‘You’ve been honest with me,’ said the headmaster, biting his colourless lip, ‘and I want to be honest with you.’
‘We don’t have a choice.’
‘Honestly, no. It’s really that or two months of post-class aberration consideration periods. I’m afraid we have to please the people, Irie. And if we can’t please all of the people all of the time, we can at least please some of-’
‘Yeah, great.’
‘Joshua’s parents are really fascinating people, Irie. I think this whole experience is going to be really educational for you. Don’t you think so, Joshua?’
Joshua beamed. ‘Oh yes, sir. I really think so.’
‘And you know, the exciting thing is, this could be a kind of guinea-pig project for a whole range of programmes,’ said the headmaster, thinking aloud. ‘Bringing children of disadvantaged or minority backgrounds into contact with kids who might have something to offer them. And there could be an exchange, vice versa. Kids teaching kids basketball, football et cetera. We could get funding.’ At the magic word funding, the headmaster’s sunken eyes began to disappear beneath agitated lids.
‘Shit, man,’ said Millat, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I need a fag.’
‘Halves,’ said Irie, following him out.
‘See you guys on Tuesday!’ said Joshua.
12 Canines: The Ripping Teeth
If it is not too far-fetched a comparison, the sexual and cultural revolution we have experienced these past two decades is not a million miles away from the horticultural revolution that has taken place in our herbaceous borders and sunken beds. Where once we were satisfied with our biennials, poorly coloured flowers thrusting weakly out of the earth and blooming a few times a year (if we were lucky), now we are demanding both variety and continuity in our flowers, the passionate colours of exotic blooms 365 days a year. Where once gardeners swore by the reliability of the self-pollinating plant in which pollen is transferred from the stamen to the stigma of the same flower (autogamy), now we are more adventurous, positively singing the praises of cross-pollination where pollen is transferred from one flower to another on the same plant (geitonogamy), or to a flower of another plant of the same species (xenogamy). The birds and the bees, the thick haze of pollen – these are all to be encouraged! Yes, self-pollination is the simpler and more certain of the two fertilization processes, especially for many species that colonize by copiously repeating the same parental strain. But a species cloning such uniform offspring runs the risk of having its entire population wiped out by a single evolutionary event. In the garden, as in the social and political arena, change should be the only constant. Our parents and our parents’ petunias have learnt this lesson the hard way. The March of History is unsentimental, tramping over a generation and its annuals with ruthless determination.
The fact is, cross-pollination produces more varied offspring that are better able to cope with a changed environment. It is said cross-pollinating plants also tend to produce more and better-quality seeds. If my one-year-old son is anything to go by (a cross-pollination between a lapsed-Catholic horticulturalist feminist, and an intellectual Jew!), then I can certainly vouch for the truth of this. Sisters, the bottom line is this: if we are to continue wearing flowers in our hair into the next decade, they must be hardy and ever at hand, something only the truly mothering gardener can ensure. If we wish to provide happy playgrounds for our children, and corners of contemplation for our husbands, we need to create gardens of diversity and interest. Mother Earth is great and plentiful, but even she requires the occasional helping hand!
– Joyce Chalfen, from The New Flower Power, pub. 1976, Caterpillar Press
Joyce Chalfen wrote The New Flower Power in a poky attic room overlooking her own rambling garden during the blistering summer of ’76. It was an ingenuous beginning for a strange little book – more about relationships than flowers – that went on to sell well and steadily through the late seventies (not a coffee table essential by any means, but a close look at any baby-boomer’s bookshelves will reveal it lying dusty and neglected near those other familiars, Dr Spock, Shirley Conran, a battered Women’s Press copy of The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker). The popularity of The New Flower Power surprised no one more than Joyce. It had practically written itself, taking only three months, most of which she spent dressed in a tiny t-shirt and a pair of briefs in an attempt to beat the heat, breast-feeding Joshua intermittently, almost absent-mindedly, and thinking to herself, between easy-flowing paragraphs, that this was exactly the life she had hoped for. This was the future she dared to envisage when she first saw Marcus’s intelligent little eyes giving her big white legs the once-over as she crossed the quad of his Oxbridge college, miniskirted, seven years earlier. She was one of those people who knew immediately, at first sight, even as her future spouse opened his mouth to say an initial, nervous hello.
A very happy marriage. That summer of ’76, what with the heat and the flies and the endless melodies of ice-cream vans, things happened in a haze – sometimes Joyce had to pinch herself to make sure this was real. Marcus’s office was down the hall on the right; twice a day she’d pace down the corridor, Joshua on one substantial hip, nudging open the door with the other, just to check he was still there, that he really existed, and, leaning lustily over the desk, she’d grab a kiss from her favourite genius, hard at work on his peculiar helixes, his letters and numbers. She liked to pull him away from all that and show him the latest remarkable thing that Joshua had done or learnt; sounds, letter recognition, coordinated movement, imitation: just like you, she’d say to Marcus, good genes, he’d say to her, patting her behind and luxurious thighs, weighing each breast in his hand, patting her small belly, generally admiring his English Pear, his earth goddess… and then she’d be satisfied, padding back to her office like a big cat with a cub in its jaws, covered in a light layer of happy sweat. In an aimless happy way, she could hear herself murmuring, an oral version of the toilet-door doodles of adolescents: Joyce and Marcus, Marcus and Joyce.
Marcus was also writing a book that summer of ’76. Not so much a book (in Joyce’s sense) as a study. It was called Chimeric Mice: An Evaluation and Practical Exploration of the Work of Brinster (1974) Concerning the Embryonic Fusion of Mouse Strains at the Eight-cell Stage of Development. Joyce had read biology in college, but she didn’t attempt to touch the many-paged manuscript that was growing like a molehill at her husband’s feet. Joyce knew her limitations. She had no great desire to read Marcus’s books. It was enough just to know they were being written, somehow. It was enough to know the man she had married was writing them. Her husband didn’t just make money, he didn’t just make things, or sell things that other people had made, he created beings. He went to the edges of his God’s imagination and made mice Yahweh could not conceive of: mice with rabbit genes, mice with webbed feet (or so Joyce imagined, she didn’t ask), mice who year after year expressed more and more eloquently Marcus’s designs: from the hit-or-miss process of selective breeding, to the chimeric fusion of embryos, and then the rapid developments that lay beyond Joyce’s ken and in Marcus’s future – DNA microinjection, retrovirus-mediated transgenesis (for which he came within an inch of the Nobel, 1987), embryonic stem cell-mediated gene transfer – all processes by which Marcus manipulated ova, regulated the over or under expression of a gene, planting instructions and imperatives in the germ line to be realized in physical characteristics. Creating mice whose very bodies did exactly what Marcus told them. And always with humanity in mind – a cure for cancer, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s – always with the firm belief in the perfectibility of all life, in the possibility of making it more efficient, more logical (for illness was, to Marcus, nothing more than bad logic on the part of the genome, just as capitalism was nothing more than bad logic on the part of the social animal), more effective, more Chalfenist in the way it proceeded. He expressed contempt equally towards the animal-rights maniacs – horrible people Joyce had to shoo from the door with a curtain pole when a few extremists caught wind of Marcus’s dealings in mice – or the hippies or the tree people or anyone who failed to grasp the simple fact that social and scientific progress were brothers-in-arms. It was the Chalfen way, handed down the family for generations; they had a congenital inability to suffer fools gladly or otherwise. If you were arguing with a Chalfen, trying to put a case for these strange French men who think truth is a function of language, or that history is interpretive and science metaphorical, the Chalfen in question would hear you out quietly, then wave his hand, dismissive, feeling no need to dignify such bunkum with a retort. Truth was truth to a Chalfen. And Genius was genius. Marcus created beings. And Joyce was his wife, industrious in creating smaller versions of Marcus.