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A BLIP’, shouted the newstexts. ‘SCIENTISTS CLAIM POLES NOT MELTING’. This was followed by a flurry of denials from scientists and politicians all over the world, worried that this freak bunch of results would undo every hard-won environmental resolution. Then the denials were challenged by a third group of scientists known to be paid by big business. But no one believed them, no one could envisage that global warming was coming to an end. It was too damn hot, and getting hotter by the day, for the news broke in spring, and soon it was summer … No one took the odd data seriously, and the original scientist who’d published the results kept her head low while she repeated the probes.
    Twelve months later it had all been forgotten. We still hadn’t managed to escape from the city. I’d been offered several posts in exciting places; I could have gone to the Galapagos, or Lisbon; I was offered a highly paid job in Africa, helping with a nationwide updating of screens in Ghana. I longed to accept the last job in particular, knowing how proud my father would have been, and knowing I’d been chosen partly for my ancestry, the gift I was so proud of and had never used. The interviewing board had an atavistic sense that my Ghanaian blood made me less likely to cheat them. (They were right. I wanted to pay my dues, and my father’s dues, and my grandfather’s.)
    But I turned them down, and I don’t blame Sarah. Perhaps that means I do blame Sarah. She told me yes, of course I must go, use my talents, live my life. ‘You’ve been dreaming of travelling for as long as I’ve known you. Go, and I’ll come out and visit you.’
    ‘Come with me,’ I said, but she wouldn’t.
    She was fronting a screen show called Gendersense, dubbed ‘Utter Nonsense’ by Conserver pundits disappointed by the way her position had changed from the early days of her Role Support work. Now she saw her mission as ‘giving a voice to the different views of men and women’, ‘exploring the options for separate development’ and ‘reflecting the range of the fertility debate’, to quote from the twopage synopsis for the series she submitted to Brainscreen at the start.
    I read it as I set the table one evening. I was heating up some Thai food for her. She had come home late, and I had made an effort. I wanted her to be pleased with me; there were generefreshed snowberries and cream for dessert. ‘Darling,’ she said. ‘I really love you.’ But I couldn’t understand this thing she had written.
    She laughed when I asked her what it all meant. ‘Nothing, really. I just have to sound – well – challenging, but not too controversial.’
    ‘Are you going to tell them what you believe?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I mean, about men and women loving each other. And living together. Then the babies will come.’
    She nodded abstractedly. Her cheeks were full of food. ‘Mmm. But it has to sound a bit more theoretical than that. I mean, it is Brainscreen. Look – it’s not about us. Please understand, Saul, it’s just a job. We’re going to live together, and have a child – one day. I mean, I know we shall. But most people don’t live like us –’
    ‘When?’ I asked, ‘when will you be ready? I’d like to try now.’ She wouldn’t answer.
    She looked different these days from when I first met her. More beautiful perhaps, cooler, more refined, the softness leaving her mouth and cheeks, her jaw more pronounced, her nose more sculptured. She hardly had time to teach any more, but she kept a loose attachment to give her credibility. She wore crisp white trousersuits and structured dresses that bared the long neck under her groomed red hair. She was known as a beauty, now, on the screens, though she avoided gossip and photographs, and particularly frowned on any mention of me, or snatched papshots of the two of us together.
    ‘You’re not ashamed of me, are you?’ I asked her that evening. She was looking like a model, lean and