Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam Trilogy, #1)

Lunch

At one time Jimmy’s mother had worked for OrganInc Farms. That was how his mother had met his father: they’d both worked at the same Compound, on the same project. His mother was a microbiologist: it had been her job to study the proteins of the bioforms unhealthy to pigoons, and to modify their receptors in such a way that they could not bond with the receptors on pigoon cells, or else to develop drugs that would act as blockers.

“It’s very simple,” she said to Jimmy in one of her explaining moods. “The bad microbes and viruses want to get in through the cell doors and eat up the pigoons from the inside. Mummy’s job was to make locks for the doors.” On her computer screen she showed Jimmy pictures of the cells, pictures of the microbes, pic­tures of the microbes getting into the cells and infecting them and bursting them open, close-up pictures of the proteins, pic­tures of the drugs she had once tested. The pictures looked like the candy bins at the supermarket: a clear plastic bin of round candies, a clear plastic bin of jelly beans, a clear plastic bin of long licorice twizzles. The cells were like the clear plastic bins, with the lids you could lift up.

“Why aren’t you making the locks for the doors any more?” said Jimmy.

“Because I wanted to stay home with you,” she said, looking over the top of Jimmy’s head and puffing on her cigarette.

“What about the pigoons?” said Jimmy, alarmed. “The microbes will get into them!” He didn’t want his animal pals to burst open like the infected cells.

“Other people are in charge of that now,” said his mother. She didn’t seem to care at all. She let Jimmy play with the pic­tures on her computer, and once he learned how to run the programs, he could play war games with them – cells versus microbes. She said it was all right if he lost stuff off the com­puter, because all that material was out of date anyway. Though on some days – days when she appeared brisk and purposeful, and aimed, and steady – she would want to fool around on the com­puter herself. He liked it when she did that – when she seemed to be enjoying herself. She was friendly then, too. She was like a real mother and he was like a real child. But those moods of hers didn’t last long.

When had she stopped working at the lab? When Jimmy started at the OrganInc School full-time, in the first grade. Which didn’t make sense, because if she’d wanted to stay home with Jimmy, why had she started doing that when Jimmy stopped being at home? Jimmy could never figure out the reasons, and when he’d first heard this explanation he’d been too young to even think about them. All he’d known was that Dolores, the live-in from the Philippines, had been sent away, and he’d missed her a lot. She’d called him Jim-Jim and had smiled and laughed and cooked his egg just the way he liked it, and had sung songs and indulged him. But Dolores had to go, because now Jimmy’s real mummy would be there all the time – this was held out to him like a treat – and nobody needed two mummies, did they?

Oh yes they did, thinks Snowman. Oh yes, they really did.

~ ~ ~

Snowman has a clear image of his mother – of Jimmy’s mother – sitting at the kitchen table, still in her bathrobe when he came home from school for his lunch. She would have a cup of coffee in front of her, untouched; she would be looking out the window and smoking. The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it. As a rule there would be no lunch ready for him and he would have to make it himself, his mother’s only participation being to issue directions in a flat voice. (“The milk’s in the fridge. To the right. No, the right. Don’t you know which is your right hand?”) She sounded so tired; maybe she was tired of him. Or maybe she was sick.

“Are you infected?” he asked her one day.

“What do you mean, Jimmy?”

“Like the cells.”