The Heart Broke In

by James Meek

  26

  When Bec had cleaned her funeral plate of ugali and stew in the village, it was dark. She went to find the driver. By the kerosene lamplight spilling from windows she traced the trodden way between the houses. Over the noise of frogs and insects was a murmur of evening voices and from doorways came shouts, laughter, wails, the crash of pans, radio music. She saw the whiteness of the big car and the driver squatting on the ground beside the front wheel, talking to two local men cross-legged beside him. A hand gripped hers. It was Batini.

  ‘We must clean ourselves,’ she said.

  ‘I have to go,’ said Bec. ‘Will you come with me, or will you stay longer?’

  ‘We must clean ourselves,’ said Batini, tugging gently on Bec’s hand.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘After a burial we are not clean.’

  Batini led Bec along a path under the trees, between tall grasses and into a stand of reeds higher than they were. The ground yielded underfoot, mud oozed up between their toes and water came up over their ankles. They came out through the reeds to a pool fed by a stream, lit by an orange half-moon. They took off their clothes and arranged them on the reeds. Bec launched herself into the water and swam, feet trailing along the muddy bottom, until she reached the middle of the pool. Batini stood with the water up over her hips and splashed her belly and breasts. She waded back to the shore, leaving a wake that broke up the moonlight on the water. Bec followed her to a fallen tree trunk close to the edge of the pool. Naked and dripping they sat side by side. The wood had been worn smooth by sitting.

  ‘You are so white,’ said Batini, looking down at Bec’s thighs next to her own.

  ‘I’m sorry about your son.’

  ‘They are ignorant,’ said Batini. ‘You told them the vaccine would only protect them halfway. You told them to keep using nets. It is not your fault.’

  It hadn’t occurred to Bec that anyone might think it was her fault. She felt her heart take a jump off the edge, into darkness.

  ‘Perhaps it is my fault,’ she said. ‘What use is a vaccine that only half-works?’

  She listened to the frogs. There were so many of them, like a brass band: hundreds of shrill peeping ones, like piccolos and flutes, a host of tenor frogs, like clarinets and trumpets, and a handful of bassoons and tubas. Those frogs must be huge, she thought. Gorilla-sized.

  Batini said: ‘Where are your children?’

  ‘I don’t have children,’ Bec said. You know that, she thought.

  ‘Where is your husband?’

  ‘I don’t have one, as you know.’

  ‘Why not? You are beautiful and healthy and educated.’

  ‘Do I have to have children?’ asked Bec.

  ‘Of course,’ said Batini.

  ‘Tell me why, one more time?’

  ‘It is joy.’ Batini looked down and made little movements with her fingers on her lap as if fidgeting with the folds of an imaginary skirt.

  ‘Will you marry again?’ said Bec.

  ‘Yes,’ said Batini. ‘I will marry next month.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘I will marry the brother of my second husband.’

  Later Bec left the village and set off for Dar es Salaam with the driver. On the way they were caught in a rainstorm and it became impossible to see through the windscreen. The driver pulled over to the side of the road. The force of water seemed to rock the car. Lightning, cutting through the darkness and the deluge, showed spouts of water twisting from the boughs of trees and the shaking fronds of a field of cassava. Thunder cracked overhead and Bec’s phone chirruped and the screen spilled a friendly yellow light. Ritchie was messaging her, asking when she was coming home. Bec called him and when he answered, when she pressed the phone to one ear and put her finger in the other, he was clear and close.

  ‘What’s that roaring? Are you standing next to a plane?’ said Ritchie.

  ‘It’s rain,’ said Bec. ‘I’m on my way to the airport. Can you hear me? I’ll be in London tomorrow afternoon. Hello?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘I thought we’d been cut off. There was a long silence.’

  ‘I was thinking.’

  ‘The vaccine doesn’t work. My colleagues think I’m a slave-driver and I think I should stay … Hello? I don’t think I should be coming back. Ritchie?’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘That’s not what I expected you to say. Are you in the middle of something? There are long pauses.’

  ‘It’s the satellite,’ he said. ‘What you’re doing is more important than having fun in London. It’d be selfish of me to encourage your hedonistic side.’

  ‘You used to tell me I should be more selfish.’

  ‘I was wrong.’

  ‘Mum’s expecting me.’

  The pause was so long that Bec was sure they’d been cut off. The rain slackened. She heard Ritchie’s voice again, earnest with a young boy’s seriousness, as if there were ways of being he had no patterns of to follow except childhood ones.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it lately,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot to be said for a quiet life, a simple, modest life.’

  ‘Then I wouldn’t have stories to tell you.’

  Did Ritchie draw in his breath? The rain had almost stopped. ‘That wouldn’t be so bad, if it meant you were getting on with things,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t tell you what happened today.’

  ‘What happened?’ said Ritchie, quick and nervous.

  ‘You said you didn’t want to hear my stories.’

  Ritchie waited for several heartbeats. ‘Tell me,’ he said, with a strange wariness.

  ‘My housekeeper’s son died of malaria.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ritchie. ‘How terrible.’ The how terrible was right in tune with respect and sympathy, but the oh seemed to belong to another conversation. Her brother sounded relieved, or disappointed, that it hadn’t been something else.

  27

  The driver dropped Bec off at the airport at dawn. After takeoff she slept soundly, not waking till the plane descended towards Heathrow. As she marched off the aircraft her vision began to blur. ‘Not now,’ she whispered. But gregi went for her eyes and she had to stop in the corridor with the other passengers streaming round her, dark trunks and appendages whirling through a blizzard of light. She edged back and leaned against the wall.

  These were the symptoms: an ache behind the forehead, a fierce itching in her eyes, the detail of the world broken into a snowstorm and blackness beyond. At moments like this, sudden blindness in a transit corridor in the airport, she felt she was a world in herself, alone in the universe, hosting millions of minute life forms striving for mastery over her and each other.

  She charted the occurrences and couldn’t find a pattern or common cause that triggered gregi’s attacks. In the wake of her discovery there’d been a division of the scientific spoils. Bec has pursued the use of the haemoproteus against malaria; the Nickells and others had laid siege to the shanty town, where they’d long ago set up camp, trying to study the human–bird-parasite symbiosis without changing it. The outsiders had done their best not to let the parasite get into them, or if it had, quickly took drugs to get rid of it. They feared for their eyes. A few of the older shanty-dwellers had permanent retinal damage and sat in their doorways, chewing betel and trying to grab the elbows of children running past, so as to have someone to talk to. Bec avoided thinking about this.

  As far as Bec knew she was the only person in the northern hemisphere allowing her body to be used as an incubator for H. gregi. It took no effort to foster her father’s multitudinous avatars, only these occasional feats of endurance; she didn’t have to feed them, or stroke them. All she did was count them, and diary the episodes. It had little to do with the vaccine. Her colleagues said she had no good scientific reason to remain infected, as they insisted on calling it. The parasite thrived in vitro and was being studied in labs all over the world. They thought she was
stubbornly taking a mad risk to prove a point, to get what she wanted. She told herself that it made the deaths of vaccinated children less hard to bear if she endangered her sight; yet the thought of losing it was terrifying. The latest word from PNG was that the shift from temporary to lasting blindness might be sudden. There were days when she considered purging her body of the parasites, yet she never acted. After all, she thought, they have Dad’s name. How could I kill the only ones in the family?

  At three in the afternoon, eyesight restored, she left the airport on the Tube, heading home. When she got to Leicester Square and changed trains, she found that a rogue compass quivering in the marrow of her bones pointed her to the southbound platform instead of the northbound, and she went to the Centre for Parasite Control.

  She’d hardly put on the light in her office when the hand of Mosi, the Ugandan who was sequencing gregi’s genes, crashed down on the door handle and he stepped in, bellowing her name in a crescendo of delight. Bec charged into his grin and hugged him but when she stepped back and looked at him again, trying to keep the welcome fresh, he was wary. He asked her if Maddie knew she was back, and Bec said she didn’t know. Mosi asked why she’d kept delaying her flight home.

  Alerted by Mosi, the director came to Bec’s office, closed the door, kissed her and asked if she could sit down. Her lean old face had impressively clear shadows under the cheekbones and eyebrows and her silver hair was cut close to the head. The brightly coloured glass globes strung on her necklace and hanging from her ears seemed to be ornaments hung on her by a lesser woman to appease her.

  ‘They managed to get you on the plane,’ she said.

  ‘I was always going to come back for Christmas,’ said Bec.

  ‘To see your friends and family. You’re going to Spain to see your mother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your brother and his family will be there.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Friends to see, going out, parties, dancing, catching up. Fun. You’ve worked hard in Africa, a lot of stress has built up and now you’ve earned yourself three – is it three? – weeks of rest and relaxation.’

  Bec licked her lips and nodded. ‘Maybe two,’ she said.

  ‘And here you are in your office.’ Maddie reached forward and grabbed the top journal on the pile in front of Bec. ‘Reading about … toxoplasma. Oh! The centennial issue!’ She tossed it over her shoulder and nodded at Bec’s luggage. ‘Have you been home since you landed?’

  Bec shook her head.

  ‘When did you last wash your hair, if you don’t mind me asking? You look as if you were caught in the rain.’

  Bec ran her fingers through her hair, got them caught in tangles and dug in her bag for a brush. ‘I went swimming yesterday before my flight,’ she said. ‘There was a funeral.’

  Maddie sat on her hands and rocked backwards and forwards, studying the floor.

  ‘Who died?’ she said.

  ‘My housekeeper’s little boy.’ Bec’s face had disappeared behind a thick curtain of hair as she brushed it through.

  ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘Malaria.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Vaccinated?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So now you think your work’s a failure. You think fifty per cent protection from malaria’s a pretty poor return for all the money and time we’ve spent turning your parasite into something useful.’

  Bec threw her hair back, stopped brushing and looked at Maddie.

  ‘Maybe you think you were right all along and we should be infecting children with live haemoproteus. But we couldn’t do that, could we? How are your eyes?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  ‘When was your last attack?’

  ‘They aren’t attacks,’ said Bec. ‘It was a bit blurry this afternoon for a few minutes.’

  ‘Maybe it seems to you that all this,’ Maddie spread her arms and tickled the air of the centre with her fingers, ‘is money badly spent. Maybe you think Europe and America got rid of malaria in their day without any vaccines cooked up by rich foreigners. I used to think that. I used to think there was an infinite number of wrong things to do and one right thing and I had to find it. I used to think my old boss was a disgusting compromiser and a politician.’

  ‘Do you really remember what you used to think?’ said Bec.

  ‘I hear somebody called for you today from the Belford Institute. They wanted to know if you got the invitation for the party tonight.’

  ‘It’s a party in honour of a man I don’t know. His nephew invited me. He’s a friend of my brother’s.’

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Maddie stuck out her lower lip, fidgeted with her necklace and put her head to one side. ‘It’s going to be in that new tower near London Bridge,’ she said. ‘You’ll be able to see all over the city. There’ll be drinking and dancing. You used to like that. That’s why you came back, isn’t it? For the past few months you’ve been slaving, not working. It’s as if you’ve been doing penance for something. What would you have to do penance for? You’ve never done anything wrong. Stop acting like some crazy Calvinist witch. Go home, charge a taxi to the centre, make yourself glamorous and go out.’

  ‘I don’t want to go out.’

  ‘Your housekeeper wouldn’t want you to mourn. That’s for her. You’ve worked there long enough to know where you can shove your guilt and pity.’

  ‘It isn’t punishment,’ said Bec. ‘If I wanted to punish myself I’d be one of the people charging around London raving about sex and love and marriage without the faintest idea what they’re talking about.’

  Bec had a mortgage on a two-bedroom basement in Kentish Town. Ritchie had offered to pay it off and she’d refused. She pushed the door open against the heap of mail in the hall and the unheated air chilled her cheeks with a hint of dampness. Brooding over the things Val had said before they parted, she hadn’t emptied the rubbish before she left, and the kitchen stank of rotten banana skins. Nor had she emptied the fridge. All that should have been green there was brown and all that should have been brown was green. A cup of coffee she’d half drunk before leaving had skinned over with pale fur and there were cobwebs on the bathroom ceiling. She opened the laundry basket to pour in her dirty clothes. It was already full; when she lifted the lid the elastic energy in the compressed pile was released and scrunched-up socks and pants sprang out onto the floor.

  The phone rang. It was Val. She didn’t answer but listened to the voicemail he left.

  ‘Hello Rebecca,’ said Val. ‘I heard you were back. I was thinking the other day about how you said there was no moral foundation. I thought, “She’s right! Why don’t I set one up?” Someone’s got to keep an eye on things. Merry Christmas!’

  Bec’s fingers fumbled angrily on the buttons of her jeans, wondering how he’d known she was in London. She threw her clothes violently on the floor, showered and washed her hair and got ready to go out. She whispered to gregi, watching with curiosity in the mirror as her reddened lips moved.

  ‘This beauty’s no use to you or me,’ she whispered. ‘You might as well make me blind.’

  28

  That night Ritchie went out in Soho. He supposed Bruce Heemingthwaite would be grateful to be invited to join ‘a few of us’ (as he put it in the email Paula sent out in his name) for drinks at one of his clubs, and he was.

  ‘It’s so good to see you again,’ said Bruce for the third time, leaning forward and punching Ritchie on the shoulder. Ritchie grinned and glanced at Midge, sitting next to him. Midge was tapping and twirling his lighter and staring into space. At the other end of the table Fred and Art talked quietly.

  ‘I’m the first to admit I fucked up,’ said Bruce. A drunken edge came into his voice and Ritchie’s muscles tensed. ‘But the fantastic thing about this sort of time in your life is, you find out who your real friends are, you know? D’you know what I
mean, Midge?’

  Midge raised his eyebrows, picked up his beer and turned his eyes back to the distant point in space he’d been focused on. He took a gulp and put the glass down carefully.

  ‘Fred!’ called Ritchie. They were close together, on a banquette and two chairs. There was no music in the club but they had to raise their voices to be heard above the din of other people’s chatter. ‘Fred! You look like you had your tie removed and they forgot to sew you up.’

  Fred fingered the open collar of his striped shirt. He’d come straight from the office. ‘They let me keep it,’ he said. ‘Here.’ He took the rolled-up tie out of his jacket pocket and held it out to Ritchie. ‘You look as if you need a donor.’

  ‘He needs more like a shirt graft,’ said Art.

  ‘Ritchie’s got a special offer on his donor card,’ said Midge. ‘It says “In the event of my death, I wish my fat to be used to help feed the hungry.”’

  ‘You’ve got a donor card,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘Fuck ‘em,’ said Midge. ‘I’d rather be made into dog food.’

  ‘Doesn’t it say you’re donating your cock to the Russian women’s netball team?’

  ‘Only for one night!’

  ‘Face transplant,’ said Bruce, his voice cutting into the laughter, which faded away.

  ‘What?’ said Midge, staring at him with mouth slightly open and nose wrinkled.

  ‘Nothing.’