An Extract from Clone Baby, by Caroline de Costa

Chapter One

It is easy enough to find the beginning. The newspapers of 5 December, 1997, all ran the story on page one…

Simon Gledhill, in the driver's seat of the new Honda Prelude, headed along Mona Vale Road, bouncing as he drove to the dance music pouring from the car's cassette player…a great new tape his mate Shane had made and given him just that afternoon. Sort of clumpy and clonky sounds on top of a strong resonant bass line, then dubba dubba dubba! dubba dubba dubba! interspersed occasionally with a deep groaning computerspeak and some high-pitched sexy purring. The noise flooded out over his fellow drivers and onto the inhabitants of Sydney's North Shore as the late afternoon sunshine streamed in through the open roof of the cerise-coloured coupé with silver trim. It was a Thursday. The fourth of December. Simon had finished his final school exams just ten days before. Since then he'd been out partying every night, and to the beach most days. Like today, a perfect day with his mates and girlfriend Marisa. He'd just dropped Marisa off at Pymble. He would head off now down the highway to North Sydney to get ready for this evening's fun. Life looked good to Simon Gledhill, that sun-drenched Sydney afternoon.

Dubba dubba dubba! Dubba dubba dubba!

It had been one of those intensely blue, oven-baked Sydney December days, those dry pre-Christmas days that every schoolchild knew crackled with the excitement of nearly end-of-school, nearly holidays. Cicadas droned in the gumtrees in the playground, and everyone, even the teacher, was thinking of the beach or the pool. Now Simon was over all that.

Just after five o'clock. The sun was over in the west, making Simon squint a little. It was just a bit hard to see the oncoming cars or the colour of the traffic lights. Simon had been on his P-plates nearly a year now; he would be eighteen on Boxing Day. The car was an early birthday, post-school present from his parents, early so he could get around in this hectic post-exam socialising period, during the day at least. One of Marisa's friends could drive it at night when he'd had a few beers and they wanted to go on somewhere, although they all generally crashed out on the floors of one another's houses at night, depending on where the party was. It was great to be alive…dubba dubba dubba… Simon just caught the amber light at Telegraph Road and headed up toward the Pacific Highway, moving over into the left-hand lane ready to turn south.

Simon's hair was light brown, slightly wavy, cut short and slicked back flat on top, now that he was free forever from the regulations of his private school. His eyes were grey. In Studyvac, and in the past ten days of holidays, he'd managed to achieve a good tan. He wore a Mambo T-shirt, fashionably torn, and board shorts. His feet were bare. As he drove, his left foot kept time with the bass rhythm; his toes, like his fingers, were wide and square, his calves strong and well-shaped. Simon was alone, so as he steered he was able to indulge in two habits annoying to his family and friends: he wiggled his ears to the beat of the music – none of his friends had the right muscles to do this - and he rolled his tongue into a shape like a fortune cookie.

Coming up the incline towards the intersection, Simon saw the lights for straight ahead turn from green to amber. "Turn left at any time with care" a black and white sign cautioned near the crossroads. He would just have time to reach the highway and slide around into that left-hand lane before the main light turned red. This was a complicated intersection. If he didn't get through now, he'd have to wait while traffic came down the highway from the north, then wait again for the traffic from across town, turning in front of him, to head south. Simon didn't want to wait. He had better things to do. He kept his foot on the accelerator to maintain his speed up the incline and swung the Prelude left onto the highway.

The semi-trailer driver, with a load of three thousand frozen chickens from the battery farms of the Central Coast, in a hurry to get in to the markets and already behind time, saw that he would not need to slow down as he approached the lights from the north. They were about to turn green so he charged straight through.

The semi hit the Prelude side-on, spun it around three times, pushing the car back down the incline and over into the culvert upside down, splintering the right side of Simon's skull, snapping the thin walls of the superior cerebral veins so that blood poured into his sub-dural space, obliterating the zone of his brain containing the answers to the Advanced Mathematics paper, and compressing the area for the appreciation of dance music.

The semi careered on for another hundred metres south, the load jack-knifing across the median strip. It swiped several small cars heading north and scattered ice and headless chickens across the bitumen before the driver brought it to a halt on the pavement and climbed out, unhurt.

The ambulance, summoned by a dozen simultaneous mobile phone calls, took eight minutes to arrive, the police eleven. In that time, a retired anaesthetist from the Central Coast pulled over onto the footpath, climbed down into the culvert and, finding Simon alive but unconscious, cleared his airway of blood and mucus with his torn surf towel. The doctor then took a calculated chance (new Honda, North Shore kid, and himself a man of 72) that Simon was not HIV positive, and gave him mouth-to- mouth resuscitation. He couldn't turn off the ignition, the key had snapped off in the impact, beneath the airbag, so the dance music played on dubba dubba dubba! until the elderly doctor was led away in tears by the police.

Hundreds of north and west bound commuters were held up for two hours until the semi's load could be moved off the median strip. Every one of them had had other plans for the warm summer evening. A few amongst them leaned on their horns in protest at the delays. Chickens thawed gently in the last warm red rays of the sinking sun - some had already slid off down the hill towards Ryde and a few more audacious commuters reached out and helped themselves. Moving slowly through the intersection, the drivers turned to gawk, at the tow trucks, the crane, to shake their heads at the smashed-in top of the cherry-coloured coupé with silver trim, before losing interest and accelerating homeward again.

The ambulance containing Simon was manned by two highly trained paramedics. Within moments there was a tube in Simon's throat, oxygen was pumping, an intravenous line was established. But as the ambulance headed down the highway towards the hospital, siren blaring, weaving in and out of traffic and up and down onto the median strip, blood clots were seeping into the brain tissue, beneath the protective meningeal coverings and into the spaces of cerebro-spinal fluid, pressing relentlessly on more vital structures beneath.

Simon's brain was dying.