The Testament of Jessie Lamb Read Free

ask her if she wanted to watch a DVD. And suddenly everything was OK again. Because they’d decided. The only night of peace was Tuesdays; Mum had an evening clinic and Dad and I always had tea together.
    Tuesday night in the kitchen .
    Dad’s got all his ingredients out, in a neat row along the counter, and he’s weighing and measuring them onto separate plates. He’s got one of those old-fashioned sets of balancing scales with a metal dish on one side and little brass weights that you add in a pile, on the other. Mum gave it him for Christmas and he loves it. The weights are smooth and chunky and fit together in a neat tower. Mum says he cooks like a scientist. He won’t cook something if he hasn’t got the exactly right ingredients.
    He’s standing there measuring, with his shoulders hunched forward, he looks a bit like an ape! He’s hairy like an ape too, with a furry chest. When Mum used to take me swimming I stared at the strange men with bare chests. He’s got broad shoulders and a thick neck but short legs, and when he turns round to smile you can see he’s got bright brown eyes and two deep smile creases carved either side of his mouth in a really monkey-ish grin. When he grins at you you can’t help yourself, you have to grin back. Except he hasn’t grinned for a long time now. Which I suppose is my fault.
    I used to do my homework on the kitchen table on Tuesdays and we’d think up perfect crimes that you wouldn’t get caught for and make each other laugh. Things like, if your victim is allergic to bee stings, put a drop of honey on his collar and let loose some bees. When they sting his neck it’ll swell up and suffocate him before he can get help. Or, if you need to dispose of a corpse, put it in your car and drive to a safari park. Chuck it out for the lions when no-one’s looking. They’ll eat it up and leave no trace.
    There was a Tuesday when Dad properly explained Maternal Death Syndrome to me. The news was saying it was everywhere. Rumours about unaffected tribes deep in the Amazon rainforest or amongst the Inuit of the frozen north, all of them were untrue. It wasn’t just the West, or the First World, or cities. There were some pregnant women left, but only ones who were far on in their pregnancies; women who must have got pregnant before MDS arrived. Once these women gave birth, it seemed there wouldn’t be any more babies.
    â€˜I don’t understand,’ I said to Dad. ‘Why is it only pregnant women who get it?’
    â€˜Well,’ he said, settling down to peel some potatoes. ‘Up till 100 years ago, pregnancy was the most dangerous experience in a woman’s life, and the one the highest percentage were likely to die from.’
    â€˜Father of Wisdom,’ I said, and rolled my eyes at him. That’s what I call him when he goes off on one. But he didn’t smile.
    â€˜D’you want to know or don’t you?’
    â€˜I want to know.’
    â€˜Right then. There are all sorts of reasons why pregnancy is dangerous–obviously. The baby can come too early or too late; it may not present head first, the placenta may not come away properly, etc. But once you take away all the physical, mechanical things that can go wrong–there’s something else, which is even more disturbing–because they think it’s what these guys have latched on to.’
    â€˜These guys?’
    â€˜The terrorists. Bio-terrorists, who’ve engineered this virus.’
    â€˜What is it?’
    â€˜Well you know what your immune system is?’
    â€˜Yes, it fights diseases.’
    â€˜Exactly. It knows what you are, and it attacks anything that is not you . Anything foreign in your system, it attacks, in order to defend you. Now spot the problem. When a woman gets pregnant, what’s the problem?’
    I sat and puzzled my brain. ‘Is it the baby? Because the baby’s a different