The Charlotte Strain: The Watchers Book 1: The Watchers, #1

By francisbooth and Francis Booth

My name is Charley and I think I'm a clone.

I think I had a mum but no dad.

Impossible, right?

I mean, a woman can't have a baby without a man's help.

All babies have to have a genetic mum and a genetic dad.

Yes?

Well, if having a baby without a man is impossible, why is there a word for it?

Parthenogenesis.

I know.

Me neither, until just now.

Parth-en-o-gen-e-sis. Like the Parthenon in Greece, which is a temple to a goddess, and Genesis, like in the bible, meaning birth. So it means a woman having a baby without a man being involved. Okay, you say, but that's just a word. Just because there's a word for something doesn't mean it exists – unicorns don't exist. Or mermaids.

Are you sure?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wu Wei Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227433978

Book preview

One

Charley

My name is Charley and I think I'm a clone.

I think I had a mum but no dad.

Impossible, right?

I mean,  a woman can't have a baby without a man's help.

All babies have to have a genetic mum and a genetic dad.

Yes?

Well, if having a baby without a man is impossible, why is there a word for it?

Parthenogenesis.

I know.

Me neither, until just now.

Parth-en-o-gen-e-sis. Like the Parthenon in Greece, which is a temple to a goddess, and Genesis, like in the bible, meaning birth. So it means a woman having a baby without a man being involved. Okay, you say, but that's just a word. Just because there's a word for something doesn't mean it exists – unicorns don't exist. Or mermaids.

Are you sure?

Have a look at this photo.

See what I mean? I found a pile of them but this is the most significant, because of the hole in the middle. I'll tell you about the missing bit in a minute.

Look closely.

There's an older man, in the chair at the front, but the rest are women, even if they are dressed as men. Apart from the man's there are only two different faces. The two women at the front left and right are wearing the same dress but different shoes. The photographer seems to have deliberately posed them symmetrically to emphasise how identical they are – maybe he had two of the same dress but not two identical pairs of shoes. Also, the woman at the front in the suit isn't wearing a tie – maybe he only had one of those too.

So, what is this picture saying?

Is it a proud father with a set of septuplets (that's like seven identical twins) and a set of quads? Maybe the mother died of exhaustion from having all those kids.

Does that seem likely to you?

Me neither.

Or maybe those women are all clones of each other and the man had nothing to do with it. That doesn't seem likely either, does it? Sherlock Holmes said, 'eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth'.

What if I told you I found a whole bunch of these photos? Some of them are like this one, with one older man and several identical, younger women. Sometimes there isn't even one man, even if some of them are wearing men's clothes. I'll show you more of them as we go along.

How old do you think the photo is? Victorian? A bit later? No. It's early 1940s. I know because of the missing bit in the middle.

It's not missing.

I've got it, I've always had it.

Here it is.

It's a picture of me, kind of. This is what I look like, although I'm a bit older than the girl in the photo now – I think she's about twelve or thirteen and I'm fifteen now. She's very beautiful, in my opinion. Obviously. Not in everyone's, though. At school they say, 'why the short face, Charley?' (It's kind of a joke, like, a horse walks into a bar, barman says, why the long face? Because a long face means you're sad. So at least I don't look like a horse.) But, you're saying how can it be a photo of me if it was taken in the 1940s?

You're right.

It can't.

It's a picture of my great-grandmother, Nan's mother. She died before I was born but Nan had this picture of her and gave it to me. Even when I was little, Nan said I looked like her mum, my great-grandma, and I would grow up looking exactly like her. Nan said that when Picasso painted a portrait of a famous writer, the writer said, 'but it doesn't look like me.' Picasso said, 'it will', and it did. And I do. Look just like my great-grandmother. So, maybe people grow to look like their portraits. Unless they've got a dog and then they get to look like their dog.

I have tried to grow into the picture. I even wore dresses a bit like hers at one time, and I still have my hair done like hers, I take the photo to the hairdressers. When I was twelve I was absolutely identical to her, though my face isn't quite so short these days. I'm even named after her – Charlotte – though no one's called me that since I was a baby. I used to think it was just a coincidence that we looked so alike, but since I found the stash of photos I'm not sure.

Maybe we really are genetically identical.

However improbable, I think I'm a clone of my great-grandmother.

––––––––

I suppose I should back up a bit and tell you something about me and how I found the photos. My name's Charley Miller, I'm an only child and an orphan – my mum died giving birth to me. So, yes, as my charming schoolfriends point out, I killed my own mother. The first thing I did as I came into the world was murder the woman who gave birth to me.

Matricide.

It means killing your mum.

I can't be the only one, or they wouldn't have bothered inventing a name for it. Some of the mean girls at school started calling me 'Matt', short for matricide, after I happened to mention it once. A couple of them had been saying they wished their mums were dead, they were such bitches, wouldn't let them do anything, were making their lives miserable. I said, 'no mother can be worse than no mother' – I read that somewhere. I said, you wouldn't talk like that if your mum was actually dead. They said, how did she die. I told them.

'You really did kill your mum?'

'When you were a baby?'

'God, Charley.'

'Good for you, Charley.'

'Brilliant.'

'And you're always pretending to be such a good girl.'

'Can you come round and kill mine?'

'And mine. I'll pay you.'

It's died down a bit now at school, but if anyone ever tries anything with me, someone else will say, 'don't mess with Charley, she killed her own mum, and her mum hadn't even done anything. Imagine what she'd do to you if you upset her'.

Well, they're right, aren't they?

I must be evil.

Born to kill.

Nan says I mustn't think like that. Mum was in a bad state when she got pregnant with me, Nan says, just seventeen and a drug addict. She didn't even know who my father was. I was tested for HIV and all sorts when I was born, but I was okay. Nan says it was a miracle, I was a miracle baby, the only good thing to happen to my mum in her short life.

But what if I was a different kind of miracle?

What if I didn't have a father?

What if my mum was genetically identical to me and my great-grandmother? There aren't any photos of my mum – Nan destroyed the few she had, or so she says. And I don't look the least bit like Nan, so maybe I don't have her genes at all, maybe she wasn't my mum's mum, maybe we're not biologically related – we couldn't be less alike, physically or in terms of our personalities.

Nan blames herself for mum being an addict. Nan was a real rock chick in her day and was only just out of being a teenager herself when mum was born – that's what Nan says, and that's what I've always believed. But what's definitely true, because I've seen photos and videos, is that Nan was the bass player in an all-girl punk band called Red Rag. I know, gross. But that was the point, they wanted to upset people, they didn't want to be 'good girls'.

I don't know how Nan got pregnant with mum – if indeed she did – she's never been into men. She doesn't know either, or says she doesn't. There were always a lot of drugs and a lot of groupies, she says. 'If you can remember the eighties you weren't really there.' I think she was really there. In the photos and videos from the early days of Red Rag, when she was just seventeen, the band are all wearing ultra-short school skirts with long socks and just a bra on top, no blouses. Their hair is usually in pigtails and dyed bright colours. 'We tried to look like we'd been kicked out of St Trinian's for being too slutty.' 'God, I looked great then,' says Nan, whenever she looks at them. 'Look at my skinny legs. What happened to me? Life happened, that's what.'

No, I happened.

I took her away from all that.

I killed my mum and ruined Nan's life.

No, she says. It was for the best, she says. 'Imagine how messed up I'd be by now if it hadn't been for you. I wish I still had those legs though.'

I've always trusted Nan, I've always told her everything. I know it sounds lame, but she's always been my best friend. But since I found the photos in the wall I've been a bit more mindful, I haven't told her anything. It's the first secret I've ever kept from her – not that I've ever done anything I needed to keep secret from her. Knowing what happened to her and mum I haven't ever done anything with a boy that might lead to anything that might 'get me into trouble'. Not that I'm into boys. I'm not sure if I'm into girls – nothing has ever happened in that way either. But I don't feel the need to rush into romantic relationships of any kind, I've got good friends and I've got Nan.

Had, anyway.

This is the first time in my life I've ever really felt I'm on my own. Nan has always been great to me. She was really young when she had mum and mum was really young when she had me, so Nan's not that much older than the other kids' mums at the school gate, and looks younger than some of them. She's always been more like a crazy big sister than a grandmother, or even a mother.

Nan's always supported me, whatever, and I owe her everything. She gave up the band for me, gave up her friends for me, gave up her life for me. She settled down, gave up the parties, the drink, the drugs, the sex – I'm guessing about the drugs and the sex, I don't actually want to know. Without her, the band decided to pack it in. They were all over thirty by then, a bit old to be going round calling themselves Red Rag and wearing ripped fishnet tights and showing off their bras. Nan said, 'we tried to live fast and die young, but it didn't work. So we all got respectable and middle-aged.'

Not that respectable though, in Nan's case. She still dresses like a girly Keith Richards (guitarist in the Rolling Stones) and she has quite a lot of tattoos – you can see a few when she's wearing a summer dress but the big one is on her back – it's a hawk picking up a big snake. Because her band name was Anna Condor – like, an anaconda is a big snake and a condor is a bird of prey.

Anna is Nan's her real name but when I was little I couldn't say it properly, I kept saying Nanan or Nan, so she called herself Nan from then on, and that's what everyone calls her now. So my nan is actually called Nan, which means I don't have to wonder what to call her and nor do my friends. One of them once tried calling her Mrs Miller. Nan looked at her and said, 'Jesus'. Then my friend said, 'sorry, Ms Miller.' Nan looked at me and said, 'where do you find these people, Lemon?' She calls me Lemon, short for Charley Farley Lemon Barley, which is what she called me when I was a kid. Quite a character, my nan. She scares the heck out of most of my school friends, but they're just jealous.

Everyone at school knows about Nan, she's very visible, always comes to events and meetings. She's not easy to ignore, with the long, wild, black hair, the tattoos, the goth make up, the rock-chick, biker-girl clothes. None of it's age-appropriate but she doesn't care, and neither do I, now. I used to get embarrassed by her when I was a kid but now I'm proud of her. Most kids have got boring, mousy mums that bring them to school in big SUVs.

Ring a bell?

How about you?

I arrive at school on the back of a black Triumph motorbike with my leather-clad nan – she has the snake/condor motif on the back of her jacket too. Even though we're best friends, we could hardly be more different – I dress very conservatively, even out of uniform, despite Nan always trying to make me more goth/emo/slutty. It's pretty much the opposite of most parent/child relationships. She's always trying to get me to wear shorter skirts and lower, tighter tops with a lot more make-up, but I haven't got the style to carry it off like she has. 'Show off your boobs, Lemon, you've got great boobs, don't hide them. If you've got it, flaunt it. I haven't got it, never had, but I flaunt it anyway.'

She does, but I don't.

Though Nan left the band when I was born she didn't give up music completely – there's a small recording studio in the shed in the garden of our new house. We just moved here, Nan used to work out of the cellar in the old house. She looks for young, troubled girls to mentor and record. Helps them turn their lives round with music. Gets them to express their anger, fear and hatred in rap, not in physical harm to themselves or others.

Nan really cares about the girls, but I think she's also trying to make up for what happened to mum. She seems to always pick the most damaged ones, the most insecure and frightened ones – some of them put on a lot of bravado and swagger but inside they're actually terrified. Nan tries to give them their self-confidence back through making them make music, giving them something of their own, something to believe in. 'If they've got angry thoughts, they can turn them into angry words, rap them, sing them, record them, turn the hate inside out, throw it back. If they can't get control of their lives, at least they can get control of their music.' Nan loves that of course – anything that sticks two fingers up at authority, especially at abusive, male authority.

Apart from music, Nan's other passion is kickboxing – Muay Thai it's really called. She says, when she was in Red Rag, the women had a lot of unwanted attention from men. Men thought, because they sang, dressed and acted like sluts they must be easy. They weren't. On an Asia tour they found out about kickboxing, and one of the band members had a 'fling' as Nan calls it – she's very old-fashioned in some ways – with an Asian woman who was a local champion. She finished the tour with Red Rag and while she was with them she taught them all how to kickbox in self-defence.

Nan took to it straight away and kept it up. She never won any major tournaments but she was pretty good and she still is. She's a bit old for competitions now, but she teaches classes for girls at a local boxing gym. Some of the same troubled and abused kids that she records come along. If they can't manage to rap their anger away in Nan's studio, they can release it by kicking and punching in a controlled, rule-governed environment.

I'm not at all like Nan, I'm useless at kickboxing and I can't sing or play a note on any instrument. I didn't inherit any of her musical or any other talents. Though of course if she's not actually my real nan I wouldn't have.

Would I?