Genesis (25 page)

Authors: Jim Crace

BEL KNOWS EXACTLY who her father is. Her version of his birthmark makes him unmistakable. She is twenty-six already and has not been greatly tempted to turn up at blood's front door
to claim her heritage. Her mother is embarrassed by the very thought of it. It would not be fair or just to rock the life of someone who'd been little more than shy and innocent and careless all those many years ago, she says. “I'm sure he won't remember it. He didn't even ask my name when we â¦” She doesn't want to say “had sex.” She doesn't want to say “made love.”

Bel adores her mother fiercely, without reservation, like many only children of single parents do, and so will not pick up the phone to call Lix until her mother finally succumbs to the lymphoma that has plagued her for the past six years. Bel has a daughter herself, a one-year-old called Cade. A child needs grandparents. So possibly, with her mother gone, there'll be good cause to show the child to Felix Dern. Bel has prayed that that day will never come.

Her streetcar, as luck would have it on this evening, is almost empty. She has space enough to leave the stroller uncollapsed on the wooden-slatted floor, its wheels wedged in the grooves to keep the sleeping baby safe. Bel likes the smell and polish of an almost empty streetcar, the loving details of the ironwork, and the heave and judder of their progress through the town. The city senate must be mad to try to phase them out, and build instead a rapid transit system underground. What if the city flooded again? What were the views from underground?

She hopes her husband's at her stop when they arrive. He often comes to meet them if he gets off work in time, and then they go together to the shops, then go together to the local eatery where there are baby chairs and simple food and friends with children of their own, then go togetherâyes, the three of
themâto bed. Bel puts her finger in her mouth for luck. She lets it hang across her lower lip like a coat hanger. The longer she leaves it there, the more likely it will be that her husband is waiting. What sweeter prospect can there be than having someone meet you from your streetcar?

The few other passengers have other homes to think about, but one young manâthe sort who wonders what the stories are that occupy the other benches of his streetcar, especially the stories of young women his own ageâis keen to catch Bel's eye and smile at her. She's pretty in an interesting way. The smudge of birthmark on her cheek is kissable. Otherwise her face is like her baby's face, as still and innocent as sleep. She's like a little girl herself, he thinksâthat girlish finger in her mouth, that girlish look of love uncompromisedâand hardly old enough to be a mother. She does not look at him. She looks ahead, into the quickly gobbled streets. The streetcar counts off its rosary of stops. The baby sleeps.

The details of our lives are undramatic, if we're lucky, and a little dull. We hear the streetcar, but we have not yet heard the helicopter sweeping through the sky above, amongst the thermals that we have made with all our efforts and our industries all day. The helicopter's payload is a photographer and cameras, keen to strip us to the bone, keen to catch us at our best, at our most mesmerizing, from above at night, with all the detail washed away by distance and by darkness. It's Fifty Cities of the World again, but for international Geo magazine this time. Life has folded long ago. Our City of Kisses will become, in this aerial depiction, the City of a Million Lights, a two-page spread with
staples in the sky. Our celebrated city is being photographed to be a shirt of light with its black tie of river.

Then everyone will see our slo-mo shift of moon and stars in Geo magazine. They'll see a thin and shaking glow, unspecified, of early evening smudged. They'll see the colored mesh of still and moving lights, enhanced by rainâa half a million windows laying out their rhomboids of reflected brilliance, five thousand cars, ten thousand headlights peeping at the world, a hundred bright and heated streetcars, six floodlit tennis courts unused, two pinprick glowing cigarettes not quite ashore. No kissing this time. No flesh and blood. No lips. Such things cannot be spotted from afar. Still, the streaks and pricks of light are eloquent. They tell of people going home. They tell of love and lovemaking, of children, marriages, and lives. You think, But this could happen anywhere. It does.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

CONTINENT

THE GIFT OF STONES

ARCADIA

SIGNALS OF DISTRESS

QUARANTINE

BEING DEAD

THE DEVIL'S LARDER

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

19 Union Square West, New York 10003

Originally published in 2003 by Viking Penguin, Great Britain, as Six

Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux