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The Testament of Jessie Lamb: A Novel
The Testament of Jessie Lamb: A Novel
The Testament of Jessie Lamb: A Novel
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The Testament of Jessie Lamb: A Novel

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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In a chilling future, one 16-year-old girl is driven to the ultimate act of heroism. The Testament of Jessie Lamb, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is the breakout novel from award-winning author Jane Rogers. Its cunningly drawn characters and riveting vision of a dystopic future fraught with difficult moral choices will make The Testament of Jessie Lamb an instant favorite for fans of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, and Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man.

“The novel does not set up an elaborate apocalypse, but astringently strips away the smears hiding the apocalypses we really face. Like Jessie’s, it is a small, calm voice of reason in a nonsensical world.” —The Independent

Editor's Note

Non-Traditional Dystopia...

Follow a fierce & fearless female protagonist through the virus apocalypse in this fascinating twist on the traditional dystopian tale.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateMay 15, 2012
ISBN9780062130815
The Testament of Jessie Lamb: A Novel
Author

Jane Rogers

JANE ROGERS has written eight novels, including Her Living Image (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Mr. Wroe’s Virgins (a Guardian Fiction Prize runner-up), Promised Lands (winner of the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Fiction Book), Island (longlisted for the Orange Prize) and The Voyage Home. She has written drama for radio and TV, including an award-winning adaptation of Mr. Wroe’s Virgins for BBC2. She has taught writing at the University of Adelaide, at Paris Sorbonne IV and on a radio-writing project in eastern Uganda. She is professor of writing at Sheffield Hallam University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Jane lives on the edge of the moors in Lancashire, England. Visit her online at janerogers.org.

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Rating: 3.1910827770700636 out of 5 stars
3/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The premise: ganked from BN.com: A rogue virus that kills pregnant women has been let loose in the world, and nothing less than the survival of the human race is at stake.Some blame the scientists, others see the hand of God, and still others claim that human arrogance and destructiveness are reaping the punishment they deserve. Jessie Lamb is an ordinary sixteen-year-old girl living in extraordinary times. As her world collapses, her idealism and courage drive her toward the ultimate act of heroism. She wants her life to make a difference. But is Jessie heroic? Or is she, as her scientist father fears, impressionable, innocent, and incapable of understanding where her actions will lead?Set in a world irreparably altered by an act of biological terrorism, The Testament of Jessie Lamb explores a young woman's struggle to become independent of her parents. As the certainties of her childhood are ripped apart, Jessie begins to question her parents' attitudes, their behavior, and the very world they have bequeathed her.My Rating: ExcellentThis is a great and easy book to recommend. For fans of literary SF, who enjoy chewing over futures found in books like The Handmaid's Tale, Children of Men, and Never Let Me Go. For readers of feminist SF, because there are a lot of things to discuss and debate in this little beast. For readers who want to read more SF but don't want to be bombarded with the science of it all, and mostly, for readers who want to see a mature post-apocalyptic story that isn't just an excuse for a romance. This book raises big questions, and gives you more than enough to find the answers that make sense to you. And while I haven't read the other Arthur C. Clarke nominees, this was a great pick to win, and it was better than some of the books nominated for the 2012 Hugo (sadly, the US didn't get this book until 2012, so that's why American readers didn't know to nominate it. I wonder if it'll be eligible for the 2013 Hugos?). It's a compelling and satisfying read, and it's one I plan to revisit one day.Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay, in that I won't tell you how it ends, but I am DEFINITELY going to spoil what the back of the book won't, so if you want to remain completely surprised, DO NOT read the full review at my blog. However, comments and discussion are always welcome, so if you've read the book, or don't care about spoilers, just click the link below for the full review. :)REVIEW: Jane Rogers' THE TESTAMENT OF JESSIE LAMBHappy Reading!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Originally reviewed on A Reader of Fictions.

    Looking at this pretty, stark cover, with its brags of the Man Booker Prize (even the long list is impressive), I could not help but look forward to reading this. I expected something extraordinary, something literary, something as well-written as Stormdancer. What I got was nothing like that. The Testament of Jesse Lamb has a marvelous concept, but the execution of the novel just left so much to be desired, like knowledge of proper grammar.

    Before I get all ranty, which believe me I will, I want to discuss the positive things. As I mentioned, the concept really does hold a lot of appeal to me. In this vision of the future, some terrorist, for reasons unknown, created a virus that affects pregnant women. Every pregnancy equals death. No cure has been devised and humanity has only so long until the youngest remaining women become to old to bear children, assuming a cure ever is created.

    Jessie Lamb lives in Britain. When the virus, MDS - Maternal Death Syndrome, hits, she becomes an activist, arguing for children to be given legal independence younger, since obviously adults cannot be counted on to protect their best interests. Basically, YOFI claims that the older generations screwed up the world, so they should really stop pretending to be all wise. Through this group, Jessie searches for meaning in this new world that could end with her generation.

    Like Jessie, everyone searches for meaning. Scientists desperately consider cures, ways to develop antidotes or to produce disease-free babies from frozen eggs and sperm. Militant women's rights groups form to protect women against this new harsher climate, where rapes and abuse have become more common. Homosexuality, too, has become much more common and more accepted, which seems one of the only good things to come of all of this. Some people distract themselves from mankind's likely end by focusing on fighting for the rights of all of the other animals, pissed off that humanity's last act will be murdering other creatures in an effort to stay alive ourselves. Of course, the end of the world would not be complete without creepy cults, and those are there too: the Noahs.

    Most pertinent to the story, though, are the Sleeping Beauties, the teenage girls that sacrifice their lives to bring a new life into the world. It is, actually, still possible for new babies to be born, though they too have the disease. However, the only way for this to happen is to put the mother into a coma and keep her alive with machines while the virus destroys her brain. After the baby is born, cut from her stomach, she is unplugged. These girls have no chance of surviving; no pregnant women do. Pregnancy has a one hundred percent mortality rate.

    All of that is just fantastic. On top of that, the book starts with a bang. Jessie is being held captive for some reason, and is being forced to write out her testament. This technique, while a bit hackneyed, was effective, because I did want to know who had captured her and why he was keeping her in the basement tied up in bicycle chains.

    From what I can tell, neither Rogers nor her editor (assuming there was one) have the slightest clue how punctuation works. Throughout the book, it seems as if different punctuation marks were inserted almost at random into sentences. I had so many flashbacks to high school English teachers lecturing the class about how awful comma splices are and how you should never ever use one in a paper or they would automatically deduct ten points. Rogers would have negative points. She uses comma splices like they are about to go out of style; the bad news for her is that they already were out of style, so this is in exceedingly bad taste.

    EXAMPLE: "I thought of the drugs trial volunteers, they were nearly all men."

    When connecting two separate but related sentences, one should use a semicolon NOT a comma. FACT. This happens innumerable times. Of course, she balances that out by also sometimes using semicolons incorrectly: "Then we walked back to my house holding hands and not talking, feeling as if we owned the night and everything in it; moon, stars, the dark shapes of trees, the crouching quiet houses." This proves that she DOES know what semicolons are, but not that she knows how to use them. To be fair, she does very occasionally use them as they are meant to be used. What I find even more frustrating about this is that if she had just accepted she didn't know how to connect the sentences and had two complete sentences, she would have been just fine.

    Another big problem she had grammatically stemmed from her desire, I guess, to make the tone sound like a teenager. A very popular way for writers to do this is sentence fragments. Here's her punctuation-challenged version: "There was a longish silence then she asked about my parents. Which was a relief; rattling off their sorry story was easy and I hope made me sound more sensible and objective." Lovely, right? This both misuses a semi-colon and is entirely unnecessary. Tack the 'which was a relief' onto the end of the prior sentence with a comma and you have perfectly correct writing. No editor should let this pass. There are way more issues, but I will stop here in the grammatical portion of the review.

    Since reading closely made me want to weep or claw my eyes out or go visit my high school English teachers and get them to commiserate with me, I ended up basically skimming most of this book. On the plus side, this did make it go faster, which is good since I was also somewhat bored. The characters just did not interest me that much. I tried to care, but Jessie is a bit distant from other people and I couldn't support most of her decisions at all.

    I did try to care about the romance. The scene where the characters admit their feelings was kind of adorable and then they realize she has built in birth control (all the girls do for obvious reasons), so they might as well have sex now. It's going great until the hymen-breaking puts a damper on things. They stop momentarily and then this description happens:

    "He began to kiss me again. And to move as slowly and gently as a little pink earthworm when you pick it up from the garden in the palm of your hand."

    What the fuck did I just read? No matter how many times I read that, I am never any less grossed out. This is one of the least sexy things that could ever be put in the midst of a sex scene. AND WHY? There's no reason for this to happen. NONE.

    This review has rambled on and on, so I should probably draw to some sort of close. The Man Booker people loved it; I did not. (Or, in her speak: The Man Booker people loved it, I did not.) With such distracting and flagrant errors, I simply cannot countenance giving this book a rating above 2, though the content would be a 2.5 or 3. Do what you will with that information. I'm off to watch Pretty Little Liars and read Blood Red Road to cleanse my soul.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not necessarily a great book, but I liked it quite a bit better than I expected to. Tonally, very reminiscent of Never Let Me Go (although I thought that was a better book). I don't expect to see it on the Booker shortlist, but I think it earned its place on the longlist. Recommended for fans of dystopian fiction. Especially if you liked The Handmaid's Tale.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Very British, minimally post apocalyptic story about a sort of daft girl who thinks she can help save the world. I disliked the ending, due to my personal beliefs about pregnancy and children. I read this mostly from curiosity, since it got lots of good reviews.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A biologically engineered virus has infected the women of the world that brings death to any who become pregnant. The future of humanity is at stake. Will there even be a future? That is what the people of the world have to wrestle with in The Testament of Jessie Lamb.

    Yet as the title implies, this is a personal story, the account of one 16-year-old. The book is speculative fiction the way I like, about the people who must react to their extraordinary circumstances, rather than filled with techno-babble as to the specifics that brought them there.

    Jessie is like many 16-year-olds I've known, her idealism untouched by cynicism, motivated by a drive to have an impact on the world, with a hope that just by dint of goodwill and determination she will be able to transform all. Hers is a great portrayal of adolescent psychology. The really complex characters in the book, however, are her parents, who clearly love their daughter but resort to some frankly horrifying tactics to deter Jessie from following through on a major decision she makes to incarnate her ideals.

    Naturally, since the story is told from Jessie's point-of-view, all sympathy is with her. She is very persuasive in making the case for her decision. But given the major consequences her decision will have, I have to question exactly how I myself would react if she were my 16-year-old daughter.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I would probably have categorized this book as young adult if it were not shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I am not sure, though, that it deserved those accolades.The book is set in near future England and is a counterpoint to The Children of Men by P.D. James. In this scenario, every woman who gets pregnant dies of a terrible bio-engineered disease. Jessie, the teenage protagonist, may be a witness to the end of the human race, as procreation basically comes to a halt. Jessie tells the story in a sort of diary; when the book opens, she is being held prisoner by an unknown person for an unknown reason who has asked her to write her "testament." Society is unraveling, although not as drastically as in The Children of Men. For me, this was the most unbelievable aspect of the story. (Some spoilers ahead.) Gender relations seem to completely break down when the possibility of reproduction is removed. Young men eschew relationships to form gangs, turn homosexual, and spit on women. Huh? This development seems to completely discount the strong emotional bonds that can form between men and women by asserting that the only reason for the sexes to relate to one another is to produce offspring. I think this is trying to be a feminist novel--women move in together and form protest groups--but they come across as irrational and man-hating. I just didn't think this aspect of the book was believable or appropriately complex, which somewhat spoiled the rest of the story for me.Jessie, as her name implies, come to think of herself as a sacrifice, which I also found problematic. However, this was more believable to me, in the context of the character. I agreed with pretty much every other character that her sacrifice was unnecessary and ill-conceived, but it seemed like something that a teen in the throes of severe angst would do. However, I'm not sure that this was the perspective the author wanted me to take. I think we are supposed to think of Jessie as heroic, maybe even Christ-like (again, the name). I won't even get into the fact that a rudimentary examination of the underlying science makes the whole scheme untenable. I'm not totally panning this book. The writing is decent, Jessie's character is well developed, and the conceit is intriguing. However, I do think we've seen this kind of thing done before, and done much better. I just get the sense that the author wrote this without truly thinking it through, or without building in the layers of complexity necessary to keep the overarching theme from seeming muddled and without real impact.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    terrible book
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I don't know what to think about this. The more I think about it, the less sure about it I become: I actually read it more or less in one go, and didn't want to put it down while reading it, but on reflection I'm not sure how convincing I found it or what I really thought of Jessie's decisions. I found her convincing -- she really did seem like a typical teenager, full of the desire to change the world, contemptuous of the adults who got it all wrong. I found the world convincing, too: the idea of such an illness spreading all over the world, the idea of how society would change and fragment in response.

    But the feeling was sort of lacking. I didn't feel enraged by the situations presented, or that frightened. It somehow didn't seem emotionally real: Jessie seems to take so much for granted, and her decision process didn't work for me -- didn't convince me, didn't make me fully understand her decision.

    Still, it's a worthwhile read, I think: the ideas and issues raised are interesting, and it's well written and pretty well paced. Like I said, I read it straight through, in one go, and before I tried to put my feelings down in review-form, I think I'd have said I liked it a lot.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I've read books before where the main character doesn't want to live (This is Not a Test comes to mind), but I understood the reasonings before. In Jessie's case she wants to sacrifice herself for humanity, but how she came around to this decision just doesn't make sense to me.I was very interested in the world-ending virus that crops up, but less interested in the main character. So this goes right up there with the other adult speculative fiction that I haven't loved this year.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The setup is interesting - an engineered virus triggers mad cow disease in all pregnant women - and the book is an exploration of a young woman's right to self-determination in these apocalyptic circumstances, which I do appreciate.

    For whatever reason, though, it just didn't really click for me. I am inclined to suspect that it's the worldbuilding problem - I just didn't really find the larger-scale reaction to such a world-changing event convincing, and that undercut the careful character work. This is a chronic problem I have with mainstream fiction that covers sci-fi subjects. I have even less patience with protagonists in the throes of adolescent narcissism, which Jessie Lamb very much is - even while I agree with the general theory that she should have the right to make her own decisions, I just didn't particularly enjoy spending time in her head.

    I can totally see why this is an important book, and one that's being taken seriously, and I approve in theory, but it's still not really the book for me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Jessie Lamb is sixteen and the world is in crisis. Somehow a virus that kills every pregnant woman has been unleashed into the world. Everyone alive is a carrier but it only becomes lethal when a woman becomes pregnant. Jessie's father works in an IVF clinic and they have found a way to keep pregnant women alive long enough for them to give birth. These women are called Sleeping Beauties because they are put into a medically induced coma. Of course, that child has the virus (called Maternal Death Syndrome or MDS) so the same problem arises. Then the clinic realizes that they have frozen embryoes from before MDS existed. If they can find surrogate mothers that will carry the embryoes then those babies would be free of MDS. (I'm not sure why these babies wouldn't acquire the MDS virus as they grow up. This is the one area that confused me and I don't think the book made it clear.) If enough of these babies grow up and have children of their own then eventually there would be a MDS free population. Sixteen year old girls make the best surrogate mothers because they are able to have full-term, healthy babies apparently. The older the mother is the worse the chances for the child. Jessie decides that she will volunteer to be a surrogate mother even though it means her own death. I thought the book did a good job of portraying what would happen to society if some cataclysmic event occurred. Women are pitted against men, scientists against non-scientists, religious people against atheists and so on. There was also a good storyline involving Jessie and her parents. Her father thinks the surrogate motherhood idea is a good one as long as it doesn't involve his daughter. I could really feel the anguish the parents felt and, to tell the truth, I sided with them. The author also did a good job of portraying Jessie's thoughts and actions. As I said before, the big problem I had with this book was believing the surrogate children would be the solution and since that's the crux of the book it is a major flaw.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    My main reaction to this book is a case of "I wish": I wish that I had liked this more. I wish that the characterization had been stronger, more developed so I cared about Jessie's final decision. I wish more had been provided about the initial act of biological terrorism that sets the book into motion and leaves humanity 80-odd years from extinction. As it is, even with my dismay over some of the core elements (main character's unlikeability, the secondary, wholly superfluous plotline revolving around the parentals marriage) to be found in this quick-moving and quick-reading novel, this is a fresh approach to a world-ending apocalypse -- it just isn't carried through the full potential. Jane Rogers certainly succeeds at creating a truly freaky end of the world scenario, and in getting her readers to think about what they would do in just such a dire situation - I just wasn't all that invested in what her invented characters did here.The Testament of Jessie Lamb certainly starts out well - and with a bang at that. With a concept that sounds like a vague mashup of The Handmaid's Tale (emphasis on feminine importance for their wombs) and Never Let Me Go (organ donation and the outcome from it), I was good to go. With the benefit of one of the more intriguing cold opens I've read so far this year, my interest was piqued from even before chapter one officially started. The idea of MDS ("Maternal Death Syndrome") and its dramatic, mortal effects is a nice, very creative spin on already-popular apocalypse genre, and Rogers' plot allows for intricate and divisive morality maneuvering between people and parties. Unfortunately, this is more of a character-driven novel and I found Jessie's first-person narration to be off-putting so my interest slowly waned as it became more and more concerned with solely her evolutionary arc. (Also, Lamb? Obvious name is obvious. First name is totally cool, though.) The novel is Jessie's epistolary to the unknown future and as a narrative structure, it works well for her voice, story and reveals, if it's not an entirely unique approach. Probably 65% of my dislike can be laid solely at the feet of our main character, Jessie. From the outset, she's a remote and somewhat cold narrator, a fact that is only reinforced by her nature towards her parents. She's obviously a complicated girl - that one so isolated would be so incredibly giving? naive? suicidal? speaks volumes of her development. I just couldn't identify with her personality-free narrative. Instead of allying with the closer-in-age main character, it's Jessie's poor, hapless parents that evoke the most sympathy. Jessie's stubborn and seemingly-willful naivety comes off as completely uncaring and apathetic to her understandably distressed parents. I don't expect Jessie to capitulate (hell, that would kill any plot in the book), but she could be infinitely more compassionate to her parents concerns and much more obligatory and explicit about her reasons for why she wants to be a Sleeping Beauty. I felt like a lot of the struggle between factions (the scientists vs the environmentals vs the 'Noahs') to be way too heavy-handed. Each side of the tripod is too extreme in their approach so none are really believable, even in this setting. The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a book that can be alternatively thoughtful or frustrating as interesting aspects of the book can be shortchanged for less original and compelling ideas, like the parents. I did like the open-ended nature of the finale as regards to Jessie's personal storyline but felt slightly shortchanged elsewhere. There's not a lot of payoff to finishing this novel - as a reader you're supposed to reflect and make your own decisions about the life and decisions made, but blehhh. In the end, instead of inspiring me to question the M.O. behind all the opposing parties, I just felt that the ideas behind The Testament of Jessie Lamb weren't as fully explored as they could have been.The Testament of Jessie Lamb is an introspective thinker of a novel and I think reactions will be divided across the board. Some readers will love Rogers's slow and female-targeted approach to the end of humanity and strong if distant main character and others will pick it apart for the misused, cookie-cutter cast, the unnecessary subplots and the lack of answers. To each their own. I can't say that I was entirely happy with this when I finished it, but nor was I filled with rage. I'll more than likely keep an eye out for what else this author will put out in the future without committing myself.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I turned the last page of The Testament of Jessie Lamb a few days ago, but the book stayed with for quite awhile as I mulled it over. Jane Roger's novel is definitely thought provoking. It is set in England sometime in the not too distant future and told from the perspective of sixteen year old Jessie. A virus - Maternal Death Syndrome, known as MDS has been unleashed. What does it do? It kills every woman who becomes pregnant, and the child is born infected as well. The virus will eventually kill off the human race. No one know who is responsible. Jessie is just coming into adulthood, making choices about school, boys and her own beliefs. She joins many activist groups and supports other current causes - fuel consumption, eco-causes, animal rights, children's rights, feminist rights and ultimately the right to choose. But not choose as we know it. Instead, the choice is to become pregnant with a embryo frozen before the virus was unleashed. It is thought that these children will be born healthy. The scientists involved have decreed that young women will be the best incubators. They become known as Sleeping Beauties. And Jessie decides that this is the ultimate act for her. Her part - her dying - will help save the human race. And this is where all the mulling came into play. Does Jessie have the right to choose death? How much of that choice is made for her with propaganda, peer pressure, societal pressure? Is she making the choice for purely selfish reasons? To show her parents she is grown up? Is she able to make such life altering decisions at what we consider to be a young age? What about a society that has accepted these Sleeping Beauties as part of their culture? And accepts these deaths as necessary. How much change can one individual make with their choices? I could go on and on - you can see why the book stayed with me. The Testament of Jessie Lamb would stimulate lots of discussion for book clubs. .The first half of the book - Jessie's life and coming of age - rang true. The dialogue seemed to belong to a sixteen year old, as did the situations and attitudes. It was in the second half of the book that I felt Rogers lost me a bit. I just didn't buy into Jessie's reasoning for choosing to die. (But this is where all my questioning started!) Those looking for dystopian fiction a la Hunger Games won't find it here. Rather, you'll find a book that make you think. The Testament of Jessie Lamb was long listed for the Man Booker Prize. And is the 26th winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the most prestigious award for science fiction in Britain.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Set a month or two in the future, Jane Rogers pulls the reader quickly into a world that has been devastated by a virus (called MDS) manufactured to cause maternal death within days of conception. The human race faces swift extinction. As scientists scramble for a cure, England’s population, particularly the young, polarize into factions. Each blames a different aspect of modern society for the scourge. An animal rights’ group insists that the virus could never have been manufactured without illicit and immoral testing on animals. FLAME, a women’s rights association, cite MDS as the last link in the chain of patriarchal oppression. Others claim that only politics will find a solution to the approaching end of humanity. Teenaged Jessie Lamb is an only child. Her parents’ marriage has hit a rough patch. Her friends have all been absorbed into various activist organizations. Jessie is dying, literally, to make a difference in the fractured world adults have left to her generation. Reports from China say that thousands of young women are being drafted to be impregnated, then kept alive on machines until their babies are born. The mothers are then allowed to die. Dad, who works in a lab, reveals that England has a “Sleeping Beauty” program to her. Teenaged volunteers are carefully screened, physically and psychologically before being admitted to the trials. This is the meaningful act Jessie has been waiting for: to be able to keep the human race alive! Mum and Dad are horrified that their daughter would even consider this course of action and when all their cajoling and arguments fail to dissuade Jessie, Dad kidnaps her and locks her in a room at her grandmother’s house. This is where Jessie writes her “testament”. Lots of debating between father and daughter result only in a stalemate. Jessie is utterly convinced that to give her life for this cause is not only justifiable but commendable. It makes her life worth something.As I read this short book (not much longer or more structure than a novella or long short story), I figured it was one of those YA coming-of-age novels that really is only for young adults. Full of that roiling mixture of teen hyperbole and lack of a meaningful life. The ending was a disappointment to me; I felt I had been “taught” something. As someone wrote, good science fiction takes place in the future as a commentary on the present. Ms Rogers seemed to be on a rant about how close to the brink of annihilation we humans have brought ourselves and our world.While researching the book and author, I discovered that it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: huh? I found an interview with Ms Rogers where she talked about the “science” behind the idea of MDS and also about how we have abused our world. This pretty much confirmed my suspicions. But then as an aside, Ms Rogers said she admired John Wyndham’s novels, particularly The Chrysalids. It took awhile for that to percolate in my brain until the aha moment came: I can’t really explain it without giving away too much of the story. Suffice it to say that the story works on more than a literal level. I don’t know how I missed the biblical allusion of the protagonist’s name: think Jesse and lamb; the double meaning of “testament”; the Disneyism “Sleeping Beauty”….Ms Rogers is, I think, using a science fiction context to give the reader an objective view of how we, particularly youth, approach the future. This opens the way for multiple viewpoints: is Jessie another Joan of Arc or a depressed, suicidal teenager? Are her parents typical adults whose own messed-up lives make them cling to their offspring or are they battle-scarred veterans hoping to save their daughter from an impulsive decision? Although a quick read, The Testament of Jessie Lamb will keep the reader pondering long after the last page.8 out of 10 for crystallizing complex issues into one young woman’s choice.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This book is unquestionably the worst Booker Dozen book I've ever completed. It's a dystopic novel supposedly set a few months in the future, in which millions of women are dying from Maternal Death Syndrome, a mysterious infection that turns women's brains to cottage cheese after they become pregnant. The narrator is a 16 year old girl who is appalled by what is taking place, and the relative indifference of those in power toward the plight of the women. She becomes active in several futile youth movements whose goals were unclear to me (or to them, I suspect), and then makes a brave (or incredibly foolish) personal decision, in order to make a statement in support of her beliefs. The characters were wooden, the dialogue sunk to the level of poorly written YA lit, and the story as a whole was implausible and thoroughly unenjoyable. Fortunately it was a quick read, in keeping with several of the other "Booker Lite" novels on this year's longlist. It gets a well earned 1 star from me; however, other LT reviewers liked it far better than I did, so I would encourage you to take my review with a grain of salt.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is one of the more unlikely picks for the Booker prize longlist, published by a small publishing house in the highlands Scotland and extraordinarily difficult to purchase if you live in North America where this particular book has no distribution deal. Set not far in to the future a virus has spread affecting the entire world's population, some sort of cross between Aids and CJD, the effects of which are that any woman who gets pregnant soon develops a rather unfortunate Swiss cheese effect on her brain and dies before the infant can come to term.In what could be described as a cross between Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' and Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' the novel is told by the eponymous sixteen year old Jessie Lamb, in part as a remembrance of events past and in part first person narrative of Jessie, locked up by her geneticist father for her decision to volunteer to be a 'sleeping beauty': a sacrificial lamb who accepts an unaffected frozen embryo and is put into a coma giving just enough time for proper gestation.The book details a world falling apart millions of women perish and world faces the prospect of no new human life on the planet. Society fractures as religious, feminist, youth and animal rights groups try to force their agenda through ever more militant methods. It is a world in which future prospects are gloomy and any solutions no matter how extreme are considered.As I mentioned above, this isn't typical Booker territory and you would be hard pushed to find anyone who would contend that this is one of the thirteen best eligible books of this year. The structure of the book is unfortunate as it essentially tells you how the book will end right from the beginning, the characters of Jessie's parents are poorly developed and the mood of the novel is unfalteringly dire, okay the last criticism could well be used against any dystopian literature. It is an interesting concept for a book but I'm afraid it's just not quite good enough for Booker material and I can't see it making the short list.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I don't quite know what to say about this book. I would probably never have come across it if it hadn't been longlisted for this year's Booker Prize. It was a quick and easy read that I enjoyed, well written, decent plot, nothing really wrong with it. But. In the context of the best books of the year as the Booker prize is supposed to be looking for I thought it fell short. The story is a "near future dystopia" set somewhere very like the present day where pregnancy has become fatal and the human race looks to be on the way out. I want it to stand up with books like The Handmaid's Tale, Never Let Me Go and The Children of Men but it just doesn't have the same kind of depth that I felt those books had (on the whole). I liked it, and I'll look Jane Rogers up again, but I don't think it's as good a book as it could have been. I've no intention of reading the whole 13-strong Booker longlist but I don't think this one is a winner or even a shortlistee. But I just mine these prize lists for interesting looking books, and I was happy to read this one! So yes, mixed feelings, but not a bad read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of the Booker longlist’s token genre selections, for science fiction, alongside The Sisters Brothers for a Western and Derby Day for historical fiction (which is the most tolerable of genre works, as far as the committee is concerned). Being a Booker longlistee, of course, means that it’s literary science fiction - the kind of thing Margaret Atwood would write and then deny writing.The Testament of Jessie Lamb is set in a modern-day England that has suddenly been ravaged, along with the rest of the world, by a genetically engineered disease called Maternal Death Syndrome. Mothers can no longer bear children; the pregnancy kills them and their unborn children. No new babies are being born, despair and suicide wrack the world, scientists are scrambling to find a cure, and religious fundamentalists are duking it out with activist groups in the streets. The protagonist is the titular Jessie Lamb, a high school student whose father works in a research lab. It reminded me partly of Oryx & Crake, partly of Never Let Me Go and partly of Children of Men.The novel is relayed as a frame story, with Jessie being held captive by someone and writing down her “testament.” It soon becomes clear that her captor is her father, trying to prevent her from carrying out a decision she has made; one which she thinks is noble and heroic, and one which her father thinks is stupid and wasteful. At first I thought the book was fairly predictable, guessing what her decision was around page 50, but I realised before long that the book’s mystery was entirely different: whether Jessie is right, or whether her father is right. Much like the fate of the children at Hailsham in Never Let Me Go, Jessie’s dilemma is revealed relatively early in the book, and the story works towards a deeper purpose.Essentially it is this: scientists have discovered a cure for MDS, but can only vaccinate embryos that already exist in frozen storage. Women must volunteer to be implanted, sacrificing their lives in order to produce MDS-free babies and preserve the human race; and because MDS attacks the immune system, younger, teenage volunteers are preferred. (This is obviously plot-servicing science, but the book is good enough that Rogers can be forgiven.) The first point this raises is whether it’s moral for 16-year old girls to sign their lives away; whether they can be considered mature enough to make that decision. Several characters give different takes on this; personally, with the survival of the human race at stake, I would sanction pretty much anything. The second (and more important) point is whether Jessie decides to do this because she genuinely believes it to be a noble sacrifice, or whether she has ulterior, troubled-teen, suicidal motives.Or maybe I’m the only one who thought that? This is one of the greatest aspects of the book; it's deceptively simple and shallow, but Rogers uses Jessie’s first-person point of view to great effect, and we often gather that there’s a lot more going on than she is interested in or thinks about – early on, for example, before she decides she wants to sacrifice herself, she mentions hearing on the news that the Chinese embryo program is recruiting thousands of teenage “volunteers,” and it doesn’t occur to Jessie to question whether they really would be volunteers in a country like China. Indeed, we hear very little of how MDS is affecting the rest of the world, because Jessie tends to be consumed with her own thoughts and problems. She is realistically written as both a rational, intelligent young woman, and yet also a girl; a girl who is swayed by small things, who latches onto ideas, and who may very well be deluding herself. Several times she makes what I took to be Freudian slips, talking about how it will soon “all be over,” and how she has to “end it.” My personal impression was that Jessie is actually suicidal, and uses the embryo program as a mask, a way to tell herself that she’s killing herself for something good and noble.Am I right? I don’t know. It’s either a very subtle book, or I read into something that wasn’t there. I can easily see readers having very different interpretations of it. I found the ending to be bleak and depressing, given my verdict, but others might find it hopeful and uplifting. I’m very interested to hear what Jane Rogers’ vision was.Regardless, there’s no doubt that it’s a well-written and well-constructed novel. Written from Jessie’s point of view, it’s quite readable and engaging (in fact, it could fit into the YA genre just as easily as the science fiction genre) and I was often compelled to sit down and read it, or keep reading another chapter even though I was ready for sleep. The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a solid literary science fiction novel, raising difficult moral questions and examining complex motives and character struggles in the face of a horrifying future. It’s well worth reading, and a worthy inclusion on the Booker longlist.BOOKER VERDICTOn the Guardian Books blog I called the inclusion of this novel “lip service,” which to some degree I still stand by. It’s not that I think the committee worries about offending science fiction writers and wants them to feel included, but I do think the longlist allows them to play with a diverse selection, and draw attention to books which they consider to be worthy of greater acknowledgement but which they have no intention of ever actually awarding the prize to. After all, merely being longlisted for the Booker prize is a much greater honour than many other prizes.Having now read the novel, I rate its chances more highly, but still low. There is no doubt that it’s a good book – better, in my opinion, than The Stranger’s Child – but it’s also shallow upon first glance, partly science fiction, and has a young adult protagonist. All these things usually cost marks in the eyes of the judging panel. It may very well take a place on the shortlist, but certainly won’t win – just like Oryx & Crake and Never Let Me Go before it.

Book preview

The Testament of Jessie Lamb - Jane Rogers

Chapter 1

I used to be as aimless as a feather in the wind. I thought stuff on the news and in the papers was for grownups. It was part of their stupid miserable complicated world, it didn’t touch me. I remember sitting on the fence at the level crossing above Roaches one evening, with Sal and Danny and some of the others. It was dark, especially either side of the railway, because of the steep banks of burnt black heather. We looked down at the bright windows of the pub in the valley bottom, and the small yellow eyes of cars running along the road. Everyone except us was indoors and we were up there in the windy darkness, facing the black mass of the moors rising up on the other side of the valley.

A train roared past, going to Huddersfield, and the hot draught of it almost blew us off the fence. Danny said we should try walking along one of the rails, like balancing on a tightrope, and see who could get the furthest. ‘Just jump off if a train comes,’ he said, ‘there’s only one an hour.’ Sal climbed down from the fence and began to teeter along the rail, arms outstretched. I could barely make her out, she blobbed into darkness as she moved and I couldn’t tell if she was really overbalancing or if my eyes were just joining her up to the rest of the dark. She swore so I knew she’d fallen off, and then each of the others tried, and we were counting loudly in a chant. ‘One and two and three and OUT!’, seeing who could be the first to make it up to ten.

When it was my go I realised I couldn’t even see the rail, only feel it through my soles, and I got my balance and looked up at the green signal light far ahead along the track. There was a kind of roaring filling up my ears. I don’t know if it was the wind up there or my own blood, or the way the others were yelling and laughing. But I felt as if I could do anything, anything at all, and nothing would have the power to hurt me. I told myself if I could do twenty steps that would prove it. On twenty-one I jumped down from the rail and as I climbed onto the fence a train came hurtling out of the darkness behind me and gave a deafening blast on its whistle. And the thought just popped into my head: I could fix it, MDS. I could make everything in the world OK again. But because no-one asked me to, I simply wouldn’t bother.

That’s almost like the daft things you believe when you’re really little, like I used to believe I could fly. I believed it for years, but it had to be kept secret. I knew if I ever told anyone or showed it off to anyone, I’d lose the power. And if I doubted it, and tried it out just to see, I’d lose the power–so I didn’t. I believed in it. I knew I would be able to fly when there really was a need. Which, fortunately for me, there never was.

I remember things that make me ashamed now, like driving home from the caravan at Scarborough with Mum and Dad, and all the roads around York being clogged up because of a mass funeral at the Minster. Dad had forgotten to check online. And I was impatient to get home and call for Sal. We were stuck behind the traffic for two hours. I remember staring at all the miserable people in their cars and saying ‘Why can’t they just stay at home to mourn? The women who’re dead won’t care!’

I thought it was normal, that’s the thing. When you’re little you think everything is normal. If your mother had a pointed head and green ears you’d think it’s normal. Only when you grow up do you realise that not everybody is like that. Gradually you can even come to learn that the time you are living in is strange too, that it hasn’t always been like this. The more you feel uncomfortable and unconfident and want to find a way to be like everyone else and fit in, the more normality runs away from you because there isn’t any such thing. Or if there is, you have to find someone else who’ll agree with you what it is. Which I seem singularly unable to do.

Back then, before, Sal agreed with me. Together we knew all the answers. And we thought it was normal for women to die. Or, even worse than that, almost that they might have deserved it, because they’d done something shameful. I thought that if you died it must be at least a tiny bit your fault. There must be something bad in you, to attract such a fate–and especially with MDS, because you had to have had sex.

The first person we knew who died fitted that exactly. Caitlin McDonagh in year ten. I’m not counting teachers from primary school or women Mum and Dad knew, because they were adults, and adults (to me then) were all old and liable to die. But Caitlin started crying her eyes out in History, and they took her to the office and she never came back. Her best friend told us she was pregnant, and we imagined her with her sleazebag boyfriend who was about 20 years old, and it seemed like just desserts. Except they came into school and gave us all Implanon implants a few weeks later, even though most of us hadn’t even got boyfriends, so that no matter what bad thing we did, none of us would get punished like Caitlin.

Sal and I were curious but it didn’t touch us. Not until–well, not until the day she heard about her aunty. We were in her bedroom with her clothes scattered across the floor and both of us trying not to listen to her mum’s anxious voice on the phone downstairs.

‘Did you see those doctors on the news last night?’ Sal asked.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘They showed what MDS does to the brain. It kind of makes holes come in your brain. They said women who get it, their brains will look like Swiss cheese.’

‘That’s disgusting.’

‘Yeah, they gradually lose bits of their brain, they stop being able to balance, and they forget stuff.’

‘D’you think it hurts?’

‘They didn’t say. Some of them die really fast. After only three days of being ill.’

We agreed that knowing it was coming must be the worst part. Who wants to know their brain will turn into Swiss cheese? We sat in silence for a while. Sal had lots of clockwork toys in her room, she used to collect them–and we wound up a nun and a Lisa Simpson and raced them across her desk. The nun won. We entered a letterbox pencil-sharpener and a toy car as well. It’s harder with four because you have to wind them up and hold one ready in each hand without it unwinding. I told myself if the nun won again then they would find a cure to MDS. But Lisa fell off the edge of the desk and the nun and the letterbox collided.

‘Maybe we’ll never have children,’ said Sal.

‘When the youngest people who’re alive today get old–’

‘They’ll be the last people on earth.’ It had been on the news for ages, but it was the first time I could really see it. ‘As we get older, there won’t be any children.’

‘They’ll have to close the schools.’

‘All the things children need–they won’t make them any more.’

‘Nappies, baby clothes, pushchairs.’

‘It’ll be so weird.’

‘And when we’re old, everyone’ll be old. There’ll be no one going to work.’

‘No shops or bin men or buses.’

‘Nothing. It’ll all just grind to a halt.’

Sal turned on the telly. There’d been a riot at some holy place in India. Too many women had tried to go there to pray and someone had panicked, and lots of them were trampled to death. She turned off the sound. ‘There doesn’t seem much point in doing our homework, does there? If we’re about to be extinct.’

We thought of all the things that would be pointless; university, work, getting married, building, farming, mending the roads.

‘There’d be nothing to do but try to keep ourselves amused until we died,’ said Sal. ‘It wouldn’t matter what we did. Nobody’d care.’

I started to worry about how there’d be no-one to cremate or bury the last corpses. Then I realized animals would probably eat them. ‘The world will be really peaceful. No more cars or planes or factories–no more pollution. Gradually, plants will take over cities–’

We thought about our houses slowly falling to bits, the doors blowing open, the roofs caving in, birds and animals nesting there.

‘Some other species will dominate,’ said Sal, and we began to argue about what it might be. All the animals in zoos etc would have to be let out before the last people died. Which would probably kill off a few of us even sooner. And those animals that could adapt to life in their new territory might take over. There might be wolves again in England, and bears. Tigers might live off untended herds of cows. Tree branches would spread out over roads, and hedges would grow huge and wild, and weeds burst through the tarmac. After a hundred years the world would be one great nature reserve, with all the threatened species breeding again, and great shoals of cod in the sea, eagles nesting in old church spires. It made me think of the garden of Eden, how it was supposed to be so beautiful before Adam and Eve messed things up.

‘But just imagine never holding a baby in your arms.’ Sal turned up the TV; that advert for dancing yoghurt pots was on, we always sang along to it in high squeaky voices, so we did.

Then her mum came upstairs in tears and told Sal it was her aunty. I didn’t even know her aunty was pregnant. All I could think about was the smell of burning which wafted in when her mum opened the door. A harsh burnt sweet smell that caught in your throat–it was the chocolate cake we’d made which her mum was meant to be keeping an eye on. I said goodbye awkwardly and went downstairs. Their dog Sammy was whining at the back door so I let him in, and I turned off the oven. There wasn’t any point in looking, you could tell it would be cinders. I didn’t feel anything about her aunty. I simply didn’t care. I thought, I wonder what will happen next? As if the human race and its fate was nothing at all to do with me. As if I was on a bicycle, free wheeling very fast downhill, in the smooth blackness of night.

Chapter 2

At that time Mum and Dad bickered constantly between themselves and when they got a chance they’d snarl at me as well. I suppose they must have been worried about MDS but I don’t remember them talking about it much. What I remember are endless petty rows. You’d wake up in the morning and there was this mood right through the house like the smell of gas. They’d manage everything without speaking, politely moving out of each other’s way, talking to me with exaggerated friendliness. They’d keep it up, sometimes for days on end, and then stop for practically no reason. Dad’d do something, pour Mum a glass of wine and hand it to her with a little bow, or 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.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said to Dad. ‘Why is it only pregnant women who get it?’

‘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.’

‘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.

‘D’you want to know or don’t you?’

‘I want to know.’

‘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.’

‘These guys?’

‘The terrorists. Bio-terrorists, who’ve engineered this virus.’

‘What is it?’

‘Well you know what your immune system is?’

‘Yes, it fights diseases.’

‘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 person?’

‘Nearly. What’s the baby made of?’

‘Doh. Blood, bones–’

He shook his head at me. ‘In the very beginning.’

‘An egg.’

‘And?’

‘A sperm.’

‘Thankyou. Which comes from someone else. And for the baby to grow, that sperm needs to survive, and all the cells that grow from the union of the sperm and the egg need to survive. But the woman’s immune system should attack it. Because it’s a foreigner in her body.’

‘OK.’

‘But it doesn’t. In most normal pregnancies, the woman’s immune system does not attack the sperm or developing foetus. Her immune system takes a step back, in order to let the baby grow. And while the woman’s not being defended against the sperm, she’s also not being completely defended against various other nasties that might want to invade her system.’

‘And that’s why she gets MDS?’

‘So they think. The blip in her immune system, which allows her to remain pregnant, seems to make her vulnerable to Maternal Death Syndrome. That’s when it kicks in. It’s a freakish chance–whoever worked it out is either a genius or very lucky.’

‘So when they say it’s full-blown–’

‘They mean it’s triggered CJD. Prion disease. They’ve married the AIDS virus with CJD, that’s what researchers reckon. So the AIDS gets a hold and makes the woman vulnerable to everything going, and the first thing that’s going is CJD. For which we have no cure in sight–never have had, not back since the days of Mad Cow disease.’

‘A scientist must have done it.’

‘Well it hasn’t happened by accident.’

‘But why?’

‘Power? Religion? Your guess is as good as mine, Jessie.’ He’d cut the potatoes into chips and now he lowered them into the pan, and they hissed and fizzed. The smell of hot oil filled the kitchen. ‘Set the table, love, these are nearly done. And let’s change the record, shall we?’

I shifted my books off the table.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘how about a perfect crime? You have to use an ostrich feather and a safety pin. I’ll give you three minutes.’ That’s what we used to do. Give each other a clue, or a weapon. We could always make each other laugh. It’s like remembering another life. ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘My nut-brown maid.’

The next thing that happened was that Sal’s aunt in Birmingham died. She was 10 weeks pregnant. Sal’s aunt and uncle already had three children. ‘Mum says we might have Tommy, the little one, to live with us,’ Sal told me.

‘Is your mum very upset?’

She pulled her face.

I felt clumsy and thick and miserable but I wanted to talk about it. ‘Why do you think this is happening?’

‘Doh.’

‘No, I mean, what’s behind it?’

She blew out through her lips. ‘Someone wants the human race extinct.’

‘But why?’

‘How should I know?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it.’

Sal started picking up clothes off her floor and flinging them into a heap in the corner. ‘Go on, wonder-brain.’

‘Maybe they’ve done it for a reason.’

‘Like?’

‘Well they must hate everyone.’

‘Brilliant.’

‘They must–they must be really angry.’

‘What about?’

‘Anything. Wars. Injustice.’

‘This isn’t exactly going to fix anything, is it?’

‘Yes. It’ll make all the bad things end.’

‘Why are they targeting women? Of all the people in the world, why women and their babies? If you want to wipe out bad people why not start with politicians–or paedophiles?’

‘Because–I don’t know.’

‘Why are you thinking about whoever did it? They’re a monster–they’re evil, they should have holes drilled in their brain and needles stuck all over them and boiling wax poured in!’ Sal wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. ‘I don’t know why you care about who did it.’

‘I’m sorry. Shall I make some cocoa?’ Sal likes cocoa, we always used to have it at her house. When we went down to the kitchen Sammy got excited and started barking, and we ended up throwing the ball for him in the garden.

That was one of the first times I argued with Sal. I didn’t really know what I wanted to say but I didn’t just want to talk about how bad the terrorists were and how they should be punished. Yes, of course they were wicked, but it was more I wanted to know why this had been allowed to happen. Or, what it was about now, about us, that made it able to happen? I felt outside all that blah about isn’t it terrible and shocking, as if there was something I knew that no one else did.

Chapter 3

Then came the public information announcement. They trailed it all week on TV and in the papers; it was when they officially stated that MDS was worldwide and everybody had it. They compared it to being HIV positive and said most of us would live out our lives without ever getting ill; the trigger for it to become deadly was pregnancy. They wanted to reassure us that governments across the world were cooperating in research blah blah blah.

I remember watching it with Mum and Dad and staring at them afterwards. They had the disease. I had it. We all had MDS. It was like knowing you’ve swallowed slow-acting poison. I didn’t want to sit with them so I went up to my room and texted Baz. (How ridiculous. Just writing his name makes me happy. Baz, Baz, Baz. And now there are stupid tears running down my cheeks.)

Back then he was just a friend. We were at primary school together. I went to Sunday School for years because of him–his dad was a vicar and Baz always went, so I tagged along too. Sometimes when you’re talking to him it’s as if he’s still practising piano in his head, you wonder if he’s even heard. Then when he speaks you realise he’s been thoughtfully considering, instead of leaping in and babbling. When we started secondary we both made other friends and avoided each other in school, as if we were embarrassed. But we still used to go round to each other’s houses.

That night he rang me back and said his parents were out, get Sal and some of the others and come round. I didn’t want to get Sal. I felt like talking to him on my own. I had thought he was the only boy I knew who didn’t fancy Sal, but clearly I was wrong. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought how much better my life would be if my legs were longer and my tits were bigger and closer together. I wondered if I should dye my hair blonde, like everyone does, but then I thought how my Dad at least really liked it brown. He called me his nut brown maid, hazel eyes and chestnut hair. And hairy brown caterpillar eyebrows, he forgot to mention that. There was no point in straightening my hair, I looked revolting and who cared?

So Sal and I went round and everyone was in a weird mood. Rosa Davis was there, who Baz’d sort-of gone out with the year before. It hardly counted, he’d dumped her after two weeks. She was pretending to be really drunk. Baz was wearing a black t-shirt with a blue whale on it the exact colour of his eyes. After we’d been there half an hour Sal rang Damien and got him to come round. The two of them smooched together for a while then went off upstairs. I asked Baz where his parents were. His dad was working with the bereaved, there was a residential weekend of counselling and faith, and his mum’d gone too, to help. We laughed about how MDS is great for business–for vicars and undertakers. I asked him if he’d watched the TV announcement and he said ye-es, slowly, as if there was more.

‘What?’ I asked him.

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