The Choice Chamber

So here she is, in the kitchen with her two teenaged sons. They’re helping with the meal, and they’re telling her about this Year 7 science experiment with maggots, which Sam did in school today.

‘It’s called The Choice Chamber,’ Sam tells her, and she glances over at him chopping mushrooms, his big serious head on his slender neck, a little boy still, but beginning to metamorphose already, stuffing into himself each day new words and new knowledge, knowledge all of his own which he can impart to her. And there’s Steve, grinning across at him, nodding and remembering three years back to his own Year 7, wide-shouldered — huge, which he likes to remind her by giving her a friendly tap on the head — a large blue vein standing out on his forearm like a proud tattoo, insignia of the adult maleness he’s gone off to and comes back to her from.

Sam goes on, in the strangely formal diction he’s adopted lately: ‘You take a box and divide it up into several chambers. One large one, and four smaller ones leading off it but sealed off with doors. Each small chamber has a set of different conditions: damp and dark, damp and light, dry and dark, and dry and light. Each pupil in turn takes some maggots and places them in the large chamber and then removes the doors and observes which of the chambers, ie which set of conditions the maggots will be attracted to. The hypothesis is that that they’ll make for the one with the damp and the dark, and the hypothesis was proved because everyone’s did.’

‘Except mine,’ Steve says, and all three of them laugh at Steve’s blind crazy maggots, which galloped off, against all expectation, into the dry and the light.

•

So here she is, in a kitchen, with teenaged children, her own, in this story of all the stories she ever imagined for herself: the one she most definitely decided against.

She was nineteen, a student in hall, the summer she so fiercely decided against it. There was a fashion that summer for headscarves tied gypsy-style: she tried it out and knocked on her best friend Jenna’s door to show her, and Jenna said with delight and even jealousy: ‘Ohmigod! You look like a bohemian country mother! I can just see you in some rambling farmhouse with an artist for a husband and loads of children running wild!’

She imagined it, she entered Jenna’s fantasy; she made it her own: it blossomed around her, and yes, in that instant she longed for it, the grey stone of the farmhouse tucked between rolling hills, a lush wood behind the house with bluebells, the smell of oils coming from the barn converted to a studio, and those children: brown-limbed, tangle-haired, feral but fiercely intelligent and destined for their own artistic futures. And in the centre of it all herself, a figure of young and fecund motherhood, standing just as she was in that real moment in Jenna’s doorway — older, of course, a few crows’ feet, but just as slim and dressed the same in her jeans and sun-coloured top and the gold hoop earrings and the summery scarf tied at the back of her neck.

All before she focussed, came back to herself, her senses, and wondered what the hell she and Jenna were thinking: the husband the artist and her just a mother, a fate she’d be a total idiot to risk.

She whipped the scarf off sharpish: it was a fashion she never took to after all.

•

Yet here she is, in a farmhousey kitchen — albeit in a city suburb: it was the fashion when they did the house up, she and Angus, a fashion she did succumb to — the antique dresser and non-fitted pine cupboards, and the kids at the big old table, preparing an omelette while the saucepans simmer. And things changed, the world changed: she never did have to give up her career after all.

Steve stands to get the frying pan, and just as he does so the phone on the windowsill rings.

She goes to answer it. ‘Hello?’

There’s a brief silence, and then a woman’s voice asks, ‘Is that 7360?’

A voice she knows but can’t place.

She says yes and there’s another silence, it seems a shocked one.

At last the woman speaks again, aghast: ‘Who is that?’

She says her name.

‘Oh!’ says the woman in horror, and puts the phone down.

‘Who was it?’ asks Steve, cracking the eggs, then holding the shell in mid-air, waiting because she hasn’t replied.

•

Jenna said she was crazy.

It was another summer, a very wet one. They had been graduated three years. They were living together in a top-floor flat in a suburb of the city. All night long the broken hod outside her window gurgled; going out in the morning to her job as a BBC researcher, she ran into soft wet billows. That summer she felt she had jumped and was swimming. All the world had gone fluid and all her possible courses, all her possible selves, were there in the liquid air for her to choose.

There was a boyfriend, a good fun sort (apart from the fact that deep down, she knew, he just wanted to settle and have the 2.5 kids): he’d call on spec and suggest mad outings or turn up late at night with chips and beer and sit with them matily watching the late show. But she didn’t want matey that summer, she didn’t want that kind of comfort; in fact she didn’t want a man at all, not necessarily, or just for sex, just for a flexing of her own gloriously, dangerously metamorphosing self. What she wanted was danger, her own dangerousness and no one else’s.

Her dangerous self. That self which had flickered through adolescence — smoking in the playground, stealing from the store and legging it down the high street fuelled by the thrill of rebellion — that old self refocused to a higher purpose, swelling in the rain that summer and trying out the possible personae, clacking through the wet in killer heels or flitting in tomboy sneakers through the BBC doors.

She was happiest that summer when she was alone.

•

One day she strode into the BBC foyer to collect an artist, up from London to be interviewed.

He was slumped in the soft seat, a long frame in baggy jeans, eyes glaring from an angular face with a dangerousness that matched her own. She saw him see it, her don’t-mess-with-me air; she saw him attracted to her in the instant, precisely because she was a challenge.

Ironic, really: it was this that hooked her.

•

It was the end of that summer, another wet evening, when she went to meet him from the train. As she crossed towards the station, light dissolved all around her in the wet dark, she had to dodge taxis emerging suddenly through waterfalls. There were holes in the station roof and water dripped on the tiles and went snaking across the floor.

She stood on the platform. Veils blew in from down the line where he would come. Then there were the lights of his train, sudden points in the swirling elements, homing in, bringing him with his dangerous exciting will, his utter focus on his art and on sensual experience, on booze and drugs and cigarettes, and now on her.

‘You’re crazy,’ Jenna said, and yes she was, but crazy was what she wanted, none of that sensible half-life the boyfriend offered, though she had never gone so far as to send him away.

And the summer had progressed, and the garden swelled and the flower buds rotted unopened, and now, here at its end, her other lover came on the train to urge her once more to ditch the boyfriend and commit to his passionate self.

The train pulled in. The passengers began to unravel from the train. She didn’t see him at first, and then he was upon her, and what she noticed was the whites of his eyes, glistening as if wet in the overhead lights, with a danger which for the first time she recognized as weakness, as need.

This was the moment she understood her real choice: between boredom or wreckage, between stability or passion.

•

Years after the choice was made she thought of the matey boyfriend she’d abandoned that summer. She knew where he was living, and somewhere she had his number.

In a moment of weakness she rang him, and was stunned when the voice which answered sounded like her own.