They both seemed to notice it at once. Although Kay’s swift, precise slicing of slender, uniform onion wedges was neither here nor there, it was extraordinary, not to mention dangerous, that she was not wearing her glasses—without which she couldn’t tell the difference between a root vegetable and her left hand. Casually, so as not to be detected, she slid her gaze slyly to the open copy of The Week a foot from the cutting board. She could not only make out the headline but the text, including the tiny italicized authorial identification in the far bottom corner. It hit her at the same time that she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d worn her hearing aids, yet Cyril’s conversation was clear and crisp, as was the early evening birdsong on the other side of the closed patio door. As a former registered nurse, she was well aware that the stiffening of the corneas starting in midlife was a one-way process, and presbycusis did not improve.
“And, well, furthermore . . .” she said, faltering, and again unsettled by the piercing look in her husband’s eyes. “It makes a big difference, to me anyway, not to be living under that sword of Damocles all the time. In retrospect, I think it took a dreadful toll on me for years, knowing that I’d committed to this . . . hard-and-fast . . . non-negotiable . . . you know. So release from all that stress, and darkness, and foreboding . . . It’s made me feel better, and maybe even look better.”
She finally raised her eyes from the board and met her husband’s gaze.
“You could pass for thirty-five,” he said accusingly. “I do not say that to flatter you. I’m saying that as a fact. What. Is going on?”
That was when she broke down and told him about the drug trial.
* * *
The medication was fast-tracked and available on prescription three years later. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence was sceptical at first, for so long as the drug was still under patent, the price of approving it for NHS purchase was prohibitive. But once the results across the ageing population were modelled, the regulatory body concluded that the cost of the prophylaxis would be overwhelmingly compensated by the money saved on treating the chronic conditions to which the elderly were prone. Besides, once the cat was out of the media bag, denying the British citizenry access to Retrogeritox would have led to widespread rioting.
According to rumour, which the subsequent longevity of a certain someone bore out, one of the first beneficiaries of the new restorative was the UK’s official head of state, who, it was said, began discreetly popping the pills along with her nightly G&T whilst the drug trial, showing such early promise, was still underway. Consequently, the poor, inhumanly patient Charles, Prince of Wales, was unlikely ever to ascend to the throne after all; when the secret finally leaked, the Princess-Consort-in-waiting Camilla Parker-Bowles was livid. The country at large, however, was delighted. With the wildly popular Queen Elizabeth II installed in perpetuity, the monarchy was safe, a thriving British tourism industry guaranteed.
The wholesale transformation of the social landscape was gradual at first. A surprisingly considerable segment of Kay and Cyril’s cohort was suspicious of fads, or resistant to taking experimental medication, or stuck irretrievably in their understanding of life, the world, and most of all themselves—they were old and their time was nigh—and it was fascinating how much some people were willing to sacrifice just to keep their version of reality from turning topsy-turvy. But the puristic hold-outs, well, obviously—in relatively short order, they died.
Little by little, the vista along the average high street included fewer and fewer pensioners—or at least pensioners who looked like pensioners. You didn’t see many mobility scooters any more, until at length most of them were repurposed as go-carts for children. No one had to impatiently make their way round old ladies with walking frames when rushing for the bus. Meanwhile, care homes closed—including the appalling Close of Day Cottages, subject to a scathing exposé in the Evening Standard. Now notorious, the greedy, self-dealing director Mimi Mewshaw had deliberately withheld Retrogeritox from her wards, who had been imprisoned in an information vacuum and had never even heard of the revolutionary cure for ageing until they were freed.
Certain business sectors suffered. Demand for a variety of products and services shrank or evaporated: creams for the amelioration of spots, wrinkles, and eye bags; reading glasses and corrective lenses; hearing aids; in-home caretaking; walk-in bathtubs, shower-stall rails, transfer discs, and electric stair lifts; wheelchairs, canes, and walkers; a panoply of pharmaceuticals that treated the cancers, hypertension, heart disease, and strokes that soon grew exceedingly rare; artificial hips and knees; pacemakers and stents; pension fund management; the writing of wills and the settlement of estates. The confidence artist trade suffered a punishing contraction, with no more addled, credulous oldsters to prey upon. But the modest damage to the economy was more than made up for by the explosion of the working population, whose taxes now largely supported dependents who were under eighteen. Indeed, for the first time in its history, the fiscally insatiable NHS had its budget cut, and even the Labour Party didn’t squawk.
Naturally, at first the ground-breaking therapy was largely available in richer countries, which gave horrifying new meaning to the “inequality” that had obsessed progressives for decades: now only the poor would get old. Talk about seriously unfair. But the UK soon devoted its entire aid budget to supplying the drug to Africa and other emerging markets; meanwhile, the patent expired, and the generic was dirt-cheap. Besides, after patients took the standard two-year course, the transformation of cell duplication turned out to be permanent, so the benevolence was a one-off. Best of all, parents who’d both drunk this contemporary Kool-Aid passed immunity to decay to their offspring. A whole new generation was born that would
