Peter James - Perfect People

John seemed like a stranger.

The baby inside her, this creature, growing in her womb, tiny arms and legs, so frail, so utterly dependent on her, was she going to turn out to be a stranger, also? I saw you inside me, saw you through the scan, wiggling your cute little arms and legs. I don’t mind if you are a girl, not a boy. I don’t mind. I just want you to be healthy.

She sensed, although she knew it must be her imagination, the tiniest sensation of movement inside her. Like an acknowledgement.

‘John,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let this destroy us – this thing – this baby of ours – don’t-’

The phone was ringing again.

John held her tightly. ‘We have to be strong, darling. You and I. Wagon train, remember? Wagon-train circle? I love you, more than anything in the world. Please, ignore the phone, take the damned thing off the hook, just for ten minutes. I can’t be late for this meeting. Please, there’s no damned interview that’s as important as this meeting.’

Naomi took the phone off the hook. John showered and shaved, gave her a peck on the cheek, grabbed his car keys and his laptop bag, and hurried out of the front door.

The morning newspaper lay where it had been chucked, on the damp lawn. John picked it up, unrolled it and glanced at the front page. His eyes were drawn to a photograph of someone familiar. Incredibly familiar. An attractive woman, in tight close-up, with sunglasses pushed back on her head. She had a confident, rich-bitch-without-a-care-in-the-world expression on her face. Then he realized why she looked so familiar.

It was Naomi.

And his own photograph, twice her size, was above. His face, staring at the camera with a DNA double helix superimposed behind.

The newspaper was the one he received every morning. USA Today. The front page headline said: LA PROFESSOR ADMITS, ‘WE’RE HAVING A DESIGNER BABY’.

Four news vans were parked outside the university entrance as John approached, hurrying for his meeting. In front of them stood a gaggle of people, some holding cameras, some microphones. He heard his name called out. Then again, more loudly.

‘Dr Klaesson?’

He heard a different voice say, ‘Are you sure that’s him?’

‘That’s Dr Klaesson!’

A short, dark-haired woman he vaguely recognized, with an attractive but hard face, thrust a microphone in front of him. Then he remembered why she was familiar: he saw her face often on a news show. ‘Dr Klaesson, could you tell me why you and your wife made the decision to have a designer baby?’

Another microphone was thrust in his face. ‘Dr Klaesson, when actually is your baby due?’

Then a third microphone. ‘Dr Klaesson, can you confirm that you and your wife have preselected the sex of your child?’

John weaved through them and, more politely than he felt, said, ‘I’m sorry, this is private, I have nothing to say.’

He felt a moment’s relief when the elevator doors closed behind him in the lobby. Then he began to shake.

We still retain many of our primitive instincts, he thought, arriving in a harassed state ten minutes late for the meeting. Before man had learned to speak, he relied so much on his eyes, observing body language. The way people held their bodies, shifted in their seats, positioned their arms and hands, moved their eyes, told you everything.

He felt like he’d just entered a room that had been skewed ever so slightly out of kilter. The ten colleagues with whom he had worked closely for the past two and a half years, and thought he knew reasonably well, all seemed to be in a very strange space this morning. He felt like an intruder who had entered a private club.

Mumbling an apology for being late, John sat at the conference table, dug his BlackBerry out of his pocket and his laptop out of his bag and placed them in front of him. His colleagues waited for him in silence. John didn’t want to be in this meeting at all right now; he wanted to be in his office and on the phone to the reporter.

Sally Kimberly.

Wow! I must give Naomi a call, have lunch with her!

He was almost beside himself with anger at the woman.

Off the record. It had been off the bloody record. She’d no right to print a word of what he’d told her.

‘Are you OK, John?’ Saul Haranchek asked in his nasal Philadelphia accent.

John nodded.

Nine pairs of eyes flashed doubt at him, but no one commented and they got on with the business of the meeting, which was to review their current curriculum. But after only a short while, as had become the norm these past few months, the meeting turned to the more pressing question on everyone’s mind: what was going to happen to the department collectively, and to themselves individually, at the end of the next year? Saul Haranchek had tenure, but for the rest the future was still bleak. None of the government funding agencies, institutions, charities, companies or other universities they had approached had yet shown any interest.

John contributed nothing to the discussion. With the newspaper headline this morning, and the expression on his colleagues’ faces, he wasn’t sure he had any kind of a future in academic research.

He wasn’t even sure he had any future in his marriage either.

At half past nine he pocketed his phone, picked up his computer, grabbed his bag and stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Please excuse me, I-’ he hurried out of the conference room without finishing his sentence.

He walked down the corridor towards his office, his eyes brimming with tears, hoping to hell not to bump into any of his students, unlocked the door and went in, closing it behind him.

There was a pile of mail on his desk, and thirty-one new messages on his voice mail.

Christ.

And fifty-seven new emails.

His phone rang. It was Naomi, sounding livid.

‘I’m being bombarded with calls here. Your new lover’s done a great job circulating my office number.’

‘Jesus, Naomi, she is not my bloody lover!’ he yelled, then immediately felt terrible. This wasn’t her fault, she had done nothing to deserve this; it was his own stupid goddamn fault. No one else’s. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘I-’

She had rung off.

Shit.

He dialled her direct line number but it was busy.

He looked despairingly at the phone, at his computer screen, at the bare walls of his office. His secretary had stuck this morning’s post on his desk and near the top of the pile was a handwritten Jiffy bag with something hard inside. Curious, he ripped it open with the silver letter knife Naomi had given him for Christmas, and pulled out the contents, two stiff sheets of card held together by elastic bands, protecting something.

Inside was the photograph of Naomi that had been missing from his desk, the one of her taken in Turkey. The photograph that was on the front page of USA Today.

A folded slip of paper was also in the envelope. A short, handwritten note, with no address and no phone number. It said:

Hi John! It was great meeting you. Thanks for lending me this! All the best. Sally Kimberly.

You bitch! My Christ, you bitch!

His door opened. Saul Haranchek came in. ‘Can I – er – bother you for a moment, John?’ He hovered, rocking on his beat-up trainers, wringing his hands as if he bore news of the end of the world.

John looked at him and said nothing.

‘You’re a dark horse,’ he said. ‘I ah – we – I mean – like – none of us – you know – we didn’t have any idea that you and-’ He wrung his hands again. ‘Look – your private life is your affair but I – someone showed me the newspaper – USA Today. ’ He shook his head nervously. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine – just tell me?’