Mendel's Dwarf (38 page)

“Genes and chromosomes.”

“I’ve heard of them. You know what the male chromosome said to the female genes?”

“No, but I’m about to.”

“There’re no flies on you, darling. It’s on page fifteen. There’s a whole bunch of genetics jokes. There’s a competition for the best one.”

“Try
me
,” I suggested.

In the street, passersby seemed to stare with new curiosity.
DWARF GOES WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE
, said one newspaper;
LITTLE GUY, BIG DISCOVERY
, said another. “You the bloke in the paper this morning?” someone asked on the bus. “You ’im? Bloody marvelous, I say.” At the laboratories the phone never seemed to stop ringing. The receptionist fielded a lot of the calls. She told the callers I wasn’t available for interviews or photographs, wasn’t available to do a show at the London Palladium or Chipperfield’s Circus, wasn’t prepared to pose with three naked models for an advertisement for color film. But one call
she did pass on to me. Jean’s voice, distant and anxious, sounded in my ear. “I saw you in the paper.”

“So did everyone else. How are things?”

“They’re okay.”
Okay
is a relative term. I waited for her to continue. “I’m in the clinic,” she said quietly. “I’ve just had the result of the test.”

“And?”

A small electronic whisper. “There’s a baby. Ben, I’m pregnant.”

It is difficult to reconstruct an emotion. At times it is difficult even to admit to one. I have practiced long and hard at denying entry to such twin imposters as triumph and disaster, or love and hate, but sometimes the barriers are breached. So I admit that standing there in the laboratory office with the telephone receiver in my hand and the desk before me strewn with the rough notes of my speech to the forthcoming Mendel Symposium, I felt a sharp lance of anguish for the child’s future, muddled with a sensation of triumph.

There was a rush of static silence in the receiver. I had almost forgotten Jean. “Are you there?” she said. “Benedict?”

“Yes.”

“Ben, I’m frightened. Will it be all right? The baby, I mean. Will it be all right?”

“I’m sure it will. It’ll be just like its mother.”

Another silence. The problem with the telephone is that silence is all you’ve got as an alternative to speech. “I wish,” she said quietly. “I wish it could be like its father.”

“That can be arranged.”

“You know what I mean. Stop trying to trip me up.”

“You’re tripping me up,” I replied tartly. “Have you told your husband?”

She ignored my question. When she spoke, there was a hint of anxiety in her tone. Even down a few miles of wire I could sense the shiver of doubt. “It
will
be all right, won’t it, Ben?” The
voice trailed off into the faint whispering of the ether. “Ben …?” And I could picture that mouse-gray head filled with doubt, that soft and stubborn face bewildered by the gambler’s sense of the shifting nature of things, the capricious machinations of the world of wagering. “Ben, you did do it right, didn’t you?”

“Do you mean have I dumped you in it? Do you mean have I played the kind of practical joke on you that life played on me? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it? Did I close my eyes and pick one out at random? God knows, that’s what God did with me.”

She made a sound, like the cry of a mammal in pain. “Ben,” she cried. “Ben … please …”

And suddenly fulfillment was transformed into anger. Anger at the docile stupidity of her, at the pleading, whining kindness of her, at her naïveté. “Well, you’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?” I said to her. Then I put the phone down.

Unforgivable? Have I forfeited all sympathy? But you must understand I have never looked for your sympathy. Even if at times I have gained it, I can assure you I have never sought it out. Sympathy is an unctuous, slimy emotion. It is tainted with
Schadenfreude
, rank with contempt, fetid with the implication that I, the target, am somehow less than you, the sympathizer. I don’t want your sympathy. I have never asked for it. Never so much as once have I played the poor, sad dwarf, smiling through his tears.

Another call that was put through to me that morning was from the BBC. One Jake Toogood. “You must be just about sick of people calling at the moment,” he said, and I agreed with him heartily. “But I was wondering whether we might meet up to discuss the possibility of our doing a documentary about you. Not just the scientific thing, but the personal interest as well. How does that sound?”

“I really don’t think—”

“Just a chat, to see how the land lies. Don’t throw me out without hearing me out, there’s a good fellow.”

Jean standing at the mouth of my cave. Jean pallid about the mouth, the iron railings standing over her head like a crown of virtue. Jean railing at me with accusation and censure. Jean clambering up onto the moral high ground while descending the steps that lead down to the door, a different Jean from the shrinking gray moth of the past. “How could you
do
this, Ben?” She spoke in italics, almost as though speaking to an idiot child that has crapped on the carpet. “How could you
do
this to me?” She was dressed all in black, as though she had come to mourn something.

“You’d better come in.”

“Are you trying to get revenge or something? Is that it?”

“No, it’s not it.”

“Because you’ve succeeded. Oh yes, you’ve succeeded.” Her accent slipped when she was angry, the ugly vowels of the Midlands breaking through the varnish that she had acquired since moving to London. “You’ve had your revenge. You’ve
had
it.”

I ushered her in through the front door, watching the way she moved, eyeing her from the angle of Ben, examining the sleek and subtle motion of her legs, the delicate flexing of them as she sat at one of the upright chairs (designed for normal people, this one). “Stop looking at me like that.” She turned away from my gaze, her hand going distractedly to her hair as though she felt something was out of place. Her eyes, those mismatched eyes, stared round my cave with a vagrant cast in them. “You’ve changed the curtains.”

“I’ve changed my life.”

“Don’t try that.” She looked back at me and shook her head. “For God’s sake, don’t try to play on my sympathy, Ben.”

“Because you haven’t any?”

“I haven’t any
left
,” she snapped. “You’ve used it up, don’t you see that? You’ve exhausted it.” She held out helpless hands.
“You must tell me, Ben. You can’t just leave me like this … If you don’t, I’ll get rid of it again—”

“It’s not it.”

She stared at me as though she had only just noticed me crouching there. “What’s not it? What the hell do you mean? You’re always playing with words. You’re always playing with people, for God’s sake. As though it was some kind of game.”

“It?”

“Oh, shut up.”

There was a moment’s truce. She tried once more: “What’s not
it?
”

“The baby’s not it.”

“What do you mean?” She touched her belly. Oh, how well I knew it, that pale, sleek presence beneath the folds of her dress, that fold of silken sin, umbilicus bulging slightly, abdomen declining gently toward a shadowy valley. How well I had known its fragrant pastures, its hidden pubescent delights. “What do you mean?” she repeated.

“It’s not
it
. It’s a boy.”

A stillness. She sat there in my dwarf’s cavern, a giantess among the normal men, gravid with a boy. “You
know?
”

“Of course I know. It’s a he. He’ll have blond hair from your mother—isn’t that right?—and a widow’s peak from my father. His skin will be pale and freckled like your own, and his eyes will be brown like mine. His nose will be aquiline like my father’s, but he will not have my father’s cleft chin. He will be, like my mother, left-handed. This, incidentally, is a disadvantage, left-handed people having a lower life expectancy than right; but I don’t think you want to worry about that too much. Above all, above every other little quirk and curiosity that he possesses, he will grow straight and sleek and will eventually reach five feet eleven inches. He will be … 
normal
.”

Jean watched me carefully. It was an expression that was quite new to her. But then she was changed in so many ways.
“You can’t know all that. You can’t.” Her expression metamorphosed. Her eyes hardened. Her lips tightened, turning white at the corners. There was a pallor about her neck. “You can’t know all that,” she repeated, and her voice was louder now, as though there were some force behind it, driving the sound out through her teeth. “It’s another of your bloody, superior jokes. You can’t know about everything, you and your bloody genes, you
can’t
know everything! You can’t play God!”

By now she was shouting. It was positive feedback, anger making her angrier still, like the cascading effect of enzymes, the second stimulating the first to stimulate the second, a dangerous and unstable cycle of hate and loathing and loathing and hate, until she was standing over me like a harpy, with her fists clenched and her face contorted. “YOU CAN’T PLAY WITH ME LIKE THIS!” she screamed. “YOU’RE NOT GOD!”

And then she hit me.

That, I suppose, broke the cycle. After the storm comes that sullen calm, and a thin drizzle of tears. She sat down in her chair and covered her face with her hands. “I’m sorry, Ben. Oh God, I’m sorry.”

I picked myself up, touching the side of my head where the skin smarted. She made to rise, but I held up my hand as though to ward her off. “I’m all right,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m quite all right. And I
do
know he’s a boy. I do know he’s a boy and I do know he’ll be tall. I didn’t play God, Jean. Unlike God, I chose … with something approaching love.”

She smiled bitterly. Miss Jean Piercey smiled through tears and misery at her dwarf. “Love of whom, Ben?” she asked. “Yourself?”

“Of course we want the labs and all that. I mean, it’ll be great to have you going over some of the simpler techniques, demonstrating
the gene machine, that kind of thing—can you
really
make your own genes?—but …”

“No, you can’t, yet. But what?”

“But we’re also after the personal thing …”

Jake Toogood was heavy and loose, with an ill-fitting fawn jacket and a crumpled navy shirt with the name Armani embroidered discreetly on the pocket flap. He had a cleft chin (autosomal dominant) and a fringe of blond hair (autosomal recessive) hanging in a long curtain around the edge of a bald cranium (sex-limited autosomal dominant). His accent was Cockney hybridized with transatlantic. He turned his nose up at the quiche and ordered wine rather than beer and asked me whether I really wouldn’t rather be somewhere other than The Pig and Poke. I told him that I was quite happy with the place, that it was my local, that I felt at home there, that at least it wasn’t a pretentious little wine bar run by someone called Damien; and Toogood suddenly found qualities in the place that he hadn’t seen before.

“Great, Ben,” he decided, “just great. It’s just the kind of thing we’re after—the personal interest. Friends, family, how you cope with life. Getting up in the morning, getting to work, doing the shopping, getting a beer in the pub, all that kind of thing. As well as the genetics. Incidentally, Ben, are your parents—?”

“There’s just my mother.”

“Is she …?”

“Is she what?”

He looked awkward.
“Normal.”

“She’s normal.”

“And your old man?”

“Also normal.” I looked him straight in the eye. “I’m a mutant.”

He barely winced. “That’s great, Ben. Great. Might your mum …?”

“I haven’t even said whether
I
will yet. I’m not a bloody circus act—”

“Circus? Christ, no, Ben. Grant me a little more taste than that. This is BBC 2, for God’s sake—bread as well as circuses, that’s the idea. A bit of everyday life, a bit of real science. I want to show that people like you are … just like people like me. Only smaller. Know what I mean? I saw that ‘Science Scene’ program you did. All very well and good, but the guys doing science documentaries are rather the breathless schoolboy type, aren’t they? You know—‘Wow, how many megabytes is it? Can you fly to the moon with it?’ That kind of thing. No, I see this film as Benedict the man, struggling with life like anyone else struggles with life, only …”