by James Meek
It was midnight. The lamp shone a sharp yellow disc of light onto the pale varnished pine of the desk and the copy of Parasitology Today Bec intended to read, and a wider sphere of dimmer illumination, floating in the darkness, that Bec clambered into with a mug of mint tea. She sat in the padded chair, let down her hair, took off her lab coat, wrapped it over her front like a blanket, tucked her feet up under her, read the first sentence of the first article, yawned, laid her cheek on her folded arms and went to sleep.
12
Next day at seven in the evening Ritchie drew up outside his sister’s bleak workplace, saw her standing at the gate and tooted. She opened the car door. He could tell she’d spent the night in the lab. Unwashed women, even his own flesh and blood, aroused a primitive fear. Instinctively he put out his hand to stop her sitting down on the new leather next to him, uttered a panicky bleat and faked a reason.
‘Don’t you want to put your bag in the back?’ he said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Bec. She dropped herself carelessly into the passenger seat, kicking her bag into the corner. It rattled with small things. Ritchie supposed he would find some of these things in the car’s far crannies over the months to come; and who knew what she carried with her when she left that house of disease at the end of the day?
‘New car,’ said Bec, pleased to notice it. The seats, she saw, were a different colour.
‘BMW,’ said Ritchie. ‘I indulged.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Bec.
‘Your Africans could spend years living high on the hog for the price of this.’
‘Sell it, then,’ said Bec.
They drove south. The car smothered outside noise so that the mass of other cars and trucks around them in the dusk receded and they seemed to pad softly from traffic light to traffic light. It was a good moment, Bec thought, to introduce the secret she wanted his advice on. All she had to do was report to her brother on a certain segment of her real and recent life. And yet introducing this truth to Ritchie in the muffled peace of his car was a great labour, as if she were having to construct a complicated lie.
When Ritchie and Karin’s marriage had been a more volatile thing it had excited Bec to see her famous, beautiful brother and sister-in-law fighting in front of her like heroes of ancient legend, the accumulated layers of tiny indentations left on their bodies by millions of eyes and cameras scintillating as they moved. Ritchie hadn’t begun to pile on weight then, his hair and eyebrows were sleek and black, his cheekbones stood out and the dark patches under his eyes were still smooth, making him look as if otherworldly suffering, rather than crying babies, stopped him sleeping. Now his paunch was fuller and his eyes had sunk more deeply between the lids and into the folds below them. He charmed people by seeming to fight off an agonising tiredness to speak to them.
‘How are the young entertainers?’ she said. She didn’t like Teen Makeover and still her brother’s creation and production of the show was a feat she marvelled at. Her imagination approached the complexity of it, the technicians, the presenters, the egotistical teenagers, the demented parents, the journalists, the deadlines, the advertisers, and recoiled. She didn’t understand how Ritchie had time for anything else; she didn’t know how he stopped himself going mad.
‘There was a band from up north,’ said Ritchie. ‘They were good.’
‘Did you pick up a guitar and play along?’
‘What makes you think that?’ said Ritchie. Bec liked to think of her brother jamming with a group of teenagers, but to Ritchie, her smile off into the distance seemed to mock him, addressed, as he had thought when they were young, to an invisible circle of friends, high up and out of his reach, who found him pitiable.
‘You like hanging out with your teenagers,’ said Bec.
‘I don’t hang out with them.’
‘You should. Are we going to talk about Dad now?’
‘Let’s wait till we see Mum.’
Bec looked down and picked at the edge of the seat. They traversed the splicing and braiding of the M23 and M25, the concrete of the flyovers greenly organic in the waning light. On the tall blue motorway signs the white spears of turning off or going on were fat and orderly, like England. In shadow now, with her mass of half-combed hair, Bec seemed to Ritchie to be the resentful teenager who barely lifted her head for years after their father was buried.
‘I wonder why I feel I can tell you absolutely anything,’ said Bec.
‘I’m your brother. You know … and then there were three.’
‘I think it’s because you’ve spanned the whole range. Selfish brat to good son, kind brother. Cokey screwing-around rock star to loyal husband and father.’
She meant to praise him. Ritchie bit the inside of his cheek, tasted blood, mixed it with saliva, swallowed it and gently cleared his throat.
‘Val proposed to me,’ said Bec. ‘I said I’d marry him and I don’t want to.’
Ritchie liked the idea of dynasty. He liked the sound of news and entertainment joined by blood, as the foundry and the manor house in days of yore, whenever that had been. Then he thought of sly, knowing, sceptical Val Oatman opposite him at the table on Christmas Day, challenging his power in front of his family. Never!
‘What would you rather do?’ he said.
‘Tell him I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Do it.’
‘It’s horrible. It seems wrong.’
‘It’s normal,’ said Ritchie. ‘It’s not as if you didn’t sleep with him. He won’t be happy, but that’s the game. He hasn’t booked Westminster Abbey. You’re a free woman.’
Bec was silent for a while. ‘Don’t tell Mum,’ she said. ‘Am I that free? How can I be? I spend my time watching single-celled organisms breeding, feeding and dying and wonder how free I’d look on a slide, eighty years in a one-minute animation.’
‘You don’t see parasites driving these babies,’ said Ritchie, patting the dashboard. He pulled over onto the hard shoulder to show his sister the nought to sixty.
13
Through the dying of engines, the tinkling of unlocked seatbelt buckles and the scrape of cases yanked out of bins, through the overamped thank-yous of the crew and the prickling silence of passengers waiting in the aisle for doors to be opened, Stephanie Shepherd stayed in her seat, filling in her food diary. She would not hurry for her children and she resented being made to fly to London to mediate between her son’s schemes, her daughter’s sense of propriety and her husband’s absence. Ritchie and Bec had permanent lodgings in her heart, but more and more her son and daughter seemed like the interruption of something ungraspably fine of which her grandchildren were the smooth continuing.
Stephanie felt a kick of nerves when the plane nuzzled the ramp at Gatwick that the gatekeepers would find something wrong with her passport. That they’d ask her the reason for your visit. ‘I’m British. It’s my home,’ she’d say, sounding unconfident. The people who checked her passport had never been her kind of people, it seemed to her, but they were even less her kind of people now. They were so mixed. She hadn’t known what to say to the wives of the NCOs when Greg was alive. She’d been a bad captain’s wife in that regard. But she was sure that if only she’d known then she might have to be patient now with somebody whose parents were born in Karachi, who had the power to test her passport in the glow of a mysterious machine, she would have found a corporal’s wife from a council estate in Plymouth easier to talk to.
She had a guide to the humours open on her lap and the food diary overlapping. Her humourist had instructed her to use the guide and the tables in it in conjunction with the diary to keep her blood, phlegm and bile in balance. He’d made it sound simple, and it was clear that the pasta they’d been served on the plane was ‘warm and moist’. But had it been a 100g serving, or 200g? Why did the table describe orange juice as ‘dry’ and chocolate ice cream as ‘warm’? If cabbage was ‘warm and dry’ and mayonnaise was ‘cold and moist’ did that make coleslaw perfectly balanced, so yo
u could eat as much as you liked?
Stephanie was sure that she understood her own body, and that now, only now, after tremendous effort and exhaustive research in monthly magazines and on the Internet, was she close to the point where she could say she was in perfect health. For the first time in her life, at the age of sixty-four, she could begin to live.
She badly wanted to know her daughter’s views on the humourist diet, but wasn’t sure how to bring it up. She knew the contours of her daughter’s disapproval. How, Stephanie wondered, did scientists get anywhere if they were closed to new ideas?
Stephanie had lived in Spain since her son acquired glamour and fame in the eyes of the world. When he was twenty-two Ritchie had been socked with a series of dizzying lump sums and bought Stephanie a house in Spain without asking her. Bec was at Cambridge already; Stephanie took the gift gladly and moved. Ever since Greg’s murder she’d wanted to leave Dorset. She hated the coomb at the bottom of the garden and the distant sound of rushing water that could be attenuated by music but never silenced. She hated the way crows rose up out of the trees in the cleft, looking from the windows of the house as if they were boiling up out of the earth.
Her friends now were expatriate Brits. Over time, without her noticing it, she’d come to resemble them in her way of thinking. She forgot that she’d moved to Spain because she was bored, lonely and liked sunshine. Now she believed that she hadn’t left Britain of her own accord but had been forced to flee because it was rotten and decaying. Immigrants, grasping bureaucrats, socialists, workshy spongers, amoral celebrities, trashy nouveau riche types, sexual perverts and traitors squabbled over the residue. Val’s newspaper – she had the printed version delivered – was her source. The discovery that the editor of her favourite rag was courting her daughter filled her with foreboding, as if the paper’s astrologer had appeared on the doorstep, clutching a horoscope and asking for her second-born by name.
14
The border guard who glanced at Stephanie’s passport was Asian of some sort, she supposed, and when he smiled at her, gave the passport back and wished her a good evening she thought sadly of her Moroccan housekeeper Shada sitting by herself in the hills above Malaga, when the two of them could be having supper together. Stephanie stepped gamely through customs and saw Bec and Ritchie at the rail on the far side. At the sight of her waving Ritchie raised his head over an imaginary crowd. Bec grinned the grin that bound her to the girl Stephanie reared; perhaps the only thing that did. Ritchie hugged his mother first. Stephanie glanced at the other greeters to see if they were watching. She wanted them to know that these were her children.
With Bec’s arms around her, she smelled a staleness in her daughter’s clothes. Bec’s hair was ratty and she was wearing ugly glasses with thick lenses.
‘You could have dressed up a bit for your mother,’ she said, stepping back, still holding on to Bec’s shoulders, feeling her daughter’s body clench. Bec pulled away, pulled the glasses off her face, pushed them into her bag and dug her fingers through her hair.
‘She won’t come with us to Petersmere,’ said Ritchie.
‘I’ve got too much to do before Africa,’ said Bec. ‘I didn’t have time to change.’
‘I didn’t mean to make you take off your glasses, darling,’ said Stephanie. ‘You should wear them if you need to.’
‘My eyes are fine,’ said Bec. ‘I had a blurry spell when we came off the motorway, that’s all. How was your flight?’ She smiled and Stephanie thought Oh, I do matter to her.
‘It was absolutely all right,’ said Stephanie. She took Bec’s hand and looked at Ritchie. She wanted to get away from the glare of arrivals and the boiled eyes of the chauffeurs holding clients’ names to their bellies.
‘We’ll have dinner at the Carter’s Arms,’ pitched Ritchie, stopping to put his head level with his sister and mother. He looked from face to face. ‘We’ll go home afterwards. Everyone’s looking forward to seeing you.’
‘Why aren’t Karin and the children coming to dinner?’
‘Because we have to talk about Ritchie’s film,’ said Bec.
‘Oh yes.’
‘We don’t have to,’ said Ritchie earnestly.
‘But that’s why she came,’ said Bec.
‘Don’t call me “she”, darling,’ said Stephanie, and she raised her voice over Bec saying ‘Sorry, Mum,’ and asked Ritchie if they were going to a pub.
‘They do excellent food. Not as good as you’re used to, of course,’ said Ritchie.
‘As long as they have plenty of different things,’ said Stephanie.
‘Oh, you’re on a new diet!’ said Bec. Her cheerfulness about it made Stephanie hope and then she thought She doesn’t care what I do any more.
‘Humourism,’ said Stephanie, so nervously that Bec didn’t hear.
Ritchie set off with Stephanie’s case and the women followed. They processioned out of the terminal and walked raggedly, none abreast, towards the car. In the stretched-thin evening light of northern summer Stephanie detected paleness around her, pale faces, pale leaves and pale concrete, and a cold breeze jostled her through her thin blouse. She wanted to tell her children that she would be having her evening swim at this time, that Shada would have a gin and tonic ready for her under the pergola, but talking up the splendour of her Spanish life would make it hard then to lament the cruelty of her forced exile.
‘I haven’t been to a pub for years,’ said Stephanie at the bar of the Carter’s Arms, confused by the conjunction of white tablecloths and ruddy boys drinking pints, and by fantastical references to marrow bone and samphire on the densely chalked blackboard menu. ‘I don’t go to the English pubs in Spain, of course.’
When Stephanie asked Bec about Val the question was answered, not in the sense that her daughter spoke, with words including ‘fine’ and ‘seeing him tomorrow’ but in a space opening up between them and a gloom Bec seemed to want to keep for herself. Stephanie had a rush of panic that she was losing her daughter and said: ‘Humourism is working for me. It’s the first time in my life I’ve felt completely well. Have you heard of it?’
Bec looked over her mother’s hair, artificially brown and glossy, her depilated upper lip, her plucked eyebrows, the soft wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes, the silk scarf wrapped round her neck, the yearning in her blue eyes. ‘You look great,’ she said. ‘You’re never ill.’
‘The headaches, the insomnia, the being tired all the time? Aching limbs? Terrible digestion.’ She looked off to the side. ‘The lines.’ She fluttered her fingertips vaguely over her cheek.
‘You are sixty-five,’ said Bec.
‘Sixty-four, if you don’t mind.’
‘And you feel healthier now than you did when you were seventeen?’
‘I don’t know that I care for the contrast you’re making,’ said Stephanie. ‘It can take a long time to find a healthy way of living.’
‘They’re always coming up with new things to try.’
‘It’s as if you don’t want me to be happy,’ said Stephanie. ‘You see what you do? Look.’ She ran her index finger across her forehead. ‘Lines.’
‘If you were more accepting now, it wouldn’t be so hard later,’ said Bec.
Her mother stared at her, her head trembling, daring Bec to spell out what she meant by ‘later’, and Bec went red. ‘What’s humourism?’ she said. ‘Does it mean you’re supposed to laugh all the time? Look, Ritchie’s found us a place.’
They walked over to a wood-panelled booth. Beyond the bar fat flames flushed the kitchen space with orange light. Stephanie told Bec about the book she was using as her lifestyle guide, about the four humours, blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile, and about the four qualities, sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic.
‘That’s medieval medicine,’ said Bec.
‘It’s older than that. It goes back to the Greeks,’ said Stephanie approvingly. ‘They had a lot of wisdom, the ancients.’
‘They didn�
��t know the heart pumped blood. They thought worms caused toothache. They died of infectious diseases before they were thirty.’
‘My humourist is allowed to have an opinion on what’s best for my health.’
‘Why not take away electricity while you’re about it?’
‘Nobody’s talking about taking anything away, darling. You mustn’t take it personally when someone disagrees with you. Just because my black bile levels are elevated doesn’t mean I can’t go on the Internet. That’s where I found out about humourism, as a matter of fact.’ She smiled and squeezed her daughter’s hand. ‘I’m so proud of you.’
‘We all are,’ said Ritchie. He sat next to Stephanie, draping his arm along the back of the booth. The two of them faced Bec. When Stephanie leaned forward to speak, Ritchie leaned with her. Stephanie said, with a shake in her voice: ‘We’re proud of you, but I don’t see why I have to die young because there’s only one kind of science allowed.’
‘Mum,’ said Bec. ‘It’s too late for you to die young.’
‘Bec!’ said Ritchie, putting his arm round their mother.
‘You’re strong. You’ll outlive us all.’
‘A lot of scientists have a difference of opinion with you about your infection,’ said Stephanie, lowering her eyes.
‘It’s not an infection. I’m hosting a benign parasite that gives protection against malaria.’
‘I don’t like the idea of that thing inside you and I don’t like it that you named it after your father. I don’t know whether to be worried or revolted.’
Wine came, and Ritchie proposed a toast to Bec’s success in Africa. He was trying not to speak, to look as if he was listening and to keep his mother and sister happy. Yet it was important to him to feel he was leading them. Bec and Stephanie no longer noticed. He’d accumulated authority as if he’d eaten a little part of the soul of each of the people who worked for him. Bec had power in her lab now too but this authority hadn’t accrued to her. She was the boss of a dozen people and yet it shamed her to give them orders or rebuke them, even to praise them. She rejected her subordinates’ submission to her will. She could tell they were offering some part of themselves to her and was afraid to take it.
