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<h2>19</h2>
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<p>“You sound like you’ve gone eight rounds.”
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Helen’s voice was sleepy and soft at the edges as if she was
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stifling a yawn. “What time is it anyway?”</p>
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<p>“Late. Or early,” David said. “I had a
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thought.”</p>
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<p>“So you just had another thought, to wake me up and share
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it with me. Woke up my niece as well.” Helen said, but
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without rancour. The initial drowsiness was fading as she came more
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alert and now he could hear the suppressed smile. “You looked
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all set for a right hook and a possible knockout tonight. She did
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not seem to me to be a happy lady.” David thought she
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didn’t realise how close to the mark she was. She would see
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the bruise in the morning. “Were you in big
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trouble?”</p>
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<p>“Deep shit,” he admitted. “It’s over
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now.”</p>
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<p>There was a silence on the phone as she considered the
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permutations and possibilities.</p>
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<p>“Over.” Another statement and question.</p>
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<p>“We finished. Split. And yes, she did hit me on the nose.
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It bled a bit.”</p>
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<p>There was another silence that stretched between them. He
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wondered whether she’d laugh, or sympathise. She did
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neither.</p>
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<p>“So you just thought you’d wake me up and cry on my
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shoulder?”</p>
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<p>“No. Not at all.” He didn’t really know now
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why he had called. He thought he did when he dialled but now, in
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the spotlight of her question, he wasn’t so sure. He’d
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dreamed, slouched in the seat in front of the flickering screen,
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surrounded by the papers that they’d been going through
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earlier, and he’d woken with a start when his arm had slipped
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and banged against the still tender side of his nose. He’d
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woken and he’d wanted to reach out and make contact.</p>
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<p>“I had a weird notion I wanted to bounce off you.”
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He said. He took her silence and the odd whickering sound that
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sounded like a stifled laugh as encouragement to go on.
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“You’ll think I’m crazy. I mean really out of the
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park. But I think we’re looking at this from the wrong point
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of view.” He paused for just a moment then ploughed ahead.
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“I asked Mike Fitzgibbon what sort of woman steals a
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baby.”</p>
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<p>He closed his eyes and recalled the tall doctor’s
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response. He could see him frown, hear the measured tones.</p>
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<p>“I’ve dealt with several in my time,” he had
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said. “Though it’s a fairly rare phenomenon. Many
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people consider it, but few carry it further. It’s a major
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taboo in our society; in any society. The drive to mother is
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inherent in most women, despite what the feminists say. It’s
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a programming thing, as much instinct and inherent as learned. More
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so in fact.”</p>
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<p>Mike had taken David back up to his office and called for two
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cups of coffee. He turned and looked out the window over the neatly
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laid out garden where the standard roses were frosted with snow.
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Two magpies, resplendently irridescent chattered to each other on
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the tall wall.</p>
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<p>“You get bereaved mothers, women who have lost a child or
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children. They’re the rarest, but occasionally, their sense
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of loss is so great that they can be motivated to take another
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woman’s child. They are found almost immediately because they
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go home and normally present the partner with the problem, which is
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often a great shock. He usually, almost invariably, reports the
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matter. These are simply traumatised women who are not at all
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responsible for their actions in the short term. Their depression
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is often treatable and it rarely develops into full-fledged
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psychosis.”</p>
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<p>Mike held up his hand and counted off his thumb, moving to the
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next finger. “Then there’s infertile women, or those
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who believe themselves to be incapable of bearing children and have
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developed an obsessive compulsion. It is a distortion of the
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normally powerful mothering instinct. They are the hardest of all
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to find because despite their clinical depression, they will have
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planned the move in advance, like a bank robbery. It is rarely a
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pram theft though. They tend to take neonates from hospitals, or
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even go so far as to pose as social workers or district nurses to
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remove them from homes. Often they build up an elaborate background
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story and rehearse earnestly, even to the extent of having a name
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for the child and all the paraphernalia, feeding bottles, cribs,
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toys, that sort of thing. That’s the kind who take longest to
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trace. So far, in the UK, there has not been a case which has not
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been resolved. In America, there are several every year, but then
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there’s more murders too.”</p>
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<p>Mike ticked off another finger. “You get sociopaths,
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psychopaths, who want to damage another woman. Again, this is very
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rare. Most woman who take a child are doing it from a deep seated
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need. There was a case in Boston of a woman taking a
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neighbour’s baby to get revenge over a garden fence
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argument.” A fourth finger was marked off. “You get
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sexual sadists, equally uncommon, but not unheard of, who want to
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damage a child. For them a baby’s cry hits the wrong
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programming. For most folk, even for men, the pitch causes anxiety
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and stress, as a number of tests clearly demonstrate. That’s
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pure evolution. It’s how a baby gets into your mental
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software and presses the buttons. For a psycho-sadist, the sound
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brings pleasure, and of course, in an infant, it’s easily
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induced. There was a very distressing case in Brisbane back in the
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eighties. The woman kept the baby fed, but made a blanket out of
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fibreglass insulation. The baby’s back was suppurating with
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gangrene by the time it was found.”</p>
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<p>Mike held up his small finger. “Lastly, and this is more
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common than you might expect, even in this country, there’s
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witchcraft. I read a paper on babies being sacrificed in Gambia,
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Zaire and Haiti. Some of them, it is believed, were stolen, but the
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majority, probably were sold, or even given willingly. There were
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two suspected cases in Bristol two years ago as far as I remember.
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That’s about it.”</p>
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<p>The coffee arrived, two small cups, lukewarm and bitter. Mike
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grimaced, as if he’d made the same gesture many times.</p>
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<p>“So, what about Greta Simon?” David asked. “Do
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you think she’s telling the truth?”</p>
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<p>“With what’s left of her brain, it’s hard to
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know. But she could be. The short term memory is gone, which means
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that by now, she wouldn’t remember your face or your name.
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She might, one time in a hundred, remember who I am, but I
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wouldn’t put money on it. Certainly, as I told you, there
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were no signs of her ever having given birth, but signs that she
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had cared for a baby, and of course, there was nothing to show why
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a woman of her advanced years was still lactating. That was a
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mystery.”</p>
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<p>“It sounds very like the case I’m working
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on.”</p>
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<p>“I know. But as far as Greta is concerned, she lives in a
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small series of bubbles in time, if you forgive the analogy. She is
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not in the present. That temporal part of her brain is damaged
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beyond repair and at her age, there will be no new neural pathways
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to be established. Whatever she’s lost is gone for good. I
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can guarantee that. But whenever she is in one particular time
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zone, as I like to call it, she sees things perfectly clearly. If
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she tells you she is holding a baby, then she believes that is what
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is happening, because the memory is forming a perpetual rationality
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loop. The brain is a wonderful, and mysterious organ. It tries to
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rationalise what it cannot comprehend. It can also recreate, more
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vividly than any memory, the exact conditions relating to any given
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period, so long as the recalled input has been strong enough
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initially.”</p>
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<p>David said he didn’t quite understand that.</p>
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<p>“Basically the cerebral cortex is a time machine. You
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trigger the response and it puts you back to where you’ve
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been. The injury Greta Simon suffered caused lesions and scarring
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which caused considerable damage. She has lost the bulk of her
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memories and that is not unusual with trauma of this sort. The
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brain compensates of course, boosting inherent and surviving
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memories, giving it some frame of reference. Basically, there are a
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few parts of her life which are still extant, still current. Each
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of these parts, at any given time, is real, and because her short
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term memory function is gone they are more real than the present.
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For Greta, the present does not really exist. Her whole life is
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encapsulated in those surviving areas of memory. At any given
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moment, she could be back in the sixties, or she could be five
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years old again, and she can tell you the name of everybody in her
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school class, where they are sitting and what they wear. It never
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varies, because she actually believes she <em>is</em> there. Most
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of the time, she’s cradling a baby, <em>Tiny Tim</em>. She
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sees him as vividly as we see each other. Now that itself leads me
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to believe that at one stage, probably very shortly before the
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accident, that she was indeed responsible for, however temporary,
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the care of a child. Greta has no capacity to lie.”</p>
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<p>“But not her baby?”</p>
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<p>“No. Quite unequivocally not hers.”</p>
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<p>Back in his own place, David had poured himself a drink, still
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shaken in the aftermath of June’s anger and in reaction to
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the stinging blow to his nose. He let the Jack Daniels bubble over
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ice and then sipped it slowly, letting the smooth burn spread in
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his throat. He tried not to go over what had happened, still
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feeling guilt and a certain strange elation which added to the
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guilt-weight. He had cleared the glass from the hallway, buttoning
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down the anger at her nasty swipe which crashed the picture frame
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to the floor. The whole thing had been unexpected, though, inside
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himself, he knew he had only been postponing the inevitable.</p>
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<p>His nose throbbed and his emotions did an eightsome reel, and
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after a while he pulled together the papers on the floor, collected
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them into a neater pile, and put them all under the coffee table,
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realising that he would get no more work done tonight. Instead, he
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poured himself another whisky, popped a can of lager, sat down on
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the carpet with his back against the couch and thumbed the remote
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control. The television came to life and offered him a choice was
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golf, a chess match, or old soap repeats, none of which were worth
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staying in for. Instead, he checked his list of tapes, possibly the
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most organised part of his life and selected the wildlife series
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he’d been compiling week by week.</p>
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<p>The beer was almost ice cold and after the first swallow, he
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held the can against his nose, letting the chill numb the hot
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throbbing.</p>
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<p>On screen, the famous naturalist was hunkered down observing a
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troop of baboons spread over a rocky clearing. He turned to the
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camera, his well known, almost beatific smile wide and excited.</p>
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<p>“And here,” he said, “the subordinate male
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protects itself from the Alpha, the leader of the troop.” The
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camera zoomed in on a bulky primate, tail held high over its
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rainbow backside, as it snatched a tiny baby from its mother. She
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screamed in protest and the baby whimpered in fright, but the
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baboon ignored both. From the edge of the picture, an even more
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massive male came powering in, its mane hackled and forelegs stiff
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with aggression. The first baboon began to run the tiny
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mite’s fur upwards against the grain and immediately it
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shrieked its discomfort.</p>
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<p>The dominant animal stopped in its tracks.</p>
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<p>“Like us,” the presenter said, “like
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chimpanzees and the great apes, baboons have a defined family
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structure. Instinctively, they react to the sound of a baby’s
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cry, which is pitched at such a level to cause distress in the
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adults. As you can see here, the Alpha male has stopped in its
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advance. It wants to fight the Beta male, driven by its natural
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response to dominate the troop. But the inferior male is using the
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baby’s shrieks as a shield. The dominant male is anxious and
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agitated, because the baby’s cries for help trigger the
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adult’s protective response, in the same way that an
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infant’s cry automatically attracts attention from a human.
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Confused by the interference of the baby baboon’s cry, the
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Alpha stops, unable to attack. In this way we see that the
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baby’s genetic programming coincides with that of the adult.
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It demands attention and the adult is powerless to ignore
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it.”</p>
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<p>Almost miraculously, while the tiny baboon shrieked its glassy
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cry, while its mother chattered in real distress close by, impotent
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to snatch her baby out of danger, the huge male stopped, sat still
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and looked quite comically confused. The rival continued rubbing
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the infant’s fur up the wrong way as it sidled off, far
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enough to be out of danger. Then, quite casually, he dropped the
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baby onto the ground. The mother rushed in, snatched it up and held
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it close, checking for damage. Instantly the baby buried its head
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against her fur and began to suckle. Its cries stopped
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immediately.</p>
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<p>David watched the programme through, but his mind kept jumping
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back to the scene with June which clamoured for his attention,
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demanding to be picked over and analysed, and for some reason, when
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he thought of her, Greta Simon’s strangely sly, lopsided
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face, would intrude in to his thoughts.</p>
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<p>“I found him,” the old woman had said. “And he
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was <em>mine</em>.”</p>
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<p>He’d been thinking about June, how she’d wanted to
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start a family, how she’d get depressed whenever one of her
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friends announced a pregnancy while she wasn’t even married.
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He thought about the biological drives some people have in
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abundance, recalled asking Helen, quite clumsily as he now
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remembered, about the reproductive imperative and she’d
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laughed, telling him that her sisters had it in great
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abundance.</p>
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<p>“Because of that, I’ve got a tight rein on
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mine,” she’d said. “I make a terrific aunt, costs
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me a fortune at Christmas, but the rest of it I can do
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without.” She’d looked up at him and given him a
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teasing smile, nudging him with her elbow. “Unless I find the
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right man, of course.”</p>
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<p>He’d smiled at that recollection, faintly embarrassed
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despite the third Jack Daniels, and then again, with no warning,
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Greta Simon’s face floated into his memory.</p>
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<p>“She fell down and the baby called to me and he needed a
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mother.” The good eye had rolled round to face him, pinning
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him with its oddly iced sharpness. “I look after him and I
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feed him. He’s so hungry all the time. He could suck you to
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death, but he needs me.”</p>
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<p>The old woman had believed she was suckling a baby, from the
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motions of her hands and the posture of her body. Her hands moved,
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the way the baboon mother’s hands had moved, a natural
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clutching, hugging motion as she pressed the imaginary child to her
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thin, shapeless chest.</p>
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<p>Superimposed on that image, he saw the baby baboon, skinny and
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flat faced, its arms stretched and fingers clenched on its
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mother’s fur, nuzzle in against the black teat.</p>
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<p>“Oh, not so hard Timmy. You’ll empty me right
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out.” Greta Simon had complained, pretended to complain, as
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the invisible baby suckled.</p>
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<p>There was something in those images, an important connection
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tugging at him. As before, he reached for it, but it danced away.
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By now he was on his third can and the effects of the liquor and
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the events of the day began to overtake him. He tried again to make
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the connection and failed. He considered calling Helen, dismissed
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the notion.</p>
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<p>On the screen the camera swung round past a crackling flame
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which ate its way up a trailing vine. It zoomed in to a hollow in a
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tree where a bird, something small and plain, a lark or a maybe a
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linnet, sat on its clutch of eggs. The flames of the brush fire
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made the air waver and dance in heat mirage, but behind it, the
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bird’s eye, black as a coal could be seen sparkling. The
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camera zoomed even closer, a terrific feat of photography, and even
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managed to capture the red flames flickering angrily in the
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eye’s reflection</p>
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<p>The red eye glared, sending a strange and unexpected shiver of
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intuitive recognition inside David, despite the numbing effect of
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the beer and whiskey.</p>
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<p>“As you can see,” the famous naturalist explained in
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hushed, awed tones, “this bird continues to sit on the nest.
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The other animals, the lizards and the snakes, the meercats and the
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other birds have fled the approaching flames. In this bird,
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however, the urge to protect her chicks is too strong. This is
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genetic programming at its most implacable. The bird wants to flee
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the flames, but it senses the danger to the nestlings. The need to
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protect its children is stronger even than its own natural
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imperative to survive. Again, we can see the command children have
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over their parents, and this it to the death. The mother bird will
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sit here as the fire consumes the bush she chose as a safe haven,
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defying the heat and the fear. All to no avail.”</p>
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<p>The flames crackled as the scene began to blur on the screen,
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the great red eye staring desperately out. The mother bird sat
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there until the heat and the smoke filled the screen, blotting
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everything out.</p>
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<p>“The natural imperative, the drive to reproduce, to
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protect its offspring against all dangers, is so powerful that it
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has over-ruled every other instinct,” he said, “In the
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end, it has killed them all.”</p>
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<p>The credits rolled and the dramatic music swelled. David leaned
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back against the settee and closed his eyes, listening to the
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soulful notes while the images, June, Helen, Greta Simon, the baby
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baboon, the dreadful red eye, they all came swimming and circling
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in his memory. By the time the next programme began, he was half
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asleep.</p>
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<p>The tape rolled on. On screen, a mass of moving twigs resolved
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as the camera pulled back, into a mound of ants. The voice came on
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again, whispering atmospherically, explaining the army ant bivouac.
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As the teeming mass of insects broke up, the camera followed the
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monstrous, swollen thing that was the queen, hauled hither and yon
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by the nurses, bloated and helpless.</p>
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<p>“She lays eggs constantly,” the naturalist said.
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“While the workers, her daughters, are programmed to raise
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them. They will die to defend the queen’s offspring, obeying
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the queen’s own reproductive imperative. She needs to breed.
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It is her sole function, and it is that drive which powers the
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whole colony.”</p>
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<p>David did not hear those words, not consciously. He was fast
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asleep. And in his sleep, he dreamed.</p>
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<hr />
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<p><em>“Bastard.”</em></p>
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<p>June’s face twisted in anger as she spat the word and all
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of the pictures fell from the walls, spinning away from him, each
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of them warping and twisting, each of them now a screen in which
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the subjects moved in their own separate cells of life.</p>
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<p>“Bastard.” The word echoed from the walls and she
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was turning to face him, her face white and eyes wide. “You
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must be impotent!”</p>
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<p>He looked down and thought he might be impotent because he was
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naked and nothing was happening where it should and when he looked
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up again, Helen Lamont was coming towards him, hunched against the
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cold in her flying jacket. Somewhere in the distance a cuckoo
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hooted and they were sitting beside a pool where dragonflies
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swarmed in fighting squadrons, snapping insects out of the air.</p>
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<p>“You’re one of the good guys,” Helen said and
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smiled at him while June was storming across the field, her skirt
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blowing in the breeze. “I might have one if I find the right
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man.”</p>
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<p>He had turned towards her and she had smiled again and the
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flames were in her eyes and they were all red.</p>
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<p>The cuckoo hopped again closer in now and he could see it
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flutter from bush to bush, seeking the pipit’s nest. He
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turned away from Helen and watched it settle on the nest, furtively
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pressing down, head swivelling from side to side. The egg came out,
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soft and membraned and it wriggled and swelled and then burst open
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to show the big-eyed bird that jostled the others out of the way,
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out of the nest and then shrieked for food.</p>
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<p>“Poor little thing,” Helen said and he turned back
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to her while the baby cuckoo begged for food. “It needs
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fed.”</p>
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<p>“Of course it does,” he told her, edging forward to
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plant his lips on hers. “We all need fed.” The words
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came out smooth as oil and he marvelled at how cool he was and her
|
|
tongue came out and the tasted the freshness of it and closed her
|
|
eyes, lifting a hand to her breast.</p>
|
|
<p>He touched the leathery skin and his eyes flicked wide open.
|
|
Heather McDougall was writhing on the ground, the three moles like
|
|
risen cancers on her cheek, while he was pressing against her
|
|
chest, trying to get the heart to start and the smell of her blood
|
|
and vomit was like a cloud in the air. Helen was screaming at him
|
|
to do something while June just kept telling him he was a bastard
|
|
and that he’d destroyed another one and that she
|
|
wouldn’t have his children if he was the last man on
|
|
earth.</p>
|
|
<p>He turned back to the dying woman and Greta Simon leered up at
|
|
him with that monstrous dent caving in the side of her head and
|
|
forcing her red eye to look at the other one, madness swimming vin
|
|
her gaze and her laughter cackling out.</p>
|
|
<p>“I left my baby lying here,” she screeched.
|
|
“And went to gather blueberries. She took it she took it she
|
|
TOOK IT.”</p>
|
|
<p>“I did not,” June hissed. “I didn’t want
|
|
that baby. I wanted <em>yours</em>.”</p>
|
|
<p>David spun, confused and the sun was going down and the
|
|
dragonflies game whirring in on their helicopter wings, great eyes
|
|
redly reflecting the setting sun. Helen lay back in the grass
|
|
beside the water filled crater. He bent to kiss her again, now
|
|
strangely excited. She put her hand down between his legs and
|
|
trailed her fingers up against his thigh. He felt the heat expand
|
|
on the side of his cheek and she leaned into him once more,
|
|
pressing against him and he was inside her, slowly surging, back
|
|
and forth, smelling the heady scent of her body and feeling the
|
|
shudder and gasp as she forced against him. She lay back and looked
|
|
at him with the sun in her eyes and after a while the water rippled
|
|
and something dark and devilish broke the surface and began to haul
|
|
its way up the stalk of reed, expanding as it came until it reached
|
|
eye level and the skin on the back split down the middle and
|
|
something else came out. He raised his camera to get a picture of
|
|
the light reflecting on the bulbous, predator’s eyes, but it
|
|
was no dragonfly emerging, it was a small, fragile baby baboon,
|
|
screeching in fear and alarm and he felt the sudden anger build up
|
|
inside him.</p>
|
|
<p>“Bastard,” June bawled fiercely. “It’s
|
|
your baby, don’t you see?”</p>
|
|
<p>He turned, whirling, and saw Helen was gone and spun back to
|
|
June who was turning slowly away with the red sun in her eyes. Over
|
|
in the bushes the pipits were feeding a huge bird, the size of a
|
|
turkey and the baboon squealed harshly as it sank slowly into the
|
|
water.</p>
|
|
<p>He awoke with a sudden start, heart hammering, thrown out of
|
|
sleep by the sudden fear of the incomprehensible and by the sudden
|
|
flare of pain in his nose when his arm knocked against it. The heat
|
|
on his cheek was almost a pain and a real pain was jabbing in at
|
|
the muscle of his neck. In the video recorder the tape was
|
|
screeching to a halt, rewinding itself back to the start.</p>
|
|
<p>Groggily he forced himself up onto one elbow, then pushed again
|
|
until he was sitting. He had slid down to the thick rug, too close
|
|
to the gas fire. His cheek felt as if it was baked and for and
|
|
instant he imagined he could smell scorched hairs. The tape
|
|
squealed shrill then clicked to a stop. The terrified baboon sound,
|
|
or what had seemed like a baboon in his dream, died instantly. He
|
|
moved again and his neck protested in a stab of stiff pain. He
|
|
groaned, knocked his glass over, spilling a tablespoon of Jack
|
|
Daniels onto the carpet. The scent of whisky overpowered anything
|
|
else and David came fully awake.</p>
|
|
<p>The after images of his dream danced in his vision, fading
|
|
slowly. June’s face still held the expression he had seen
|
|
when she’d stormed out. Old Greta Simon’s distorted
|
|
head slowly fuzzed out, leaving Helen Lamont, eyes glazed and mouth
|
|
open, as she had been in the strange dream. Embarrassment and
|
|
sudden lust challenged each other and cancelled each other out.</p>
|
|
<p>For a few minutes, blinking the sleep away, he tried to
|
|
recapture the details of the dream, but they faded as quickly as
|
|
the images had done, leaving him with the slightly disoriented,
|
|
half-bewildered sense of something not quite achieved, of something
|
|
half-grasped and now lost.</p>
|
|
<p>He got up, went to the bathroom to wash his face in cold water,
|
|
massaging the cramped muscles of his neck with a cool hand and then
|
|
came back through to the living room. Somewhere in the ten yards
|
|
from bathroom to where he’d fallen asleep, the notion
|
|
he’d been reaching or came in on him with complete,
|
|
crystalline clarity. The connection.</p>
|
|
<p>He sat down by the table and clenched his hands together,
|
|
resting his chin on the lattice his fingers made, thinking about a
|
|
concept so monstrous he could hardly believe he could even consider
|
|
its possibility. He let out a long, slow breath. The dream images
|
|
had fragmented and vanished, but the core of the symbology remained
|
|
with him, mental pieces interlocking, parts forming a monumental
|
|
whole. He wondered why he had not put them together before, because
|
|
his interest in the natural world had already provided him with all
|
|
of the clues. He had known about the drives and the imperatives
|
|
without having to see them again on a television programme.</p>
|
|
<p>Drives. Imperatives. Programming.</p>
|
|
<p>Pieces of the jigsaw. Could they all fit? He sat and forced
|
|
himself to think, drawing on the dream images, sizing them up. The
|
|
naturalist on television had spoken of fundamental drives, the
|
|
basic instinct that is the engine of the vast and intricate
|
|
biosphere of the earth, the urge to replicate. The cuckoo of
|
|
David’s previous dream came back to him, the hairless and
|
|
blind chick, murdering its foster-siblings by throwing them from
|
|
the nest while its new parents could do nothing but follow their
|
|
programming to respond to its cries for food and work themselves to
|
|
exhaustion to feed their giant ward.</p>
|
|
<p>A brood parasite, the cuckoo was. There were worse parasites,
|
|
but this one used the parents drive to protect its offspring. Like
|
|
the baboon baby’s cry which drove the adults to feed and
|
|
protect. Like the bird in the nest, suicidally remaining on the
|
|
nest, the genetic program was clear. The bird had no choice.</p>
|
|
<p>And in humans, biologically no further along on the evolutionary
|
|
trail. Did humans have any real choice? He thought of a
|
|
baby’s high-pitched cry and knew that even he would
|
|
experience the quickening of his pulse and the tightening of his
|
|
nerves if he heard a child’s wail. That response was an
|
|
evolutionary necessity. It was how the infant controlled the
|
|
parent.</p>
|
|
<p>If, <em>if</em> there was a kind of thing that had evolved to
|
|
use humans, how best to be protected? There was one answer to
|
|
that.</p>
|
|
<p>The concept he’d arrived at was such a stupendous one that
|
|
he really had to sit down and think it through. The bottle of Jack
|
|
Daniels picked up the light and gleamed from the far side of the
|
|
table. He almost reached for it again, changed his mind, and hauled
|
|
himself out of the chair, his stiff joints protesting at the sudden
|
|
motion. He flipped the switch on the kettle and paced the kitchen,
|
|
still juggling with mental images, until the kettle boiled. He made
|
|
a pot of coffee, strong and aromatic, downed a cup, had another and
|
|
by the time he was on his third, he was almost completely
|
|
awake.</p>
|
|
<p>“Say that again?” Helen said, on the other end of
|
|
the line, her voice quizzical. “And slowly this time, so I
|
|
can understand it.”</p>
|
|
<p>“I asked Mike Fitzgibbon the wrong question, I think. What
|
|
sort of woman would steal a baby. What if it was the other way
|
|
round?:”</p>
|
|
<p>“You’re serious?”</p>
|
|
<p>“Sure. Maybe. Christ, I don’t know.” He
|
|
stopped, pulled himself tight. Took a mental step forward.
|
|
“Yes. I’m serious. It sounds crazy, and it is crazy.
|
|
But we’ve done the checks and this is not the first time
|
|
it’s happened, and there’s no real evidence of any
|
|
other babies. Not ever. People have seen the prams, maybe even got
|
|
a glimpse, but there’s no name, no real identity.”</p>
|
|
<p>“Are you drunk?”</p>
|
|
<p>“I’ve had a drink. But I’m not drunk.”
|
|
He wasn’t sure if that was the actual truth or not, but right
|
|
at that moment he felt absolutely sober. For a moment of misgiving,
|
|
he felt that he might have made a complete idiot of himself, but
|
|
then he realised how it all fit.</p>
|
|
<p>“You think we should look for a baby that steals
|
|
mothers?”</p>
|
|
<p>The silence drew out for longer than before. He hadn’t
|
|
heard a click on the line, but just as he wondered whether
|
|
they’d been cut off, Helen’s voice came back. She spoke
|
|
quite softly.</p>
|
|
<p>“I don’t want to talk about this just now. I think
|
|
you should get some sleep and we’ll talk about this in the
|
|
morning.”</p>
|
|
<p>This time she hung up.</p>
|
|
<p>She never got back to sleep that night. Now that she was awake,
|
|
now that he’d put the idea into her head, she couldn’t
|
|
let it go, and the more she thought about it, the more, however
|
|
preposterous the notion seemed, the more it seemed to fit with the
|
|
facts of the case. She lay in the dark, with a shaft of moonlight
|
|
lancing between the narrow gap of the curtains to slash a silver
|
|
line down the wall, trying to sleep while her mind picked and
|
|
teased, refusing to let it go.</p>
|
|
<p>What if. <em>What if?</em></p>
|
|
<p>He’d told her about Greta Simon, when they’d arrived
|
|
back from Levenford where the trail had suddenly gone cold. Greta
|
|
Simon had been on the bridge where she’d been hit by the
|
|
front end of a lorry and lost too much of her forebrain to exist in
|
|
anything but an institution and a sphere of time somewhere back in
|
|
the distant past. She had had a baby and it had gone missing,
|
|
presumed drowned. But nobody knew who the baby was, or, more to the
|
|
point, <em>whose.</em> And it was never found, dead or alive.</p>
|
|
<p>Heather McDougall who had vanished on the same day. She turned
|
|
up dead in the mall, with a baby in a pram, caught on camera in the
|
|
moment of death. The baby caught, blurred on the screen only when
|
|
it too vanished. Ginny Marsden who had gone missing so dramatically
|
|
while the McDougall woman lay writhing on the ground. Ginny Marsden
|
|
had stopped and snatched the baby, cuddling it tight against her
|
|
body.</p>
|
|
<p>The baby.</p>
|
|
<p>The link was there. It was clear, and yet Helen was reluctant to
|
|
reach for both sides, because that would make her a conduit, a link
|
|
which would keep the circuit, make the connection between one case,
|
|
another, a third. If she was a conduit, the electrical connection,
|
|
a canal linking them all, then she could be contaminated by this
|
|
thing. Something inside of her mind, a part of her brain which
|
|
might not quite operate on the truly rational, the part of her mind
|
|
that the little parasite had recognised over the distance when she
|
|
had felt someone walk over her grave, shied away from this.</p>
|
|
<p>The fingers trailed down her spine again. Out in the dark, at
|
|
the far end of the hallway , one of her nieces snuffled in her
|
|
sleep and wailed faintly in dream distress and Helen remembered the
|
|
same feeling of impending danger that she’d sensed when Nina
|
|
Galt had opened the door and the bitter smell had come wafting out
|
|
from the room. That part of her mind that could reach out of the
|
|
rational and pick up a taste of the other-natural, flexed, still
|
|
weak, still unready, and gave her a sensation of shadowed and
|
|
threatening prescience.</p>
|
|
<p>There was danger here and it was real.</p>
|
|
<p>The same smell as at the house on Latta Street. The same as at
|
|
Celia Barker’s apartment where the dead cat had got up and
|
|
danced and the walls had breathed and the two-headed beast had come
|
|
lurching for her in the hallucination. She sensed danger looming
|
|
ahead.</p>
|
|
<p>What sort of baby would steal a mother?</p>
|
|
<p>Helen closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but still the shiver
|
|
of prescience wouldn’t let her go and her mind still tickled
|
|
and itched with the preposterous notion of something completely
|
|
unnatural.</p>
|
|
<p><em>Yet</em>.</p>
|
|
<p>She had sensed something that morning when she’d come out
|
|
of the cafe where Margaret and Maisie had told her of the girl with
|
|
the baby. She’d stopped and the unnerving sensation of being
|
|
watched had insinuated itself. She had felt eyes on her, felt the
|
|
touch of something else slide across her consciousness, leaving her
|
|
with a besmirched feeling of contamination. She had dismissed it
|
|
then, in the cold light of day, but in the dark of the night, with
|
|
the dust motes dancing in that strip of moonlight, it came back to
|
|
her and she knew why she had been scared in the hostel. She had
|
|
pushed the idea of being watched, shucked it away from her, but it
|
|
had clung to her. In the chill of the winter’s night, she
|
|
knew her instinct had not been wrong. She had received a warning
|
|
then, just as she felt the warning now.</p>
|
|
<p>And who had been watching unseen? Had it been Ginny Marsden? Had
|
|
it been someone else? Intuition buzzed inside her head, an angry,
|
|
insistent insect. Had it been some <em>thing</em> else?</p>
|
|
<p>Damn David Harper, she thought. He was probably sound asleep by
|
|
now. He’d sounded thick and mumbling when he’d come on
|
|
the phone, as if he’d just woken, or as if he’d gone
|
|
the distance with that bottle of Jack Daniels. He was most likely
|
|
snoring like the proverbial pig by now, while she tossed and turned
|
|
and tried to shake off the images that came dancing into her
|
|
imagination, images she did not want to consider in the cold
|
|
shallows of a midwinter’s morning.</p>
|
|
<p>The baby’s blurred, unclear and wavering likeness on
|
|
screen stayed with her. It had no face.</p>
|
|
</div>
|
|
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|
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</body>
|
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