Nowhere Girl

Chapter 4

Shortly after that, Ben said that he had to go. He'd got work to finish off that he needed to hand in the next day. We walked down to the bus-stop together. But everything now felt different: the air had a stickiness to it and the luminous sky of earlier was replaced with a dense night time dark. Whereas the daytime sky had been cloudless - light and giddying - the night sky was heavy and overcast. Not a single star penetrated. It seemed as if I was wading slowly along the bottom of an oxygen-less ocean. Instead of that wild, exhilarated feeling I had had earlier in the day - the feeling that anything would be possible, that I could fly if I tried - I felt suffocated, as if there were deadly secrets beyond my understanding, and that even mentioning them would lead to frightening consequences.

And then there was the kiss. It had felt fine, Ben leaning over and holding me close. But since then, he had felt like a stranger. All too quickly he had remembered the work sheets he needed to hand in, and had been in a rush to get home.

I was more doubtful than ever. But why? After all, he had spontaneously agreed to come home with me, using up time which later it had transpired that he hadn't really got. What's more, he'd listened to my wild speculations about how I had been experimented upon - and even seemed to take them seriously. And to end it all, there had been that kiss... All more than I could ever have pictured happening on one day. And yet now, walking side by side with him, the world seemed to have shrinkwrapped itself around us, squeezing out hope, squeezing out happiness. I began to be anxious to reach the bus stop and for Ben to go. I regretted saying anything about my crazy ideas concerning my birth, and started to feel a return of that habitual bitter anger I had towards my real mother who had dumped a life time of rejection and anxiety on me.

I tried as hard as I could to act normally. When we got to the bus stop, I asked Ben if he minded if I went straight home. To my surprise, though, he held me close again, and said he'd like me to stay. I almost felt protected like that, held up close to his body, feeling the faintest of stubble on his cheeks and catching the scent of his aftershave. I almost began to wish the bus would never come, and we could just stay like that.

But after a few minutes, through the viscous night air, an eerie row of fuzzy neon lights came into focus; the single-decker bus appeared as a string of blankly shining windows, led by two round headlights - the staring eyes of an irradiated sea-serpent. Ben pulled himself away from me, saying softly that he would see me tomorrow. The doors opened and closed with a hiss, and the bus was sucked into the dark, dank night once more.

Despite the warm humidity of the air, I shivered and wrapped my jacket closer around me and hurried home. I just longed to get back to my bedroom and close the door on the world.

I found myself reading what was written on the screen.

Science or God? Who is the creator of life these days?

Our Science Editor, Melanie Stone, looks at how the lines between fact and fiction are blurring...

'Last of all, God made people – men and women – that looked just like him. "You shall rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and the animals of the land," he told them. "You own the Earth." '

So says the Bible, but what about now? Have we taken over the role that God once had in making us? Are we, in fact, now creating new versions of ourselves, are we reshaping ourselves to such an extent that we are redefining what it is to actually be human?

First we had Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where man brought to life a creation of his own, then we had Huxley's Brave New World, with the human race being grown in test tubes, genes selected and modified so as to produce the type of citizens necessary for society: just the right numbers needed of the intelligent rulers, just the right number of the drone workers.