The Power(21)
On the morning shows, they bring in experts on human biology and prehistoric images. This carved image found in Honduras, dating back more than six thousand years, doesn’t that look like a woman with lightning coming from her hands to you, Professor? Well, of course, these carvings often represent mythical and symbolic behaviours. But it could be historical, that is, it could represent something that actually happened. It could, maybe. Did you know, in the oldest texts, that the God of the Israelites had a sister, Anath, a teenage girl? Did you know that she was the warrior, that she was invincible, that she spoke with the lightning, that in the oldest texts she killed her own father and took his place? She liked to bathe her feet in the blood of her enemies. The TV anchors laugh uneasily. That doesn’t sound like much of a beauty regime, now, does it, Kristen? Certainly does not, Tom. But now, this destroying goddess, do you think those ancient peoples knew something we don’t? It’s hard to say, of course. And is it possible that this capacity goes back a very long time? You mean, women in the past could do it, too, and we forgot? Seems like a hell of a thing to forget, now, doesn’t it? How could it have been forgotten? Well, now, Kristen, if a power like this existed, maybe we bred it out deliberately, maybe we didn’t want it around. You’d tell me if you could do something like that, wouldn’t you, Kristen? Well, you know, Tom, maybe I’d want to keep a thing like that to myself. The news anchors’ eyes meet. Something unspoken passes between them. And now the weather on the ones.
The official line for now from the Mayor’s office, handed out on photocopied sheets to schools across the major metropolitan area is: abstinence. Just don’t do it. It’ll pass. We keep the girls separate from the boys. There’ll be an injection within a year or two to stop this thing happening and then we’ll all go back to normal. It’s as upsetting for the girls to use it as it is for their victims. That’s the official line.
Late at night in a part of town she knows has no surveillance cameras, Margot parks her car, gets out, puts her palm to a lamp post and gives it everything she’s got. She just needs to know what she’s got under the hood here; she wants to feel what it is. It feels as natural as anything she’s ever done, as known and understood as the first time she had sex, as her body saying, Hey, I got this.
All the lights in the road go out: pop, pop, pop. Margot laughs out loud, there in the silent street. She’d be impeached if anyone found out, but then she’d be impeached anyway if anyone knew she could do it at all, so what’s the margin? She guns the gas and drives off before the sirens start. She wondered what she’d have done if they’d caught her, and in the asking she knows she has enough left in her skein to stun a man, at least, maybe more – can feel the power sloshing across her collarbone and up and down her arms. The thought makes her laugh again. She finds she’s doing that more often now, just laughing. There’s a sort of constant ease, as if it’s high summer all the time inside her.
It hasn’t been this way with Jos. No one knows why; no one’s done enough research on the thing even to venture a suggestion. She’s getting fluctuations. Some days she’s got so much power in her that she trips the house fuse box just turning on a light. Some days she has nothing, not even enough to defend herself if some girl picks a fight with her in the street. There are nasty names now for a girl who can’t or won’t defend herself. Blanket, they call them, and flat battery. Those are the least offensive ones. Gimp. Flick. Nesh. Pzit. The last, apparently, for the sound of a woman trying to make a spark and failing. For maximum effect, you need a group of girls all innocuously whispering ‘pzit’ as you walk past. Young people are still deadly. Jos has been spending more and more time alone, as her friends find new friends with whom they have ‘more in common’.
Margot suggests that Jocelyn could come to stay by herself one weekend. She’ll have Jos; Bobby will take Maddy. It’s nice for the girls to have a parent all to themselves. Maddy wants to take the bus into town to look at the dinosaurs – she never gets to take the bus any more; it’s more of a treat for her now than the museum. Margot’s been working so hard. I’ll take Jos for mani-pedis, she says. It’ll be good for both of us to take a break.
They eat breakfast at the table by the kitchen’s glass wall. Jos helps herself to some more stewed plums from the bowl and tops them with yogurt, and Margot says, ‘You still can’t tell anyone.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘I could lose my job if you tell anyone.’
‘Mom, I know. I haven’t told Dad and I haven’t told Maddy. I haven’t told anyone. I won’t.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Jocelyn smiles. ‘It’s cool.’
Margot suddenly remembers how much she would have liked to have a secret to share with her mother. How the yearning for it made even the grubby rituals of elasticated bands for sanitary towels or carefully concealed leg razors seem faintly lovable or even glamorous.
They practise together in the garage in the afternoon, challenging each other, fighting and working up a little sweat. Jos’s power gets stronger and easier to control if she works with it. Margot can feel it flickering, feel that it hurts Jos when the power rises up and then suddenly shorts out. There must be some way Jos can learn to control it. There must be girls in her own metropolitan-area’s schools who’ve had to learn to control it themselves and could teach Jos a few tricks.