by Andrew Brown
The mention of the Chinese had woken Symington, who was now sitting forward and rubbing his eyes; perhaps he had been listening after all. Gabriel had mentioned Zhejiang to give the undertaking an international flavour, but once articulated it sounded forced and perhaps a little dishonest, given that the two university teams were now involved in a desperate race to confirm the distinction of the plant as a new subspecies and to claim the taxonomical right to name it. And exploit all that it had to offer.
‘The critical question is this: is this a mutation of thaliana along the lines of Zhejiang’s laboratory-invoked stress mutation, which has formed the basis of much of their work? If so, this sample represents an example of a stress-induced mutation naturally established in order to cope with Fe hyperaccumulation. An interesting mutation but ultimately limited in its significance. Or …’ He paused for dramatic effect, but apart from the overeager admirer in the front row, he was met by largely blank expressions. ‘… Or, as we have proposed here at Bristol – and we believe we’re about to prove – is this a new subspecies, unique and evolutionarily adapted to meet a long-term challenge in a transition zone? Is this a subspecies that has adapted to climate change from above and soil degradation from below, by simultaneously countering iron surpluses while increasing its reflectivity to protect its internal structures and moisture retention from heat exchange? If so, this will provide us with important insights into both the evolutionary model and the prospects of realistic bioengineering to cope with a changing planet.’
This was the climax of his talk, the moment when the audience ought to have burst into rapturous applause. Gabriel knew better than to expect it, and none was forthcoming. There was some shuffling of papers, a cough or two. He was pleased to see that the rosy-faced undergrad was looking at him with an expression of marvel on her face, almost teary in the harsh light. He looked away for fear of raising the devil in him once more, pointing instead to one of the hands raised by a PhD student. The questions were the usual humdrum of references to personal studies, opinions devoid of intellectual rigour. Gabriel answered with increasingly complex explanations, dissuading any continuation. An acne-spotted student towards the back stood up when his limp hand was finally acknowledged. His unkempt hair gave him a slightly demented appearance. Gabriel recognised him – a tutorial class on eukarycytes, he fancied – but he couldn’t dredge up a name.
‘The United Kingdom is a signatory to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity,’ the boy said. ‘It confirms national sovereignty over the biological resources within any state’s boundaries. How do you marry that principle with the acquisition of a new species from a sovereign territory in the name of this university?’
Martin, that was his name. Martin Harrier. Gabriel was pleased with himself, now remembering the eco-warrior arguments that had knocked around in the tutorial. ‘Capitalism is theft’, ‘Science the watchdogs for multinationals’. The student was a self-proclaimed disciple of Foucault. Gabriel eschewed the idea that you could subscribe to another man’s theory in toto: why elevate another person’s thoughts above one’s own? Hadn’t they farted and snored and masturbated like everyone else? Taking on the world view of someone else seemed not just criminally superficial, but somehow lazy as well, a cage rather than a platform. Harrier had annoyed Gabriel in the tutorial all the more because he was clearly bright, but avowedly welded to his emotive self.
‘Science is never about acquisition, Martin. God forbid, or we might all end up as politicians.’ A pleasing titter from the front row. What did the boy think, that the starving peasants of war-torn Sudan could give a toss about a new subspecies of shrub? ‘Science, and in this case taxonomy, is about the sharing of truth,’ he went on. ‘The fact that the truth emanates from a plant growing in the middle of untamed Africa doesn’t detract from its significance. Nor from the world’s right to know its secrets.’
Harrier looked as if he meant to respond, but Gabriel rather obviously turned away and took a last innocuous question from the other side of the lecture theatre.
Then it was over and the half-yearly obligation was fulfilled. He felt both relieved and impatient. He wanted to waste no more time and to return to his unfinished paper for the Annals of Botany immediately. A small, disparate group was holding back, hanging around the first line of seats while he packed his laptop into its bag, no doubt hoping for an opportunity to indulge their own ideas further. He tried not to make eye contact and was tempted just to wave them off, but noted the rosy-faced student pushing forward. He shuffled the last of his papers in ambivalence, knocking them into a straight-edged pile and placing them into the side pocket of his bag. As he stepped off the podium, she moved forward to block his path to the exit. Gabriel was about to put his hand out, perhaps place it firmly on her shoulder and invite her to join him as he walked back to his office, when a figure abruptly pushed between them. A short, thin man with a very dark complexion, goatee beard and white skullcap smiled at him, his arm outstretched. The young woman raised her eyebrows in surprise and took a few steps backwards. The man’s eyes sparkled with almost manic eagerness.
‘Professor Cock-Burn, may I introduce myself—’
‘It’s pronounced “Coeburn”,’ Gabriel interrupted him. ‘It’s an old Scottish name referring to a hill or stream.’ He didn’t correct the man’s assumption of his professorial status.
The small man beamed back at him, as if the correction in pronunciation had been a sincere compliment. ‘Thank you. Very good. A name that is not what it appears to be. A mark of heritage and civilisation.’ He grasped Gabriel’s hand. The skin felt like the underbelly of a lizard, cool and soft, but somehow also scaly. Gabriel wasn’t sure that he trusted the man’s tone: there was an obsequiousness in his manner that made his words seem barbed. The young woman in the tights looked ready to give up, fiddling with her cellphone while she waited at a polite distance.
‘If you’ll forgive me, Professor,’ the man proceeded, undaunted. He had moved into Gabriel’s body space, his breath somehow industrial. Like anthracite or wet concrete. ‘I am from the “untamed Africa” of which you speak. You talk about this plant, and the land of its origin, like it is a bug under a microscope. Or a distant star seen through a telescope. But are you perhaps aware, Professor, that the plant of which you speak has been used by the Dinka people of Sudan to treat conditions of the blood for centuries?’
Gabriel saw the combative spark now, the unmistakable challenge disguised by the smile and the warmth of the handshake. Some traditional healer or herbalist come to interfere in his scientific domain, casting his aspersions wide while he peddled his snake oil.
‘How interesting,’ he lied. ‘But herbalism is really a matter for social anthropology, which finds its home in the faculty of humanities. My research is a matter of pure science. Please excuse me.’ It was as cutting as he dare make it.
The man nodded genially and pressed his card into Gabriel’s hand. The aspirant professor closed his fist around the card and headed for the doorway where the young woman was about to make her exit. But up close he found that her face was a little too ruddy, as if she was suffering from an allergic reaction. Her eyes were not so much teary as rheumy. And any passion Gabriel may have harboured fled as she began to speak. A tongue stud flicked about in the lair of her mouth, and her enunciation was unclear and phlegmy. Perhaps the stud was new, but her voice was nasal, as if compensating for the presence of the foreign object. For a moment, Gabriel wondered if she was a foreigner. Her question was delivered with intensity, a plea for him to engage with her seriously. It was intolerable, this neediness, this inability to articulate a single clear sentence. He felt trapped and quickly brought the conversation to an end, escaping her intellectual whimpering with an impolite excuse.
Outside, his breath soon frosted in the air from the exertion. As he turned the corner, he spotted an ash-stained rubbish bucket and uncurled his fingers to toss the herbalist’s card away. He glanced at the bent piece of cardboard as he
thrust his opening palm towards the wastebin.
Professor Abdurahman Ismail,
Department of Botany,
Faculty of Science and Technology,
University of Khartoum, Sudan.
Oh God, Gabriel groaned.
* * *
Gabriel flopped down into Brian Hargreaves’s leather armchair. The fabric had been worn to a sheen on the arms, and the beading along the sides sprouted threads that gave it a herbaceous appearance. Hargreaves contemplated his friend and colleague while resting his double chin portentously on his fist, one eyebrow raised.
‘The intellect is dead, long live the intellect,’ Gabriel said, his words accentuated by the hiss of air escaping from the cushion as his weight dropped into the seat.
‘Surely not that bad?’ Hargreaves gave a nervous smile, his round lips lifting and pulling facial fat across his cheeks. ‘Sorry I didn’t make the lecture, I came in a bit late today.’
Gabriel felt his usual annoyance rise. Hargreaves had allowed a sharp mind to wallow in a morass of social mediocrity and physical excess. When they’d first met, the man had been half the size, a portly but focused young scientist working on gene-sequencing in spirulina mutations. The work had been groundbreaking, and Gabriel had entered into energetic conversations with him around his research. Their friendship was cemented around nucleotide disparity rather than anything more personal. It had remained that way ever since.
‘As bad as that. Good grief, Brian, there’s a parasitic dearth of intelligence out there, bloated from rational inactivity.’ Gabriel found his references inevitably drifting towards metaphors of obesity in his friend’s company, the uncomfortable issue of his weight unspoken save for these parried blows. He moved on to safer territory. ‘What news from your source at Zhejiang? What the hell are the Chinese up to?’
Hargreaves sucked at his lower lip like a lozenge, letting the flesh pop back from the bar of his teeth. ‘Apparently they’ve hit a glitch. Something to do with the SXRF microprobe. Some kind of setback, that’s all I’m told.’
‘And you believe your mysterious mole?’ Gabriel felt warm with excitement.
‘I thought you’d be pleased.’ Hargreaves had a rather pained expression, suggestive of a digestive impasse more than anything else. ‘It’s got the smell of Copenhagen all over again. A diversion. To set us off course.’
Gabriel knew what his colleague was thinking, even before he saw Hargreaves avert his eyes. ‘Brian, you know as well as I do that collaboration with the Chinese on this involves me bending over to give them a pedestal to stand on, waving their flags, and a bum to wipe their shoes on.’
Hargreaves’s lack of ambition would have them sidling up to the competition, only to be left on the back benches of scientific progress. Gabriel closed his eyes in an effort to centre himself. They sat for a while in silence, each contemplating the unspoken recriminations that academics harboured in their hearts.
‘Well, old chap,’ Hargreaves broke the silence, ‘assuming it’s not a Copenhagen switch, the information is that they’re being delayed by the X-ray fluorescence probe. That would mean they could surely only be ready for submission by the end of the year, at the soonest. That leaves the field wide open. You’ll be ready way before then at the rate you’re going. And with that, well, I imagine full professorship is a certainty.’
‘Perhaps one should be aiming higher than that …’
‘You mean with Symington retiring?’ Hargreaves’s podgy eyes narrowed. ‘Do you want the position though? God, think of the distractions, the abominable admin.’ He chewed his lip some more, making quiet popping sounds, before bringing his hands together in a parody of anguished sincerity. ‘Gabriel, old fellow, is this research … is it going to be big enough?’
Gabriel resisted the urge to curse out loud. He had to acknowledge that this was a senior associate posing the question. Not like Jane, who only two weeks previously had asked a similar question, looking up from her magazine and seeking to challenge him as if he nurtured some esoteric obsession – a passion for small scooters or a belief in a conspiracy against the Crown. She asked not to gain an answer, but to articulate her own view that his endeavours were misguided, or at least unserious when viewed against the greater travails of the globe. Her questions lacked the innocence of his mother’s bland queries over Sunday lunch: ‘But dear, can one cook with it?’ The response – ‘No, you cannot fucking cook with it’ – had caused a family rumpus that required an afternoon of filial placating as recompense. Jane was too bright to query from naivety and her questions were loaded. But she was wrong; this was how one advanced in his world. And Hargreaves’s reference to the departing Symington confirmed it. The question deserved a measured reply: was it big enough?
‘Brian, I’m telling you, it’s not Arabidopsis thaliana. It’s not some mutant that’s adapting to desertification. This is the real thing. An evolutionary prototype that explains how a germinating embryo can withstand the toxicity stress of a concentrated iron medium. It’s our best chance to understand the role of ferritins in buffering iron hyperaccumulation in the first hours of life. It may be the most significant step in decades in the research of plant homeostasis and the origins of life itself. The wonder of it is that it’s been quietly reproducing in some godforsaken corner of the world, waiting for discovery. The bioengineering angle is just a bonus to keep the bunny-huggers at bay; it’s about a new subspecies.’
‘So not so much Arabidopsis thaliana as Arabidopsis cockburn, then?’ Hargreaves smiled widely at his jest, but the fleshy folds around his mouth fell as he observed the determined look on his colleague’s face. He stifled a smirk in the back of his hand instead. ‘You’re not serious, are you?’
‘Well, why the hell not?’ Gabriel’s cheeks glowed. ‘I identified it. I ascertained its importance. So why not take the credit?’
Hargreaves chuckled. ‘God, the Chinese will be livid.’
‘Well, precisely, some Oriental displeasure will temper my own vengeful spirit. They have no vision, Brian, no sense of the bigger picture. Beavering away with X-ray fluorescence, never bothering to look up and consider a holistic view. It’s like my research assistants, diligently trimming gene sequences, but quite unable to gather the adaptation itself. That’s why I deserve this, Brian, and they don’t. Stuff them!’
Hargreaves clapped his hands together like a delighted child. Gabriel believed it all: it was his project; he was its master. He was driven by something purer than personal ambition. This was about truth and unencumbered discovery. Jane would never understand that.
‘On the subject of Symington,’ Hargreaves said, leaning back again with a loud sigh, ‘I take it you’ve forgotten the college dinner tomorrow night?’
Gabriel felt momentarily unbalanced, confused by the change of gear from his lofty idealism to the mendacity of an institutional meal with the senior staff. He hadn’t forgotten, but had planned to avoid it, perhaps blaming Mrs Thebes for failing to remind him. But now Hargreaves had raised it, he knew there could be no reprieve. Hargreaves pulled a face as if in apology for obliterating the strategy. Gabriel muttered an expletive under his breath. Administration, lecturing undergrads, funding, the whole gamut of departmental obligations reared up: it felt like a wall seeking to obstruct his path, forcing him into detours and time wastage. It all sapped at his resolve. How he loathed it.
‘Old chap,’ Hargreaves said as Gabriel extricated himself from the chair, ‘you appear to have something underneath your nose …’
Chapter 4
FOUR SEASONS HOTEL, CANARY WHARF, LONDON
The Thames looked oily and saturnine, the low-hanging clouds adding to its gloom. The surface had a grey-green slick covering it, as if stagnant, though beneath it no doubt still flowed ponderously towards the Channel. The wind had raised the swells, scalloping their edges with white foam, leaving scummy trails as the waves pushed upstream. A few crafts battled their way along, spray thrown across their battered cabins, nothing but a h
uddle of shadows inside. But most were secured to their bollards, left to the elements as their skippers escaped the waterway for familiar bar stools and warm hearths. Occasionally, a seagull, lost on the squalls, plunged and banked as it tried to make headway. Otherwise the river had been abandoned.
The hotel dining room by contrast was crisply white and warmed to a desirable ambience by unseen heaters. The windows gave guests an unrestricted view of the turbulent river without allowing any of its intemperate discomforts to impose. But the vast room was almost empty now; it was already midmorning and most patrons had completed their breakfast. The more slothful were probably still in their postcoital double beds, picking at scrambled eggs delivered by room service while they lazily watched the tumult outside.
Khalid Hussein sat relaxed at his table, wearing a loose jacket and open-necked shirt. There was something playboyish about his informality, as if he’d just slipped into whatever had been thrown over the back of his chair, and it happened to be finely tailored and extremely expensive. A gold Rolex peeked out from the edge of the coat sleeve, the other wrist also adorned with a gold interlocked chain. His moustache was clipped and the remainder of his face freshly shaved. He had dark eyes, a brown that on occasion bordered on black, making the distinction between the iris and pupil difficult to discern. It was unnerving, the way his eyes darkened the moment he turned or looked down, the light no longer direct enough to pick out the colour. Sometimes it seemed that his eyes changed even without movement, just from the tenor of his voice or in reflection of his mood.
The Saudi was sipping fresh orange juice from a champagne glass, a warm plate of eggs benedict, heaped in mounds like dual Welsh mountain peaks, awaiting his attention. The juice left some cells on the bottom edge of his moustache and he dabbed his mouth as he watched his fellow diner pick at a cold piece of toast on the other side of the table.
