by James Meek
She bought the paper edition and as she turned its pages, looking for the story, she skimmed the other articles. They made her feel she was in a room full of bitter, frightened people who reckoned the world had been going to hell for ever and it was somebody else’s fault.
When she got an invitation to Val’s Best of Britain party she went along. She liked parties; they were like little lives. And when Val asked her there if they could have dinner, the contrast between his nervousness towards her and the nervousness his journalists felt towards him made her skin tingle. Saying yes seemed to be another woman’s risk, like something the Bec in the picture would do, and not regret. It’d been easy for her to start seeing him and sleeping with him without thinking it would turn permanent, imagining that it could be rewound in some mutually painless backward version of the way they’d got together.
Val took her to grand places – a hotel on an island on a lake in Italy, with rose petals floating in the stone bath set in the floor of their rooms; a country house in Scotland, owned by a lord Val was friends with; the British Museum after hours, when some gazillionaire hired it for a ball and decked it out with gold and red silk organza. She liked lifting her hand out of the bath and seeing it covered with soft scarlet petals; the gold and red made her open her mouth in wonder; and the lord’s house was full of touchable, gnarly artefacts made of walnut, oak and brass. But she never met the tycoon, didn’t like the lord and was made uneasy by the rich guests at the island hotel, who seemed sad that they couldn’t meter the goodness of the time they were having, to the decimal point of a smile. Val arranged these displays for her too close together, one showy weekend after another. She felt hurried through a process. When friends used words like ‘glamorous’ and ‘romantic’ to describe the experiences Val contrived for her, she resented him.
Since she’d begun going out with Val she’d found herself dressing up more, as she’d played in childhood, posing in her father’s beret or an old miniskirt of her mother’s. When she turned herself out one morning at the lord’s house in green wellies, a white Aran sweater, a tweed skirt, a waxed green jacket with corduroy collar and a small string of fake pearls, her hosts hadn’t looked surprised, and didn’t laugh at her, even though the lord’s niece was dressed almost identically, except that her pearls hadn’t, presumably, cost £9.99 from a chain.
Bec wished that Val had complimented her on the success of her disguise instead of telling her she looked wonderful. At a garden party Bec thought she’d gone too far with elbow gloves, a broad-brimmed hat, a gauzy shawl looped round her waist and forearms and a ridiculous little satin-effect clutch. The extreme whiteness of her dress, the pleats, the A-line! But Val, and the other guests, had told her she looked, whatever it had been, one of those words, and she hadn’t been the only woman with garden-party gauntlets on. And Val was good at it, too, exactly the part in a white linen suit. He dressed in the perfect imitation of an imaginary past archetype. Once, delighted by his mimicry of a wealthy middle-aged American being smart-casual in London – the dark blue blazer, the light blue shirt, the khaki slacks, the loafers – she’d told him that she liked his costume, and he hadn’t seemed to understand. ‘What costume?’ he said.
After she’d taken his ring, she remembered him looking her up and down before an elaborate dinner and saying ‘Celia would be proud.’ She wondered now whether he’d been looking not so much to replace his wife by marrying Bec as to pay the dead woman tribute. How strange, Bec thought, that she and Val could have been moving in such different directions, so close together; that she’d enjoyed his company as a rolling holiday from the lab, and liked the feeling she was helping him recover from Celia’s death, while he’d been pursuing a suitable acquisition, someone who looked fresh in a party frock, came with a sort of patriotic stamp inherited from her father and seemed to be doing good in the world.
She really had not been paying attention. He wasn’t a churchgoer but she’d never known what kind of conversations he’d been having with God when, each night, he knelt by the bed, clasped his hands together, touched his forehead to the knuckle of his thumb, and was silent for a minute or two. She’d asked him. ‘Just praying,’ he said. It never seemed to hold him back when he got into bed with her.
The death of her father, when she was nine, and the death of the love of Joel, when she was twenty-six, were still present to her now at thirty-three in the alterations they’d made to the fabric of her peace of mind. She’d got used to the monumental remains of those disasters looming up in her moodscape. They overshadowed her and she didn’t understand how the people she had dealings with didn’t seem likewise overshadowed by the ridges and craters of their own encounters with fate. She wasn’t the only one to have known the early death of a parent or the death of love, and she couldn’t work out whether other people had come up with a system for rationalising catastrophe that she wasn’t being let in on, or whether they’d learned how to fool themselves into thinking there would be no more catastrophes.
She was on the hunt for secret systems. Her behaviour outside science seemed quite random to her and she hoped that in her randomness she might stumble across some pattern that others had concocted to show them how to behave. It left her vulnerable to confident men, although she found that the moment their plans and their confidence fell apart was when she liked them most.
The post-docs would invite her to parties and she’d often drift straight from the lab late at night into the music and drunken talk of somebody’s living room. One morning not long after her thirtieth birthday she got up from the bed where she’d spent the night with a man she’d just met. Karl, or it could have been Carl, she never found out, had a desk under the window in his room. Bec found her shirt on the desk, crumpled and inside out, covering a pile of folders and books. When she picked up the shirt she saw there was a sheet of paper at the top of the pile partly covered with grid-like doodles, a column of figures and a list of girls’ names. Bec counted. There were twenty-five names. Bec turned and asked C/Karl if this was all the women he’d gone out with.
‘All the girls I’ve slept with,’ said C/Karl. ‘Since I left university.’
‘Are you going to add my name?’
C/Karl smiled, propped himself up on one elbow, and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. ‘I was bored. I wondered how many.’
‘But why did you write the names down like that?’
‘Don’t you ever do it?’ said C/Karl, as if this were an answer.
‘No,’ said Bec, sitting down on the edge of the bed with her back to him, pulling the sleeves out of the shirt. ‘What do these symbols mean?’
C/Karl wriggled over and looked with reluctance at the sheet. ‘Which ones?’ he said.
‘Here, where there’s a lightning flash.’
‘Those are the crazy ones.’
‘There are a lot of those.’
Now that his system had been exposed he was excited to be explaining it. ‘A star means they’re good-looking, an M means marriage material, and the F means the sex was amazing. The smiley face is them being fun to be with.’
‘What about the pound sign? That means they’ve got money? That’s the one that embarrasses you, isn’t it? Why?’
C/Karl shrugged, smiled, scratched his thigh and searched for the makings of a smoke.
‘Did you propose to any of the marriageable ones?’
C/Karl shook his head, shook the match out and wrinkled his eyes against the white strands curling up from the cigarette.
‘Too young to settle down.’
Bec frowned. ‘What about this one?’ she said. ‘Dora. Star star star, M, F F F, smiley face, pound sign. She sounds too good to let her get away. Were you in love with her?’
C/Karl laughed a soft, hoarse laugh. ‘Lightning flash, lightning flash, lightning flash …’
‘Do you have a target? Are you competing with your friends?’
‘No questions before breakfast,’ said C/Karl, holding her shoulders from behind. His
hands slipped over her breasts and she reached up and fondled his shaven head, warm like some just-baked thing. She plucked the cigarette from his mouth and took a drag.
‘I have to go,’ said Bec.
‘Do you really not know how many men you’ve slept with?’
Bec looked at him, breathed out a cloud and said she’d been with three men already that week.
C/Karl snatched his hands off her as if contact would burn them and moved crabwise back in the bedclothes. His eyes became remote and tough. She couldn’t tell, when he clasped his hands over his knees, looked down and shook his head with something like a laugh, if he was disapproving or envious or just surprised.
She told a friend. ‘Four in one week is quite a lot,’ said the friend. ‘I never had four in one week. I never had two in one week.’
‘That was the only time,’ said Bec. ‘I was feeling unvalued. But still, who says it’s a lot?’
The friend wriggled. ‘It sort of kills the idea there’s any intimacy there.’
‘Is that obvious? Is there a law? Is there a rule? You wouldn’t say it was a lot if I said I made four new friends in one week.’
‘That would be shocking,’ said the friend.
‘So you’re shocked.’
‘You’re a scientist. You’re looking for the kind of certainties in life that you find in the lab.’
‘You talk as if there are certainties, as if it’s an obvious rule that having sex with four men in one week is excessive, and I don’t see that it is obvious.’ She’d raised her voice and became aware that the mothers with toddlers in the café were looking at them. She and the friend leaned in closer to each other.
‘And what about his list?’ said Bec. ‘He wasn’t a scientist, he worked in a chichi coffee shop and made dance tracks, and he was imposing his grid on the world like a system to live by.’
‘It wasn’t a theory, was it,’ said the friend. ‘He was just trying to keep a handle on matters. Look.’ She woke her iPhone and flicked to an app called ManRater. She showed Bec how it assigned points; plus two for being funny, plus one for every £2o,000 a man earned over the minimum wage, plus two for wanting children, minus one for every previous marriage after the first, plus two for being tall, plus two for being big, plus three for being very big.
‘It syncs with your contacts,’ she said.
‘How much is love worth?’ asked Bec.
‘You get plus two if he loves you, and plus one if you love him.’
‘That’s rather sad.’
‘It does seem to set the bar low.’
‘It’s just a game, though, isn’t it?’ said Bec. ‘It’s just scratching the surface.’
‘Surface is all most of us have,’ said the friend, her eyes widening and fixing on Bec. ‘Surface is a lot to be getting on with.’
‘Did you pay for it?’ said Bec.
‘Fifty-nine pence,’ said the friend, and that made them laugh.
11
Early on Sunday Bec took the Tube to her lab at the Centre for Parasite Control. Through the grubby metal-framed windows of the old concrete block the slats of Venetian blinds could be seen, pushed up slantwise by pot plants, faded sheaves of printed matter and old plastic cutaway models of the workings of parasites, painted in Atomic Age colours of teal, cream, tongue-pink and kidney-brown.
On the third floor she hauled on a buttonless lab coat over her white linen shirt and jeans. In a secure airlocked room five incubators, grey and new and taller than she was, hummed sweetly and their lights shone steadily. They were the reward for her discovery.
‘Why not put them in Dar es Salaam instead of making the stuff here and taking it there?’ she once asked.
Maddie told her the Africans wouldn’t look after them properly. They couldn’t afford the running costs, she said.
‘We can afford them,’ said Bec.
‘They haven’t got the infrastructure,’ said the director. ‘I suppose you’d like to move the whole centre to Tanzania.’
‘That’s where the malaria is,’ said Bec.
Maddie looked at her, seemed about to smile, then leaned forward and whispered in Bec’s ear: ‘One day they’ll take our jobs. But not while I’m alive.’
Bec put on latex gloves and a mask, took the cover off the hood and switched on the flow of air. She unlocked the first incubator, pulled out a drawer, took the nearest flask and closed the door. The machine gasped as it flushed itself free of oxygen. Bec carried the flask to the hood, sprayed ethanol over the gloves, opened the flask, drew chicken blood out with a pipette, dropped it in an Eppendorf and gave it a turn in the centrifuge. Dotting a clean glass slide with specks of blood, she smeared the blood into a film and dried it with a hairdryer, then fixed the film with ethanol, made up a flask of Giemsa solution, dropped the stain onto the blood and set it aside to take. She pulled off the gloves, tossed them in a pedal bin, took a sterile pricker and examined her left hand. She’d been pricking herself every week for years and the pads of her fingertips were speckled with tiny holes, black with dried blood. Sometimes they hurt a little.
She put on another pair of gloves, held the pricker between her lips, took a fresh slide in her left hand and a piece of cotton wool dipped in alcohol in her right, slipped off her shoes, sat on the linoleum floor with her back against a cupboard and tucked in her left leg. She swabbed her little toe, jabbed the pricker into it, touched the slide against the bright bead of blood, got up, made a film and hopped over to fill a dropper with water. She hopped back to the slides, counted to two hundred, flushed the stain off with water and put the slides on a rack to dry.
When she’d heard that her father had been killed, it seemed obvious to her that he’d died from the intervention of a not-human force. She knew he was a soldier; they told her he’d been captured, tortured and executed by someone from the other side. It didn’t sound to her as if it could be of the human world. The other side was the place where the terrors waited. As a small child Bec had been prone to daylight fears; that the tractor driver, for instance, was trapped inside the cab of his machine because the crows swirling round the plough were attacking him. That the wind making the curtains swing when it blew through the window of their house in Dorset would keep getting stronger until it smashed the family and their furniture against the walls. That when the tap was turned off, and its mouth was open and dry and seemingly empty, something terrible was about to flow out of it, something that was not water and had no human name.
It was in the way of going up against the other side that Bec went to the interview room where she persuaded an admissions panel that they had to let her study tropical medicine. ‘What if poor countries were infested with some huge predator, hundreds of thousands of invisible monsters six feet tall who were charging round, tearing the heads off babies?’ the eighteen-year-old Bec asked the panel accusingly, her cheeks red and her forehead damp from the heat of the heavy suit and buttoned-up blouse she was wearing. ‘I think we would have done something about it by now.’
‘What if rich countries were infested with a predator that was tearing the heads off old people?’ said one of the professors. ‘Shouldn’t we do something about that?’
‘Old people aren’t as important,’ said Bec. ‘Everyone has to die in the end.’
The three professors on the panel laughed in a knowing way as if in that moment she’d become one of them, as if they assumed she didn’t mean it, that she was only shocking them to make them remember her.
Bec put the chicken blood slide onto the stage of a microscope, put a couple of drops of immersion oil on the thick film, turned the nosepiece to the x100 objective and looked through the binocular lenses at the indigo field of stained serum. It was full of her parasite, H. gregi, dark blue dots in the chicken’s blood cells, growing to be killed and made into vaccine. She counted the number of parasites and leukocytes she could see, moved the slide a few microns to the left and counted again. She did this a hundred times.
When she finished
with the slide from the incubator, she turned to her own blood. It wasn’t part of the programme, but she liked to keep an eye on what gregi was up to in there. She studied hundreds of fields; at field 405 she saw a blurry darkness inside the walls of one of her cells and whistled a fanfare to herself. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘My dear little hypnozoite.’
Bec dallied at the lab, eating crisps from the vending machine. The incubators were full and the data was written up. In the early evening Val called and said that it wasn’t too late, they could still meet. It was essential to Bec that she didn’t lie to Val, yet she had no reason to stay at work. As he talked he steadily lowered a slab of obligation onto her. She felt its weight, and she would either have to come up with a way to make more haemoproteus, or see him.
She saw the face of the security guard on his rounds peeping at her through the view panel in the door and remembered that there were boxes of anaerobic flasks and candle jars in the basement.
‘I still have more to do,’ she told Val.
‘It’s Sunday. You’ve been there all day,’ said Val. ‘If there’s extra work get your minions to do it.’
Bec got the guard to open up the store room and help her carry the boxes upstairs. She cut them open carelessly, ignoring the instructions not to use knives. She pulled the anaerobic flasks out of their sterile packaging and set up an assembly line with flasks, petri dishes, cultures and pipette. One by one she filled the flasks with primed dishes, popped the catalyst in and closed the seal. She emptied her mind of everything but the work. Once she’d finished with the flasks she set about another round of parasite production with the centre’s old stock of candle jars. The flame drifted from point to point as Bec lit candles and placed the jars over them and they gulped down their oxygen and went out until every free horizontal space in the lab was covered in glass or flasks. The lab smelled of burned wax. Bec turned up the extractor fan and put out all the lights except a single reading lamp on the desk in her office.
