Soul

‘You’re not dangerous.’

‘Take my word for it, I’m dangerous.’

With the phone hooked under her chin, Julia surfed the channels: an embracing couple, a shot cowboy falling into a ravine, a space shuttle blasting its way through the azure of the outer atmosphere and into deep space. Is tragedy a perspective, a narrative, something we ourselves imposed on the most ordinary of events, she wondered—a stifling marriage, an impossible love affair?

‘I’ll ring you tomorrow,’ she said distracted by the television.

‘Julia, I’m worried about you. You seem really tense and yesterday—’

‘Gabriel, we’ve just had an earthquake, it’s four in the morning.’

Julia hung up. Enveloping herself in a dressing gown, she walked out into the lounge room. Settling into the leather armchair, her feet tucked up under her, Julia let her gaze wander to the portrait of her great-grandmother. In the growing light of the dawn outside, Lavinia Huntington’s eyes seemed to stare back at her sympathetically. She looked so young; too young to be encumbered with a child and to be the mistress of the palatial estate just visible beyond the forest glen. Julia looked at the bow Lavinia held in her hand, in keeping with her persona as the goddess Diana. The fletch on the arrow protruding from the dead stag matched those on the arrows in the quiver slung over her shou

lder. Had Lavinia Huntington murdered her husband or not?

Suddenly, Julia leapt up.

At 6 a.m. Westwood village was deserted. A cleaning van, its huge circular bristles whirling against the empty kerb, crawled down the street. On the other side, an early morning worker opened the McDonald’s burger bar on the corner.

When Julia arrived at the gates of the university, the night security guard, secure in his cubicle, appeared to be dozing. His head rested on an open copy of the National Enquirer, a cup of coffee cooled in a polystyrene cup beside him. Julia drove slowly past his booth into the parking lot, careful not to wake him.

The campus was hauntingly empty. Early morning mist trailing across the lawns and into the quadrangle seemed to hold in its faint white tendrils the after-images of all the students who had ever studied there.

Julia’s footsteps clattered across the paving. The silence all around and the unfamiliar isolation made her feel defenceless. Panicked, she broke into a run.

Inside, the darkened laboratory was a familiar womb of chemical smells and electronic purrs. Julia switched on the lights. Immediately, the fluorescents splattered into life.

Unlocking the door of her office, she went to her computer and called up her work from the day before: the gene activity results showing the genetic correlation between the final four subjects she’d narrowed down to. Was she staring at the descendant of the first murderer in the history of mankind? The first Homo sapiens who had smashed a rock against his brother’s skull? Did this gene function stretch back that far? And if so, why had it survived this long? Was there a need for it in the species—an evolutionary bloodletting?

Julia gazed down at her hand, then pulled a sterile slide from a drawer. She punctured herself in the thumb and squeezed a drop of her blood onto the slide—a thick, darkish film. She marked the slide with a number rather than her name. She didn’t want Gabriel to know it was her DNA and gene activity profile he would be testing.

On the way home, Julia stopped by a gun shop and bought some bullets for the gun Tom Donohue had given her. Next door was a florist. Deliberately emptying her mind of thought, she walked in and meticulously selected a large bunch of lilies, tuber roses and narcissi—flowers she knew to be Carla’s favourites. The note read simply: Carla, congratulations on the pregnancy. Julia. She stood by the counter, all conscious responsibility now pushed deep down below the instinct of her actions, flowing blindly like liquid glass—relentless, unstoppable. The florist’s voice breaking into her thoughts startled her as she asked if Julia wanted the bouquet sent by express delivery.

Gabriel slept again after the quake, but somewhere in his dreaming landscape the sense that he should be up and working nagged him. A bleep from his laptop, telling him he had mail, woke him completely.

He slipped off the bed and, naked, sat down and opened the reply from Matt Leman, which contained several more questions about the characteristics of the mutant gene function.

67

GRABBING GABRIEL’S HAIR, JULIA pressed her pelvis down hard, riding him vigorously, straddling him as he sat pinned to the kitchen chair. There was a violence to her lovemaking, a desperation in the way she had taken him with very little foreplay, her hand reaching for his penis as if she was determined to be the aggressor.

It had been a week since they’d argued in Julia’s office and her intensity now frightened Gabriel, this frenetic seduction that bordered on a rape. What was she trying to do—obliterate all emotion in their lovemaking? Perhaps even obliterate herself?

He struggled to see her face: her hair snaked across her forehead, her eyes were squeezed shut in concentration. Wrapping his arms around her, he held her tight, as if to squeeze all the fear and rage out of her. It was a futile gesture. Gabriel had never been so aware of the limitations of his experience. Her grief was overwhelming and elemental, like the earthquake, like the few deaths he had known: inevitable, non-negotiable and utterly daunting. He closed his eyes to block out her grimace. The chair, rocking under their weight, nudged a fruit bowl, which went crashing to the floor, spilling apples and oranges.

Julia’s thighs clenched as she began to reach orgasm. Gabriel, now determined to throw himself into her excitement, clasped her buttocks, playing her. They both came shouting. A second later, the neighbour’s dog started howling.

‘This has got to be the last time.’ Her legs were still slung over him, her skirt pushed above her hips; her breasts hung freely over the top of her blouse.

‘You were fantastic,’ Gabriel lied. Penis shrivelling, pants down to his ankles, he stayed in the chair.

‘Did you hear what I just said?’

Julia turned away as she adjusted her bra, feeling self-conscious about the age difference that showed in their bodies.

‘Look if it’s the love issue you’re worried about, you can relax. I’m over it. It’s not like I don’t find other girls attractive.’

Face hidden, Julia winced at his use of the word ‘girls’.