Nature isn’t great, but she’s better than the alternatives. Oh yes, hallo, what planet are you on? Mother Nature has dominated Homo sapiens since the species first appeared five hundred thousand years ago. And what a screw up! If Mother Nature was a political leader, she should have been executed for genocide! If she was chief executive officer of a multinational company, she’d have been fired for incompetence. Why not give science a chance at the helm? Is science, in the right hands, going to make an even bigger mess?’
‘What do you call the right hands?’ John replied.
‘The man you have just tried to murder,’ Luke said, staring at Naomi. ‘Dr Dettore. The biggest visionary this planet has ever seen. The man you just tried to kill.’
‘You need to leave now, Parent People,’ Phoebe said darkly. ‘Before too many people here find out what you have done. We will take you to your plane. You need to know that everything on this island is recorded. If you go now, we’ll erase the tape showing you trying to commit murder, Mother, which is more than you deserve, but you are our parents…’
‘We don’t really want to kill you,’ Luke said. ‘That would just bring us down to your level. We want you to leave. Forget you were ever here. Forget all about us and everything you saw.’
‘I can never forget you both,’ Naomi said.
‘Why not?’ Luke replied.
Naomi blinked tears from her eyes. ‘You are our children and you always will be. Our home will always be your home. Maybe, one day, when you are older you might come and visit us.’ Her voice faltered. ‘Perhaps you have things you’ll be able to teach us.’
John nodded, then added, ‘Our doors will always be open. I just want you to understand that there will always be a home for you with us, if you ever want or need it. Always.’
‘We understand you very clearly,’ Phoebe said.
128
Naomi’s Diary
Once upon a time I nearly killed a man.
I write it this way because it makes it feel less real to me. That’s one good thing about the human brain, it constantly revises the past, cutting bits here, adding bits there, presenting it in an ever more palatable way – the way we would have liked things to have been, rather than the way they really were.
Soren Kierkegaard wrote that life must be lived forwards but that it can only be understood backwards. I wind back the tape inside my head all the time. Returning to Halley’s death. Returning to that decision John and I made to go to Dr Dettore’s Clinic. Returning to that moment – incredible that it was eight years ago – when I was following John and Dr Dettore up the path, in the bright sunlight. That moment I knelt and picked up the rock and threw it.
I wind that tape, trying to analyse what I had intended. Did I want to kill him? Or did I just want to throw the rock for no other purpose than to vent something out of me?
There’s a part of me that hopes that the latter is the truth, but my conscience tells me differently. This, as Luke and Phoebe told us, is one of the flaws of us Parent People. A flaw that defines our species. They told us that we have failed emotionally to keep pace with our advances in technology. We’re a species that is on the verge of being able to travel faster than the speed of light and so much else our ancestors could never even imagine, yet hasn’t learned how to deal with the hatred in our hearts. A species that can still only resolve problems by throwing rocks at each other. How can I argue against that? How can I download copies of the morning newspapers and read all the terrible stuff going on in so many places in the world and persuade my kids that no, they are wrong, we have learned to do things differently now?
This is my first diary entry in a long, long time. I just lost enthusiasm for writing it. I lost enthusiasm for everything. After years of therapy, I feel a little stronger now. Perhaps I’m slowly getting better. John and I rarely talk about it any more, as if we’ve made an unspoken decision to put the past behind us and concentrate only on the future.
You are taught as a child that your parents are right, that you must learn from them, and pass on that stuff, in turn, to your own children. It’s a strange moment when you realize that the world is no longer as you understood it.
None of us knows what the future holds. Perhaps we’d go mad if we did. We have dreams into which we escape. Dreams that we hold in our hearts. In my dreams Halley is alive and well and growing up, and John and Halley and I do things together and are happy. We go on holidays and we visit theme parks and museums and we play in soft white sand by the ocean and we fool around and laugh a lot. And then I wake.
Sometimes when my memory is being kind to me, the rock I threw at Dr Dettore feels like a dream. But mostly I live it, every hour of every day. I take pills at night and sometimes they’re my friends and they let me sleep, and if they are being really good friends to me, they let me sleep all through the night without dreaming.
Those are the rare days when I wake refreshed. When I feel there is something to look forward to. I’m sure that’s when you really know you are happy – when you wake up wanting to embrace your future, rather than trying to squirm away from your past.
From time to time I Google Dr Dettore, and the names of Luke and Phoebe Klaesson. But nothing new ever comes up. To the outside world, Dr Dettore died in a helicopter crash, end of story. The mystery place that we went to remains a secret. After we returned, John spent months at his computer, on Google Earth, trying to find the island, but he never did.
The police tried, too, but they had no success either. Not that we gave them much help. We never told them Dettore was still alive. We felt that if that got out, sooner or later some fanatic group would track him down – and the lives of everyone on the island would be in danger. Despite everything, John and I do love our children. We’re their parents, we always will love them. I worry about them all the time. About how they are getting on, their health, and I have this constant fear, which never goes away, that if anything were to happen to them, we would probably never know.
We made a decision not to have more children. John immersed himself in his work. I’ve become involved in a number of local children’s charities. We have two dogs, black Labradors called Brutus and Nero. They’re adorable, and good guard dogs, too. We don’t feel in danger any longer, but we are still careful over security. I expect we always will be.
It is one of those rare days today, when I feel happy. Not for any reason I can define except, perhaps, because of how far the past has now receded. I came across a quotation from a book of the wisdom of American Indians, which in so many ways now sums up where John and I are, regarding Luke and Phoebe.
‘Although we are in different vessels, you in your boat and we in our canoe, we share the same river of life.’
129
Mixing his drink had become John’s ritual every evening when he arrived home from work. Alcohol helped him numb the pain. The heartache of the loss of his children was constantly with him, but so was another loss of something else, almost equally important to him: the passion he had once held for his work. The truth was that since leaving Dettore’s island he felt, in ways he could not define, a changed man.
He kissed Naomi, poured himself a large whisky on the rocks, then went into his den and logged on to check his emails. Outside he could hear the bleating of sheep in the fields around them. Spring. New life starting over. The air was warm this evening, and the forecast was fine for the weekend. He would get the barbecue and the garden chairs and table out of the garage. Maybe this year, for a change, they would have a good summer.
Then he froze. He read the first of the new emails that had just downloaded in disbelief. Then he read it over again, before running to the door and yelling for Naomi to come in and see this.
