His hand closed round the scrap of paper as if it were a nugget of gold. He leaned his head against the wall. He folded the paper and put it carefully in his hip pocket. He hoped he would still want to phone her when he was sober. Then he saw her come back in, taking off her coat. She said something to Sylvia. He watched her mix two drinks at the table. One seemed to be whisky and water. She turned and walked towards him until she was standing beside him, exactly where she had stood before.
‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘The taxi-driver was nice. Said he’ll look after him.’
She handed him the drink that looked like whisky and water.
Sometimes the gods smile upon the lunatic, he thought.
‘Cannamore?’ Alison said. ‘Ends of the earth? It’s about an hour on the ferry.’
‘Her sense of geography is prehistoric,’ Kate said.
‘At least my sense of men isn’t. Like you, Kate. Dark pasts and romantic figures wrapped in mystery. Like a bloody opera-cloak. What’re you waiting for? To meet Byron in Tesco’s? He’s dead. Long time dead. Look at them.’
She indicated the young men at the bar. Kate followed her nodding head. She saw, first of all, the living representation of a thought she had often had: the physical variety of people is amazing. Wasn’t it incredible that, with all the people there were in the world, you couldn’t find two exactly the same? Even identical twins weren’t really identical. The term didn’t describe the reality, just the carelessness with which people observed the reality. And beyond a category like that, all was blatant and mind-blowing difference.
What life managed to do with limited materials was astounding. After all, how many different shapes could you give to something as basic as a nose? A bone, a lump of skin and two breathing holes. It wasn’t exactly, you would have thought, the stuff of infinite variation. How many eye-colours could you get? Not a lot, and you weren’t allowed to have different colours within any one iris. You couldn’t, for example, have striped eyes. That might have helped to vary things a bit. And mouths. Two soft folds of flesh around a set of teeth or the lack of them, as the case may be. It really was amazing.
Look at those men at the bar. Everything was slightly different about each of them. Height, weight, hair, features – everything. Looking at them, she realised what exactly she had against Dolly the sheep. Well, not against Dolly personally but against the whole idea of cloning. (Come to think of it, could you have anything against a clone personally, since it was not itself in the first place but merely an imitation of somebody else? It would be like, say, standing in a cave with someone. And they insult you. And the insult has an echo. It would be like starting an argument with the echo. Instead of with the person who insulted you. Something like that.)
But that was what was wrong with cloning. People were always discussing the ethics of it. It didn’t seem to her it was so much a matter of ethics as a matter of the nature of experience. The whole nature of life, it seemed to her, moved towards difference, unique individuality. At least, among people that was true. In a sense, life never repeated itself. Cloning was a precise, deliberate repetition. Cloning was anti-life.
Yet, watching the men at the bar, she was forced to wonder if cloning had been invented before Dolly had come along. For all their immediately obvious physical differences, these men seemed determined to pretend they were all one another. It wasn’t just their clothes. The behaviour of each was like an echo of everybody else in the group. They had the same self-assurance, the same way of glancing arrogantly round the pub. They laughed like a convention of mimics. They were trying, she decided, to clone themselves psychologically.
It was sad. It was sad because it couldn’t be true. There had to be some who felt a little insecurity. Maybe one didn’t feel tough at all. Maybe one was afraid of spiders. Maybe one was even still a virgin. But you couldn’t have guessed it.
It wasn’t that she would have expected them to declare such things publicly. She didn’t expect them to walk about with placards round their necks. Fragile – Handle with Care. Arachnaphobics Anonymous. Vagina might as well be a state in America for all I know about it. (That would have to be a sandwich-board, she supposed.) But she would have hoped the truth of themselves might be honestly, if obliquely, expressed in the way they acted towards others. Otherwise the most interesting aspects of themselves, the places where they really lived, were being denied all the time. So how could you hope ever really to meet them or, perhaps more importantly, allow them to meet you?
With these men, she didn’t even want to try. They were all acting in close harmony, like a repertory company that had been together a long time. You were allowed to watch but they were the only ones who knew the plot. It was as if only they were natives here. Everybody else was just a tourist. She certainly felt like one.
‘You see what I’m saying?’ Jacqui was saying. ‘Just look at them. Romance? They think that’s a long run for their team in the Cup. Don’t waste your time looking for more than sex with them. They can only relate to you from the waist down. They look round the women in this pub, all they see is a lot of convenient spaces. Somewhere they can park their amazing equipment. Till the urge passes. And they can get on with what really matters again. Mainly beer with the boys and football matches. The rest is patter. Just the money in the meter that lets you stay there till you get your business done.’
Jacqui took a bitter gulp of Bacardi and Coke.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘If that’s the game, more than one can play it.’
Kate winced. Some suspicion in her was worried that Jacqui was right. She didn’t want her to be right but almost envied her for her certainty. At least it made her connect directly with the world around her, even if she did it rather abrasively. At least she was dynamic.
She seemed strong. Kate saw her as a kind of Boudicca figure. She drove through situations and her chariot-wheels had blades on them, very sharp blades. So what if some people were hurt? It was mainly men she did the damage to and, post Kevin, she saw them as her enemies. At least she got where she was going. Didn’t she?
Kate always felt that she wasn’t going anywhere. She was hanging about in the anteroom to her own life. If Jacqui was Boudicca, she was the Lady of Shalott. Weaving fancies inside herself and hardly daring to venture out into where things actually happened. Catching echoes of what it might be like.
And Jacqui was honest – often brutally honest, but honest. She wasn’t. But to be honest you had to know what you thought about things. She didn’t. Maybe that was why she accepted so many situations without reacting to them in the way she really wanted to. She hesitated too much. At school she had been the type of pupil who knows the answers but is afraid to put up her hand in case she is wrong and makes a fool of herself. She would have liked to be able to run home, check it out in the World of Knowledge book her father had bought and run back into the classroom with her hand up. She was the type, except with Alison and Jacqui, who was likely to listen to nonsense or swallow a mild insult and postpone a reaction until she had gone back to her room and reprocessed the entire occasion in her head. She always thought exactly what she should have said when there was no one there to say it to.
It was a kind of lying, not having the nerve to own up to the truth of where you were. It was a condition that had become more serious recently. It no longer applied only in incidental moments. It had taken up permanent residence in one particular area of her life. She could still hardly believe that she had lied to Jacqui and Alison about not being a virgin.
That was one of the problems with lying. You spent so much effort sustaining the lie and elaborating on it that you almost began to believe it. There were times, remembering real situations like the one where she had had her pants off, when she could almost convince herself that what had happened was really a kind of sexual intercourse. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t. She was the only supposedly sexually experienced woman she knew with her hymen still intact. At least, she assumed it was. If it wasn’t, and her father insisted the culprit made an honest woman of