Genus

by Jonathan Trigell

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In the Britain of a few tomorrows time, physical perfection is commonplace and self improvement has become an extinct expression: all the qualities men and women could aspire to can be purchased prior to birth. GENUS is a time of genetic selection and enrichment - life chances come on a sliding scale according to wealth. For some there is no money or choice, and an underclass has evolved; London's King's Cross, or The Kross as it is now known, has become a ghetto for the Unimproved. In The Kross, the natural, the dated, the cheap and the dull, live a brittle and unenviable existence. But unrest is growing; tension is mounting and a murderer is abroad in these dark quarters... Acclaimed author Jonathan Trigell's third novel is a breathtaking tour de force, exploring a dystopia of the not-too-distant-a future which will leave readers wondering not 'what if', as the original audience of Huxley's Brave New World did, but 'when'. Praise for Jonathan Trigell : 'A compelling narrative, a beautifully structured piece of writing, and a thought-provoking novel of ideas. It's a wonderful debut.' - Sarah Waters, Chair of the Judges for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize on Boy A 'A fine and moving debut novel... compulsively readable... a rare treat' The Independent on Boy A 'Does for extreme winter sports what Alex Garland's The Beach did for backpacking.' - Financial Times on Cham.

Release date: July 21, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 300

Sample

IT’S BEEN AN HOUR since he told her about Jesus, and she has now sobbed herself to exhaustion. She looks old when she cries, which is usually only when someone close to her dies violently. Holman has only seen it a few times. The tears have dissolved into her make-up and drained it into the struggle-carved gutters of her face. He would like to paint her like this, maybe he will when he gets home. He tries to feel for her pain, he attempts to comfort her, but he can’t help being fascinated by her. He can’t stop himself thinking about how he could do something with oil or charcoal, to recreate what those streaked cheek creases say about her world. Even as he holds her heaving head and breathes in the longed-for, but rarely received, smells of woman, he feels detached. Like he is watching himself doing it. As if he is a tourist in the land of his own life.


The air in the studio apartment is stale, like the sheets of the drooping double bed on which they both sit. So he hauls himself by his cane and shuffles over to the stained-glass window, where the panes depict a grey-bearded saint. The arthritic creak as the window frame is forced open could have come from the stained-glass-saint’s old bones.

Holman puts his head outside. It’s no cooler out there and no fresher, with mopeds guffing out bacterial bio fumes into the already saturated air, but at this height there is a small breeze at least. They say it’s the hottest June since records began, but such platitudes have long since lost all meaning: it always seems to be the hottest since records began. The sounds of the street – little burps from moped horns and the general tra-la-la – seem to have roused Dolly a little. She lifts her head and smiles a self-consciously brave smile at him. One of her false eyelashes is coming unstuck, hanging at the edge like a half-bitten thumbnail. A gash that shows the baseness of it all. A gap like an easily visible hole in a lie.

‘Do you want a glass of synth?’ he asks her, ‘That might be the best thing for now.’

‘I’ve got nothing left, and I can’t be going out, not today.’

Holman winks a large dark eye at her. People seem to perceive something from his eyes: perhaps because the warm, permanently dilated pupils look pleasantly out of place on such a shrunken, uncomely homunculus as him. He limps back to the bed and sits down, thinking how he and Dolly make a comically chaste pair, side by side on this site of incalculable fornications.

Now that it isn’t needed to support his weight, Holman is able to unscrew the top of his cane, and he pours from it a stream of frog-green liquid into the tea-tarnished china mug that sits on Dolly’s bedside table. Though the sweet, strong smell of the synth instantly ignites his yearning, he leaves nothing in the cane’s hidden flask for himself. But there’s a decent dose for Dolly. Enough to medicate her troubles for a while.

She takes the mug to her face two-handed, looking childlike in her anxiousness not to spill a tear drop. He remembers her like that, and while she lies down to try and sleep away the pain, he starts to sketch her in the notepad that he always carries. Preparations.

Holman first moved to King’s Cross – The Kross – in the hope of sanctuary. Some instinctive sense that he would blend in better. He had seen that the strange were more numerous there: the detritus from the closed-down communes, burdened with religion as well as imperfection; some elderly early failures; the dated, the cheap and the dull; the charity packs; and the ragged remnants of the city’s Unimproved still lingered in the streets round that Elizabethan railway station. The Kross had become a beacon for the genetic underclass. Holman couldn’t say that he grew to love it, but he grew to prefer it to anywhere else. And among the whores, the broodmares, the synth heads and the silk workers, there were artists, and many other bright splashes of colour on that drab urban palette.

His studio is not far from Dolly’s. He hobbles out through the communal vestibule – her building is one of the many churches converted into council flats after The Dissolution of the Temples Act – and out on to the canicule street. He isn’t dressed for weather like this, he never is, but his unusual uniform: the black suit and bowler hat acts as armour somehow, it helps push the world a little further from him. Already a grotesque oddity, to be odder feels safer than a pretence of normality would be. He passes a group of wall-leaning gavroches, most of whom wear their T-shirts tucked up under their armpits, in pretence that it cools them, but really to show off exercise-defined abs. Trying to look gene-improved, but exhibiting only self-loathing.

There is a languid menace in street youths like these, posturing that can flip instantly to violence. But Holman is left alone. He keeps his gaze ahead and down, so as not to meet the eye of one who might take that as offence. He hears a whisper of ‘fucking cripple’, but doesn’t look up. To seem utterly defenceless is Holman’s best defence.

Outside an unopened shop, stacked crates of dusty Coke bottles, filled and used so many times they are almost sheenless, still sparkle, so bright is the sunlight. So hot it feels like the glass should melt. Something about their neat segregated rows in the plastic slots reminds Holman of military ordnance: newspaper pictures, grenades that some tracksuited fanatic might have lobbed from the back of a moving truck, to make more martyrs to his insanity.

Vents from a few illegal air-conditioning units churn out ever more superheated air. Moisture drips from them on to the streets below. Dun sparrows try fruitlessly to bathe in the lens-thin puddles they produce.

Ahead of him – but making such slow progress that eventually even Holman overtakes them – walks a boy, proudly holding the paw of one of those mini pandas that were popular a few years back. The panda looks mangy and malnourished: bare pink patches in its black and white fur – it’s probably from a rescue centre, if it belongs to a Kross kid – but it gnaws eagerly on the bit of chorizo sausage it’s holding.

Holman loves to watch children and at the same time hates them, and for the same reason, because children are a repository for all the joy left in the world. However they may have come – picked and modelled in computer simulation, or conceived in timeless two-backed tussle – at the points they arrive they are still just children. However those bluest eyes or that duskiest skin came about – with genes enhanced from ma and pa, bought entirely anew, or left to chance – they still arise like a gift of nature. They still laugh at life and discover old truths for themselves with fresh wonder. They still smile unblemished by guile. And they still remind Holman that he – perhaps not alone, but nearly so – was denied this joy even for those transient years when it should have been his right. In a world where physical perfection is ever more commonplace – and so of course becomes itself plain, in the striving for better – he has always fitted firmly in the lowest cadre of those who have been left behind entirely.

As he unlocks the front door to his building, Holman finds himself surprised, catching sight of the gnarled stub-bishness of his own fingers around the smooth, slim, long-barrelled key. And simultaneously unsurprised by his surprise: because every time he awakes he is brought down anew by the realization that this is the real him, even though the other him, the him of his dreams, felt more real and more really who he was supposed to be. He never ceases to be disgusted by his own dwarfish fingers clutching the anchor-rope rim of his duvet.

When he paints, though, it is different. When Holman paints, his fingers become long and lithe like a pianist’s or pickpocket’s. They float and fly about the canvas, deft strokes making the images of his mind more substantial than they ever were, either within his imagination or even in the original scenes that stirred them. He has a talent for capturing the inner vehemence of his subjects, for making the years of rage and despair and caved-in dreams explicit with a stoical stare or half-cocked leer. Holman has a rare skill for bringing to life the inhumanity of humankind. Somewhere within, he has always known this, from his snubbed art-school days, through the disdain of his family, and now, perhaps – he feels a smarting draught of hope – the world is starting to agree. Charlie Smith sold two of Holman’s paintings last month, for enough money to keep him in supplies a good while, were it not for the fact that his rent was late and he drank most of the remainder in celebration. But people other than pimps and whores and the paupers he buys synth for are beginning to look Holman in the eye; even though they have to look down to do so.

He is not a dwarf, though, not a true dwarf – as such things are recorded and measured: he stands at four foot nine, with corns and blisters on the floor. If his fractal, valgus legs could be straightened, then he might have another two inches on that. If those foreshortened bandied limbs were in proportion to the rest of his frame, then he might be five foot eight, or more, which would have been respectable enough, though still strange in a world where only poor or religious males continue to linger below six feet.

But beyond even his height there is something dwarfish about his face. Dwarfish in the semblance of the minions who worked the mines and foundries of Vulcan perhaps, because Holman’s skin is reddish, like it’s fire-scorched from a forge. His lips are thick and would be lascivious, but they lack the look of intellect that word suggests and so they are merely brutish. Uncomfortably numb, drool will sometimes drip from his lower lip – with owner unaware – into his beast-thick beard. He has long since given up on shaving, an act that feels like an attempt to fight time or tide: since the hairs on his left cheek appear to have begun re-emergence even in the while it takes to shave the right. His eyes are dark, shadowed beneath thick brows and a tomb-front forehead. But they are, if not a window to his soul, at least not a mirror of his body.

Holman rifles through the meagre piles of mail in the lobby; then pulls out his pad and looks again at the sketches he made of Dolly, while he gathers his strength for the stairs. He made a show of strength for her – show or charade? – either way such displays take it out of him, leave little energy for himself. And inwardly, of course, he is still shaken from having found Jesus.

THE SPIDER’S HISSED SHRIEKING startles Gretchen. The creature’s ten-inch mandible fangs twitch and flare, though the noise doesn’t come from the black gape they reveal. The screech emanates from its bulbous, wolf-haired thorax, or from the vibration of the flapping cage-door lungs that lie beneath it. There is no emotion in the four pairs of blank black eyes that stare at Gretchen, but the screech is horrible. Instinct erects the tiny time-whitened hairs on her elderly lady’s frame, long past fight or flight. Seven of the spider’s three-foot-long legs jerk manically, their triple claws clattering on the tiled kitchen floor. Its lame and trailing eighth leg is trapped under the door, again.


‘You silly thing, Bojangles,’ Gretchen scolds; but she looks on fondly as she frees the leg and the creature stalks across to its hardboard lair under the sagging but freshly scrubbed work surface.

Gretchen goes back to scanning her rescued copy of yesterday’s newspaper, she’ll use it to re-line Bojangles’ lair when she’s had a quick look. There isn’t much of interest: another terrorist attack, but not a big one, bit of a botch job, it sounds like: blew himself up and the back wall of an empty library. Silly thing. There is editorial discussion about the morality of using a shark gene in people: it would allow for perfect pearly-white teeth that renewed continually through life. It would never get through parliament, though – they never cross the Rubicon of using non-human genes – the press just run these articles to shock. The newspaper ink leaves a smudged stain on Gretchen’s fingers, which are looking greyer by the day anyway. Grey as her hair. Grey as her pinafore. But the day’s not grey, she thinks, looking out the window. The sky’s blue and you can bet it’ll be a scorcher, but that’s all right. That’s not so bad.

‘A bit of sunshine never hurt anyone, did it, Bojangles?’

Donald used to like the sun. Even at the end, weak as he was, he used to like to be wheeled out to sit on the parched little patch of earth in what passed for a front yard. No front yard now, in this new place, but she’d never grumble, plenty have it worse.

She hears the building’s front door go and looks out of the spyhole next to her pantry that gives her a view of the entry. It’s part of her job as the concierge, she always thinks, she’s not being nosy, but she needs to know who’s coming and going. It’s poor Holman coming in. Hobbling across the hall resting on his walking cane. He really is a horrible-looking little man. ‘But you can’t blame him for that,’ she says to Bojangles, with a sympathetic smile: the spider not being much of an Adonis itself. Bojangles doesn’t move, just stares at her, not that it has too much choice, since its eight eyes don’t blink or move. Actually, it would probably be quite a catch in spider world, Gretchen always thinks. It has lovely strong dark-furred legs, except for the gammy one, dances them ever so nimbly when something agitates him – hence his name – and makes her ever such a lot of silk. But Bojangles is a mule spider, of course, they don’t mate, don’t have the urge to. The breeders say it makes them calmer and stops them trying to run off, but everyone knows it’s really just so you go back to buy another one when your spider dies after five or six years. Stops you ever really getting independent. Though people reckon it’s hard to breed them anyway; it’s difficult enough just to keep two at a time, without them eating each other. She knows enough folk who’ve tried. Sooner or later they’ll find each other and struggle to the death. They’ve made them completely vegetarian – she’s seen Bojangles sit spinning, ignoring a sparrow not a half-lunge in front of his fangs – but the gene-splice scientists still can’t stop that urge to kill other arachnids.

It’s like with people in a way: though, for the Improved, at least, sex is now completely separated from reproduction, the rape rate hasn’t gone down and men still live in fear of being cuckolded; jilted lovers still murder one another. There’s always something in the paper, when she fishes it out of the bin of Flat 10. There are some bits of nature you just can’t get rid of. That’s what she always used to say to Donald, when they were choosing their son.

‘I don’t care what the doctors claim,’ she’d say, ‘they don’t know everything: you look at Mrs De Castillo’s boy. They can have a go, but they don’t know everything; nature will take its course too.’

Of course, the more you paid the less the chances were of unforeseen developments, but you can only afford so much, only do so much. They’d borrowed as much as they could, she’d said to Donald, so that was that; no point in worrying afterwards. Just let nature take its course. They were both the first generation of either of their families to gene-enrich at all. Prior to them, their relatives had all procreated in the same, slightly unseemly pot-luck fashion as their ancient ancestors.

And hadn’t the investment turned out well? Their Paulo was a lovely boy, all their joy, and had grown into quite a man as well. Didn’t come round so much as he might these days, but that was life. They gave him the best start they could. And anyway, if he was a bit too independent, well, that was probably old Donald’s fault. Donald said he’d never been independent enough, wanted his boy to really make something of himself. Which he had, in a smallish way, but he never visited much.

The spyhole gives Gretchen quite a wide-angle view. She wonders if that’s how Bojangles sees things, with his eight eyes. Holman’s checking the mail now, sifting through all the piles to see if anything is for him, though he must know that Gretchen always separates it out. To think that his mother is that famous model what’s-her-name. Donald had quite a thing for her, as much as he was interested in any celebrity types. She probably doesn’t look as nice now, of course, close up anyway; though she still looks dandy when you see her in the papers, which you occasionally still do. You’d certainly never credit Holman as coming from her. All that money and those genes to work with, you’d have thought Holman would have been quite something. But no, they thought they knew best, didn’t they? Silly things. She supposes he wouldn’t have been Holman then though, if things had been different. He would have been a Holman, but not him. But he wouldn’t have minded either, would he? He would never have known any different. That’s what all the protesters and the religious folk didn’t get: what you never knew never hurt you.


She and Donald could have chosen any number of other little Paulos, but the one that came along was theirs just the same. Their son. And he was the best they could afford anyway, so that was that. It would be nice if he called by a little more often, though. She wouldn’t mind that.

Bojangles dances his funny little twitching-leg jig of anticipation when she gets his fly biscuits out. Who knows if there’s real flies in them; Gretchen doubts it, but he certainly enjoys them. She uses the bowl of biscuits to tempt him out of his little den under the sink, the easier to change the newspaper in it.

Most people who keep silk spiders just do it for the money, for the bit of income the silk brings in. But Bojangles is her second now, and Gretchen finds them quite therapeutic. Well, maybe that’s not the right word, but they ease the loneliness anyway. They help to fill the gap that was left when Donald died. It wasn’t that she and Donald used to do much together, any more than she and Bojangles. But just having him sat there, even if he was in the other room, helped time pass. A day is a long time to spend on your own. Though not as long as a night: even in the heat of the summers there is a cold patch in her bed, where a funny little man used to sleep once. A man who shrank the longer she knew him. Whose eyebrows grew into great white clouds above his eyes as he aged. Once big eyes that eventually became little pinpricks, but were still the same kingfisher blue as the eyes she fell in love with and still belonged to the same man. And she can fully understand how people want to believe in life after death. Sometimes, in those first months, the thought that her Donald had just disappeared was almost more than she could physically bear. It used to hit her like a sickness, used to suck the air from her and leave her panicked. If there had been any religious groups to join, she might well have done so, back then; for the support, the solace. She supposes that’s when they used to get people. But now she’s mostly all right, she just keeps ticking on through the long days and longer nights. She knows she’s not the first widow the world has ever known, and she’ll not be the last. And she’s not the worst off, not by a long shot. She did well to get this concierge job, with the free flat. And Bojangles gives her a lit. . .