12 Canines: The Ripping Teeth -1

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 ofBrinster

(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 micro injection retrovirus-mediated trans genesis (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 theA 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.

Fifteen years later and Joyce would still challenge anyone to show her a happier marriage than

hers. Three more children had followed Joshua: Benjamin (fourteen), Jack (twelve) and Oscar (six),

bouncy, curly-haired boys, all articulate and amusing. The Inner Life of Houseplants (1984) and a

college chair for Marcus had seen them through the eighties boom and bust, financing an extra

bathroom, a conservatory and life's pleasures: old cheese, good wine, winters in Florence. Now

there were two new works in-progress: The Secret Passions of the Climbing Rose and Transgenic

Mice: A Study of the Inherent Limitations of DNA Microinjection (Gordon and Ruddle, 1981) in

Comparison with Embryonic Stem (ES) Cell-mediated Gene Transfer (Gassier et al, 1986). Marcus

was also working on a 'pop science' book, against his better judgement, a collaboration with a

novelist that he hoped would finance at least the first two children well into their university years.

Joshua was a star maths pupil, Benjamin wanted to be a geneticist just like his father, Jack's passion

was psychiatry, and Oscar could checkmate his father's king in fifteen moves. And all this despite

the fact that the Chalfens had sent their kids to Glenard Oak, daring to take the ideological gamble

their peers guiltily avoided, those nervous liberals who shrugged their shoulders and coughed up

the cash for a private education. And not only were they bright children, they were happy, not

hot-housed in any way. Their only after-school activity (they despised sport) was the individual

therapy five times a week at the hands of an old fashioned Freudian called Marjorie who did Joyce

and Marcus (separately) on weekends. It might appear extreme to non Chalfens, but Marcus had

been brought up with a strong respect for therapy (in his family therapy had long supplanted

Judaism) and there was no arguing with the result. Every Chalfen proclaimed themselves mentally

healthy and emotionally stable. The children had their oedipal complexes early and in the right

order, they were all fiercely heterosexual, they adored their mother and admired their father, and,

unusually, this feeling only increased as they reached adolescence. Rows were rare, playful and only ever over political or intellectual

topics (the importance of anarchy, the need for higher taxes, the problem of South Africa, the soul

body dichotomy), upon which they all agreed anyway.

The Chalfens had no friends. They interacted mainly with the Chalfen extended family (the

good genes which were so often referred to: two scientists, one mathematician, three psychiatrists

and a young cousin working for the Labour Party). Under sufferance and on public holidays, they

visited Joyce's long-rejected lineage, the Connor clan, Daily Mail letter-writers who even now

could not disguise their distaste for Joyce's Israelite love-match. Bottom line: the Chalfens didn't

need other people. They referred to themselves as nouns, verbs and occasionally adjectives: It's the

Chalfen way, And then he came out with a real Chalfenism, He's Chalfening again, We need to be a

bit more Chalfenist about this. Joyce challenged anyone to show her a happier family, a more

Chalfenist family than theirs.

And yet, and yet.. . Joyce pined for the golden age when she was the linchpin of the Chalfen

family. When people couldn't eat without her. When people couldn't dress without her assistance.

Now even Oscar could make himself a snack. Sometimes there seemed nothing to improve, nothing

to cultivate; recently she found herself pruning the dead sections from her rambling rose, wishing she could find some fault of Joshua's worthy of attention, some secret trauma of Jack's or

Benjamin's, a perversion in Oscar. But they were all perfect. Sometimes, when the Chalfens sat

round their Sunday dinner, tearing apart a chicken until there was nothing left but a tattered ribcage,

gobbling silently, speaking only to retrieve the salt or the pepper the boredom was palpable. The

century was drawing to a close and the Chalfens were bored. Like clones of each other, their dinner

table was an exercise in mirrored perfection, Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself

infinitely, bouncing from Oscar to Joyce, Joyce to Joshua, Joshua to Marcus, Marcus to Benjamin,

Benjamin to Jack ad nauseam across the meat and vcg. They were still the same remarkable family they always had

been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers,

actors and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at there was no one left to admire

Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed

passengers of The Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land.

They were bored, and none more than Joyce.

To fill long days left alone in the house (Marcus commuted to his college), Joyce's boredom

often drove her to flick through the Chalfens' enormous supply of delivered magazines (New

Marxism, Living Marxism, New Scientist, Oxfam Report, Third World Action, Anarchist's Journal)

and feel a yearning for the bald Romanians or beautiful pot-bellied Ethiopians yes, she knew it was

awful, but there it was children crying out from glossy paper, needing her. She needed to be needed.

She'd be the first to admit it. She hated it, for example, when one after the other her children,

pop-eyed addicts of breast milk, finally kicked the habit. She usually stretched it to two or three

years, and, in the case of Joshua, four, but though the supply never ended, the demand did. She

lived in dread of the inevitable moment when they moved from soft drugs to hard, the switch from

calcium to the sugared delights of Ribena. It was when she finished breastfeeding Oscar that she

threw herself back into gardening, back into the warm mulch where tiny things relied on her.

Then one fine day Millat Iqbal and Me Jones walked reluctantly into her life. She was in the

back garden at the time, tearfully examining her Garter Knight delphiniums (heliotrope and cobalt

blue with a jet-black centre, like a bullet hole in the sky) for signs of thrip a nasty pest that had

already butchered her bocconia. The doorbell rang. Tilting her head back, Joyce waited till she

could hear the slippered feet of Marcus running down the stairs from his study and then, satisfied that he would answer it, delved back into the thick. With raised eyebrow she inspected the mouthy double blooms which stood to attention along the

delphinium's eight-foot spine. Thrip, she said to herself out loud, acknowledging the dog-eared

mutation on every other flower; thrip, she repeated, not without pleasure, for it would need seeing

to now, and might even give rise to a book or at least a chapter; thrip. Joyce knew a thing or two

about thrip:

Thrips, common name for minute insects that feed on a wide range of plants, enjoying in

particular the warm atmosphere required for an indoor or exotic plant. Most species are no more

than 1.5 mm (0.06 inch) long as adults; some are wingless, but others have two pairs of short wings

fringed with hairs. Both adults and nymphs have sucking, piercing mouth parts. Although thrips

pollinate some plants and also eat some insect pests, they are both boon and bane for the modern

gardener and are generally considered pests to be controlled with insecticides, such as Lindex.

Scientific classification: thrips make up the order Thysanoptera. -Joyce Chalfen, The Inner Life of Houseplants from the index on pests and parasites Yes. Thrips have good instincts: essentially they are charitable, productive organisms which

help the plant in its development. Thrips mean well, but thrips go too far, thrips go beyond

pollinating and eating pests; thrips begin to eat the plant itself, to eat it from within. Thrip will

infect generation after generation of j delphiniums if you let it. What can one do about thrip if, as in

this case, the Lindex hadn't worked? What can you do but prune hard, prune ruthlessly and begin

from the beginning? Joyce took a deep breath. She was doing this for the delphinium. She was

doing this because without her the delphinium had no chance. Joyce slipped the huge garden

scissors out of her apron pocket, grabbed the screaming orange handles firmly and placed the exposed throat of a blue delphinium bloom between two slices of silver. Tough love.

"Joyce! Ja-oyce! Joshua and his marijuana-smoking friends are here!"

Pulchritude. From the Latin, pulcher, beautiful. That was the word that first struck Joyce when

Millat Iqbal stepped forward on to the steps of her conservatory, sneering at Marcus's bad jokes,

shading his violet eyes from a fading winter sun. Pulchritude: not just the concept but the whole

physical word appeared before her as if someone had typed it on to her retina Pulchritude beauty

where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a

skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce

from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed

her chequebook to from behind the thick glass of a bank till.

"Mill-yat Ick-Ball," said Marcus, making a performance of the foreign syllables. "And Irie

Jones, apparently. Friends of Josh's. I was just saying to Josh, these are the best-looking friends of

his we've ever seen! They're usually small and weedy, so long sighted they're short-sighted, and

with club-feet. And they're never female. Well!" continued Marcus jovially, dismissing Joshua's

look of horror. "It's a damn good thing you turned up. We've been looking for a woman to marry

old Joshua .. ."

Marcus was standing on the garden steps, quite openly admiring Irie's breasts (though, to be fair,

Irie was a good head and shoulders taller than him). "He's a good sort, smart, a bit weak on fractals

but we love him anyway. Well.. ."

Marcus paused for Joyce to come out of the garden, take off her gloves, shake hands with Millat

and follow them all into the kitchen. "You are a big girl."

"Er .. . thanks."

"We like that around here a healthy eater. All Chalfens are healthy eaters. I don't put on a pound,

but Joyce does. In all the right places, naturally. You're staying for dinner?"

Irie stood dumb in the middle of the kitchen, too nervous to speak. These were not any species

of parent she recognized.

"Oh, don't worry about Marcus," said Joshua with a jolly wink. "He's a bit of an old letch. It's a

Chalfen joke. They like to bombard you the minute you get in the door. Find out how sharp you are.

Chalfens don't think there's any point in pleasantries. Joyce, this is Irie and Millat. They're the two

from behind the science block."

Joyce, partially recovered from the vision of Millat Iqbal, gathered herself together sufficiently

to play her designated role as Mother Chalfen.

"So you're the two who've been corrupting my eldest son. I'm Joyce. Do you want some tea? So

you're Josh's bad crowd. I was just pruning the delphiniums. This is Benjamin, Jack and that's

Oscar in the hallway. Strawberry and mango or normal?" "Normal for me, thanks, Joyce," said Joshua.

"Same, thanks," said Irie.

"Yeah," said Millat.

"Three normal and one mango, please, Marcus, darling, please."

Marcus, who was just heading out the door with a newly packed tobacco pipe, backtracked with

a weary smile. "I'm a slave to this woman," he said, grabbing her around the waist, like a gambler

collecting his chips in circled arms. "But if I wasn't, she might run off with any pretty young man

who rolled into the house. I don't fancy falling victim to Darwinism this week."

This hug, explicit as a hug can be, was directed front-ways-on, seemingly for the appreciation

of Millat. Joyce's big milky-blue eyes were on him all the time.

"That's what you want, Me," said Joyce in a familial stage whisper, as if they'd known each

other for five years rather than five minutes, 'a man like Marcus for the long term. These

fly-by-nights are all right for fun, but what kind of fathers do they make?"

Joshua coloured. "Joyce, she just stepped into the house! Let her have some tea!"

Joyce feigned surprise. "I haven't embarrassed you, have I? You have to forgive Mother Chalfen,

my foot and mouth are on intimate terms."

But Me wasn't embarrassed; she was fascinated, enamoured after five minutes. No one in the

Jones household made jokes about Darwin, or said 'my foot and mouth are on intimate terms', or

offered choices of tea, or let speech flow freely from adult to child, child to adult, as if the channel

of communication between these two tribes was untrammelled, unblocked by history, free.

"Well," said Joyce, released by Marcus and planting herself down at the circular table, inviting

them to do the same, 'you look very exotic. Where are you from, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Willesden," said Irie and Millat simultaneously.

"Yes, yes, of course, but where originally'?"

"Oh," said Millat, putting on what he called a bud-budding-ding accent. "You are meaning

where from am I originally."

Joyce looked confused. "Yes, originally."

"Whitechapel," said Millat, pulling out a fag. "Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus."

All the Chalfens milling through the kitchen, Marcus, Josh, Benjamin, Jack, exploded into

laughter. Joyce obediently followed suit.

"Chill out, man," said Millat, suspicious. "It wasn't that fucking funny."

But the Chalfens carried on. Chalfens rarely made jokes unless they were exceptionally lame or

numerical in nature or both: What did the zero say to the eight? Nice belt.

"Are you going to smoke that?" asked Joyce suddenly when the laughter died down, a note of

panic in her voice. "In here? Only,

we hate the smell. We only like the smell of German tobacco. And if we smoke it we smoke it

in Marcus's room, because it upsets Oscar otherwise, doesn't it, Oscar?"

"No," said Oscar, the youngest and most cherubic of the boys, busy building a Lego empire, "I

don't care."

"It upsets Oscar," repeated Joyce, in that stage-whisper again. "He hates it."

Till.. . take ... it... to ... the .. . garden," said Millat slowly, in the kind of voice you use on the

insane or foreign. "Back ... in ... a ... minute."

As soon as Millat was out of earshot, and as Marcus brought over the teas, the years seemed to fall like dead skin from Joyce and she bent across the table like a schoolgirl. "God, he's gorgeous,

isn't he? Like Omar Sharif thirty years ago. Funny Roman nose. Are you and he .. . ?"

"Leave the girl alone, Joyce," admonished Marcus. "She's hardly going to tell you about it, is

she?"

"No," said Irie, feeling she'd like to tell these people everything. "We're not."

"Just as well. His parents probably have something arranged for him, no? The headmaster told

me he was a Muslim boy. I suppose he should be thankful he's not a girl, though, hmm?

Unbelievable what they do to the girls. Remember that Time article, Marcus?"

Marcus was foraging in the fridge for a cold plate of yesterday's potatoes. "Mmm.

Unbelievable."

"But you know, just from the little I've seen, he doesn't seem at all like most Muslim children. I

mean, I'm talking from personal experience, I go into a lot of schools with my gardening, working

with kids of all ages. They're usually so silent, you know, terribly meek but he's so full of... spunk!

But boys like that want the tall blondes, don't they? I mean, that's the bottom line, when . they're

that handsome. I know how you feel... I used to like the troublemakers when I was your age, but

you learn later, you really do. Danger isn't really sexy, take my word for it. You'd do a lot better with someone like Joshua."

"Mum!"

"He's been talking about you non-stop all week."

"Mum!"

Joyce faced her reprimand with a little smile. "Well, maybe I'm being too frank for you young

people. I don't know ... in my day, you just were a lot more direct, you had to be if you wanted to

catch the right man. Two hundred girls in the university and two thousand men! They were fighting

for a girl but if you were smart, you were choosy."

"My, you were choosy," said Marcus, shuffling up behind her and kissing her ear. "And with

such good taste."

Joyce took the kisses like a girl indulging her best friend's younger brother.

"But your mother wasn't sure, was she? She thought I was too intellectual, that I wouldn't want

children."

"But you convinced her. Those hips would convince anyone!"

"Yes, in the end .. . but she underestimated me, didn't she? She didn't think I was Chalfen

material."

"She just didn't know you then."

"Well, we surprised her, didn't we!"

"A lot of hard copulation went into pleasing that woman!"

"Four grandchildren later!"

During this exchange, Me tried to concentrate on Oscar, now creating an ouroboros from a big

pink elephant by stuffing the trunk into its own rear end. She'd never been so close to this strange

and beautiful thing, the middle class, and experienced the kind of embarrassment that is actually

intrigue, fascination. It was both strange and wondrous. She felt like the prude who walks through a

nudist beach, examining the sand. She felt like Columbus meeting the exposed arawaks, not

knowing where to look.

"Excuse my parents," said Joshua. They can't keep their hands off each other."

But even this was said with pride, because the Chalfen children knew their parents were rare

creatures, a happily married couple, numbering no more than a dozen in the whole of Glenard Oak.

Me thought of her own parents, whose touches were now virtual, existing only in the absences

where both sets of fingers had previously been: the remote control, the biscuit tin lid, the light

switches.

She said, "It must be great to feel that way after twenty years or whatever."

Joyce swivelled round as if someone had released a catch. "It's marvelous! It's incredible! You

just wake up one morning and realize monogamy isn't a bind it sets you free! And children need to

grow up around that. I don't know if you've ever experienced it you read a lot about how

Afro-Caribbeans seem to find it hard to establish long-term relationships. That's terribly sad, isn't it?

I wrote about one Dominican woman in The Inner Life of Houseplants who had moved her potted

azalea through six different men's houses; once by the windowsill, then in a dark corner, then in the

south-facing bedroom, etc. You just can't do that to a plant."

This was a classic Joyce tangent, and Marcus and Joshua rolled their eyes, affectionately.

Millat, fag finished, sloped back in.

"Are we going to get some studying done, yeah? This is all very nice but I want to go out this

evening. At some point."

While Me had been lost in her reveries assessing the Chalfens like a romantic anthropologist,

Millat had been out in the garden, looking through the windows, casing the joint. Where Me saw

culture, refinement, class, intellect, Millat saw money, lazy money, money that was just hanging

around this family not doing anything in particular, money in need of a good cause that might as

well be him.



"So," said Joyce, clapping her hands, trying to keep them all in the room a little longer, trying to

hold off, for as long as possible, the reassertion of Chalfen silence, 'y u're all going to be studying

together! Well, you and Me are really welcome. I was saying to your headmaster, wasn't I, Marcus,

that this really shouldn't feel like punishment. It's not exactly a heinous crime. Between us, I used

to be a pretty good marijuana gardener myself at one time .. ."

"Way out," said Millat.

Nurture, thought Joyce. Be patient, water regularly and don't lose your temper when pruning.

'.. . and your headmaster explained to us how your own home environments aren't exactly .. .

well .. . I'm sure you'll find it easier to work here. Such an important year, the GCSEs. And it's so

obvious that you're both bright anyone can tell that just by looking at your eyes. Can't they,

Marcus?"

Josh, your mother's asking me whether IQ expresses itself in the secondary physical

characteristics of eye colour, eye shape, etc. Is there a sensible answer to this inquiry?"

Joyce pressed on. Mice and men, genes and germs, that was Marcus's corner. Seedlings, light

sources, growth, nurture, the buried heart of things that was hers. As on any missionary vessel,

tasks were delegated. Marcus on the prow, looking for the storm. Joyce beneath deck, checking the

linen for bedbugs.

"Your headmaster knows how much I hate to see potential wasted that's why he sent you to us."

"And because he knows most of the Chalfens are four hundred times smarter than him!" said Jack, doing a star jump. He was still young and hadn't yet learnt to demonstrate his pride in his

family in a more socially acceptable manner. "Even Oscar is."

"No, I'm not," said Oscar, kicking in a Lego garage he had recently made. "I'm the stupidest in

the world."

"Oscar's got an IQ of 178," whispered Joyce. "It's a bit daunting, even when you're his mum."

"Wow," said Me, turning, with the rest of the room, to appreciate Oscar trying to ingest the head

of a plastic giraffe. "That's remarkable."

"Yes, but he's had everything, and so much of it is nurture, isn't it? I really believe that. We've

just been lucky enough to give him so much and with a daddy like Marcus it's like having a strong

sunbeam shining on him twenty-four hours a day, isn't it, darling? He's so fortunate to have that.

Well, they all are. Now, you may think this sounds strange, but it was always my aim to marry a

man cleverer than me." Joyce put her hands on her hips and waited for Me to think that sounded

strange. "No, I really did. And I'm a staunch feminist, Marcus will tell you."

"She's a staunch feminist," said Marcus from the inner sanctum of the fridge.

"I don't suppose you can understand that your generation have different ideas but I knew it

would be liberating. And I knew what kind of father I wanted for my children. Now, that's surprised

you, hasn't it? I'm sorry, but we really don't do small talk around here. If you're going to be here

every week, I thought it best you got a proper dose of the Chalfensrnow."

All the Chalfens who were in earshot for this last comment smiled and nodded.

Joyce paused and looked at Me and Millat the way she had looked at her Garter Knight

delphinium. She was a quick and experienced detector of illness, and there was damage here. There

was a quiet pain in the first one (Irieanthits negressium marcus ilia a lack of a father figure perhaps,

an intellect untapped, a low self-esteem; and in the second (Millaturea. brandolidia joyculatus)

there was a deeper sadness, a terrible loss, a gaping wound. A hole that needed more than education

or money. That needed love. Joyce longed to touch the site with the tip of her Chalfen green finger

close the gap, knit the skin.

"Can I ask? Your father? What does he?"

(Joyce wondered what the parents did, what they had done.

When she found a mutated first bloom, she wanted to know where the cutting had come from.

Wrong question. It wasn't the parents, it wasn't just one generation, it was the whole century. Not

the bud but the bush.)

"Curry-shifter," said Millat. "Bus-boy. Waiter."

"Paper," began Irie. "Kind of folding it ... and working on things like perforations .. . kind of

direct mail advertising but not really advertising, at least not the ideas end .. . kind of folding ' She

gave up. "It's hard to explain."

"Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. When there's a lack of a male role model you see .. . that's when things

really go awry, in my experience. I wrote an article for Women's Earth recently. I described a school

I worked in where I gave all the children a potted Busy Lizzie and told them to look after it for a

week like a daddy or mummy looks after a baby. Each child chose which parent they were going to

emulate. This lovely little Jamaican boy, Winston, chose his daddy. The next week his mother

phoned and asked why I'd asked Winston to feed his plant Pepsi and put it in front of the television.

I mean, it's just terrible, isn't it. But I think a lot of these parents just don't appreciate their children sufficiently. Partly, it's the culture, you know? It just makes me so angry. The only thing I allow

Oscar to watch is Newsround for half an hour a day. That's more than enough."

"Lucky Oscar," said Millat.

"Anyway, I'm just really excited about you being here because, because, the Chalfens, I mean it

may sound peculiar, but I really wanted to persuade your headmaster this was the best idea, and

now I've met you both I'm even more certain because the Chalfens-'

"Know how to bring the right things out in people," finished Joshua, 'they did with me."

"Yes," said Joyce, relieved her search for the words was over, radiating pride. "Yes."

Joshua pushed his chair back from the table and stood up.

"Well, we'd better get down to some study. Marcus, could you come up and help us a bit later

on the biology? I'm really bad at reducing the reproductive stuff in bite-size chunks."

"Sure. I'm working on my Future Mouse though." This was the family joke name for Marcus's

project, and the younger Chalfens sang Future Mouse after him, imagining an anthropomorphic

rodent in red shorts. "And I've got to play a bit of piano with Jack first. Scott Joplin. Jack's the left

hand, I'm the right. Not quite Art Tatum," he said, ruffling Jack's hair. "But we get by."

Me tried her hardest to imagine Mr. Iqbal playing the right hand of Scott Joplin with his dead

grey digits. Or Mr. Jones turning anything into bite-size chunks. She felt her cheeks flush with the

warm heat of Chalfenist revelation. So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't

drag ancient history around like a chain and ball. So there were men who were not neck-high and

sinking in the quagmire of the past.

"You'll stay for dinner, won't you?" pleaded Joyce. "Oscar really wants you to stay. Oscar loves

having strangers in the house, he finds it really stimulating. Especially brown strangers! Don't you,

Oscar?"

"No, I don't," confided Oscar, spitting in Irie's ear. "I hate brown strangers."

"He finds brown strangers really stimulating," whispered Joyce.

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of

the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground

and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke

bouncing a basketball, and Me Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct

collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold

arrivals, medical checks.

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