Leila Doll
Words by Helen Sedgwick
I pulled the curtain aside for the third time and looked out. It was quieter than earlier. The window of one of the flats down the street had been smashed, its shattered glass sprayed out like splashes of water in the moonlight. Sitting back down, I held the panda on my knee and inspected the stitching that attached its arms and legs to its torso. The fur covering its body and head was thin from years of stroking, of love.
Leila was nine when the real giant pandas arrived in Scotland, transported all the way from Chengdu. On the first day the zoo was re-opened to the public, her family stood hand in hand, mum-Leila-dad, like a chain of party streamers, staring into the cage.
“Why are they here?”
“Because they are an endangered species,” her mum said, spelling out en-dang-ered like it was a long word.
“Why?”
Leila didn’t take her eyes off them. Couldn’t stop looking at their huge eye patches, their quizzical expressions, the curiosity implied with every turn of their heads.
“Do you know what that means?” Her mum insisted. “It means they’re dying out.”
“I know, but why?”
“Because they only eat bamboo.”
“Why?”
“That’s just what they eat.”
“But why?”
“Leila, doll, please give it a rest,” interjected her father.
But it wasn’t just the bamboo. The pandas were totally uninterested in having sex. The entire species seemed to have stopped reproducing. The zookeepers tried everything; first there were subtle introductions, getting the pair comfortable with one another. Then came the insistence on complete panda privacy – maybe they didn’t like to be watched. Later, there was the idea of panda porn. Perhaps that would get them in the mood. It didn’t. Panda couples were passed from zoo to zoo as city after city, nation after nation gave up, and another would rise to the challenge. The discussions of artificial insemination were met with opposition; it was postulated that a species that was no longer ‘naturally’ reproducing were just meant to die out. It was natural selection. It was God’s will. It was the way it was.
“They actually seemed to think that because the species was dying out in the wild, we should have just let them die,” Leila told me one night. “Where does it come from, this attitude that human intervention must be bad? That science is bad?”
When she gets animated her eyebrows furrow in so deep they almost meet in the middle. I touched her there, trying to smooth out the wrinkles.
“Science is beautiful,” I told her. “And human intervention is a coupling of words that assumes humanity and nature are two different things, when we should know by now that one is part of the other.”
“Do you think it’s unnatural?” she asked me.
“That they tried to save the pandas?”
“No. Don’t be cute. My work. My research.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by unnatural,” I told her. “I think we have naturally evolved to understand how life is created. Just as one animal might move from living in the trees to the ground, or just as birds evolved to fly and fish developed lungs and left the sea, so we have evolved to understand. If the fish that had developed lungs decided not to use them because nature intended them to live in the sea, they would all have died, and there would never have been any land dwelling mammals.”
Leila laughed when I said that, and asked me to play for her. I chose some Mozart, his violin concerto in G major. The adagio. Leila curled her legs up under the cushion as the opening phrase resonated between us, the simple calm of it settling over our home. Later she said, “There’s nothing sexier than when you play,” so I unbuttoned her shirt and we made love our way on the living room chair while we listened to Schubert’s String Quintet.
I heard her key in the lock and looked at my watch. It was gone ten. She must have stayed late to finish the application. It’s all she talks about these days. The final stage.
“How was work?”
She sat up on the arm of our chair and rested her hand on my shoulder.
“The crowd was bigger today,” she said, after a pause in which she glanced over to the window. The curtains were closed, so she couldn’t have seen out.
“I know.”
“Is it change they are afraid of?”
“It’s always change they are afraid of. And whatever is different from themselves.”
Her hands slid through my hair, distractedly. My eyelids felt heavier, as though now that she was touching me I needed to rest.
“It’s finished. The application.”
“That’s good.”
“Maybe. What if we are overruled?”
“You won’t be. There are plenty of people who still believe in the value of science.”
“Are there enough?”
I breathed out, exhausted. Worn out.
“Let’s go to bed, Leila. I was just waiting up for you.”
“All I want to offer them is choice.”
“The choice of a different way.”
“Yes, the choice.”
“I know. Come to bed, love. Please, come to bed.”
I finished writing my Partita two weeks later. It’s for solo violin, constructed from a mixture of perfect intervals and dissonance. I wrote in lots of double-stopping, like Bach does in his solo works, so my violin would become its own accompaniment. I stood by the window all day to play while there was still light, watching as I practiced because the streets seemed uncomfortable, blocked up with angry people not going anywhere. After dark, I put my violin away and waited for Leila. Late again. I listened for what was happening outside, but heard steps coming up the stairs instead.
“We won the ruling,” she shouted before she’d even closed the door behind her. She was out of breath. I could tell she’d been running. The twoo of an owl rose above the voices and cries coming from the street.
“We got a green light from the ethics committee. Voted in by a landslide. More than that, even.”
She was almost jumping with excitement, and I lifted her up and spun her round in the kitchen.
“You are pleased for me.” It wasn’t a question, but I replied anyway.
“More than that. I’m proud of you.”
“Good.” She gave my hands a squeeze and kissed me. “I bought Champagne. We have to celebrate, come on.”
I followed her up to the roof, picking a piece of broken glass from her jumper where I saw it glint in the fluorescent light of the close. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, so just folded it up in an old bit of paper that had once been a shopping list and buried it away in my jeans pocket. I didn’t want anything to dampen her mood.
Up on the roof we laid down our picnic blanket and sat under the textured sky. Streetlights below made hazy pools of orange, and tenements opposite were dark rectangles punctuated with squares of light. I popped the Champagne, holding the cork tight in my hand as a frosty stream of gas swirled out from the bottle.
“I didn’t bring the glasses.”
“Neither did I.”
“I’ll go back,” I said, standing up but Leila caught my arm and pulled me down to her.
“Don’t go.”
“Are we drinking out of the bottle now?”
“Why not?”
“Okay, classy lady. It’s your party.” I took a sip and misjudged it completely, the Champagne bubbling out of my lips and running down my chin. Leila gave me a look, and a smile, then took the bottle.
“Imagine how much good we can do,” she said.
“You can save the pandas.”
I wiped Champagne from my neck.
“And so much more than pandas. Just… Oh my god, everything!”
Her excitement was infectious. Empty Champagne bottle laid aside, we sat on the roof snogging like teenagers. She pushed me over and pulled up my jumper to tickle my tummy with her hair. She was young again, playful, hopeful.
“I’m going to prove to people that they don’t have to be scared of science. That humanity is learning things. We’re evolving. That we understand more and more all the time, that we can understand how to create life. That it’s not bad or dangerous or frightening. It’s beautiful. It’s amazing. How could anyone think that understanding something could make it less beautiful?”
“I don’t know,” I said, understanding her, and seeing her beauty. I held my hands either side of her face and she smiled back at me, her eyes like an invitation.
We slept together in our one-person sleeping bag on the roof. Everything was soft. In the middle of the night our sweaty bodies slid against one another and our breath mingled and froze in the air. A rare peace settled over the city that nearly lasted until morning.
After the announcement on the TV, the crowd grew every day. There was a hostility that clung to the buildings like grease. An encampment had sprung up outside Glasgow of people rejecting technology, and there was a strange pervading belief that somehow we had gone wrong. That things would be better if we lived in caves, let women die in childbirth and accepted the natural age of mankind as somewhere between three and four decades – advances in medical research being associated with our modern unnaturalness. The spires and gothic towers of the university made a strange skyline above the protestors and their shouted slogans. The banners they held made less and less sense. “Nature’s Way or No Way” was one we saw a lot of. We could hear them chanting from our kitchen. Then there was a newspaper article that proclaimed that, yet again, scientists were trying to play God.
“But nature gets it wrong sometimes,” Leila said, throwing the paper down on the table between us.
I took a sip of my coffee.
“I mean, say there’s an earthquake that buries a whole city, should we leave everyone to die, buried alive, because that’s what nature intended?”
“No. We should try to save people.”
“Exactly. And what if an asteroid comes hurtling to earth, should we sit back and let it destroy all life on this planet, because God sent the asteroid?”
“No, we shouldn’t.”
“And who defines what’s natural anyway?”
She seemed to need to work herself up into a state of aggression before she could even leave the house. I think she had to fight through the mob every morning just to get to the university. For my part, I didn’t often go outside at all.
“I don’t think they even have the first clue about what it is we’re actually doing.”
“I’m sure most of them don’t.”
“They’ve watched a bad remake of Frankenstein and mistaken it for non-fiction.”
“Or they didn’t understand science at school so they resent it as adults.”
“When did people stop wanting to learn, anyway?”
“A while back.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It became un-cool.”
“But why?”
I shrugged. “I’ve made you tea.”
She took a sip, to make me happy.
Before she left for work, we stood by the window together. We could see the crowd as usual, but they’d spread far beyond the university gates. They were in the road, on the grass verges, on the street outside our door. I could hear near-hysterical shouting, the mindless chants of a mob.
“Look what I’ve done,” I said, handing her the panda. I’d re-stitched his foot where the stuffing was poking out. I’d spent a long time doing it, having felt it was important to get the style and spacing of stitches just right. Also, I’d needed to be gentle. Leila reached out and took her panda, looking at him with familiarity, and a touch of pity. Then she pressed her USB key into my hand.
“What is this?”
“My data.”
I looked at her, waiting for more. An explanation.
“Just keep it for me.”
“You’re afraid?”
She took a step back. I had never known her to seem scared before. I wanted to hold her, but something stopped me.
“If you’re afraid, don’t go. Someone else will do the research. Things will change, in time.”
“They change too slowly.”
“It doesn’t have to be you.”
“It has to be someone. You know they imprisoned Galileo.”
“He spent his life under house arrest.”
“Because he questioned the church’s view of the universe.”
“He was ordered to stop.”
“And he didn’t stop.”
“I know but-”
“And you know what they did to Giordano Bruno.”
“He was burned at the stake.”
“He challenged the world to change its views.”
“And the world didn’t want to.”
“They’re always afraid of new things.”
I felt my legs going into a sort of spasm, like a shiver but without the feeling of coldness that usually accompanies it.
“You don’t have to go.”
“I do. I believe in this.”
“It’s just science.”
“No. It’s knowledge. It’s everything.”
“Leila.”
She put her panda back on his chair, then took my face in her hands, as if to say goodbye. I felt something dawning on me but she was gone before I had time enough to understand what it was.
The door closed behind her. I stayed inside as usual, but felt worse than ever. A deep unease twisted in my gut. I didn’t want to look, but I walked over to the window anyway. It was a blistering day. The sun, refracted by the broken shards of glass everywhere, sprayed out into rainbows that fell onto the cracked pavement of the street. I watched as Leila’s body was engulfed by the crowd below, then thrown high above them into the light, like a rag doll.