where her bodily autonomy was taken away. The one a seemingly stern nurse had quietly warned her about, softening as she made it clear that she, the nurse, would likely be imprisoned if it got out that they’d had the conversation. It was the first time the Girl realised that everything about the facility was covered by the Official Secrets Act. And that had been chilling enough. The stern nurse – who turned out to actually be a kind nurse made stern-looking by the pressure of working ever more closely to the wrong side of the Hippocratic Oath – told her that things were consensual at the facility, until they weren’t. And that some of those other subjects who had been “moved” had in fact done so under duress, and several of them had not survived the “experimental augmentations” they had been subjected to in anything close to good health. The nurse had advised her not to give anyone the idea she was anything other than still fully compliant, because there was a regime of closer surveillance that the less amenable patients were subjected to.

“Keep smiling,” she said. “And if you decide to run, run without giving them a clue you’re unhappy.”

“Why would I run?” said the Girl. “I can just tell them I want to go.”

“You can tell them,” said the nurse. “But they won’t let you.”

“How do you know?” said the Girl, feeling the catch of fear in her throat.

“Because I’ve seen it happen,” said the nurse. “And I couldn’t do anything about it. I can do something about you though, and I’m doing it. Be clever. Be smiling. Talk about it with your bloke. But do it in person, and do it outside, away from any trees.”

“Trees?” the Girl said. Her world was beginning to spin a little too fast and she felt a kind of rising vertigo.

“Come on,” said the nurse. “It’s not just the walls have ears.”

That’s when the terror began to build in her. That’s the moment the unsaid and the suspected became real, like shadows in the dark solidifying into a monster. Everything that had felt bad about the place, everything she had suppressed and chided herself for being paranoid about in order to survive the treatments and the endless waiting and the disappointment crystallised into a crushing concrete reality.

They came for her at dawn, just as she’d feared they would. Not just the doctors and the scientists but two government lawyers with matching policewomen, walking behind the still friendly but apologetic male nurses, who were pushing a gurney fitted with hand and feet restraints. Just in case.

It was something of a parade, but then the business was one of national, even international, significance. The security team had confirmed she was on the premises, which was as expected, it being the Friday, the day when she went for her swim later than normal, after getting the weekly hormone injection. They’d watched the CCTV as GJ went off to the beach on her own, which was unsurprising as – being pregnant now – she no longer needed the injections, her own smile of bruises being complete.

There’s one thing about having an escape plan – the having of it can be its own problem. It can lull the potential escapee into a kind of complacency. Knowing you can leave makes you less claustrophobic as the Girl had said, but that can also make you less aware of the urgency. It can mess up your timing. It can deaden you to the signals you should have been alert to.

They weren’t normally stupid or overly naive, neither the Boy nor the Girl. They had a signal of their own. Of course they had a signal. The signal was a word they’d never normally use, and though the nurse had warned her that the emails were likely monitored she figured it was safe enough to write an anodyne update on the last few days since they’d communicated. So the email saying she was feeling more “chipper” at the prospect of his return from Saudi in a couple of weeks winged its way through the increasingly hiccuppy internet. En route, in a cruel twist of digital timing, it must have passed his last email coming in the other direction, because no sooner had she hit send than he pinged into her inbox with an update too extensive to have been written in response to her message.

Hey. Missing you a lot like always. It’s worse when I’m closer to coming home. Why is that? Anyway, are you OK? I hope (think) you are this time. A strange (Spooky? Good) thing happened. Had a dream about you last night, a good one, like the old, old days, and we were running up a hill and I kept laughing and trying to make you slow down but you wouldn’t and when I asked you why not, what was all the hurry about you pointed to the top of the hill and said “Because we have to get there before he goes”. And at the top of the hill was Arch, just standing there in the sunlight, tail wagging and as excited to see us as we were to see him, and then there was a rustling noise in the heather behind him, like a rabbit breaking cover, and he turned and ran barking over the lip of the hill, and when we got to the top he was gone, just gone, no Arch, no rabbit, just hill and more hill and no dog at all, even though we could see for miles and I was sad and you laughed and said it was all right, because we’d seen him.

And so far, so sentimental, right? That’s not the strange (Spooky? Good) thing. That happened this afternoon. We were at the site trying to figure out this week’s fuck-up, when I went on a smoke break with Rahul (sorry bad habits proliferate when you’re not around, you know that). And there was a family sitting in the sun outside their house and the woman was playing with some puppies her dog had had a couple of months ago. We got to talking and she said how sad it made her that there were no children to play with them, because when she was young there were always children and puppies, because they just went together like each was made for the other. And I looked at the mother dog, and I swear, I stopped breathing for a moment. I’ve attached a picture. You’ll see why. Doesn’t look like any other dog I’ve ever seen out here. Does look like you know who, right? Anyway. After dreaming about him the night before, and seeing there were these puppies going begging… If I can get him his shots and certificate – if anyone still worries about that stuff – I’m bringing him home. For you. Keep you company if I have to go away again for a time. But I don’t want to. I think I’m done fixing things other than us for a bit. I think that’s why the universe sent me the dream and gave us the dog. I’m getting superstitious in my old age, right? Dog’s almost offensively charming btw. A lovely ball of fur sleeping in my lap as I type this.

I love you. xxx

There are two pictures on the bottom of the email. One is a dog that is, despite its background – sun-bleached and sand-blasted – the spitting image of the dog jumping with them on that beach, back on the day the world began its long countdown to genetic oblivion. The other is a picture of a small ball of black and tan fur, sitting alert on the passenger seat of a 4WD, peering out at her, head cocked, one ear up, one ear down, looking, as advertised, almost offensively disarming.

It would have been ridiculously heart-warming had she not been chilled beyond measure by the nurse’s warning. She just stared at the dog, and reread the message a couple of times, until his actual reply to her email pinged in.

So glad you’re feeling more chipper. Know you were a little low earlier in the week, but that’s just when it’s time to dig deep and take hope. I’ll be with you soon and can’t wait.

Dog sends love too.

Xxx

So by the time the rattling procession had arrived at her door, she’d done exactly that, left in the dark in GJ’s distinctive Dri-Robe with the hood up to hide her face, made her way to the sea, taken Hope, slipped its moorings and headed south.

GJ had insisted she use her Dri-Robe. She’d enjoyed the conspiracy, and had waved off the Girl’s worries about getting her into trouble.

“What are they going to do to me?” GJ said. “I’m up the duff! I’m the goose that lays the bloody golden eggs! They’re not going to slice me up and stick my bits in RoboWomb are they? You just bugger off sharpish. And don’t tell me where you’re going. I’m not strong like you. I’d buckle under questioning.”

“Hell you would,” said the Girl, hugging her with a fierceness that surprised both of them. “You’re a tosser, just like me.”

The Girl continued heading south until she was out of sight of land and all the watching eyes, concentrating on just sailing the boat, finding a kind of mental calm in the physical demands of balancing the wind on the sails above her head against the cut and tug of the rudder against the sea beneath her feet. After three hours, when she judged the tide had turned and was heading back out into the Atlantic – and the light was coming back into the sky enough that she trusted her eyes to see any potential collisions ahead of her – she turned off the running lights and prepared to say goodbye to her phone. This was something they’d talked about when joking about planning the escape that was now not a joke but an increasingly chilly reality. She checked the horizon, took a GPS fix from the phone, and ducked below deck to pull on a second musty smelling wool sweater and retrieve the jar. The jar was a big plastic one that had once held peanut butter. She put her phone inside, and screwed the lid shut as tightly as she could. She then pulled self-fusing black silicon tape around the rim, stretching it tight and cinching it against itself so that it melded into a waterproof seal. She looked at the phone one last time, feeling oddly sentimental, as if saying farewell to an old friend, and then dropped it into the water. Despite herself she felt a reflexive twinge of guilt about littering the sea with more garbage. She watched the wind and tide carry the jar away from the boat, heading more or less in a south-westerly direction towards the open ocean. Then the screen blipped out as the phone went to sleep to conserve what would be its final charge, and she checked the compass, adjusted her canvas and turned about, heading north, racing aslant the tide, sails tipped like a fugitive keeping low as she made her run for freedom.