The sudden levelling of the generations exposed a chronic sense of superiority on both parties’ parts. In the past, parents had always felt a trace of condescension towards their children, however warmly disguised. They’d already experienced what the kids were going through for the first time, and they knew better. But the condescension worked both ways: always more “modern,” an upcoming generation also knew better. Even if they didn’t yet enjoy position and wealth, the young had every other advantage: strength, looks, health, a future. It was their role, kindly or brutally, to discard and replace.
This subtle battle of mutual contempt was over. Simon, Roy, and Hayley could hardly write off their parents as yesterday’s news when the children and grandchildren were no more “the future” than Kay and Cyril, whose life expectancy was now indefinite. As time went on, too, the family’s power dynamic shifted dramatically, which was especially hard on Cyril. Once a father and son were both within a stone’s throw of 150, seniority grew meaningless, and this rough parity translated into a dizzying loss of parental clout. The uniformity of the family’s visual ages also made them feel more like friends than relatives—which sounds agreeable, save for the fact that kinship is ineluctable, friendship elective. Thus at get-togethers they all found themselves weighing up in the starkest of terms whether, love and the bonds of blood aside, they actually liked one another.
Roy was pissy because the very concept of inheritance had become an anachronism. (To be fair, in his disgruntlement on this point, their middle child was not alone. A host of entitled progeny who’d been waiting to come into trust funds would have to make their own way in life after all, and they weren’t all eager to demonstrate their entrepreneurial pluck.) Of the three, Roy was the most inclined to regard everlasting life as a millstone, since living forever meant working forever. Hayley had also made the disheartening discovery that when all your cells replicate perfectly, your fat cells replicate, too. But at least she enjoyed a faster metabolism, and as for slimming? There was all the time in the world.
Therefore it turned out that the Wilkinsons needn’t have been in such a rush to visit Australia, Japan, Key West, Las Vegas, and Malta. They sampled Russia, Tunisia, and the Philippines. They did mountain treks outside of Cape Town and took boat tours through the Amazon. They visited the obscure spice island of Pemba—where they were put up by an inhumanly generous expat New Yorker named Shepherd Knacker, whom not only his gorgeous wife Carol but the entire local population seemed to adore. In Thailand, they stayed with a fellow Brit called Barrington Saddler; once the booming bon vivant lurched off to bed, they whiled away the boozy wee smalls with his obliging sidekick Edgar Kellogg, musing together about how their overweight and self-satisfied host could be at once so damnably charming. They browsed for antiques in New England, where they made the acquaintance of a woman who seemed cold and standoffish at first, but Kay warmed to Serenata enormously over the weekend, even if the husband could grow tiresome if allowed to go on about LED streetlights. Kay and Cyril cycled alongside the Rhine and ploughed in a submarine along the Mariana Trench. Though they’d foresworn cruises as hedonistic and vulgar, they finally capitulated purely for the change of pace. Once such adventures became affordable, they spent a week in the International Space Station and went camping on the moon.
The NHS having downsized, Cyril was laid off as a GP, and resisted idleness by writing his memoirs. Unfortunately, infinite leisure to write a manuscript is not in any author’s interest. He produced to excess. He revised to excess. He edited to excess, so that after whittling the record down to nearly nothing he was obliged to build the narrative back up all over again. He dithered over every adjective and rearranged every sentence. Sick of hearing about it, Kay insisted he commit to an inevitably imperfect version and submit the book as-is. But Cyril didn’t find any takers. The whole subject of health care was of little interest to a population all biologically twenty-five, and with time stretching infinitely to the horizon everyone else was writing memoirs, too.
To her own surprise, Kay grew weary of interior design, and branched into landscaping. Then she qualified as an engineer, and for a while worked in bridge maintenance. As an escape from the responsibility, she tended a shop till, and then she tried acting in an historical television series on its 307th season, which comically entailed wearing elaborate make-up to look like the old woman she had once been in real life. A few years later she segued into municipal government, after which she experimented with what proved the purely theoretical satisfactions of manual labour and learnt to lay bricks. For everyone was swapping places. You could do whatever you’d always wanted to do, and then you could do whatever you’d never
