WE KNEW, BUT WE DIDN'T KNOW

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

I walked home, chilled and tired after my initial meeting with Kathy. While trudging up the four flights of stairs, I was fiercely hoping that my flat-mates weren’t in, and they weren’t. I had the dump all to myself! I poured myself a contraband glass of cheap white wine, and switched on the telly. Carer-complexes had a special cable service: no news stations, no documentaries, no dramas. Reality programmes, situational comedies, and shopping channels were primarily what we were allowed to receive. I went through a phase after I first began my career as carer of spending a lot of time and money on these shopping channels. I purchased mostly cosmetics and costume jewelry, and the anticipation provided me with an emotion that was close to happiness. Every time I’d arrive home after an exhausting and confusing day and there’d be a parcel just outside the door or on the kitchen table if one of my flat-mates had brought it in, my heart turned cartwheels. How delightful! Something waiting just for me! I’d read the address label lovingly, and then unwrap the parcel carefully, lovingly. Most of the time, I was disappointed. The simulated gemstones looked cheap and flat. The lipstick wasn’t rosy, but a garish orange-red. Nonetheless, I never sent anything back. I couldn’t be bothered.

My next disillusionment was about flat-mates. The rules changed after my first eleven months as a carer when the Carers’Rights and Duties Committee (CRDC) decreed that two to three carers would be allowed to share a flat if they received a permit. Permits were renewable on a yearly basis. I thought this would be a panacea to my loneliness, all the while overlooking how inconvenient it would be to share the loo and how to properly implement a fair division of tasks.

My first response was the more the merrier and my first two flat-mates were both Class B blokes. They were handsome lads, shy and respectful, but utterly colourless and dull. Moreover, they were addicted to computer games and had no culinary skills whatsoever. Being as I was the one to find the flat and sign the lease, I asked them to leave after a month and they acquiesced with no fuss.

I then thought it would be easier to have just one flat-mate and that a girl might be more interested in decorating, cooking and heart-to-hearts. I left the following advert on the billboards of at least a dozen recovery centres:

 

 

SEEKING CLASS A CAREER

PREFERRABLY FEMALE TO SHARE A FLAT WITH OTHER FEMALE.

CENTRALLY LOCATED

LARGE SUNNY KITCHEN. ELEVATOR. JULIET BALCONY.

225 £ MONTHLY .

IF INTERESTED, CALL SOPHIE AT __________.

 

 

Eleanor F. rang me up the same day I posted the adverts. She visited me that evening and I was enchanted by her bouncy auburn curls, cinnamon sprinkling of freckles and bounding energy. She charged into the living room and gushed, “Wow! This flat is brilliant! I love what you’ve done with it. There are so many pops of colour! Where did you find those curtains? Are they bronze or gold?”

I followed her into the kitchen where she exclaimed, “It’s absolutely humungous! You have a microwave! I love your plants! It smells like peanut butter biscuits in here. Do you bake?”

Eleanor loved the flat and signed on immediately. She proved to be so tiresome, all that unquenchable enthusiasm. I suppose she was in deep denial, but I never met a clone as upbeat and energetic as Eleanor F. Oddly, that wasn’t what put me off. It was her sexual promiscuity that unnerved me. Different blokes every night, sometimes two or three in manic succession. She walked about almost nude, her full, pale breasts with perky pink nipples reminded me of pea-brained pets — soft, blind baby mammals destined to be slaughtered.

Eleanor found me morose. “You never smile, Sophie. You’re always scowling. You take your work too seriously,” she told me repeatedly.

“Well, Eleanor, you have to admit. Our work is pretty grim, isn’t it?”

She shook her head daintily and argued, “We only live once, Sophie, and our lives are very, very short. I want each day to be as bright as possible. That’s why I decided to live here. This flat is so pretty. But you, Sophie, you’re always so despondent and unreachable. My friend Andrew thinks you’re very, very cute but ever so remote. He really fancies you but I told him, ‘No chance. No way. Sophie’s not into having fun.’”

But things ended badly for bouncy Eleanor. She fell in love with one of her cases, and when he completed she plunged into a depression. She didn’t get out of her bed for days, and three members of the CRDC took her away. She offered no resistance. On her way out she said to me, “You were right. I always knew you were, but I didn’t want to admit it.”

 

After Eleanor, I went through a series of flat-mates until I ended up with Mike and Lucy. At first, I believed them to be lovers, but they weren’t exactly that. Lucy was very petite and pretty, whereas Mike was homely and lanky, and they shared a lot of secrets and inside jokes. I can’t say that I liked them, but neither did I dislike them. They were all right, tidy and mindful of my privacy. Among the three of us, we had purchased a number of inexpensive items that made the flat imitate a kind of home: lamps with pastel shades, colourful area rugs, several art posters. Sometimes Mike and Lucy shared the second bedroom, and at other times he slept on the sitting-room futon.

I carried my glass of wine to the bathroom and drew myself a bath. While taking a long, hot soak in the tub, I composed a list of questions I wanted to ask Kathy:

·       Did you ever find anything valuable or beautiful at the sales?

·       What was the food like at Hailsham?

·       Did your monitors embrace you and kiss you when you were really young? Did any of them seem to actually like you?

·       Did you ever fantasise about having a mother and a father?

·       How did you get to know about love? Did you feel it or did you merely hear about it?

·       Were you assigned to Hailsham because your models were upper class volunteers and not the usual low-life sort?

I knew that my list would grow and grow but this was a starting point. I also wanted to prepare a lucid summary of my years at Ingersoll so that Kathy would know what a lower-level institution was like. I suppose that I wanted to comfort her, to remind her that her childhood was sweet and good and that she’s lived a very lucky life. But behind everything was my compulsion to discover whether or not there were pardons or exemptions for exemplary carers because a recurring rumour circulated that there was. Perhaps it wasn’t too late for Kathy to apply for one? Perhaps I could apply on her behalf. She had just undergone her third donation, a lung transplant, and it was possible that she would recover. I hoped that under my expert care she could.

After my languorous bath, I put on a pair of flannel pink and white striped pyjamas and made myself a peanut butter and apple jelly sandwich. Even though our telly channels were censored, occasionally a commercial about cigarettes, beer and wine slipped through. I imagined legal white wine, not the contraband crap that clones were able to purchase at great cost, as tasting crisply cool and cigarettes as tasting musky and hot. I yearned to try both, but the penalty if I got caught wasn’t worth the risk.

I was so tired that I didn’t hear Lucy and Mike come in. I thought I should have myself checked out at the district clinic, but then I thought the better of it. If I had the flu, I could be sorted out in a jiffy, but if it were something more serious, then I could end up in an early-completion ward. Of course, that rarely happened, but it could happen; it did happen.

By the next morning, however, I was in fairly good, if not top, form and I listened to my cold cereal snap, crackle and pop. Two cups of rose hips-cranberry tea and I was out the door. Windmere Heights was only ten blocks away from my apartment complex. I should mention that normally a carer minded three or four different donors and that schedule could really run you ragged, but Kathy’s superb reputation warranted an exception: she was to have only one carer visit her and stay with her six days a week for a minimum of six hours a day. The shifts themselves could be flexible as long as the partnership agreed. Kathy and I hadn’t discussed hours during our preliminary meeting, but I had to remember to encourage her to state her preferences. Also, I had no problem putting in unclocked overtime. After all, this was Kathy H and there was so much I hoped to learn from her.

It was a bright November morning. The air smelled like a wood-burning stove. Kathy was leafing through a fashion magazine when I entered her room. “Finally I’m thin enough for all these clothes to look right on me.”

“A month’s wages might almost cover a pair of shoes or a handbag. I wonder who’s buying all that outrageously expensive stuff.”

Kathy smiled, “Oh probably just secretaries and shop girls. I suspect the super-rich have more interesting ways of spending their money.”

 

“Do you fancy something from the cafeteria? Mineral water, fruit or maybe a biscuit?”

“Thanks. I’ve just finished breakfast. I even ate an egg even though it was awfully runny. Sophie, I often wonder if we want stuff more or less than regulars because we were denied so much while growing up. When I think about my pitiful collection box, I wince. Did you have sales at Ingersoll like we did at Hailsham?”

“No, we didn’t. But what about the sales at Hailsham? Did they ever have anything good?”

“No, it was all tawdry, grimy junk: old cassettes, cheap dolls with their hair chopped off, puzzles with missing pieces, chewed up plastic animals and the like. But if you didn’t have any sales, how did you get your stuff, your keepsakes?”

“We boarded a bus once a month to the local shopping centre. This privilege began when we turned twelve. Before then, we were each assigned a rewards monitor who would present us with little trinkets or do-dahs every once in a while. At Christmas, there was a different ritual entirely. I vividly remember the driver of our military-looking bus. He was fat and jolly and always very kind to us. He had a nickname for each one of us. Mine was “Brigitte.” He said I looked like a young brunette Brigitte Bardot. Anyway, we were given a dollar apiece to choose something at the dollar store. We weren’t allowed into any of the other shops, not even the restaurants. If you wanted something that was more than a dollar, you had to save up for a whole month. One time, I came upon a pretty glass bird. It was turquoise and amber, but it cost three dollars. I asked the manager if she could set up a layaway for me but she declined. By the time I had saved up the additional two dollars, the bird was gone. I was devastated and never went inside the store again. The bus driver, Mr. Steeple, let me hang out with him while the others were shopping. There were always two monitors assigned to the bus, but never Miss Veronique.”

“How did the others, the regulars treat you, all of you, when you were browsing in the dollar store?”

“Oh, they tried not to see us. Almost no eye contact. Except for the kids. Of course, the kids couldn’t tell the difference, so their parents or grandparents or nannies would kind of shield them, yank them out of our reach.”

Kathy looked at me intently. “Please don’t be offended but what I’m about to say, but you wear a lot of cosmetics for a carer. No one’s ever reprimanded you for that?”

“Only mildly. I’ve wondered about that myself. I guess they don’t know quite what to say. The Carers’ Manual has all kinds of do’s and don’t’s, but I don’t think there’s anything in it about lipstick, blush and mascara.”

Kathy smiled. “Have you ever been in love, Sophie?”

I plopped down on Kathy’s bed causing her to wince a little. I knew about her and Tommy. Theirs was a fabled love story. But I had my own kind of love story, and I wanted to share it with Kathy. My other questions about Hailsham would just have to wait. Besides, she was starting to look sleepy even though it wasn’t yet mid-morning. I reckoned that the tale of Allen and I would lull her into sleep. For as far back as I can remember, I’ve equated sleep with healing, and on that beautiful November day, I wanted Kathy to heal as fiercely as I’ve ever wanted anything.