But then again I really did feel a sort of closeness to Tommy because of the weird experience that just the two of us had shared, and because there were so many strong emotions going around in my head, and because there was never going to be anyone else to turn to but Tommy – and whoever else he and I managed to summon up between us inside my body.
After we’d done, we looked around and I noticed that there was a tree by the pool with ripe fruits high up in its branches. I’ve always been good at climbing trees and so I separated myself from Tommy and scrambled up to get something to eat for us. Tommy stood up and waited for me below. I could just make him out in the soft glow of the tree’s white lanterns, smiling up at me. Like a little boy, I thought, and then I suddenly felt incredibly angry with him. He was nothing but a silly over-indulged little boy, I thought, who does silly selfish thoughtless things and expects to be instantly forgiven.
I got the fruit and clambered back down, pausing before the last bit to toss it to Tommy so I could use both hands. As I dropped to the ground beside him, Tommy, without any warning, kissed me profusely and then burst out that he loved me and that he’d loved me from the day he saw me. In fact he’d never loved anyone as he loved me, he told me. He hadn’t known until now what love was really like.
Jesus!
Well, of course I told him not to talk crap. I mean I didn’t ask to come here, did I? I didn’t ask to be stuck with bloody love-rat Schneider. I would have much preferred Mehmet. Yes and I didn’t ask never to see my mum and my dad and my sister Kayley again. I didn’t ask to be cut off forever from my friends, and the sun, and green leaves, and the friendly streets of London. And if it wasn’t for Tommy Schneider here and his selfish friends I would still have had all of those things. Most likely I would have had them for years and years to come.
So I was angry. I ignored what he had said completely. I started instead to tell him all the grimmest things I could think of about what lay ahead of us.
If we got sick here there would be no one to cure us, I told him. I told him we’d go blind one day in this dim light. I told him I could easily die in childbirth, die in agony and leave him alone here with nothing for company but mine and the baby’s corpses. Yes, and I told him – I pointed out to him – that if we did have children that lived, they would have to turn to each other for sex partners – unless of course they turned to us – because there would be no one else there for them.
And I told him that after a couple of generations of inbreeding our descendants would have to cope with all the hereditary diseases and deformities that were now hidden away harmlessly in his and my genes. There’s sickle cell in my family, I told him, and diabetes too, and my grandmother on my mum’s side and two of my aunties were born with a cleft palate. (Did Tommy Schneider know what a cleft palate looked like, or how to surgically correct it, of course without the use of anaesthetics?) Many of these things would become rife in a few generations, when inbreeding brought recessive genes together again and again, along with whatever little genetic contributions Tommy’s family might have to make. That was assuming of course that there actually were future generations at all and that the line didn’t simply die out, as was quite likely, leaving some poor devil at the end of it all to face the experience of being completely alone in this ghostly forest where day would never come, and no other human being would ever come again.
“This isn’t some kind of happy ever after story, Tommy,” I told him. “This is very very far from happy ever after. The best you can say for it is that it’s the only way we’ve got of going on living and finding out what happens next.”
(And, though I didn’t speak about it to him, I thought, as I sometimes do, about my ancestors, my great-great-great-great-grandparents, taken from Africa in chains to the Caribbean to cut cane under a slave driver’s lash. Horrific as it must have been they went on living, they kept going. If they hadn’t, I would never have been born.)
Tommy nodded. He seemed quite calm about everything I’d said, which was disappointing because I wanted to upset him. I wanted to trample over his lovey-dovey daydream so as to pay him back for what he and his friends had done to me. Those three men had stolen my life from me, stolen my home, stolen everyone I really loved.
“So it was all a cold calculation?” he asked, quite calmly. “You staying with me. You making out with me here beside the pool. There wasn’t any feeling involved, just a clinical assessment of the situation. Is that right? Is that what you are trying to tell me?”
I’d thought a lot about this. I’d been thinking hard about it for days. Of course I didn’t love the man. He didn’t love me either, whatever he’d decided to tell himself. (What did he know of me, after all, except that I’m pretty and that I have a brave face I’ve learnt to put on when I’m scared?) But there was a bond between us now, I’d decided, which in a way was much stronger than love. And love could grow from that bond, is what I’d thought, maybe not constantly like the lantern flowers of Eden, but perhaps, if we were very lucky, on a recurring basis like the flowers back on Earth.
That is what I’d decided in those strange quiet days of waiting. If we stayed on Eden there would be a bond between us of necessity, stronger in a way than ever existed in almost any marriage on Earth. Necessity was as deep as love and maybe deeper; that was what I had told myself, and perhaps love could grow from it. That was what I’d made up my mind to believe.
But right now I still wanted to hurt him.
“A calculation?” I sneered. “Yes, that’s about right, mate, a calculation. If Mehmet had stayed, it would have been him who had laid down here with me just now. If…”
But he didn’t let me finish.
Tommy:
It was bad enough to look at her up in the tree, just like I watched those girls in the tree all those years ago when I was a kid at school, asking for them to accept me into their game. It was worse when I tried to tell her how I felt and she trampled on that (just like those little girls did when they all laughed at me and told me to leave them alone). But it was when she mentioned Mehmet that I got really mad.
“You goddam women are all the same!” I found myself yelling at her. “You fool us, you lie to us, you twist us round your fingers. You offer us something sweet, something so sweet that we’d give up everything we have just to possess it – everything! – and then you take it away again and trample on it, and tell us it doesn’t mean anything to you at all!”
I’ve been told I’m ugly when I get like that. My eyes bulge and spit comes flying out of my mouth. She looked at me with disgust.
“I suppose this is what happened with all your other women,” she said, speaking very quietly and coldly. “As soon as they try to inject a tiny note of reality, as soon as they admit that Tommy Schneider isn’t the one thing they’ve been pining for since the day they were born, then Tommy Schneider flies into a rage and runs off to find some other woman who doesn’t know him yet, so that she can dry his tears and take him to bed and tell him he’s perfect and wonderful. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what always happens, yes? Well, you’ve got no one else to run to now!”
“You don’t get it!” I told her. It was such an old, old script she’d recited there and I felt so weary of it: “None of you get it. I don’t want you to think I’m perfect. I know I’m not. I’m nothing special at all. I’m good at flying space ships, that’s all. I’ve never asked anyone to think I’m perfect. I’ve just wanted someone to make me feel that I’m wanted anyway for what I am. Why is that so hard to understand?”