Chapter 28
‘Where is everybody?’
Alec’s voice rang out, cheerful, reverberating through the lofty hall and up into the big stairwell leading to the bedrooms. Seb appeared instantly at the top. He hauled his body on to the banister rail and started sliding down the first section, backwards, towards his father.
‘Hello, Daddy.’
‘I’ve told you not to do that, Seb.’
He grinned. ‘It’s like the beach, Daddy. Jiminy slidded down to the beach.’
‘You’ve been to the beach? Today?’
‘We was going to have a picnic, but Mummy helped Jansy pee, and Jiminy fell asleep and then it was too cold.’
Alec looked up the stairs, surprised to see Lisa there, a bath towel in her hands.
‘Bathing them? At this time?’
He hoisted Seb on to his shoulders and vaulted up, galloping and trotting by turns, then running into the children’s bathroom.
‘Hello, you lot,’ he said, bending down and kissing each toddler’s head, then turning to Lisa. ‘It’s only half past four! I came back early especially to take them off your hands.’
Lisa could feel him looking at her intently. He’s sure I’m going off the rails completely, she realised, panic rising, and tried to gather her strength together.
She couldn’t manage it. Her face, when she turned to look at her husband, was ashen.
‘My God, Lisa! What on earth’s the matter now?’
‘We went to Brean,’ she said quietly, holding her breath to stop herself from shaking, then breathing out slowly. ‘We were just about to have our picnic when Jiminy slid down a sand run on to the beach and seemed a bit stunned. I thought I’d better come back immediately and bath them all early. Just to check that Jiminy’s OK.’
Alec looked carefully at his triplets, happily splashing in the bath, then back at Lisa.
‘I can’t even see a bruise on any of them,’ he said, examining the children carefully, ‘But I must say, you’ve got a point about those earrings.’ He looked up at his wife sombrely. ‘If it weren’t for the gold earring I’d say Jeffers looks just like Jansy. Well, a thinner Jansy, somehow. His ear’s a bit red.’ He looked from one child to another. ‘So which is Jansy? Neither of these other two has an earring on!’
He stooped, tilting up the face of one child without an earring. ‘Hi, Jeffers.’ He turned to Lisa, his eyes perplexed. ‘Why did you take his earring off?’
‘Jeffrey’s, you mean?’ A forced laugh which could hardly have fooled a stranger, let alone Alec. ‘It must have slipped out when they were playing on the beach,’ she lied bravely, her voice barely audible.
‘Slipped out? What d’you mean, slipped out? And slipped into another child’s ear? This boy has a gold earring!’
Alec lifted the child with the gold earring out of the bath and looked him over carefully.
‘He looks like Janus,’ he said. ‘Except he doesn’t seem to have any of that bloating which has been coming on again. He seems almost back to normal.’
‘Yansy,’ the child smiled at him.
‘He even says he’s Janus,’ the father said, alarmed. ‘You haven’t been changing earrings to test me out, or anything, have you?’
‘Jiminy slidded down to the beach.’ Seb said, taking his father’s hand and holding it. ‘Jiminy was gone.’
Alec turned amiably towards Seb, smiling, not understanding him. ‘Turned into a toad, did he?’ he asked him jocularly.
‘Turned into a bwabbit!’ Seb shouted happily. ‘Turned into lots of bwabbits!’
‘That conjurer seems to have made a lasting impression,’ Alec laughed. ‘You’ve all decided to play tricks on me, haven’t you? You’ve changed the earrings to trick me, eh?’
‘Turned into another Jansy,’ Seb told him solemnly.
‘Just because he’s lost his earring? And which one’s he?’ Alec pointed to the child without an earring he’d just called Jeffers.
‘Jeffers!’ Seb laughed. ‘You know he is, Daddy. You just said so!’
‘And what about the one with the gold earring?’
‘That’s Jansy,’ Seb said pragmatically.
‘So you did change them.’ Alec’s lips drew tight as he looked at his wife. ‘If we’re going to use the earrings, let’s get them sorted back again, Lisa,’ he said. The cold calm modulated voice which drove her mad. ‘I really wouldn’t have thought you’d have the energy.’ He turned towards her, forcing a smile, trying to keep his temper. ‘Why did you take Jiminy’s off?’
‘He wasn’t well. I got really worried about him.’ She looked helplessly at Alec. Would he ever understand? ‘I thought maybe it was his way of showing an allergy to the earring.’
‘Oh, right. Good thinking. Let’s just forget about it all.’ He was, Lisa saw, about to take the gold earring out of Janus’s ear.
‘Don’t!’ Lisa’s shriek of horror stopped Alec in his tracks.
‘What on earth d’you mean, don’t? Janus is definitely allergic to gold!’ He stared at her. ‘So you didn’t just play around? You did put the gold earring back on him deliberately?’
‘I needed one for Jansy. Jeffers is all right without his.’
‘You’ve decided to change Jansy back to gold again? Is that it? After all the trouble we had?’
‘It’s not like that at all,’ she said, soft and low. And then the tears came. A trickle at first, then more and more. She could not stop them. ‘Later, Alec. I’ll have to explain it to you later. Let’s get them bathed.’
‘Mummy’s tired,’ Seb told him. ‘Because Jansy peed and Jiminy slidded down.’
At last Lisa saw he realised that this wasn’t a game, that she was in deadly earnest, trying to tell him something. He looked at her, the tears still rolling down her cheeks, unchecked.
‘Right,’ he agreed. ‘Later.’
Mechanically he helped her bath, dry and dress the children in their night things. They avoided speaking to one another.
‘I’ll give them tea,’ Alec said crisply. ‘You get some rest. Doesn’t help any of us if you overdo it.’
There was nothing further she could do. Looking bleakly at her family Lisa left them to make herself some valerian tea and went to lie down on a sofa in her living room. She felt exposed, alone, vulnerable. She closed the shutters tight and lay back. Her eyelids drooped, but she heard the sounds of Alec romping with the children, putting them to bed. Such ordinary sounds...
Exhausted, strained, she drifted away into her thoughts, seeing the Priddy Woods, two toddlers where there had been one, identical. Could anyone believe a thing like that? Would Alec have her certified? She heard his footsteps, determined, bouncing down the stairs and shut her eyes. The living room door burst open.
‘Just what is going on, Lisa?’ Alec walked into the room and turned the overhead light on, flooding her out of the shadows. ‘I’d have to be an idiot not to know something is. Let’s have it. There’s more to it than I realised. Seb keeps saying that Jiminy, who does look rather pale, is “another Jansy”. It doesn’t make sense to me, but he must mean something by it. What’s that supposed to mean, “another Jansy”? Have you been encouraging him to play conjuring tricks?’
‘Seb lives in a dream world; you know how imaginative he is. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
Dare she take the plunge, tell Alec? He was, after all, as entangled in the situation as she was herself.
‘Something is going on, Lisa. I know I’ve thought it’s you cracking under the strain, but this is different. This time Seb’s talking what sounds like rubbish.’
The urge to confide in him, the only human being who would, after all, be really motivated to support her, was overwhelming. She had to tell him if she was to survive, and help her children to survive. Their father was the obvious person to share the burden with her. He was involved with them intimately, now. The triplets weren’t strangers, newly born infants. They were his sons, he’d grown to love them. He would be as unlikely to betray them as she was.
‘All right, Alec. I’ll have to tell you this time. He’s your son as well as mine, and I can’t keep it to myself any longer.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘You’ll think I’ve really flipped.’
‘Try me.’
‘Seb is quite right. James was “another Jansy”. When he was born.’
‘Come on, Lisa! Even in fun, what are you talking about?’
‘I put the gold earring in Jansy’s ear because he was about to clone again. I lost the silver one.’
‘Clone? Jansy was going to clone?’ He looked almost distraught. ‘For God’s sake, Lisa, what is that supposed to mean?’
‘Split into two identical beings. Reproduce himself.’
‘Reproduce his complete body?’
‘He can only clone when he’s completely free of anything which isn’t part of his body,’ Lisa rushed at him. ‘If there’s nothing, and he’s naked, and the time is ripe, he simply splits.’
Her husband just looked at her. ‘Splits,’ he repeated mechanically, evidently humouring her. ‘Of course.’ Ice cold, detached. He didn’t believe anything she’d said. ‘Go on.’
‘The first cloning was in the womb, just before I gave birth. The doctors said it couldn’t be twins because the scan only showed one foetus. They were quite right; the first baby, Janus, split into two identical babies just before they were born. That’s why they weighed exactly the same. The only difference between them was the shape of the head - you must remember that yourself. Apart from that, the two foetuses would have been identical. Witherton, of course, thought they were identical twins.’ She looked at Alec. ‘Which, in a sort of way, they were.’
‘I see. And then?’
‘The second time was when I had the triplet,’ she said. ‘You assumed I’d given birth. What else were you to think? So I let it ride, almost convinced myself. The truth, after all, is so incredible. But it did happen. Apart from me, only Seb knew. Janus cloned, split into two separate human beings. Seb saw the two babies together in Janus’s cot. He can tell which is which.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Alec said, keeping his voice a monotone. ‘You didn’t give birth to a third triplet; you found two identical infants, together, in Janus’s cot?’
‘It was hot, remember. Obviously Janus had kicked his nappy off, so there was nothing attached to him - and then he cloned.’ She paused and saw that Alec was simply waiting for her to go on. ‘The real truth is so unbelievable, so utterly unheard of among vertebrates, that everyone believed that I’d had a late triplet. That has been known.’ She smiled slightly. ‘Then I had to work out what was actually happening. I finally cottoned on. I had to fasten something to the cloner’s body to stop him doing it again. Actually, Don Chivers put me on to it, though at first I didn’t understand what he was telling me.’
She looked at Alec. He was staring at her, speechless, waiting for her to go on.
‘I did mention it to you; Don came to warn me after the twins were born.’ She stopped to collect her memories. ‘I thought it odd at the time that he should be interested in the twins. In fact I got quite cross with him. He was only trying to alert me, trying to draw my attention to how he coped with the farm animals.’
‘Animals? You’re comparing our children to farm animals?’
‘Remember when Don said if he didn’t tag the newborn lambs immediately after they were born, that there’d be more?’
‘You’re suggesting our children should have been tagged as soon as they were born,’ he said, slowly and deliberately. ‘Just like Frank’s lambs.’
‘We all have bodies, Alec. Humans are no different from animals in that respect.’
‘In fact it’s what you arranged in the end - the bracelets, then the earrings. Those were their tags.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And you think Janus swells up just before the cloning,’ Alec said quietly, searching her face, looking into her eyes.
‘And becomes more and more aggressive.’
‘What happened when you went to see Morgenstein?’
She told him what had happened in Priddy. ‘At first I thought I’d lost him, Alec - when I ran after Jansy. In the end I thought I must have imagined it all. Then, a couple of months later, Frank told us about the mauled toddler on HTV news. Now I’m sure that was him.’
She could see the pity in his eyes. He didn’t believe anything she’d told him. Why would he? How could he? This type of reproduction outside the womb was unknown among the higher animals. As every secondary schoolchild knew, binary fission was the reproductive system used by amoebae and other primary animal organism, not by humans. But that was precisely what had happened to Janus. It was just scientific jargon for what amounted to cloning.
‘Tell me about this afternoon,’ Alec said wearily. ‘After all, it’s different this time. There are still only triplets, not quads.’ He looked at her quizzically. ‘Unless, of course, you’re maintaining Janus did away with one of them?’
‘It’s not funny, Alec. The new clone could be dead moments after cloning. They don’t always survive, you know. I found that out from Don as well.’
Her weeping, so long suppressed, burst forth into a fountain of tears, a wailing of sobs. She could not go on - could not bring herself to tell the story of the cloning in the bath, the death, the disappearance of the body. It was too much.
‘If you don’t mind, darling,’ Alec comforted her. ‘I’m going to ask Gilmore to prescribe something for you. You really can’t go on like this. Try to tell me what happened this afternoon.’
He waited while the sobs lessened, while she sipped the herb tea and calmed herself.
‘We were just going to have a picnic, when Jansy said he had to pee.’
‘Honestly, Lisa. He does it all the time.’
‘Not like this. He went on and on and on, just like he did in the Priddy Woods. Not really pee; a viscous, deep yellow fluid with an odd smell.’
A spark lit up Alec’s eyes. ‘And the puffiness went down?’
‘Exactly; he wasn’t quite so bloated. So I knew he was about to clone again.’
‘Just like the time you stopped off in the woods on your way to Morgenstein,’ Alec pointed out succinctly. He sat in his chair, his right knee over his left leg, trembling slightly. ‘So did he?’
It seemed to Lisa nothing was real any more. ‘Did he what? Pee? I told you; loads of it, all that revolting yellow.’
‘Did he clone, Lisa? You said he was about to clone!’
‘I took Jeffers’ earring off and jabbed it into Jansy’s earlobe before he finished peeing.’
‘So that he couldn’t clone,’ Alec said gently, looking at her.
‘Yes.’ She gulped again, pouring tea down herself. She could feel it affecting her, sedating her. ‘I had to be quite brutal. The hole was smaller, almost closed.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Seb said Jiminy had gone. I was concentrating so hard on Jansy, pushing the earring in, I didn’t notice what else was going on.’
‘And was he?’
‘Gone, d’you mean?’
‘Yes. Had Jiminy gone?’ Alec said, his voice rising somewhat.
Fear began to clutch at Lisa again. He wasn’t going to credit a single word; he simply thought she was insane. She saw his face through tear-filled eyes, swimming in front of her, his glasses, magnifying his eyes, goggling at her.
‘Jiminy was down on the beach. I thought he’d fallen over the precipice.’
‘And?’
‘I told you. He’d slipped down a sand run, but he was okay.’
‘And Jansy?’
‘He can’t clone with the earring in his ear, and he can’t take it out by himself.’
‘He’s allergic to gold, Lisa!’
‘You still think that’s all it is?’
Her husband looked at her, then walked towards the drinks cupboard. ‘Better drink this.’ He poured a stiff whisky. His voice had taken on a gentle, caressing tone. ‘You look all in, darling; what on earth possessed you to take them to the beach all by yourself?’
‘It was such a lovely day.’ She shuddered. ‘I thought Jiminy was dead. Seb was shaking me; he said Jiminy had gone. And when I looked I saw two triplets. The third one was down on the beach. I thought the heap on the sand was Jiminy’s body. It seemed to be quite still. When I went down he was half sitting, half lying there. Then he began to move.’
‘He was all right in the bath, no sign of any injury.’
Lisa nodded. ‘He seemed to be okay, though I couldn’t be sure. But he isn’t himself. I expect you’ve noticed that.’
‘He did seem very tired. That’s it?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
Alec took a long, hard look at her.
‘You don’t believe any of it, do you?’
‘I believe you think these extraordinary events happened. I don’t think they did, no.’
‘You didn’t immediately know which was which, either! They’re more alike than ordinary identicals.’
‘Because Jiminy isn’t well, you said so yourself. And Jansy is much less bloated.’ He sighed. ‘That’s because I took his earring off. It’s finally showing results. Morgenstein did spell it out for you, Lisa. Janus is allergic to metal.’
‘Just try to think there may be something to what I’m telling you, Alec. First I had twins unexpectedly. An identical triplet turned up in a most unusual way. Janus swells up all the time, and he is very much stronger, brighter and more assertive than his identical triplet brothers.’
She sighed as her eyes filled again with tears. They seemed to pour from her, in a never-ending stream. Just like the way Janus peed, she found herself thinking. His way of crying about his fate, perhaps.
She had done all she could to share her terrible secret with her husband, the father of her children. He thought she was, at best, deluded. She’d tried to enlist Trevor, too. He hadn’t wanted to know. Neither of them believed anything she told them. Because it had never happened before, they thought it could not happen at all. But who, she thought to herself, believed in test tube babies just a few years ago? That had been considered impossible.
She couldn’t tell Meg, she was Frank’s wife. There was only one person she could trust, one human being who knew what she was saying was the truth. And he was far too young to help her.
There was nothing further she could do to convince Alec. Until the next time. That’s when she’d confront him with the evidence. At least when Janus cloned again his father would have been forewarned.