EXTRACT
The Bad Seed
by
Maurilia Meehan


Part Two

Magdala took another drag on her herbal cigarette and flicked off her voice-recorder. She had given up smoking tobacco years ago, but still relaxed with these herbal ones, so tightly rolled that she told herself they were good for her because they exercised the jaw muscles.
Around her on the floor, on every surface, lay books, photocopies, pages, notes marked up with highlighter - the blue was for water references, the yellow for fish.
She was sitting in an armchair in the sunroom, looking out through a picture window into a water-garden. Three levels of waterfalls, Japanese grasses, and in the centre a figurine of a water-goddess from whose fingertips, the pièce de resistance, flowed eight fine streams of water into the highest pond.
She called out to an invisible other, 'I didn't know there was a spa in Australia.'
Silence.
'Did you?'
No reply save for the impatient rattle of a newspaper from the next room. She spoke louder. 'I thought we'd been to them all - but now that would be splendid. A spa with the water from the Southern Hemisphere …'
A man in his fifties, dressed in cords and a soft mohair jumper he had knitted himself, appeared at the sunroom door. He moved his glasses further back onto the bridge of his nose. In his hand was a newspaper, folded into four, with current rates of exchange marked up in blue biro.
'I thought after Vichy you said you were feeling better.'
'Better, but not splendid,' she snapped. 'I'll have to try it. I'm sure it would cure me.'
He restrained himself. It was not that she wasn't ill - she definitely had arthritis, and some kind of fainting spells were undeniable, and she could have told you of ten concurrent afflictions. It was just that he wasn't sure which one was the dominant one today, which would be cured by leaving Bath, England, and going on another trip. At least she would be paying for it this time - the advance on her book had just come through. Unbelievable, really, that someone was interested in publishing a book which argued that Darwin was, though not totally wrong, greatly misguided, and that we were all in fact descended from aquatic mammals, not apes. Homo aquaticus. He had to remember not to say descended from fish, which upset her.
It was not that he was envious of her success - no one could accuse him of that. After all, he had published two scientific works on salinity and aquifers, and last time they had travelled - to take the waters at Vichy - those works had funded them. It was a quiet but definite pleasure, in fact, to have her succeed in getting the advance, the prospect of spending her money for once. And the Australian dollar, he had noted in the newspaper in his hand, was unbelievably weak against sterling.
No, he was definitely pleased for her, especially as his next work, on water tables, was not going as quickly as he would have liked. And after all, their interests coincided - she with her love of research into fish and her yen for spa waters, he with his more rational area of research.
And wasn't that the secret of a lasting marriage? A coincidence of interests (both intellectual and self)? Yes, he thought with satisfaction, as he looked at her, excited about this new trip, this new possible cure, he did still love her. She did of course go off the deep end a bit with her theories about water births and babies born with webbed toes. Not to mention the significance of the little scars behind his own ears.
Remnant gills, quite common, born like that. Non-functioning, of course - had been sliced off when he was a baby. He did not like to think how much sway these gills held in her love for him. He liked to think that her regard for him was based on more than the fact that she believed he was living proof of her theory. But at times it was hard.
She kissed and caressed these gills when they made love - which took place, without fail, in their rather large spa bath, sunk into the bathroom floor. She was, in short, a most watery woman.
He thought of relationships in terms of aquifers. Love lay below the water table, endless, or threatened by pollution, able to be drawn up to nourish the pair, the couple. Difficult to contact, for the single person, love. He was grateful to be in a couple, and could not imagine life otherwise now.
In a way, they were the same. She too thought in terms of water, oceans, fishy ancestors of humans, bereft of their true watery element, forever in search of it - drinking, swimming, bathing, creating whole towns centred on spa water, whole birthing wards to allow babies to be born into water, where they instinctively swim.
'Shall I run the spa bath, dear?' he asked hopefully, leaning against the doorway.
'We no longer know how much closer we are to fish than to apes since you have hogged the limelight,' was her reply.
However, he noted that her cassette tape was turning, and that this remark was not addressed to him, required no response.
Her book took the form of a series of speculations addressed to Darwin, which she read onto her voice-recorder each night, and it was Darwin to whom this remark had been addressed. He supposed she did not feel like a spa, which was as much their private word for making love as doing a cattleya was for M. Swann and Odette.
He stood a moment, listening to these imaginary conversations with Darwin (in which, of course, the author was given no right of reply) and was glad of this third person's company in the house. He knew that his wife was either a revolutionary genius or quite mad. At first he tried to follow the arguments, but then decided that it didn't matter; Magdala had no need for him to follow them, as it appeared Mr Darwin not only followed them but was floored by their brilliance. Giles' own role was just to love her, mad or not.
'Why did we lose our body hair?' she was at that moment asking Mr Darwin. She had placed his tome, open, on the armchair opposite her. 'Olympic swimmers shave off their body hair to save a second in a hundred metre swim. Did our more hairy ancestors lag behind, get picked off by sharks, and thus favour the selection of the hairless? The streamlined body, smoothly shaped by layers of subcutaneous fat (which make the chubby, buoyant baby the most likely to survive), the jawbone shaped like that of a frog. All add up to homo aquaticus spending at least six or seven hours a day in the sea. The first tool may have been to open shellfish; imagine that, Mr Darwin. Making fires of dried seaweed and driftwood along the shores …'
'The point, dear, get to the point,' muttered Giles to himself.
'When she emerged from the water, after millions of years, she was very different - now hairless, streamlined, and above all - erect. This is my explanation of the missing link, that period of twenty million years between the earliest fossil homo erectus and their more apelike ancestors. The fossils would be in the water, Mr Darwin.'
'Better you than me, Mr Darwin …'
'And then there is the diving reflex. This exists only in mammals and birds that dive underwater - whales, seals, penguins, ducks. It only happens if the face is submerged, not if a mask is worn. So pearl divers underwater, with the face exposed, trigger an immediate cutting down of the blood supply to most of the body, but leave a good supply to the brain and the heart.
'And seven per cent of people are born with webbing between the toes, especially between the second and third toes, but they do not like to talk about it …'
'They certainly don't,' Giles grumbled, and at this point, he left the room, glad he'd had his own webbing surgically removed as an infant.



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© Maurilia Meehan, 2005.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
The rights of Maurilia Meehan to be identified as the author has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and patents act 1988