by James Meek
‘This must have taken you ages,’ she said.
Alex shrugged and swallowed. His mind contained magnificent thoughts Bec would like but he couldn’t make them fit through the narrow opening of his mouth.
‘Drumming by itself isn’t my favourite kind of music,’ said Bec.
‘I can’t play any other instrument,’ said Alex. A drop of rain fell on his cheek.
‘But my room’s on the other side of the house,’ said Bec. She put her hands in her pockets and looked over her shoulder at the door as if she hoped somebody would come out to fetch her. It was raining heavily, pattering in the leaves above and around them.
‘Listen,’ said Alex. He stopped back and crouched down beside the drums. He beckoned to Bec. ‘Listen.’
She came over and squatted a few feet away.
‘Can you hear it?’ said Alex. The rain was tapping on the skin of the snare drum.
‘It sounds like rain on a tent,’ said Bec.
‘Can you hear the cymbal? Put your ear close to it.’
Bec put her ear to the rim of the cymbal and listened. The raindrops rang faintly on the gleaming metal.
Alex took out a single drumstick and with the blunt end began softly to tap the bass drum. Bec listened to the rain’s rattle on the snare, the cymbal ringing and the faint deep boom of the big drum. Streams of water ran down Alex’s forehead. Bec’s hat was soaked. She stood up. Alex got to his feet after her.
Bec kissed him on the mouth. A chink of warmth and softness opened and closed. ‘Goodnight,’ she said, and turned and walked away.
Alex called after her to wait. Bec ran the last few steps to the door and went inside, closing it behind her. Alex rang the bell, hammered on the door with his fist and called her name through the letterbox. No one came.
Soon afterwards Alex was recruited by a research lab in Baltimore. When he came back to London to work at Imperial College, four years and several girlfriends later, Bec was in Sacramento, living with Joel. By the time Bec returned to London and Joel left her, Alex had moved in with a health administrator called Maria. He was sure Maria, dark and patient, was the right partner, with her detective pursuit of his obscure lines of thought and her mission to improve him. He imagined them growing old together and seldom thought about Ritchie’s sister. His drum kit sat for years in a spare bedroom, ready for action at first under a dust sheet and then, when the room was redecorated, packed away.
Alex put the drums on eBay and the buyer came round in a van one evening to pick them up. He was a short, eager, muscled young Australian with a ponytail, rolling on his heels as he swaggered into the house. He had the envelope with the cash sticking out of the pocket of his jeans. Alex let him in, a ride cymbal shimmering where it hung from his free hand. He looked over the buyer’s shoulder at the blue sky and children’s TV clouds and said he didn’t suppose it’d rain.
‘It’s a beautiful day, mate,’ said the buyer, winking and clicking his tongue. ‘Can I take a look?’
Alex showed him where he’d set up the kit and surrendered the cymbal. The buyer lolloped through a few minutes’ worth of breaks. He stood up, clenched the sticks in his fist and handed Alex the money. ‘Sold, sir,’ he said.
‘I want to see them off,’ said Alex, moving to the throne.
‘Be my guest,’ said the buyer.
Five minutes later Maria came to tell them to stop the noise and saw Alex soaked in sweat, hammering away at the snare and tom-toms as if trying to break through to something on the other side. The buyer shouted in her ear ‘This guy’s a beast!’ Alex gave Maria a terrible look and she clasped her hands to her jaw. He looked at her as if someone had died, and they were both to blame.
18
When he was focused on Maria, Alex’s intensity promised an extraordinary programme for which the length of their lives was hardly enough, even as the world of medicine was clamouring for his brains. He gave himself to her at a time convenient to him, between three and five in the morning quite often, or a Wednesday to Wednesday trip far away the moment he finished a project. Why not now? You said you wanted to do things together.
Talking to her about what interested him, his work, for instance, or whether humankind was still evolving, or his conviction that he could get anywhere in central London faster by bike than by Tube, his eyes shone with the fervour of a prophet. He couldn’t bring the same passion to other people’s preoccupations, or hers. In company he was a partisan for her excellence but his praise was generic. He was interested in her up to the point where he had to take, or fake, an interest in her interests.
The deeps of the cytoplasmic world he explored alone inside his head were inaccessible to her beneath layers of technical terms, where she could get to the definitions of the definitions and only find more words to look up. Yet she liked to be in the house with him when he was working. He was vulnerable and trusting when he was below the surface. She felt she, and only she, had her hand on his air supply.
She tried to change him, and discovered that in small ways she could. She couldn’t stop him punctuating the gaps in his thoughts with snatches of bygone TV show themes and old advertising jingles – ‘Up in the valley of the Jolly Green Giant … now you sing Ho, ho, ho!’ – but she got him not to do it in public, not when she was with him. She told him he drummed too much with his hands and pens and cutlery on other people’s tables, and that he should suppress the compulsion to methodically empty any plate of snacks that was put in his reach, and he stopped doing these things with an eerie meekness that pleased her. Made bold, she moved into the sexual jurisdiction. He was rather good, she thought, with his long, strong hands and chubby cock. The hook-nosed face opposite hers had a crooked grandeur to it, like the picture of a great old man in his youth before he was famous. But she told Alex he should talk to her while they were making love. He took it as an accusation of sexual incompetence and grieved silently for two days, then told her she should find somebody else, someone who could fuck and dance properly. Maria didn’t see the connection and soothed and seduced him and after that he talked while he played with her and while he was inside her, shyly and repetitively at first, then brimming over. It seemed to Maria that the two of them had the kind of thing she imagined parents were supposed to have before they were parents. Five years after they’d begun living together, she raised the matter of having children, not as an abstract idea for the indefinite future, but as a project it was time to start, now they were in their mid-thirties.
‘D’you think?’ said Alex. ‘Maybe.’ He frowned, scratched his nose, raised his finger and smiled. ‘Clathrin! That’s the protein I was looking for. Give me five minutes.’ She heard the stairs groan as he bounded up to the study, singing. It’s Marvel-ous – less fat too! Bom-bom-bom.
One winter’s night they were walking towards Farringdon station after dinner at a restaurant in Clerkenwell and passed a line of pale young people queuing to get into a club. A few had vintage fur hats and ground-trailing secondhand greatcoats but most were protected from the cold by single layers of leather, fishnet, velvet, polyester or tartan clinging tightly to their sticklike bodies. They seemed to dissolve the rest of the world; there was only the club, the queue and each other.
‘Let’s go in,’ said Alex.
‘It’s not my kind of place,’ said Maria. ‘I’m not dressed for it. It’s not for anyone over thirty.’
‘I want to see what it’s like in there.’
‘Full of cute young trendies dancing, trying to get served in the bar, trying to get off with each other, posing and screaming in each other’s ears to make themselves heard.’
‘Let’s take a look. We’re people too.’
‘I want to go home,’ said Maria, linking her arm in his. ‘We don’t belong in there. They won’t let us in.’
‘Who says we don’t belong? Why?’ Alex pulled his arm free and walked off to stand at the end of the line. Maria stood still, watching him for a minute; he didn’t look in her direction. She left hi
m there and was woken a couple of hours later by the sound of the taxi bringing him home.
‘Did they let you in?’ she asked when he got into bed beside her.
‘Eventually,’ he said, and sulked, refusing to talk about it.
Over the years Alex registered the expansion of his tribe with detached interest. When his brother Dougie had his first child, it was bound up in Alex’s mind with Dougie’s financial and emotional recklessness. When his cousin Matthew and his wife Lettie started producing offspring at a steady rate, Alex talked about it with scientific curiosity: what was it about religious families that made them have more children? Did this mean that religious people had an evolutionary advantage over non-believers like him and Maria?
‘Let’s start the infidels’ comeback,’ said Maria hopefully. Alex only laughed and jiggled his knee.
Alex grew up breathing the air of success around his uncle Harry. Harry was a medical geneticist who’d discovered that most people had a few immune cells with a recurring set of benign mutations that turned the mutant lymphocytes into cancer-hunting aces. The same mutations made them vulnerable; the mutant cells, named expert cells by Harry, would pop up naturally every so often in the human metabolism and be ruthlessly destroyed by their peers, like lone geniuses smothered by mediocre rivals. Harry’s brilliance – he liked to think of it as brilliance, as a series of perfect rapier strokes, although it was fifteen years’ stubborn labour by him and his research group – was to find a way of finding the expert cells before they were destroyed, removing them from the body, tweaking them genetically to toughen them, culturing them up by the million and putting them back. He all but cured one rare form of cancer, then rested, and without realising it, never stopped resting.
Harry hoped and didn’t expect his bright nephew would follow him into the life sciences, yet Alex did follow him, and excelled. He turned out to have the mind Harry longed to have had for himself: a mathematical acrobat who could run molecule-folding formulae in his head, a controlled yet outré dreamer.
Alex made it his work to discover what Harry had never been able to explain, why the expert cells worked as they did. With pen and mouse and brain he journeyed deep into the body, into the cells that make it up, into the organelles inside the cells – the fuming mitochondrion, the pancake-stack assembly lines of the endoplasmic reticulum and the Golgi apparatus, the cryptic fasces of the centrioles – into the molecules inside them, and into the atoms that make up the molecules. He spent hours Internet chatting and then, when it came along, Skyping, with a Bulgarian-American colleague in Switzerland, Thomas, who made computer animations of the choreography of the proteins. One day, Skyping from home, they were arguing over a fancy bonding sequence when a small dark shape flitted across the scene behind Thomas, the murky scrim of old pizza boxes, cliffs of paper and unwashed coffee mugs Alex avoided looking at.
‘What was that?’ said Alex.
‘Define,’ said Thomas.
‘A creature crossed the room behind you, about the size of a large flightless bird.’
Thomas looked over his shoulder. ‘Margarita!’ he called. A waxen-skinned girl of about six, with coal-black hair and eyebrows and a smear of chocolate coming off her mouth, stepped into the picture, clasping a stuffed unicorn.
‘This is Margarita,’ said Thomas. ‘My daughter.’
‘Hello, Margarita,’ said Alex. ‘I’m Alex.’ His eyes moved from Thomas, paunchy, incompetently shaven, with long, unwashed strands of grey hair and a baggy t-shirt of indefinable colour, to the new and normative person he had seemingly co-produced.
‘Say hello, Margarita.’
Margarita twisted and turned her face away.
‘I’d like to shake your hand, Margarita,’ said Alex. ‘But I’m in London and my arm isn’t long enough to stretch to Switzerland. And I don’t want to break your daddy’s screen by putting my hand through it.’
Margarita looked round, tempted by the promise of broken glass, and realised the man with the big nose was bullshitting. She ran away.
‘My mother’s watching her in the kitchen,’ said Thomas.
‘I didn’t know you had children,’ said Alex. ‘Only Margarita.’
‘I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.’
‘I was married for a few months once. I see Margarita on Wednesdays.’
‘You never mentioned you had a daughter in all the times I was in Geneva.’
‘It’s because children, they’re not your thing,’ said Thomas.
Alex clicked on the red button to end the call, yanked the computer power plug out of the wall and stood up, cracking his fingers. In that moment it seemed incredible to him that he’d spent fifteen years pondering the cell, making himself a master of life’s cogs and wheels, fretting that he didn’t belong in the procession of human life, an alien observer taking notes on the gypsies, fiddlers and balladeers jigging past, and had missed this insight: that men and women could have children. A child, Alex reasoned, trumped dancing, music and door policies. You were in. With a family you were the very substance of life; you were the traveller and the road together. It was one thing to talk about evolution but having children was the way to be part of it. If life was the party, children were the after-party, and only thing that stood between you and it was nature: the big bouncer. It staggered Alex that Ritchie didn’t know one ion from another, and thought evolution meant if you spent too long hunched over a laptop in your twenties you’d evolve a humped back, yet he’d instinctively understood all this, and already had a son.
You were right about kids, he texted Maria. Come home ASAP and let’s get started.
19
When Alex was a boy his uncle Harry would read to him from a manuscript he’d written for children called Tales of Life. He talked about getting it published. The hero of the work was a single-celled organism born billions of years ago who evolved, through many adventures and strange encounters, into a human being. One of the stories was about how the mitochondrion first entered this hero, the sole ancestor of all men and women. The ten-year-old Alex didn’t understand what the mitochondrion was when he first heard his uncle say it, but he loved the word, and the idea of having an ancestor billions of years old made him feel colossal. At school he would advise anyone who fell over in the playground and bled not to let the mitochondrion spill out.
A long time ago, read Harry, forty million grandfathers ago, your ancestor the single cell was big and weak and slow, but his neighbour the little mitochondrion was full of energy. And the mitochondrion said to the cell, ‘Let me come inside you and live in you, and I shall make you powerful, and your descendants will be too many to count,’ and the cell said, ‘What’s the catch?’ And the mitochondrion said, ‘I shall give you energy, but when I make energy, I shall put a little poison into you, and it will make you old, and you will die.’ And the cell said, ‘What’s old? What’s die?’ And the mitochondrion said, ‘It is the end of you. But not yet, and you will have so many children that you will not mourn your end.’ And the cell agreed to let the mitochondrion in, and they multiplied together in the fertile seas of the young Earth, under the young sun.
Once, a set of sixty trillion of that first cell’s descendants, a set called Alex Comrie, went to California, where a scientist in a laboratory explained to him that it was the mitochondria in human cells, and the toxins they produced as they did their work, that made people old.
He showed Alex a compound, a black powder, which, he said, bonded with those toxins and made them harmless. Not immortality; but, the scientist reckoned from their work in worms and mice, pretty close. The scientist looked round to see if anyone was watching and said to Alex, ‘Try some, go on. Put a little bit on your finger. But don’t tell anyone.’ Alex sucked a dab of the astringent powder and left. And apart from finding, that one evening only, that he was able to drink five beers without needing to pee, the powder had no effect. The beginnings of lines appeared, his skin coarsened and his torso sagged as he approached forty, no f
aster or slower than anyone else’s. But he did notice, the first time he ate pomegranate seeds after eating the powder, that they had the same tannic astringency, and he mentioned this to Maria.
Soon afterwards she began eating fresh pomegranate for breakfast. ‘Maybe it’ll work,’ she said. It was when ‘Maybe it’ll work’ was their catchphrase, when the doctors who tested them exhaustively couldn’t find anything wrong with either of them and the third IVF cycle failed. ‘Maybe it’ll work’ was anything, swallowing a fly, sex in a hotel garden, accidentally salted tea. Pomegranates. And Alex had wondered whether ‘maybe it’ll work’, for pomegranates, meant conception, or not getting old; and once he’d asked Maria if she would rather have a child, or live for ever, and Maria said ‘either’.
After the IVF debacle Maria suggested adoption. Or, since it was so important to him to have a child, she said, they could use another woman’s eggs or another man’s sperm.
‘It has to be ours,’ said Alex.
‘It would be ours,’ said Maria.
‘Not in nature.’
‘But you’re a scientist, a medical scientist,’ said Maria, turning red with frustration and struggling to speak through tears. ‘Everything you do is not in nature. How can you interfere with nature to stop people dying and not interfere to let people be born?’
‘Why do I always have to be the rational one?’ said Alex. ‘Because I’m a scientist? You’re profiling. It’s bigotry.’
He knew he might be the infertile one, but what, he thought, if the problem was on Maria’s side? In the secrecy of his heart he compared her to his former girlfriends and imagined how it might have been if he’d stayed with one of them instead, with a little boy or girl by now.
He followed Bec’s work in the journals. He found pictures of her on the Internet and staring at the bright pixels it seemed to him that he felt as he had fifteen years before, without the comforting illusion of those days that he was bound to meet others, like her, who let their true self and their surface coincide.
