Perfect, Stories of the Impossible

By Sally Emerson

In these stories of the impossible, master of the domestic thriller Sally Emerson introduces the eerie and supernatural into her keen-eyed portraits of everyday life. A clerk working in a public register office begins to receive death certificates dated in the future, but can she alter fate and save their victims? A woman unable to have children discovers a way of cloning her husband, but is their cloned son destined to repeat the mistakes of his father? A suburban mother is prescribed a health supplement with rather amorous side-effects; can she resist its sway and keep her hands off her neighbours? Emerson's tales of quotidian life invaded by forces beyond our control are both beguiling and uncanny as she celebrates reality and unreality in its many forms. Magical, humorous, written with headlong pace and brio, 'Perfect' will stay with the reader long after they leave the suspense of its pages. Sally Emerson's bestselling novels include the dark love stories 'Fire Child' and 'Heat' and 'Separation'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quadrant Books
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005455293

Book preview

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Also by Sally Emerson

Fire Child

‘A taut, beautifully constructed story moving simply but inexorably towards its cataclysmic ending.’

Sunday Times

‘Sally Emerson’s bonfire of a book demands to be read in one gulp from its deadpan beginning to its demonic end … This is a bravura performance.’

Daily Mail

‘Compulsive, irresistible, remarkably vivid.’

Time Out

‘Fire Child pulsates with lust, grief and revenge. In spite of the contemporary setting, it has the immoderate quality of myth.’

Victoria Glendinning

Heat

‘A story of obsession and love and the difference between the two … Emerson writes superbly about the dark side of love.’

Sunday Times

‘Sally Emerson has done something rather remarkable: in Heat she has restored passion to the serious English novel.’

The Scotsman

‘A thriller of Hitchcockian dimensions … permeated with eroticism and danger.’

Daily Telegraph

Separation

‘Separation is a triumph. I was hooked, if not immediately, then pretty darn soon. This is dark and scary and humorous and oddly moving and at times plain nasty.’

Literary Review

‘Devastating … a novel which demands to be read in one sitting.’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Thoroughly gripping … poignant, absorbing and terribly heart-rending.’

The Scotsman

Broken Bodies

‘Sally Emerson is a serious class act. This is a wonderful book.’

Sunday Express

‘Emerson has an enormous gift for holding the reader in a close and forceful grip.’

New Statesman

Sally Emerson

is the award-winning author of six novels, including bestsellers Fire Child, Heat and Separation. This is her first collection of short stories. She lives in London. Her website is www.sallyemerson.com

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Fiction

Fire Child

Heat

Separation

Second Sight

Listeners

Broken Bodies

Non-Fiction

New Life: An Anthology for Parenthood

Be Mine: An Anthology for Lovers,

Weddings and Ever After

In Loving Memory: A Collection for Memorial Services, Funerals and Just Getting By

First published in Great Britain by Quadrant Books in 2022

Copyright © Sally Emerson 2022

Sally Emerson has asserted her right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Perfect

Paperback ISBN 978-1-86151-978-8

Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

This is a work of fiction. All characters are fictitious.

Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons,

living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

To Adam and Eliza

Contents

Perfect

Lust

Death Certificates

Fairy Tales

Storms Like This

Lucky with the Weather

The Couple

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Perfect

‘Oh darling,’ said Portia, sitting on the arm of the sofa, her hand on Jack’s neck. ‘I thought getting pregnant would take weeks, and next month it will be three years.’ Their drawing room overlooked a garden square in Primrose Hill, with pastel-painted houses gathered round like elegant guests at a party.

Both Portia and Jack were beautiful. Jack had a strong jaw, high cheekbones and blue eyes with a laser intensity. Raised in Streatham, Portia’s background had been rough, though there was little sign of it in her refined voice and manner. She was ballerina-thin in a black polo neck and a shining kingfisher-blue skirt that fitted smoothly over her hips. Her pretty oval face was made up like a doll’s, with scarlet lipstick, a porcelain complexion and green eyes enhanced by coloured contact lenses. Portia helped run an international cosmetic company and thought nothing impossible. Jack ran a successful hedge fund. She thought he was over-cautious; he knew how reckless he was.

Outside a miserable drizzle shaded the room, in spite of the dazzle of its yellow velvet sofa.

‘I have an idea. An indecent proposal,’ she said. She slipped beside him. He turned to her and she smiled to let him see the hopefulness, the eagerness.

‘Oh good,’ he said.

‘I don’t think you’ll think it good.’

‘Don’t tell me then.’ He began to get up, brushing down his jacket. She held on to his arm and gazed up at him. He noted she had put in her contact lenses and her eyes looked particularly emerald and appealing. Portia always thought about the end goal and then worked out the steps to make it happen, in this case by exuding a Bambi-like innocence and sweetness.

‘But it is good. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve even made inquiries, and I want to tell you this is not as outrageous or as unlikely as it sounds. It can be done.’

‘Tell me, Portia,’ he said warily.

‘IVF hasn’t worked. My proposal is this …’

‘Say it …’

‘You know that certain animals have been cloned …’

He blinked, slowly crossed his arms and stared inertly through their full-length windows and into the rain. The room weighed down on him.

‘Jack!’ She had a lovely voice, clear and clean.

‘That’s out of the question,’ he said.

He stood slowly up and walked to the window.

‘Why don’t we live somewhere where it doesn’t rain so much?’ he said.

She was beside him, holding his arm. He tried to shake her off but she hung on.

‘But don’t you see? With the people we know, our good sense, we could make this child happen. And he would be as you could have been if your father hadn’t died when you were young. The new child would have everything, all the love, all the security in the world. Your second chance.’

‘Entirely out of the question, Portia,’ he said. ‘Even if it were possible, which it isn’t, it is a monstrous idea.’

She leaned against him.

‘I have done the research, and I can assure you the doctor in question has done it successfully, a number of times. Why, his own son is a clone. The new baby would be you. You as a baby, as a toddler, you before anything bad happened to you. Before your father died and all the sadness followed. I would love to look after you more than any other baby in the world, to turn you into the ideal person you so nearly are. It would be an experiment … in wonder.’

He checked his watch.

‘What are we having for lunch?’ He shook his head. ‘An experiment in wonder!’

She looked down. ‘But I have a quote I thought might win you over. It’s by Shakespeare: Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair / To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir,’ said Portia.

‘The answer, Portia, is no, no and a thousand times no.’

‘Your father,’ said Portia. ‘You told me his death was an accident, right? So it definitely wasn’t suicide?’

‘Correct.’

‘And he didn’t have any terrible disease?’

‘No.’

‘Why do you avoid talking about his death?’

‘I don’t. He fell off a roof, that’s all. Hit his head.’

‘But remind me exactly what he was doing on the roof.’

Jack sighed.

‘Cleaning out the gutters. He liked to do things for himself, and he didn’t mind taking risks. If someone told him not to do something, he’d do it.’

They had another round of IVF. It seemed to Jack he spent his entire life signing forms that Portia put in front of him. Portia exercised with her usual dedication, a personal trainer taking her out on Primrose Hill every morning to prepare her body for pregnancy, and she even made Jack have a special blood test to check his mineral levels.

One of Portia’s attractions was her firmness of purpose. The world could end and she’d somehow be fine, starting a successful business on Mars.

Portia was practical in her pursuits. She kept up not just with trends in make-up, but with the whole geo-political landscape, the moods of China and India as well as Europe and America. It wasn’t the minutiae of a person’s thought processes that interested her, but how thoughts and fashions translated into great movements of money.

At her parties in London, Paris, New York and LA, everyone was immaculately groomed, not a crease out of place, no fraying, no odd bits of cotton dangling from a button. The women’s nails were painted and rounded and the men’s perfectly manicured. Shoes were polished, smiles white. There were no hairs in the men’s noses or their ears, or probably on their chests or scrotums.

Jack and she held one of their parties at the Beverly Wilshire in LA, and the heavy smell of lilies wafted out from the display on a shiny table. Among the guests sipping champagne were film stars who endorsed the products produced by Portia’s company, and others who received regular overtures to do so in the form of extravagant boxes of make-up and creams. And besides, it was good champagne and Portia and Jack were charming. They knew everyone’s name, they introduced well, they were interested in each individual. A few of his clients were there too, very polished men he had helped to make very rich, all pleased to see Jack with his warm voice and smile. He approached each as if he liked them, and he did.

‘Portia’s such a great name,’ said a guest. ‘Were your parents fans of Shakespeare?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Portia (she had changed her name from Cheryl).

Over the next year, while Portia and Jack tried energetically for a baby, Jack’s hedge fund continued to deliver impressive results. The group of ten who worked for him provided him with the data, but he made the final decisions.

A year after their conversation about cloning, on another spring morning, Jack and Portia walked up to the top of Primrose Hill.

‘Daffodils,’ said Jack, with a hint of joy. He had always loved the contrast between the darker frill of the trumpet, at the centre of the flower, and the lemony soft outer petals. Spending time in the country when he was young, he had had plenty of time to study flowers with his father, who used to help him draw them. Every now and again Jack would come across books containing pressed violets, snowdrops, yellow crocuses which used to blaze like candles, and the time would disappear and he would be sitting next to his father at the kitchen table placing the flowers between the pages.

A little black pig that had been given to his father by a local farmer had become a pet, loving to cuddle up on the sofa, though every now and again it would run away and make for the open road.

In the garden there had been tall white foxgloves, and Jack used to slip his finger into one and imagine he was a fox.

‘Oh yes, very pretty,’ said Portia, whose interest in the natural world and its eccentric cycles was minimal. She in fact thought daffodils particularly dull, the way they turned up in such profusion all over the place, nodding their identical heads in agreement.

The sun began to shine weakly over the ragged cityscape of London town, the towering skyscrapers naked in the faint morning light but the dome of St Paul’s robustly glittering, dominating in spite of its size, reminding Jack that the sketchy modern buildings were only temporary and that there was a deeper, vibrant London that would survive anything.

‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ said Portia. For once her voice sounded knotted, as if the words were twisted at the bottom of her throat.

He waited. This time she didn’t turn to face him but gazed out at the show below them. She shivered in her forest-green trench coat, which today seemed too big for her. It wasn’t like her to be overwhelmed by anything.

‘See, I’m pregnant.’

His throat was dry and his whole body suddenly hot. He swallowed to moisten his throat. He was aware of all the other people on the hill and could almost hear them breathing.

‘Portia!’ he said, feeling a new lightness. So he did want a child, after all.

‘Yes.’

He wanted to tell his father.

‘Are you sure?’ he said.

He wondered how his mother would react. Surely she would be pleased. He didn’t see her much nowadays. Everything had changed after his father died. At present she was in Madrid, where her foreign-office husband had been posted. Jack wanted to hop up and down on one leg and then the other like some deranged jester.

‘Yes,’ she said solemnly.

He cupped her face in his hands.

‘Oh darling. How long?’

He did want this, really badly, he wanted a child. This was the next stage, this was what would remove the hollowness that had been inside him ever since his father’s death when Jack was just twelve. But that was over, this was the future.

‘Three months.’

‘That’s fabulous!’

‘Oh yes,’ she said.

‘You don’t sound one hundred per cent,’ he said.

An unease lapped around the edge of his thinking. He and Portia had been together for five years, enough to pick up unspoken worries. Indeed, Jack was almost too empathetic and could easily pick up even the feelings of strangers. Though when it came to poker, which he had started playing after his father’s death until meeting the steely Portia, it was a great help.

‘Oh I am.’ She tightened the belt of her trench coat.

She examined the belt carefully.

‘You know what I told you was a blood test and saliva test for mineral levels?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. He knew what she was going to say. ‘Portia …’

She finally managed to tie the belt to her satisfaction.

‘It was for your DNA.’

He kept staring at her, and staring at her, and people kept arriving at the top of the hill and reaching for each other’s hands. Normal people, carrying out their normal lives, falling in love, worrying about money, smoking marijuana, making promises to each other they wouldn’t keep but thought they would.

‘I’m sorry. But could you repeat that?’ he said.

Portia didn’t reply, and she didn’t reply, and she didn’t look at him, and he realised she was frightened. When she did look up at him her face was losing form, caving in, and her eyes losing brightness.

Now Jack had his hands on her shoulders. He wanted to shake her hard.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe even you would do that when I said no.’

She nodded. He gripped her tightly.

‘No, Portia. This is a real pregnancy. You are teasing me.’

She shook her head, and her face was darker and smaller than ever before, and he hoped she was not just going to disappear.

‘I am sorry,’ she said.

She gazed up at him.

‘I’ll abort it … er, well … if you like,’ she said.

His head was all black inside. He would like to have asked his father what to do, what to say. He would have liked to have spoken to his mother. Curious in the end one can become so alone, he thought.

‘I suppose I didn’t really think it would happen,’ she said in a miniature voice, a doll in a doll’s house. A few minutes ago everything had felt so full, so complete, so real.

He gave her a slight push as he let go of her, and with fury raging red in every nook and corner of his body and mind – battles in his head, sword fights in his stomach, gunshots assailing his chest – he swung away from her down the hill, half-running at times to escape her, down the hill, over the road, over Regent’s Park, faster and faster and faster. How could she go this far? How could anyone let her go this far? There were limits. Even she had to observe certain limits. It was dangerous to challenge the norms, to defy the gods, surely even she knew that? Over the other side of the park, to his own surprise, he hailed a cab to take him to St Paul’s.

His father used to love singing to him about London’s great bells:

‘Oranges and lemons,

Say the bells of St Clement’s.

You owe me five farthings,

Say the bells of St Martin’s.’

Jack could almost hear his father’s rich, teasing voice.

‘When will you pay me?

Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,

Say the bells of Shoreditch.

When will that be?

Say the bells of Stepney.’

And then his father’s voice would go very deep and husky and he would boom:

‘I do not know,

Say the great bells of Bow.’

Next came the words that made Jack shiver as a child:

‘Here comes a candle,

To light you to bed.

And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

Chip chop, chip chop – the last man’s dead.’

Jack sat down on one of the pews and put his head in his hands.

‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.’

He checked his phone, and Portia had called him six times and left twelve messages he didn’t read.

Jack had arrived in the middle of a service. ‘I will give thanks unto thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,’ intoned the canon, ‘thou has covered me in my mother’s womb.’

He wondered where she had undergone the process. He stayed for the whole service despite the need for something less intimidating. Yet time was comforting, he considered, and London and its great symbol, St Paul’s, were all about time.

On his return he opened the door and Portia ran to him in the hall, her face tear-stained. But he wouldn’t let her touch him.

‘I never guessed,’ he said. ‘Three months and I never guessed.’

He pushed through into the kitchen where he tore open a satsuma from the blue bowl on the table.

‘Please forgive me. I knew this was the right thing for us,’ she said.

He swallowed a couple of segments and the sweetness calmed him slightly.

Her mascara was smudged. Was this, too, carefully judged? It did make her pity her, a little.

‘Portia,’ he said levelly. ‘The results for any cloning are unreliable, but cloning primates is virtually impossible. What is more, if you clone from adult tissue you have the problem that the telomeres are already shortened.’

She looked down and then, her head still lowered, glanced back up at him.

‘The fertility specialist …’ she began. ‘The Professor …’

Jack threw the curl of satsuma rind into the bin.

‘The fertility specialist has overcome that problem,’ she said in her finest non-confrontational voice. ‘Trust me.’

‘I did. But from now on only about the colour of lipstick. There are serious risks.’

‘Jack!’

He made himself a cup of tea in a mug covered in drawings of birds. ‘Why didn’t you have to get my agreement?’

‘Can I have a cup of tea?’

He reached for another mug.

‘You’re getting me the