current

Desperately Seeking Darcy

by R. J. Astruc

      “What in the heavens is that?”

      Jessica Pemberley-Weston stops welding just long enough to flick up her visor and give me a look of disgust. “A time machine. Duh.”

      Well, of course it’s a time machine. I can tell from the colourful date dials, the primitive pseudo-TARDIS shape and the words TIME MACHINE clumsily graffitied across its gleaming metal front-plate. But that’s not really what I’m asking and Jessica, in her infinitely obstinate teenage wisdom, is well aware of it.

      “Miss Jessica…”

      The welding rod snaps off, the visor snaps up, and Jessica turns her precocious, pimpled face to mine. “Look, Pandy,” she says, in that haughty, Too British voice she learnt to mimic from watching back-to-back episodes of Are You Being Served. “Mom says—I mean, Mummy says I don’t have to answer to you.” Her chin’s out now, her lower lip quaking ever so slightly. “I don’t need some stupid butler telling me what to do. I mean maybe I have like, stuff I want to see in history. Like, that’s totally about me, personally. What are you, a school counsellor? You don’t know anything!”

      I sigh. “Is it a boy?”

      “No. Yes. Shut up! How did you know that?”

      How? Because you’re a teenage girl. But I don’t say it out loud. I’ve been a butler for more than a decade, and in this business you quickly learn when to keep your mouth shut. (Although considering the confessions of Paul Burrell, your mileage may vary.) I sit down on an old wicker chair that Jessica has dug out of the summer house and examine her half-baked creation, steaming and hissing in the midday sunlight like a huge, neon-lit kettle.

      Buttling for the British is easy, who consider it a colonial right of sorts, but it makes Americans uncomfortable; they have a residual ancestral guilt over things like black slavery, Native American genocide and Gangsta rap. I’m well aware that the Pemberley-Westons—who were the plain old Parkwells before Mr P-W made his fortune in the engineering market and Mrs P-W invented the suctionless vacuum—only hired me for the sake of their social image. When in Britain, do as the Britons do, and so on.

      Unfortunately, the P-Ws aren’t very good at being buttled for. Mrs P-W, who prides herself on being a homemaker, likes to run the house without interference, while Mr P-W is loudly confident he can find everything there is to know about British social etiquette on Ask Jeeves.com. Which leaves me with little to do except serve as a nanny to fifteen-year-old Jessica, who tolerates my intrusions into her life with marginally more grace than her parents do.

      “An educated guess, Miss Jessica,” I say, wondering vaguely where she managed to get all that scrap metal from. Perhaps there’s some HMS warship in Portsmouth missing its hull. “Are you trying to impress him, then? Is this some manner of intellectual challenge?”

      “Impress him? It’s just a stupid conflation of Hawking and parallel universe theory. Like, sooo H.G. Wells, not.” Jessica slaps a dismissive hand against the time machine’s round-bellied door, and the little neon bulbs inset in its hinge blink in sequence. The entire Pemberley-Weston family are geniuses and Jessica is no exception. It’s a blood thing, I think. Genius-ness—geniosity?—runs through the P-Ws veins like haemophilia through the old royal family. “Anyway I don’t actually have a him yet. I mean he doesn’t even know I exist. But when I get him, Hortense is going to be sooo jealous.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Like, Hortense from school? See she’s dating Viscount Hopkins who is such a drag but he’s got a title, right, and Jemima Parker-Hamilton is practically engaged to some prince from Africa and Susanna is with Sir something’s son, you know, the one who saved all those starving children with music, duh, and they’re always talking about their boyfriends and I’m like, sooo bored of listening. So obviously I need a boyfriend who is, like, way better than theirs and will make them totally go green. Someone Totally Posh who’ll defend my honour and be filthy rich and have dinner parties and stuff.”

      “You’ve been reading Jane Austen, haven’t you?”

      “We’re studying it in English, it is like sooo true.”

      That’s what I like about Jessica Pemberley-Weston and, generally, all Americans—they’re practical. They’re A-to-B people. When they want something, they aim to get it by the most direct route possible. The British procrastinate, which is why we ended up with tragic heroes like Hamlet and Macbeth while the Americans got hardboiled gunslingers like Sam Spade and Dirty Harry. You wouldn’t catch a British girl building a time machine to find a Totally Posh boyfriend to annoy her Totally Boring school-friends with. But an American? For Jessica, with all that P-W genius-blood bubbling in her veins, it’s the only practical thing to do.

      Not that I believe for a minute that she’s actually done it. Sooo HG Wells is right—time travel is pure science fiction. I steeple my fingers and put on my best humouring-Jessica face. “I’m not sure Mrs Pemberley-Weston would like it if you went gallivanting about the Regency era.”

      “Oh, it’s okay, she’s always like, Jessica, you should find a nice boyfriend, when are you bringing home a boy...?” She frets for a moment over an ugly knot of recently-welded metal, her gloved fingers testing and squeezing at its rough edge like she’s brooding over an unpopped zit. “Anyway Mom—Mummy—Mother thinks Wells is like, the best writer ever.”

      “Do you want me to come with you?”

      Jessica wrinkles her nose. “Ew, like as a chaperone? No way!”

      “Mrs Pemberley-Weston would probably—”

      “Okay, fine! I promise I’ll bring him straight home so Mummy and Daddy can meet him,” Jessica huffs, shoving her gloved hands as deep into the pockets of her overalls as she can. “Just leave me alone now, Pandy. I’m almost finished the welding and you are like, such a distraction.”

      “Certainly, Miss Jessica.”

      Thus dismissed, I head back to the P-W’s stately pile, stepping carefully over and around the various power tools Jessica has left lying about the gardens. As a mere butler, it’s not really my place to question the actions of my employees—or their daughters—but sometimes I would definitely like to.

      I meet Jessica’s self-styled Mr Darcy that evening. I’m in the dining room organising the P-Ws’ engraved cutlery when the littlest lady of the house flounces in with her new (or should that be old?) beau. He’s a small overfed youth with a freckled face and sour-cream complexion, rather froggish about the eyes and throat. I have to admit the pair of them have done a good job with the costuming—it’s perfect BBC traditional, with a ruffled shirt, broad-cuffed jacket and those waistless pants that grip the thighs just that smidgen too tightly. His shoes have silver buckles on them that shine the way I wish my silver would.

      Frankly I think Jessica, for all her spots, could do better, but this is another situation to which the keeping-my-mouth-shut rule applies.

      “Ohhhhhh Pandy!” gurgles Jessica delightedly. “I want you to meet someone suuuper special.”

      On the inside, I’m groaning. On the outside: “I’m honoured, Miss Jessica.”

      “I bet you like, thought I wouldn’t be able to do it,” she crows, gesturing at the mini-Darcy as if he’s an amazing palaeontologic treasure and not, say, a short fat boy in fancy dress. “I brought him back from like, the seventeenth century. It was sooo smelly there and everyone was like, posh as anything. They were all bowing and hand-kissing, we did waltzing and everything. Wasn’t it brilliant, Charles?”

      She turns to look at the Darcy, whose froggy eyes are cold with ill-temper. “You are introducing me to your butler?” he asks.

      The accent is pretty good. Not very BBC, admittedly, but it has a touch of the midland-riche about it. And what’s best is that he actually enunciates, pronounces each word as if he’s patriotically proud of speaking the Queen’s Own English. Although I suppose that could actually be the King’s Own, depending on which year he’s pretending to be from.

      “Duh,” Jessica tells him. “It’s like modern ages. Duhhhh.”

      “Ah, pardon me.” The Darcy bows formally, sincerely. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Master Pandy.”

      Shame on me for encouraging their games, but I find myself bowing in return. “My lord.” Which is laying it on rather thick, although the Darcy doesn’t see the humour, and Jessica is too hopped up on new-boyfriend glee to notice.

      I’m on the verge of asking the Darcy about the weather in Regency England, when the two elder Pemberley-Westons enter the dining room, Mrs P-W carrying a bowl of the traditional family favourite, macaroni cheese. She’s wearing her usual about-the-house clothes: short skirt, ridiculous heels and a sleeveless top that makes the most of her considerably costly cleavage—she’s that kind of woman. One look at her and the Darcy recoils like a tomcat before a hose, actually hissing in horror. He’s overdoing the Regency thing a bit now, but at least he hasn’t broken character yet.

      “Chin up, man,” I advise him, making some final adjustments to the tablecloth before taking my leave. Usually I eat in the kitchen while the family ‘breaks bread’, to give them some privacy, but today I’ve got a touch of the Burrell in me. I’d really like to know how Jessica plans to justify the paradoxes of time-travel to a celebrated engineer and a quantum physicist. Standing in the corridor, my ear pressed to the ornate double doors, I’m just in time to hear the Darcy loose his cool.

      “Lady, you are immodest!”

      “Aw ducky, don’t fret. It’s only me wee legs. I bet your mummy has legs too.” Mrs P-W has what they call a blended accent: one part Noo Yawk drawl, two parts Corrie-Enders cockney.

      “I beg your pardon? My mother would never clothe herself in such a wanton—“

      “Charlie, shut up. It’s like, the future. That’s what women wear.”

      “Disgraceful!”

      “Is this a new friend, mm, Jessie? What’s his name then?”

      “His name’s Charles Chamberlain, Daddy, and he’s from 1812.”

      “That’s nice. Do you go to school around here, then, Charles?”

      “Daaaa-dddy! He’s from the past, of course he doesn’t. Duh.”

      “Theo, honey, they’re playing a little game, we’re meant to play along. Didn’t you read the Living with Teenagers website I bookmarked for you? They’re just going through a phase.”

      “Mummmy, you’re being like soooo embarrassing in front of Charles!”

      “Good grief, will someone give that woman something to wear?” It seems that the Darcy is appealing to the universe at this stage, the P-Ws being largely unresponsive.

      “Sonny, that’s enough from you. I know my daughter probably put you up to this but I won’t tolerate any boy in my household disrespecting my wife.”

      “Oh my god, Daddy, I swear this moment is seriously going to be the one that I tell my shrink about when he like, asks me at exactly what point you totally ruined my life forever.”

      “Boobs, ducky, they’re just boobs. Everyone’s Mom has boobs, every baby’s got to suckle somewhere.”

      “Mummy, you’re being even more embarrassing! When I tell Hortense she’s going to be all, like, no way your Mom said that. And I’ll be like, oh you have like nooo idea, they are like the worst—”

      “Enough,” shrieks the Darcy, whose voice has gradually been rising up the register and has peaked, here, at a startlingly prepubescent soprano. “You people are quite, quite intolerable! I knew I should have stayed in 1812.”

      I leap back just in time, as the double-doors to the dining room swing back with a thud and the Darcy stamps past, his froggish eyes bulging and his sour-cream complexion piqued with red. Jessica is two steps behind him, arms outstretched, wailing platitudes, in much the same way I’d expect Dr Frankenstein to go screaming after his errant monster. And that’s the funny thing: during all this neither of them have broken character, have ditched the charade, have admitted, Okay, we thought this Regency thing would be good for a laugh, but I guess the joke’s old now, so… Which is strange because Jessica has never been a good actor—she’s been a sheep or a tree in every school play since the first grade—and she’s also terrible at keeping secrets.

      As the pair of them bellow their way down the corridor toward the manor’s east wing, I start to get a weird feeling in my stomach, not butterflies but not bad-cottage-cheese-the-morning-after either. And it’s a feeling I can’t shake, even after popping half a tube of Pepto-Bismol. Jessica does this to me sometimes: she twists up my insides with worry, she makes me doubt.

      Girls’ night starts at six o’clock sharp every Saturday at Disco Chips, the coolest place in town for bored rich kids under the legal drinking age. Think strobe-lights, bad pop music, velour lounges, mirrored walls and cocktails whose strongest ingredient is Red Bull. If I had a choice in the matter I’d never set foot in the place, but unfortunately that decision is out of my hands. I am, as always, the Designated Chaperone.

      The place is run by Hortense’s auntie’s poolboy’s grandfather’s half-sister twice removed—look, it’s some equally illogical connection—and Jessica and her school friends go there every week to gossip and do other fun ‘girl things’. Well, traditionally fun ‘girl things’. I rather suspect that Miss P-W is far happier mucking about in the garage with her mother’s welding gear than she is drinking mocktails in a strobe-lit kiddie-bar, listening to Susanna Hampton-Burgess complain about her manicurist.

      But this Saturday will be a little different, I’ll bet, because this time Jessica has brought the Darcy.

      The Darcy has become something of a fixture in the PW home, having taken up residence in one of the many guest rooms. One of the ones with a walk-in closet. Tonight he’s dressed in full BBC regalia—ruffled silk shirt, satin vest, swallow-tailed coat, et al.—and amidst the sea of boob-tubes and designer jeans and henna tattoos he looks as out of place as an American in, well, London. How Jessica convinced him to dress up in public is a mystery to me, but he looks oddly comfortable, as if he’s grown used to it. He fills out a pair of frilled knee-high stockings with pride, a pride no boy born this side of the ’80s should possess.

      “Miss Jessica, are you sure this is wise?” I hiss in her ear, as we thread through the crowds. “I understand you both want to make a point, but… look, the boy is wearing knickerbockers. The local hooligans will be drawing lots outside to pick which one of them gets to beat him up in the parking lot.”

      Jessica shrugs. “That’s like, totally what he wanted to wear. Nothing to do with me, duh.”

      “Miss Jessica, having him pretend to be Mr Darcy was your idea, not his. He’s only going along with it because of you.”

      “Oh my god, Pandy—do you like, totally never listen? Seriously, you, Mom and Dad—Mummy and Daddy, I mean—are like the slowest people in the universe. He’s not pretending to be Mr Darcy, he’s really Lord Charles Chamberlain from 1812, and he thinks he looks like, soooo cool in that gear because it was like, soooo cool in 1812.”

      “Right. Fine. Okay. Have it your way.” I’m clutching at straws. “But what do you think your friends will say?”

      “Oh, I think they’ll be like, super impressed. Hah! They’d better be.”

      There’s an ominous tone in her voice that I recognise all too well as a harbinger of Jessica Pemberley-Weston Getting Her Own Way, and I start wishing I’d brought a bottle of Pepto-Bismol along.

      The girls—Hortense, Jemima and Susanna—are seated at the Disco Chips bar on stools entirely too high to be practical. They’re direly dull girls, this trio, three intellectual stooges, and I have to admit that I’ve always wondered why Jessica, a girl who once built a particle accelerator out of three old washing machines and the engine of Mr P-W’s old Mercedes, persists in hanging around them. But then I suppose that fake-tanned, air-headed brand of stupidity is considered cool these days, and Jessica, for all her genius, just wants to fit in.

      Stirring their mocktails, the girls look at the Darcy dubiously as we approach.

      “Who’s the… uh, the guy,” Jemima asks.

      “Are we like on telly?” Susanna reaches for her eyeliner.

      Hortense Decourtenay-Davenport, a blubbery, pink-faced girl with unlikely blonde hair, curls her lip like one of her polo ponies. “You meet him at a fancy dress party or something?”

      Jessica smiles a tight smile. “Hortense, this is Charlie. The one I was like, telling you about.”

      “This is Charlie? Oh my god.”

      “Why oh my god?”

      “This is the guy you were mooning over? He’s a total minger,” Hortense hoots, bursting into laughter. “I mean he’s like soooo dull compared to my boyfriend. That’s Viscount Hopkins, by the way, he actually has a title—”

      “My name is Lord Charles Chamberlain,” the Darcy interrupts. “I, also, actually have a title. How odd that you should bring up the young Viscount Hopkins; I only recently heard that the poor boy’s father has recently declared bankruptcy. Some embarrassing tax evasion business. The story even appeared in the papers—well, I think it was buried somewhere near the back, between the Lonely Hearts column and that hilarious little comic about the orange cat and his impotent owner. The Hopkins family fortunes aren’t exactly front page news.”

      Hortense goes pale, goes red, goes pale again.

      “That rude interjection aside, I’m truly charmed to meet you all,” says the Darcy, committing one of small bows. “What wonderful company my Jessica keeps! Although I’d expect nothing less. A young woman blessed with genius such as hers would surely associate with only the most astute and genteel members of her generation. I expect you all come from respectable families and are distinguished conversationalists.”

      He smiles. And suddenly it doesn’t matter that he’s wearing knickerbockers or that he’s spotty or that his shoes have ridiculous silver buckles on them. There’s class and there’s class, and the Darcy and his Regency idiosyncrasies are the very height of class: that generation practically re-invented it. And it’s that kind of class these girls feed on, that all of Britain is guilty of feeding on, those overdone and overworked Austens and Brontes and Eliots, with their stockings and their graces and their puffy dresses and even their bloody butlers…

      Jemima breaks the silence. “Oh my god he’s like the best ever, Jess, where did you meet him?”

      “Does he have a brother? I want to be a Lady Chamberlain.”

      Even Hortense grudgingly joins in: “He talks brilliant, don’t he? Like something out of Shakespeare, yeah?”

      “Shut up,” says Jessica, completely flattered.

      “You all are truly too kind,” the Darcy agrees. “I’m afraid my modesty won’t permit me to let you go on. And, at any rate, I believe Miss Jessica and I have business to attend to. My lady,” he finishes, dipping a knee, “might I have this dance?”

      “Ohhhh, totally! Pandy, mind my purse?”

      The Darcy takes her hand, and they head to the dance floor. Together, amidst the booty-shakings of their peers, Jessica and her Darcy calmly waltz the night away.

      Three days later I find Jessica in her father’s study, working on her laptop with her feet on his desk. Despite the size of the P-Ws’ mansion, it’s never hard to find her—you just have to follow the trail of casually-discarded welding gear and the smell of burnt metal. Today she’s in Inventing Mode: she’s wearing the pink fireproof overalls Mrs P-W got her for her birthday, and has a pair of laboratory goggles dangling on elastic around her neck. Biochemistry books are piled about the desk, some fifty different How-To manuals for manipulating the genetic code.

      “Good afternoon, Miss Jessica. I trust you’re feeling well today?”

      “Like, duh.”

      “Marvellous to hear it. What is it you’re up to?”

      “Just random stuff. Mapping the human genome, gene splicing, cyborgs, transhumanism. Like, sooo Philip K Dick.”

      Sometimes when she starts talking like that—when any of the P-Ws start talking like that—it’s best to just move on. So long as she isn’t using her genius to blow up the school, create a deadly super-virus or propel Hortense Decourtenay-Davenport and her pock-faced cronies into the sun, I don’t care. “That sounds interesting,” I lie, wondering if I have Harrison Ford and Blade Runner to thank for this latest obsession. “And how is your boyfriend?”

      “Who, Charlie?” Jessica glances up from the screen. “We broke up.”

      There’s a surprise. “I expect that pretending you were from 1812 could put a strain on any relationship.”

      “You’re like sooo frustrating. I keep telling you, he totally came from the past. Didn’t I like, show you the photos?” She clicks a few keys and spins the laptop around to face me. “Not that it matters. Charlie and me are like, seriously over. We like, had a fight, and I’m totally not going to talk to him ever. I was like on the phone to Jemima and she was like, oh my god, you are like soooo too good for him and I’m like, like duhhh. Regency guys have like one thing on their minds—marriage.”

      “Wait… photos?”

      “Daddy always tells me to like, document my discoveries otherwise some stupid chav will steal them. Remember Edison, he says. You don’t want to be, like, Joseph Swan.”

      Bless this digital age, she’s transported her Regency photos into a slideshow. I click through the images: dirty-faced peasants carrying outdated gardening equipment around a barren field; Jessica sitting in a parlour room, sipping tea in a dress shaped like an up-ended fishbowl; four middle-aged people in period clothing smiling uneasily into the flash; Jessica and the Darcy dancing in a ballroom, serenaded by a string quartet. And there’s more: ornate barouche carriages, the cobbled streets of old London, a lamp-lighter hesitantly reaching a match toward a taper…

      They could be doctored. They could be old photos retouched. They could be snapshots from a local Ren Faire, but in my gut I know that this is the genuine article. I’ve worked in houses like this before, I’ve seen real life re-enactments, and I’ve watched the bloody BBC. “Isn’t this—I mean doesn’t this cause some kind of…” I take a breath. “Doesn’t this… for godsake, you could have killed your own grandmother, Jessica…”

      “Whatever.”

      My hands are shaking. Just my hands. That’s all I can allow myself. It is not becoming of a man in my position, I tell myself, to have a panic attack. “Did you send Charles back to the past?”

      “No! I told you we’re like never talking again.”

      “Jessica, where is he? You have to send him back to the past.”

      “You can’t make me talk to him! I hate him!”

      “I’ll tell your mother.”

      “So what? She can’t make me talk to him.”

      “Perhaps. But she can ground you.”

      Forget the damage caused to the time-space continuum and the chance that the world might disappear suddenly into a paradox vortex, it’s grounding that poses the real threat to Jessica Pemberley-Weston’s existence. About to snatch up her laptop and storm up to her room, the teen time-traveller pauses to reconsider her position. “I don’t even know where Charles is,” she grumbles, puffing out her lower lip. “I left him wandering around the garden yesterday. He could be, like, anywhere by now.”

      Somehow I doubt it. I can’t imagine any Regency man whipping off his stockings, pushing up his doily-lace cuffs and stamping bravely out into the great unknown, never mind what Jane Austen and her fans would like to believe. Perhaps Colonel Brandon ran out into the wilderness for his Marianne, but a more sensible man would have sent out his butler with a lantern and a pair of wellies. Which is, of course, the job I’m bound to do. “I’m sure he won’t be too hard to find, Miss Jessica,” I say, swallowing a sigh. “Now how did you say that time machine worked?”

      Half an hour later I locate the Darcy. He’s sitting under a bush in the summer garden, muddy of face and knee, the ruffles of his shirt torn and his silver buckles looking significantly less shiny. The thread in one stocking has snapped altogether and hangs about his ankle. Twigs and leaves protrude from his pockets and hair. Poor lad; the twenty-first century hasn’t treated him well. I help him to his feet and together we limp around the house to the time machine.

      It’s still where I last saw it, its gleaming front-plate shouldered in by painted ceramic pots spilling with Mrs P-W’s peonies. The neon bulbs burn a little brighter as we get closer.

      “I’m told you only have to twist the dial to the correct date, Lord Chamberlain, and you will be transported back to 1812,” I say, jimmying open the door with a discarded hubcap that I assume once belonged to Mr P-W’s ill-fated Merc. “When you get back you should destroy it. It’s not safe to have a machine like this floating around.”

      The Darcy struggles to regain his poise. “Of course. I should like to forget this horrible mistake as quickly as possible. I despise this future England. How could the King’s own country descend into such shameful debauchery?” He pauses, one foot inside the machine. “Well, man? You’re from the future—my future. Anything you’d like to tell me before I go?” he asks.

      I don’t know what to say to him. Take me with you, perhaps? Because deep down I’m a Regency man myself, with my black swallow-tailed coat and my BBC-posh accent and my near encyclopaedic knowledge of proper dining etiquette. Part of me, hungry for an era I’ve never known, wishes that I could go with him. But another, louder part of me knows I couldn’t stand it, not unless I could come back every now and then to catch up with Eastenders, play a few rounds at the local golf club, and nab a quick dinner from the chipper down the road. See, I want the class without the limitations. In the end, I’m not much better than Jessica.

      “Never work for Americans,” I say eventually.

      The Darcy smiles. “Quite so.”

      He pushes a button inside the machine’s hull. Then there’s a whistle, a hiss, and the machine is gone, taking the Darcy with it. I linger for a few minutes there in the garden, waiting for something terrible to happen—for timelines to clash, for worlds to collide, for someone to kill my great-great-great-grandfather. But nothing happens.

      It’s almost a disappointment.

      “So Charles is gone now? Super big thanks for that, Pandy. Like, I so do not want to talk to an ex, ever. Susanna talked to her ex once and like, he convinced her to like, give him back all his CDs. He was such a minger, oh my god. This one time, right, we went out together with him and Hortense was like, Susanna, that guy is such a minger—”

      The biochemistry books are gone by now, pushed off the desk to make room for a host of different apparatus that I assume she’s stolen from Mr P-W’s company’s laboratory. Goggles on, lab coat fastened, Jessica currently hovers over one of her father’s microscopes, pulling at the many knobs on its side like a game-show hostess spinning prize wheels.

      Leaning against the study door, I surreptitiously check my pulse. It’s not as regular as I’d like. “Can I ask what you’re doing, Miss Jessica?”

      “No!” She stiffens. “It’s like, none of your business.”

      “Is it a boy?”

      “No. No! Yes. Maybe.” She pushes back her goggles, her face flushed. “Okay, maybe it is. But like Jemima just started dating thingy, you know, the hot guy with the brilliant hair, he’s like in the jeans commercial and once he was on a billboard outside Harrods. And Hortense is totally finished with Viscount Hopkins because he’s a minger, she’s with Gary Simpkin from that band, I used to have his poster on my wall but I’m soooo not telling Hortense that. Not that I like him any more since he like, cut his hair, which was totally his best feature. And anyway I thought like, the best way to get the sexiest boyfriend is like to–”

      “To genetically engineer him.”

      “Well not exactly—I mean, I want a boyfriend right now, I don’t want to wait like sixteen years until he’s old enough. So I figured I could like, use some of Mom—Mummy’s research on cybernetic grafts and Daddy’s work on genetic re-engineering, and kind of pair them together so I’ll have like, my own Rutger Hauer. Like on—“

      “Blade Runner?”

      “Oh, like totally!”

      As Jessica tinkers with her father’s devices, several uncharitable thoughts come to mind, not least of which is my duty to inform Mrs P-W that her impressionable daughter should not, under any circumstances, take studies in Ancient Greek literature, robotics or—heavens forbid—theology. I have the feeling I’ll live to regret my decision not to hop back a couple of centuries, to when people were intelligent enough to limit their daughters’ education to etiquette and needlepoint.

      “Miss Jessica?”

      She pushes back her goggles. “Pandy?”

      But there’s nothing I can say—nothing that translates easily into the dialect of American-British teen. So, “Just be careful,” is all I manage, before making a hasty retreat.

      There’s a bottle of antacid in the bathroom waiting for me.

RJ Astruc is an Irish-African author currently based in Australia. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Abyss & Apex, Andromeda Spaceways and like a bajillion other places. Her new novel, Harmonica + Gig, is coming out in 2008.

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