Where the Rainbow Begins

"Standard procedure is to go to the Repair Wing."  I hated Sylvia's Standard Procedure voice.  She knew as well as I did that if I went to the Repair Wing they were likely to erase my imagination just for the hell of it.  Naturally, I didn't want that.

Mind you, McBradley had had it done last year and they's replaced it with a better one.  But McBradley knew how to bribe a saint if he had to.

Anyway, Orgone came to the rescue.  She was the only transexual on the team.  I'm not really into trannies, but anything seemed okay to get my arm back.

After all, why would anyone want to leave Paradise on Mars?  Assuming  we were on Mars and not a Shake 'n' Vac computer simulation.

"The rough" Floss added. "with the smooth."

"It's terminal."

"Maybe if we..."

"It's no use."

Gregory had been dozing, but suddenly he seemed wide awake, caffeine-alert.  "Puce is a good rhyme," he suggested.  "If we can fit it in."

Chapter  2 The gold Lamee Wetsuit

It was impossible not to like the guy, despite his stupid diamond fangs.  Pity he was too old for me - and, ideally, the wrong gender.

Etc

She was beautiful, she was sexy, she was trash.  He had rented her body for the afternoon, and he could do anything he liked with it, subject to not being found out.  Not that Grant had any desire to be violent.  This incident (he was already anticipating others) was nothing to do with vengeance.  He could not imagine two whores less similar than Frederique and the one who had taken his virginity. Yet... Maybe vengeance is a dish best served sweetly.

The taste in Grant's mouth was sour.

Frederique legs were too short for her to be a model.  At last he had found fault with her.  The underwear made her look tawdry.  That was part of the reason he had got her to leave it on.

She was twitching.  Her body was shaking!   She was frightened, poor girl.  Probably all her normal clients would have finished their fornicating by now.  But Grant was not like the others.  Besides anything else, he would never fuck her.  That wasn't the point.  He had no plans for adultery.  Penetrate Frederique's mind maybe, but never her body

He hated her for looking  cute.  She had no right to.

Unspoken.

There is no way back the hill,

Except memory,

In another part of his heart, Sissy loved Janet with the long blonde hair, the most beautiful girl in the village.  Janet appeared to love Sissy, too.  They kept exchanging long glances, her bionic eyelashes fluttering.  The looks felt more and more meaningful - until they stopped.

Sissy knew it was all his fault.  He lacked the courage to approach her, the imagination to know what to do or say.

Stupid, pathetic.  He hated himself and took to going on long walks in the woods, trying to think of ways to beat himself up, while doing little about it.  One day he came across a beautiful, hidden lake.  A few swans, a few fish, a birds or two - and Sissy.  That was all that was there.

He stared for hours at his hateful reflection - the image of a young man who was born to fail.  Occasionally a swan's wings or a gust of breeze would disturb the surface water, and Sissy became fascinated how his face became refracted, almost re-arranged.  Was it an improvement?  Would he ever recover?

Suddenly, he saw a reflection of another face alongside his own.  Janet's!  For a split second he resented it - her- being there and it must have shown.

"Nah!"  Janet, who had been about to embrace Sissy, changed her mind.  She pushed the beautiful but pathetic young man into the water and held him under till he drowned.

He must have meant "choir practice" because most of he dream had happened in Durham cahedral, a building he had never visited.  He must have meant "swans".

It was most confusing.  And how did that commercial for Omo fit in, the one from the sixties?  Omo Shariff, perhaps.  Sans serif?  Omo Kayam?  Extremist Anglican Terrorism?  He wrote down all the details of the dream, as instructed by his psychothrapist.

He wrote them down, and again woke up, this time in a sweat.

Dear Simon

I waited for you for ages but you didn’t come, so then I went home with the money you lent me.  It took ages.  Why didn’t you come?  (Something crossed out)  The café was closed so I waited outside.

I got home before my mum got back from grandma, but dad was hopping.  Where had I been etc.  I don’t think he believed what I said, but it was better than the truth, which didn’t matter cos of the curse coming thank God..  Simon, I will never, never do that again, at least with Gary.   I haven’t even seen him, really.

If you ever visit, I mean I don’t expect you will, you have no reason, but don’t tell my dad anything or my mum, please?  But I have dreams of you a bit and if I ever do have a baby I will call it Simon unless it’s a girl, of course.

Sorry I caused a fuss. It's never been late before

Rachel

PS  I will send you £10 (your money) when I get a job.

Rachel focused on the rug.  But there was no trap door there – I had checked already.  Why couldn’t she say something more in my favour?  Tell my father I’d already promised to stand by her whatever happened?  In the heat of yesterday, I’m sure I had promised that.  “You see, dad..” I began.  But he was already telling Rachel about the rose garden at the Unmarried Ladies’ Home.

Six months hidden away  - without her mum finding out!  What would Mrs Davies be meant to think?  That her daughter had chosen to go on a round the world cruise!
Ha, ha.  No clever remark would change a thing. “I’m going to make some tea” I mumbled.

xxxxx

A few minutes later, as I walked along the corridor with the tray, Rachel rushed past, head down, on her way to the loo again.

“I hope she’s not long” my father said, pacing.  “There are lessons you must learn here.  No tea for me at the moment, thanks.”  He glanced towards the lavatory the only one working, because of building works.  “In a way, you know, it might be for all the best that this has happened.”

“All for the best!”  I put the tray down. Only the coffee table stood between us and a knuckle fight.  In fact, after all that had happened, I should have felt angrier than I did.  I imagined feeling angry, as I might on the stage, acting.

“Aren’t there any chocolate digestives?” my father asked.

“Chocolate digestives!”

“Simon, there’s no need to shout.”

“No need!”  A little voice somehwere inside told me this was my chance.  OK Corral.  Oedipal High Noon.  All my life I’d waited for this, without even realising.

“Don’t you see how easy it would be, to throw your life away.”

“Yes, by submitting to you…”

“…on a lame duck…”
“A LAME DUCK!”  In unison, at the end of the corridor, Rachel pulled the chain.

“I can’t hear you” my father said, cupping his ear. ironically I think.

“A working class kid with no money, and to you she’s not even human.”  I had said everything already but now I was going to yell it.  Scream!  “You’re making me out to be some sort of criminal, just because I want…”

“I can’t hear.”

“This public school shit…”  Maybe I hadn’t said everything.

“… vulgar language…”

“Class… liberal hypocrisy….”  And so on.  Behind the shouts, another little voice told me I had lost my way, lost the script, the plot, the point.

“Now, Simon, when you’ve calmed down…”

“I’m not going to calm down!”  If only there’d been a director to shout “cut”, get me take it again from the top.  

“…morality…”

“…giving in to your basic instincts…”

In the end, after five or ten minutes, it was one of my father’s basic instincts which ended our row.  “What’s that silly girl up to?  I really will have to go the lavatory soon.”
“Rachel finished some time ago, I think.”  My voice quiet again, hoarse.  “She’s probably gone to lie down in the spare room.”  Dad was already running down the corridor.  I heard the loo door open, and a groan.

“What’s she done with the paper?  Oh Christ! He rushed round the flat, frantic . “We haven’t got any spare!”

And what had happened to Rachel?  Perhaps she’d got frightened by the shouting.  Or she needed time alone, to cry, and count the days till she gave birth.  I still hadn’t decided what I should do to help.  “Rachel!” I called.  She wasn’t in the spare room.  “Rachel?”  On the carpet between the lavatory and the front door, there were little spots of red.

And in the loo, something tucked half behind the washbasin. The white panties I’d bought Rachel in Marks and Spencers yesterday.  St Michaels panties, soaked in blood.

And Rachel’s emotions?  She sat down again, in the middle of the sofa, the exact point she’d been sitting before going to the lavatory.  She nursed the undrunk whisky in her lap, just as she had a few moments earlier.  Couldn’t she do something different, something unpredictable, something which subverted my father’s image of her vulgar dullness?  Frustratingly not. In her terror,  all Rachel could do was conform to his expectations.

“Mr Perfect, I know I shouldn’t have done it.”  She frowned at her tears.  “My dad’s really angry.”

“And he” I added, “he thinks it’s best too, if Rachel has an abortion.”  Or so she’d told me, on the train.

“‘They were all honourable men.’”

“My dad’s a builder.”

“It’s a quotation from Shakespeare”  I explained.

But literature was not the subject of today’s tutorial.  My father opened Kant's A Critique of Pure Reason at a passage he had already marked, apparently for an occasion like this.  With a slight shake of the head, he raised himself up to his full height.  “‘Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature.’”

“Is it that Shakespeare again?”

“Not exactly.”

“You see, Rachel, Kant is trying to explain the rational basis of morality.  Even if God did not exist...”  My father was preparing for a long exposition.

“My mum says if there is a God, He wouldn’t have let granny live so long.”

“But Kant would say that is not, in itself, a justification of euthanasia.  This imperative isn’t conditional, it’s categ...”

“Ethu - what?”

“This is ridiculous, dad.   Rachel and I didn’t come here for a philosophy lesson.  We need your help.  There  is…  we have - that is Rachel has - a very specific problem.  Abstract reasoning won’t help.”

“Simon has never been very good at applying principles to every day situations.” 

What?  To my face, he had only ever criticised my spelling.  “It’s quite simple, really.  The Categorical Imperative means that if you do something, you must be prepared for everyone else to do it.  So, logically, if you have your child killed before it’s born, you must approve of every child being killed…”

“Mum says…”

“Including yourself, Rachel.  What right have you to exist, if you deny that right to your son?”

“Dad, it could be a daughter.”

“Son implies daughter, as you well know.  So you see my dear, any action entails a belief, which entails another belief.  And as that would mean the end of the human race...”

“Not everybody who gets pregnant wants an abortion.”

“Probably more women do than you realise, Simon.”  He looked me straight in the eyes, as if the remark had personal significance.

“Dad, this is a very specific situation...”

“So you keep telling me.”

“... Rachel is only seventeen.  Her boy friend doesn’t want to know.  It was all a mistake.  She lives in a small village, where people gossip...”.  Excuses, special pleading.  Like inventing reasons why I should be allowed to stay up late.  Surely, there were principles on my side, too?  Rachel’s side.

“Gossip should not be the basis of anyone’s morality.”

Yes, but…  And so on.  I had never dared disagree with my father’s philosophical meanderings before.  No point.  Hot air.  No relevance.  And now I could see it was a smokescreen.  Underneath his sophisticated liberalism, there lurked a strict dad, like everyone else’s. I felt furious with myself for never seeing it before.