Free The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers Page B

over the keyboard, arms spread and taut, fingers delicately tapping the keys, notes rippling from them. The music was so clear and clean. Then I fell properly asleep. When I woke up it was the afternoon and Baz’d gone. I put on my shoes and went upstairs. His dad was still sitting there in his dressing gown and he looked at me fiercely. I was afraid he was going to be angry with me. But he didn’t speak, he didn’t even answer when I said ‘good afternoon.’ I could hear someone moving about in the kitchen but I didn’t know if it was Baz or his mum, and it seemed easier just to quietly let myself out the front door.
    It was the strangest day, for a while after I felt as if I’d dreamed it. The way he listened to me, then played, the way I slept and woke feeling soothed. I wished I could give that feeling of peace to Sal–but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything to make her feel better.

Chapter 9
    I texted Sal all the time but the only reply she sent was ‘x’. When I called round her mum said she wasn’t well and was in bed. I was pretty sure her mum didn’t know what had happened. I was getting to the point of thinking I had to tell her, when Sal finally sent me a message; ‘U want 2 com 2 wimin only protest meet? Thur 8pm xS’.
    We met at the bus stop. She was hidden under a mask of makeup and when I asked how she was she snapped ‘Fine. Don’t talk about it.’ So I rattled on randomly about college. She’d heard about this group through a friend of her mum; they were called FLAME. Feminist Link Against Men. They met in Glossop in a big old house that a group of women shared. The living room was like a doctor’s waiting room with chairs and sofas pushed against the walls. There were about 20 women there. Everyone was older than me and some looked older than Mum. They were all a bit hippy-ish, with layers of old clothes and shrunken cardigans or ponchos on top. I wished I’d had another layer, it was freezing.
    Compared to YOFI, it felt serious. There was something almost deadly about it. The woman running the meeting was called Gina, she was quick and fierce and she never smiled once. She talked about the war against women. She said the introduction of MDS is the logical outcome of thousands of years of men’s oppression and abuse of women. Women’s sexuality disgusts men and they’re jealous of a mother’s ownership of an unborn child. That’s why they want to marry virgins and keep women subservient, because they can never be certain that a child is their own. And women used to just be men’s possessions, and only men could inherit, and no one wanted daughters. Millions of baby girls have been killed or aborted. She kept bringing it back to having babies. How it used to be women’s business, helped by wise women, and then men said these midwives were witches and insisted on male doctors. And when some women couldn’t get pregnant, male scientists started working out ways to make babies outside women’s bodies. Which was what they’d always wanted to do, so they could own the mystery and power of creating babies. She talked about the first test tube babies and men stealing control of the process and turning women into passive cows. ‘Mad cow disease is no mistake, believe me, that’s what we are to them.’ She called MDS the atom bomb of the sex war. ‘By turning pregnancy into a death sentence they can take it away from us forever. They can insist there is no other way but the man-made child.’
    I glanced at Sal but she was intent on every word. Another woman talked about sex, and how men prefer to have sex with other men but they were obliged to have sex with women in order to make children. She said that was at the root of religious laws against homosexuality, because it was in the interests of religion to create as many new babies as possible, to boost membership. But now