Peter James - Perfect People

‘It was a boy? The second one?’

‘A lovely little boy.’

He tried to sit up again but the pressure against his eye was too strong. ‘And my wife’s really all right?’

The junior midwife nodded vigorously.

John felt relief flooding through him. He heard a door open and a moment later heard the voice of the consultant obstetrician.

‘Well, you’re going to have a nice shiner there, Dr Klaesson!’ he said cheerily.

He came into John’s line of vision, clogs slapping on the floor, hat and mask removed, gown slack. ‘Four stitches in your head and a black eye – still, you’ll be able to tell everyone in years to come that at least you didn’t let your wife suffer alone during childbirth!’

John managed a thin smile. ‘I’m really – I-’

‘No, listen, old chap, I’m sorry about the kerfuffle, but your wife is doing well, and the babies are absolutely fine. How are you feeling?’

‘A little rough.’

‘I’m sorry you had to go through that but there was no alternative – and your wife supported me. The second baby was definitely starting to suffer from lack of oxygen and I had to deliver him quickly otherwise we’d have lost him for sure.’

‘Can I see them?’

‘You’ve taken quite a crack on your head – you caught the edge of the table and the anaesthetics machine as you went down. They’re going to take you for an X-ray just to make sure everything’s tickety-boo inside. By the time you’ve done that, Naomi will be all tidied up in her bed, ready for you to come down and see her and the babies.’

Aware that his voice was sounding a little strange, slurred, as if he had been drinking, John said, ‘Special Care unit – did you say?’

The surgeon nodded.

Edgy now, John said, ‘Wh-why?’

‘Perfectly normal for any premature baby. Your little girl weighs two point six five kilograms and your boy weighs two point four three – both around five and a half pounds in old measurements. That’s a good weight for twins at thirty-six weeks. They seem jolly healthy – in fact, remarkably robust – and they’re breathing on their own. We’ve been lucky the toxaemia hasn’t affected them.’

He gave John a knowing smile, and John, uneasy suddenly, wondered if Holbein knew, if he’d seen a piece in an English newspaper and remembered their names or faces.

Then the consultant turned and walked from his line of vision. ‘I’m afraid I’m due back in theatre. I’ll pop by later on this evening and see how Naomi’s doing.’

John heard the door close.

‘You’re not the first person to have passed out,’ Lisa said.

‘It was the brutality – I – I couldn’t believe-’

‘At least your wife is all right, and the babies are fine. That’s the main thing, isn’t it?’ the young nurse said.

John took a long while to answer. He was thinking about how, up to this point, none of this had seemed totally real. Of course Naomi had been suffering for months, but all the time the babies had been inside her, he could imagine they might wake up one morning and find her bump had gone, that it was all a misdiagnosis, just a phantom pregnancy, that was all.

Now, through his aching brain, the true reality of it all was finally dawning. The irreversibility. They had brought two human beings into the world whose genes might have been tampered with by Dettore in ways they had not wanted, and there was not a thing they could do about it, except pray that they were going to be fine.

He looked back at the cheery young nurse and, in answer to her question, nodded uncertainly.

His head throbbing, John stared through the glass, watching Luke and Phoebe asleep on their backs, swathed in white bedding and intubated. They were even smaller than he’d imagined, more wrinkled, more pink, with tiny little hands like starfish.

More beautiful.

Utterly, utterly, incredible!

He was choked, close to tears with emotion as he watched these tiny people, these miniature copies of Naomi and himself, encased in clear Perspex, dwarfed by the high-tech equipment all around them.

Even in their scrunched-up faces he could see the likenesses. There were distinctive characteristics of Naomi in Luke. And he could see himself in Phoebe. Logically, it ought to be the other way around, he thought, but it didn’t matter; there was only one thing that was important, and it was plain to see it in their faces:

Absolute confirmation that their worst fears were unfounded. These were their children, his and Naomi’s, without question.

He closed his eyes in relief. For months this had been his biggest fear. Naomi’s, too, despite all he had said to try to reassure her.

Now they faced another worry – just what other mistakes might Dettore have made? Or what other deliberate alterations had he done to their genes that he had not told them about?

But at least they were healthy! Strong. Remarkably robust, the obstetrician had said.

His thoughts went back to Halley, to the awesome sense of responsibility he had felt when Halley had been born, and all the hopes he’d held for his son, long before he knew anything of the time bomb inside him. He felt even more responsibility for these two, now, bringing them into the world knowing the risks he and Naomi faced. Just hoping and praying Dettore hadn’t messed up with the one gene that mattered.

Phoebe, eyes shut, raised her starfish hand a little, opened out her fingers, then closed them again. Moments later, Luke did the same. Almost as if they were waving at him, acknowledging him.

Hi Dad! Hi Dad!

He smiled. ‘Welcome to the world, Luke and Phoebe, my little darlings. You’re our future, your mum’s and mine. We’re going to love you more than any parents ever loved any child,’ he whispered.

Once more, in their sleep, first Phoebe then Luke’s little hands raised a few inches, opened out their fingers and closed them again.

John went back to Naomi’s room, to sit with her until she was sufficiently awake to be wheeled up to see them herself.

Mountain air is different to any other kind of air that you can find on this planet. Mountain air doesn’t have all that shit that you have to breathe in.

Down below it is just one big sewer, my friend, and I’m not just talking about the air.

Hasn’t always been that way, of course. And one day it’s going to be all back to how it was. You’ll be able to walk the streets of cities and smell flowers.

Seriously, when was the last time you smelled flowers in a city?

Maybe in a park, but only if the park was big and the flowers had a strong enough scent. And to have a strong enough scent they’d probably been genetically modified.

We can’t keep our hands off anything, can we? I tell you something, you walk in one of those supermarket places, they’ve got berries the size of apples, apples the size of melons, and those tomatoes, you know the ones I mean, those like big, mutant things – they have pig genes in them, to give them their colour, to keep them riper longer, but you don’t see that on the label.

I tell you, my friend, you step down off this mountain and you walk in the sewers of the valleys and plains, you’re stepping into a world you think you might know, but you don’t, trust me, you do not know any of it. Like, get this – there’s a big burger chain, a national chain and they’re mixing polyester into the bread in their buns – to make them puff out. They’re making you eat polyester and all the time you are thinking, hey, bread that looks this good must be doing me good!

That’s how cynical scientists are, my friend.

You know what science is really about? Scientists pretend it is about knowledge, but the truth is that it is partially about power and about death, but mostly it is about vanity and greed. People don’t invent things for the greater good. They invent them to satisfy their egos.