Human Croquet (1987) by Kate Atkinson

Author:Kate Atkinson
Format: epub
Published: 1987-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

PRESENT

EXPERIMENTS WITH ALIENS

Debbie is having trouble giving the baby a name. I think this is because it is not her rightful property, the baby’s identity is, after all, in question and to name it might be to somehow rob it of its true inheritance. (But does the baby know who it is?) “Sharon?” Debbie tries out on Gordon. “Or Cindy? Andrea? Jackie? Lindy? We don’t want anything old-fashioned.” Like Isobel, presumably.

Debbie was right – the baby has been accepted on the streets of trees without a murmur and, as no-one has come forward to claim their mislaid infant, we appear to have it for life. Perhaps it really is a changeling, deposited by mistake, the fairies not realizing that we had no real baby in the house to exchange – for of course, the fairies’ tithe to hell must be paid in human life every seven years.

The baby is the only person that Debbie thinks is still itself (perhaps because it has so little self) although she still communicates with the rest of us robotic doubles in much the same way as she’s always done.

Debbie is now on an elephantine dose of tranquillizers which have no noticeable effect, certainly not on the strange, obsessive behaviour that she’s in the grip of – the hand-washing, the wiping of door handles and taps, the hysteria if a vase is moved so much as an inch. Perhaps these are the rituals that ward off the madness rather than the symptoms of it. “She should see a bloody psychiatrist,” Vinny says crossly, loudly, to Gordon. “A trick-cyclist?” Debbie shrieks. “Not bleeding likely!”

After a great deal of rummaging in the further corners of her brain, Eunice has come up (after a great deal of click-clicking ) with her own diagnosis, “Capgras’s Syndrome.” (‘Gey queer’ is Mrs Baxter’s diagnosis.)

“Capgras’s Syndrome?”

“Where you believe that close family members have, in fact, been replaced by robots or replicas.”

“Gosh.” (Well, what else can you say?)

“Scientists believe (a contradiction in terms, surely?) that it’s a condition related to the well-known phenomenon of deja vu.”

(Now that’s interesting.) “It’s to do with our sense of recognition and familiarity.” But then, what isn’t?

“The first known case was cited in 1923 – a fifty-three-year-old Frenchwoman complained that her family had been replaced by identical doubles. After a while she began to complain that the same thing had happened to her friends and then her neighbours and then eventually everyone. In the end she thought her own double was following her everywhere.” (A-ha!)

Eunice rather spoils the scientific effect by dragging hard on a Senior Service, she has recently set foot on the primrose path (fittingly), where will it end? In sex and death I suppose.

What if these things are real though? What if, say, I really do have a double? Mrs Baxter, for instance, reports seeing me buying shampoo in Boots yesterday when I know for a certain fact I was in the middle of a double English lesson and, to be more precise (“about half-past-ten,

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