by James Meek
Bec went to bed with a book, assuming she would be awake when Alex came. But although he wasn’t late – in fact, he went around the house looking for her, and feared she’d left – she was asleep when he checked the bedroom.
He brushed his teeth, took off his clothes and stood next to the bed, looking at Bec’s face on the pillow. Here in the shared bed, he thought, this is where it all changes, or doesn’t change. The sex was the least of it, as far as sharing was concerned. These days even kings and billionaires lived like the purest Communists where the bed was concerned. You shared the sheet, the quilt, the mattress, the air. You cooperated or bickered over lighting. You woke each other with your thrashing, your snoring, your nightmares, your needy bladder. If one spoke, the other had to answer. You were naked. You were vulnerable. But if you were frightened, there was someone to hold.
And the worst of it was, the two of you were never alone. Even before the children turned up and even after the children left there was someone else in the room – an entity. You never knew. It might be Excitement, capering all over the bed in a spangled leotard, it might be the corpse of Love lying on the floor in a pool of blood, it might be the matronly Domesticity clacking her knitting needles in the corner, it might be the pale clerk of Boredom examining his nails by the window. Tonight Love, shabby and bruised, was pushing him towards Bec, but in order to lie down beside her, he had to get into bed with Infidelity.
Alex lifted the quilt and slid in next to Bec, who stirred but didn’t wake up. He lay straight, not touching her, feeling her warmth but feeling too the almost corporeal presence between them. While he was wondering what that presence was – his own construct, some hormonal taboo, a prejudice of social conditioning – Bec rolled over and wrapped herself around him, and he yielded to her embrace, her human heat and fullness, gratefully.
They woke up at five and at six sat in front of Bec’s laptop, looking at the home page of the Moral Foundation. It was still showing the previous week’s exposé. Bec pressed refresh on the browser and the page changed to show a new story.
It read:
‘FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH’ SCIENTIST IN FAMILY DEATH RIDDLE
Top scientist gives uncle illegal shot of mutant cells just WEEKS before he dies – then gets his house
One of Britain’s best known medical researchers broke the rules of the institute he runs to give a relative who later died a shot of highly experimental ‘fountain of youth’ cells, the MF can reveal.
Dr Alexander Comrie, 42, became head of London’s prestigious Belford Institute for Cancer Research last year after the previous director, his uncle, Professor Harold Comrie, retired through ill health.
Harold Comrie, 64, had terminal cancer – but not one of the cancers that the so-called ‘fountain of youth’ cells, also known as ‘expert cells’, can cure.
Under the terms of his uncle’s will Alexander Comrie, rather than Harold Comrie’s son Matthew, effectively inherits the dead man’s luxury London home.
Sources at the Belford Institute say that Alexander Comrie used his privileged access, bypassing normal procedures, to take the cells out of the freezers where they were stored.
An agency nurse who cared for Harold Comrie in his final weeks, Judith Tembo, said that Alexander Comrie brought the cells to his uncle’s house in an orange Sainsbury’s bag and that she helped him infuse them. She said: ‘I did not think at the time that I was doing anything wrong.’
Matthew Comrie told the MF that he gave verbal permission for his father to be given the cells, but that the implications were never properly explained.
‘My cousin mentioned the cells to me, but I assumed what he was doing was above board,’ said Matthew Comrie. ‘Now I want answers.’
Perk
It had been assumed that Harold Comrie would leave the house to Matthew, his only child, when he died.
But in a highly unusual move, Harold Comrie bequeathed the house to the institute as a free perk for its director.
‘I know my cousin knew about the will when he administered the cells. I don’t know whether the cells had anything to do with the speed of my father’s death,’ said Matthew Comrie, who is one of Lancashire’s assistant education directors.
‘But now I know that he should never have been given them. It’s all very troubling.’
Alexander Comrie shot to fame last year with a paper in the journal Nature claiming that expert cells, which his uncle first discovered, could make humans immortal.
The claim has attracted increasing controversy. Sources say there was already concern that appointing Alexander Comrie as his uncle’s successor could expose the institute to accusations of nepotism.
Breach
Soon after Harold Comrie died Alexander Comrie and his girlfriend, Rebecca Shepherd, moved into the late director’s house, a £1.5 million terraced property on Islington’s exclusive Citron Square.
Dr Ben Norridge, a specialist in medical ethics at Oswestry University, said: ‘Expert cell therapy is a highly experimental treatment that should only be administered to patients under strict protocols and only when the patient is suffering from a very specific kind of cancer.
‘What the junior Comrie did is an astonishing breach of elementary medical ethics. It breaks all the rules. I expect they’ll throw the book at him.’
Alexander Comrie’s actions put the BBC in a dilemma over his role as presenter of the organisation’s soon to be released documentary about ageing, Why Not Live Forever?
Drunken
Last year Shepherd and Alexander Comrie were hailed in the media as ‘science’s golden couple’.
Before becoming the head of a global malaria prevention campaign recently, Shepherd, daughter of murdered Special Boat Service hero Captain Gregory Shepherd, led a successful effort to develop a vaccine for the disease.
She is the sister of Teen Makeover producer and ex-Lazygods front man Ritchie Shepherd.
Since moving into his late uncle’s house Alexander Comrie and Shepherd are understood to have made inroads into the former director’s extensive cellar of vintage wines, which he bequeathed to them personally.
Neighbours describe a series of late, noisy parties at the house. Comrie and Shepherd are reported to have been seen cycling round the square late at night singing drunkenly in the company of Alexander Comrie’s brother Douglas, a postal worker.
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For the rest of the day it seemed to Alex that everyone – Bec, his colleagues, his parents, friends from different continents, people who knew him and who had known Harry – was on his side. On Monday lawyers got involved. In them Alex perceived the power to enter a room and without any obvious effort make everyone in it move apart until nobody was within touching distance. He was interviewed by the police, who were annoyed to be obliged to do it by the Moral Foundation, and took their annoyance out on Alex in the form of a sternness that every attempt by him to lighten made colder.
The trustees interviewed him in the board room. In the larger-than-life full-length portrait behind their heads Belford was looking off into the distance and as the interrogation went on Alex kept glancing at the founder’s baggy blue suit, white moustache and watery blue eyes. It seemed to him that the giant Belford knew what was happening and was pretending not to see or hear what was going on beneath him.
Why, the deputy chairman of the trustees asked Alex, had he not followed proper procedures, when he’d been a working scientist for twenty years?
‘If I’d followed proper procedures, I wouldn’t have been able to give him the cells,’ said Alex.
‘Then you shouldn’t have.’
‘I knew it wouldn’t help him. I think he did, too. But we knew it wouldn’t hurt him. He was infused with cells from exactly the same line when we ran safety tests a while back. They were his own cells.’
‘If you didn’t think it would help him why did you administer the cells?’ All five men and two women facing him had printouts of the MF story in front of them. They had other papers
but it was the article they kept referring to, shuffling the two pages over and over.
‘He asked me to. I wanted him to be happy. He was about to die and he wanted hope.’
‘You’re not a qualified medical doctor. You had no business carrying out an untried, invasive procedure on such a sick man.’
‘A nurse was present. I was carrying out a dying man’s last wishes.’
‘You have no way of knowing that you didn’t shorten his life.’
‘I have no way of knowing that I didn’t lengthen his life.’
‘I find that an extraordinarily cavalier attitude,’ said the deputy chairman.
One of the lawyers leaned forward and spoke. He was turning a pen in his hands as if he was rolling a long black cigarette. ‘The issue that concerns me is one of consent,’ he said.
‘They were Harry’s cells, it was his request, and his son agreed to it.’
‘There’s no paper trail,’ said the lawyer. ‘There are no signatures. You didn’t sign the cells out, you didn’t tell anyone what you were doing, you don’t have any forms, you didn’t even make notes on the procedure. Now your cousin is saying that he wasn’t given enough background to give informed consent.’
Alex was sure this face of coldness was assumed, that his inquisitors had forgotten they could relax and deal with it like the decent human beings they were. He leaned forward, spread out his hands in front of him, smiling and frowning, looking from face to face.
‘You knew my uncle,’ he said. ‘He was a great man. He didn’t want to die, and he was afraid of not having done enough to be remembered after he died. It didn’t seem wrong to give him what he wanted when nobody would be hurt by it. I didn’t want to live in his house. I didn’t ask for his wine. I didn’t want to give him the cells. I didn’t want to talk about the cells’ potential to inhibit human ageing in the Nature paper. I did it for him.’
He thought of Harry not long before he kicked the bucket, petulantly demanding to be taken upstairs when he thought it might be the end. ‘I don’t want to die in the living room,’ he’d said, and a mellow, staccato croak had come from him, the last warm laugh of a dying man.
‘Don’t you remember how funny he was?’ said Alex.
‘I’m not sure laughter is appropriate here,’ said the deputy chairman.
One of the trustees said: ‘Are you telling us that you altered the conclusion of a scientific report to please a superior?’
‘That’s not what I said, and that’s not what I did,’ said Alex. His mouth had gone dry. He didn’t understand the change that had come over people who’d been so fawning towards him the last time they’d met.
‘It sounded to me as if that’s just what you did,’ said the trustee.
‘We’re all on the same side here,’ said the lawyer.
Alex cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know what you want me to do,’ he said. ‘You know what happened. I’ll talk to Matthew and if you want me to say sorry to anyone I will.’
The deputy chairman pressed his fingertips together. How old was he when he first did that? thought Alex. Does it comfort him?
‘There’s been some serendipity here,’ said the deputy chairman. ‘Because you’re on leave of absence while you make your film, we’re spared the awkwardness of suspending you during our investigation.’
Alex’s lips parted. The sound of ‘ending’ persisted in his ears.
‘We may need to postpone your return for longer.’
‘I have work to do,’ said Alex. ‘People are still falling ill.’
One of the trustees said: ‘Some of us questioned your commitment to the institute when you went off to get your face on the box.’
‘You encouraged me to go,’ said Alex. ‘I sat here in this room a few months ago and you told me that it would be good for the institute’s image. Why am I having to defend myself? This isn’t a court.’
‘The last time we saw you we thought you were a sober, responsible scientist.’
‘Nobody told me I wouldn’t be able to have a glass of wine if I became director.’
‘So it is true about the drunken episodes?’
‘You’re treating a report in an online scandal sheet, from a vindictive man, as if that’s the truth, and I have to prove otherwise,’ said Alex.
‘You’re saying your cousin is being vindictive?’ said one of the trustees.
‘Not Matthew. Val Oatman.’
‘What do you mean, vindictive?’ said the deputy chairman.
‘That’s a personal matter,’ said Alex.
The trustee cleared her throat and looked down at her papers. The deputy chairman looked at the others. The lawyer said: ‘It would help if we could be sure you were disclosing all the relevant information.’
‘I’ve told you everything you need to know,’ said Alex. He got up. ‘I take it you want me to vacate the house.’
‘It’s an awkward issue,’ said the deputy chairman. Alex walked out. He heard someone calling after him. It seemed to him that he was watching people he knew tearing at each other’s flesh with teeth and talons in a battle between good and evil in the last days of man.
As the week went on, his heart withered. It began to appear that Harry’s decomposed body might actually be dug up. He acquired a lawyer of his own, who said it was unlikely that he would face criminal proceedings. A woman named Jane from the BBC called to tell Alex that in the circumstances the broadcast of the film would be put back by at least a year.
The consequence of Alex’s mid-life introduction to injustice was a yearning for the world to be rebalanced and he began to look forward to the moment when Bec would expose Ritchie. He couldn’t see a way to punish Val or Matthew or to get them to admit they were wrong. He’d forgiven Bec and Dougie. The only possibility of redress was in the punishment of his old friend, and his desire to see him hurt encouraged him. It made him feel that he was a part of the human story after all. Were he able to choose between the ability to want revenge and the ability to dance, he would take the dancefloor over a longing to see Ritchie in the stocks, but thirsting for revenge was something. He couldn’t understand why Bec didn’t speak about her brother.
On a dark March afternoon they were together in the living room of the Citron Square house, waiting for the removals van to take them to Bec’s old flat. Ragged flakes of snow the size of postage stamps were falling and settling in patches on the roofs opposite, cold enough for the snow to cling to like white moss at the overlap lines of the slates. They’d packed and had nothing more to do. Bec was sitting on the sofa, staring into the fireplace. They’d turned off the boiler and the residual warmth in the radiators was fading. Alex was standing by the door with his hands in his pockets. He went to the window that looked out on the street to see whether the van had come. Bec lifted up the coat lying next to her on the sofa and put it on.
‘When are you going to tell Karin what Ritchie did?’ said Alex.
Bec shivered and rubbed her hands together between her knees. ‘Val was too proud to publish the story about me. He thought he could be cruel to me like a gentleman, by attacking you. That’s what he seems to think he is: an old-fashioned English gentleman. Because they could be cruel, couldn’t they, old-fashioned English gentlemen? They challenged people to duels they knew they’d win. If a woman offended them they’d kill the woman’s lover or her husband and shame the woman’s brother, but they wouldn’t touch her, just leave her crying there with corpses of men around her.’
Alex sat on the sofa beside her. ‘When are you going to tell Karin?’ he said again.
‘I’m not going to.’
‘You’re going to keep your brother’s secret.’
‘Yes.’
‘He betrayed you, and betrayed his wife with a fifteen-year-old girl in his care, and he’s not going to be punished for it.’
‘Not by me.’
‘And we’ve been through hell without having done anything wrong.’
‘I did something wrong. I shouldn’t
have had sex with Dougie. You didn’t do anything wrong but what Matthew did has nothing to do with Ritchie.’
‘It’s not fair.’
‘I don’t want to give him away. I don’t want to break up his family. I don’t want him to go to prison because of me. Just because he betrayed me doesn’t mean I have to betray him.’
‘What about the girl?’
Bec bent forward and reached into her bag. She took out a folded page ripped from a celebrity magazine, unfolded it and gave it to Alex. It was a page covered in small photos of people with heavily styled hair, white teeth and shiny skin in various tones of orange, yellow, terracotta, chocolate and flashbulb white. A circle had been drawn in black pen round one of the faces and a line drawn from the circle to the edge of the page, where the words the ‘victim’!!! were written. The marked face was of a thin young girl with pronounced cheekbones and lots of eyeliner. She was wearing a tight, strapless black dress and a silver necklace and was grinning into the camera. A boy with a shaved head and an earring, looking shy and eager in a suit and tie whose knot was too big, had his arm around her. The caption read Craig Arbutnot with girlfriend Nicole Culhame. Alex recognised Arbutnot’s name; he was a footballer.
