‘Get on with it!’ yells one of the beer-monsters.
‘Which is just a way of saying that Sansom and the Lycee want different things for the mapping data. The Lycee’s team will soon be ready to assemble this data into a complete map of the memory circuit. If Sansom could get hold of it, they would be well on their way to an effective treament for dementia.’
I thought I was invisible. I’m at the back of the hall, barely out of the foyer. There are students all around me. But somehow it’s me James is looking at, as though the bodies in between us were just the medium that made my awkwardness all the more visible — as if he could see me because I’m hidden, and that very effort gives me away.
‘And who are they going to test their new Alzheimer’s drugs on?’
A roar goes up at the front of the hall. A shaggy black figure lopes onto the stage, and my first thought is that it is another runaway chimp, stumbling on into a benevolent limelight. Then I recognise the prank of a beta in a gorilla suit. There’s a slowly dawning familiarity to those realistic flaring nostrils: this is one of the outfits Gareth and James tried to embarrass me with, back when the world was straightforward.
‘Apes,’ James says. ‘Apes is who. Dudes, let me tell you about Sansom’s chimp model of Alzheimer’s Disease.’
The gorilla waddles over and slumps down next to the compère on the sofa. So this is what Conscience are planning. They’re going to accuse Sansom of conducting secret experiments on primates. Earlier today, the idea would have seemed ridiculous. But then I made the acquaintance of McQueen.
‘Sansom are buying in enculturated chimpanzees that have outgrown their usefulness at American primate research stations. These are chimps that have been brought up as humans to see if they can learn language and stuff. Back in the nineties, every tenure-fixated grad student was trying to teach chimps language. What no one ever considered was what would happen to these guys once they’d claimed their subject expenses. They’ve been brought up as humans, and so they now expect human company, human privileges. They’re so human it’s not true. You can’t just return them to the wild: they’d be bushmeat before sundown. So Sansom have bribed their way to getting an import licence, and they’re shipping them over here. They’ve got themselves a subject pool of little hairy human-substitutes who, conveniently, can’t make much of a noise about how they’re treated. Result: Sansom can try out various manipulations to mimic the effects of Alzheimer’s. Because most of these chimps and bonobos know sign language, you could argue that they provide a plausible model of human dementia.’
The Conscience contingent whoop it up. The scientists in the audience groan at the absurdity of it all.
‘So this is the truth behind Sansom’s research on Alzheimer’s. Chimps that have been reared like American children are being shipped over here and kept in the animal equivalent of a Victorian lunatic asylum. They’re given none of the social contact or intellectual stimulation they’ve been used to all their lives. They’re fed on a special protein drink rich in amyloid precursors and aluminium, to encourage the build-up of plaques. On their last day on earth they do a bunch of psychological tests and are then killed so the scientists can see how much damage this amyloid cocktail has actually done to their brains. The whole thing happens a few miles away at Sansom’s European headquarters. No doubt they think they can get away with this because they’re only using dumb animals. Dumb animals who chat to each other in sign language. Whose favourite TV programme is Sesame Street. As dumb as you are, in other words.’
The crowd roars. A drunken boatie climbs up onto the stage and starts wrestling with the gorilla. The two stagehands try to pull them apart. James hasn’t moved. He’s still settled on the throne, staring out over the audience towards the portrait of Bishop Walden, as though waiting for a harmless fire to burn itself out, and prove a point about the transience of small disturbances, the all-conquering power of patience.
Night rain has flushed out the market square. Streetlight buzzes and expires on a wide curve of cobblestones. The rain has stopped now, but there’s still that bitter wind. I’m hugging myself inside my military coat. The crowd disperses noisily, with nothing particular in mind. The shops keep on selling. Plasma screens in the window of a bank give details on a range of tax-efficient investments; a DNA nanoprocessor laptop above the doorway of a computer shop rotates slowly inside a glass case. I’ve only had two glasses of champagne but still the façades seem to lean and totter. Alnwick Street feels narrow and sepulchral. I can hear them up ahead, the little crowd we’re following. They’re drunk and happy. The townies have gone home, leaving the ancient city to the occupying force of term-time. My satchel is pulled tight over my shoulder. It’s as if I’m dragging something, a weight I’ve been hitched to while I slept, but if I look around there’ll be nothing there.
James hasn’t said a word.
We’re walking side by side. He slows with quaint chivalry to let me go first down a narrow bit of pavement, even though there are no cars. He’s come out without a coat. His face is red with cold. He looks heavy, bear-like. I have a wild urge to push on him, shove him as hard as I can, see if he wobbles. All that mass of meat and bone.
‘I didn’t know you were going to be speaking.’
My tone alarms me. I should get to know him better before I start nagging him. He looks up, frosts up his lungs with a gallon of night air, and contemplates the wet trail of cobblestones leading up to the abbey.
‘Last minute thing. The main speaker dropped out.’
He doesn’t look around.
‘That’s why you were giving me such a hard time this afternoon. I thought it was a bit suspicious that you were suddenly so interested in my research.’
Not just my research, I want to say. He can’t know that I watched him earlier, as he filmed the iris scanner on the third-floor landing. He’s a Conscience activist, sizing up our institute as a possible target. He demonstrates at Sansom every week, and now the Lycee is going to start getting the same attention as the biotech. At least I know now what side he’s on.
‘I thought that was the point of tutorials. To challenge the received view.’
His privileged accent. The carefully insinuated hurt.
‘You’re Conscience, aren’t you?’
The idea makes him wince. ‘I think for myself.’
‘But you agree with all that stuff.’ I brush the green ribbon on his chest, the badge of the animal rights activist. My touch is firmer on him than I meant it to be, and he smiles.
‘Of course I agree with it. It’s common sense. The lines we draw between humans and animals are entirely arbitrary. They’re based on bad, out-of-date theology. You’re a scientist. You should understand that.’
We pass a seventeenth-century estate agent’s clad in scaffolding, and James scans rows of little dream houses, seeing nothing he likes.
‘You’ve been going on demos at Sansom.’
He takes it calmly. His lips are in motion again, wrestling with a smile.
‘I’m there all the time. The guards call me Fred.’
‘Fred?’
‘The mask. Fred Flintstone. It’s pretty unnecessary. They all know who I am.’
‘I thought you might have told me.’
‘I didn’t lie to you, Dr Churcher.’
‘You didn’t tell me you were going on demos.’
‘Should I?’
‘It might have been polite to declare an interest. Given the nature of our relationship.’
‘Do we have a relationship?’
‘I’m your tutor. You’re my student. Which is pretty relevant, given the kind of things I was going to be teaching you about.’
‘Surely none of that involves hurting animals?’
I don’t give him the pleasure. ‘And given recent events at Forest Campus. The security situation. There are guidelines, James, judgements to be made. I need to know what my students are up to.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I’m not tha
t kind of activist.’
His hands make deep nests in the pockets of his boatie top. The poor boy is shivering.
‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I couldn’t tell you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if I’d told you, I couldn’t have been in your group.’
That throws me. My cheeks start to burn, and I’m sure he’s noticing. I’m too bothered by this. Whatever’s happening, it should not be happening with one of my second-year students. I can feel myself walking faster, trying to outstrip it. I need to stand my ground.
‘You could have let me decide that.’
He frowns, perhaps regretting his confession.
‘All right then. It didn’t seem relevant. We’re not interested in you lot.Those break-ins you’ve been having? Just kids. It’s Sansom we’re targeting, not this place.’
He gestures vaguely at the college buildings that dwarf us. Medieval sandstone has been worn away into deep concavities, leaving bas-reliefs of harder mortar. You see faces in the contours, accidental gargoyles. This place looks after its own, even those who would try to destroy it. I remember the leaflets I saw stacked up on the table at the back of the Priors’ Hall.
‘So what about the animals we’re supposed to be torturing at the Institute?’
He’s seen the leaflets too. He shakes his head, and it almost looks like regret.
‘We can’t control that stuff. This movement attracts idiots, like any high-profile thing. You’re not going to feel any pressure. The big guys are not going to bother with a few loony mice in a paddling pool.’
‘The big guys?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Are you a big guy?’
‘I told you. I think for myself.’
His pace slows again, for whatever invisible traffic.
‘Anyway, James, you’re going to have to get your facts right. What you said about the chimps at Sansom. There’s not an ethics committee in the Federation that would give permission for that kind of research.’
‘OK, so they just do it without permission. That’s why they’re trying to keep it quiet.’
‘And how do you know that?’
‘We’ve got evidence. Photos. Memos rescued from the shredder. A very graphic video smuggled out by an ex-member of staff.’
I run my gloved thumb along the strap of the satchel. It feels soft and sticky, and clings to the suede even in this cold.
‘And you think that’s enough basis for you to start taking action against Sansom?’
‘It’s plenty. Have you seen the railway track that goes through their land? It carries supplies for their experiments. Some of us were up there last week, after dark. They were taking a delivery. Suddenly the guards were not so tolerant. This lorry drives in with its headlights off. Our guys were watching from the trees. Saw them pulling out huge crates of tomatoes and fork-lifting them into this great big hangar thing. Our guys tried to get in for a closer look but the grunts were getting intense. It was pretty obvious the attention wasn’t welcome.’
‘Tomatoes?’
‘For the chimps. You’ve got hundreds of chimps in there. Fruit-eaters, yeah? They need feeding. Tomato salad and then brain surgery.’
‘Well, that’s one interpretation.’
He gives a showy, thrown-back laugh. ‘You can interpret all you like, it won’t change the truth about Sansom.’
I let the satchel swing out on my hip. Eclectic tastes, maybe, but Sansom surely don’t think they can get away with illegal experiments on primates. Whatever Conscience think they’ve got on the world’s third biggest biotech, I hope they’ve bothered to check their facts.
‘Sansom are going to claim that they’re the victim of a smear campaign. They’ll say all that evidence was planted by Conscience.’
‘Of course they will. But then there’s the kind of evidence you couldn’t fake. Like the fact that there’s an adult chimpanzee roaming wild in Wenderley Forest. How’s that got there, if it hasn’t escaped from Sansom’s labs? One of these days someone’s going to get a good look at this chimp they call McQueen. Then Sansom’s PR people will be busy. Unless, of course, Sansom get to him first.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’ve got men going after him with guns. They’re brutal. They have people working for them who will stop at nothing. They’ll shoot him. Do whatever it takes to dispose of the evidence.’
I feel a shiver. He flashes his knowing look. But he can’t know. Only I know what I saw on my rooftop this afternoon.
‘How could a chimp be surviving in Wenderley Forest?’
‘He’ll have a food supply. Fruit or whatever. And he’s probably living close to people. Buildings where there’s a heat source.’
The treehouses. Half of them are unoccupied. I don’t go up to the boiler housing in my own stairwell from one year to the next.
It’s possible.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘We’re going to put this video out there. This time next week, the whole world’s going to know about it. Keep the telly on.
You’ll probably see it on All Points North.’
The crowd has stopped at the kebab van at the top of Alnwick Street. I can see Gareth at the front, joking with the serving woman. James has already joined the queue and is inspecting some change in the palm of his hand.
‘James, I don’t know what this evidence is that you think you’ve got. But I know what sort of research they’re doing at Sansom. A friend of mine used to work there. They’re working on interface systems, developing biocompatible electrodes. They take incredible care when they work with animals. Do you know what sort of hoops you have to jump through to get a licence to do animal research these days? This is not some evil biotech trying to take over the world.’
‘They’re doing a lot of stuff. You don’t know what they’re doing. Anyway, my job is not to understand how Sansom’s different interests interconnect. My job is to stop them.’
We look across the river to where the Memory Centre is already dominating the skyline. This is how the Executive will celebrate the publication of the map of the Lorenzo Circuit, with a monument to the modern understanding of human memory. It will be an international research centre, a temple to neuroscience, a memorial to achievements and atrocities, a museum of forgetting. Some dismiss it as an empty gesture, the kind of overhyped public engagement shop-front that passes for a research institute these days. Others wonder what the Executive will do to fill it. But it looks impressive there on the northern bank, a bright space-park of arc-lights. Beyond it, the sky-hoardings over Pelton burn the edge of the darkness.
‘This is how I see it,’ James says. ‘Sansom want to get their hands on the mapping data. With the layout of the Lorenzo Circuit, they’ll be able to take their research to a new level. They’ll be able to develop treatments that are tailored specifically for these pathways, and test them out on their Alzheimer’s chimps. Have you any idea how much money’s going to be made out of this? Within three years they’ll have cleaned up.’
A flush of cortisol tickles the lining of my skin. What he’s saying is uncomfortably plausible. A dietary supplement could fill you with enough amyloid precursor to trigger the build-up of the plaques that cause Alzheimer’s. If that’s what they’re doing to chimps, they’re going to have cases of dementia. Maybe that explains McQueen. Too confused to find his way home, he followed his instincts: a warm boiler room, a ready source of food. In which case, the dementia that Sansom gave him might have saved him from being tracked down.
‘They won’t get those mapping data,’ I say. ‘They’re safe.’
‘Any encryption system can be broken.’
‘It’s not about encryption. Trust me. They’re as safe as any data could ever be.’
The next thing James does is order a steak sandwich from a woman who looks like she’s been handling meat too long. I think my surprise has lights on it.
‘What?’ he says, hatching the burger’
s insides with mustard.
‘I just assumed you animal rights campaigners were vegetarians.’ ‘Don’t worry. This stuff has never been anywhere near a cow.’
He hears shouts from the footbridge and turns to look. People are crowded at the far end by the arts centre, looking up at the parapet of the rooftop terrace. Someone has climbed up onto the parapet and is trying to mount a unicycle while drinks-traying a kebab in one hand. The white paper bustles, a greasy flag in the wind. The parapet must be a couple of feet wide at the most. A hundred feet below, the dug-up collapse of the riverbank sinks into black water. The prankster seems to glance down, and then has to grab the unicycle to keep it from toppling into the drop. The Churl slides by, massive and sequinned. People have died falling from here. James has wandered down to the foot of the steps, already certain of what I’m still just realising. Now he breaks into a run.
‘Go on, Gaz! Go on, my son!’
I’m running too, breath rasping at my throat. Red fleece, black woolly coalman’s hat. It’s him.
‘Jesus ... you’ve got to get him down!’
‘Don’t worry, he’s brilliant on those things. They made him secretary of the One-Wheeled Bicycle Society.’
We reach the rearguard of jeering students. James seems hardly out of breath.
‘He’s going to get killed.’
I grab at my satchel, wondering what I’ve done with my phone. He grins, retrieves an old-fashioned button-phone and starts dialling for himself. Up on the parapet, Gareth has climbed up onto the unicycle and is pedalling a couple of very quick turns, and then one foot jerks backwards and he loses it and seems to panic. The kebab swings out of his hand and flies out in an arc over the river, shedding shreds of lettuce, loops of onion and sopping meat. A couple of figures appear behind him on the terrace, apparently sent up there to talk him down. Gareth has caught himself again, seesaws his feet on the pedals, and then with a yell he topples, someone grabs the unicycle, arms reach up and drag him to safety and he’s lost behind the parapet. A gas heater topples over, and I can hear the scrape of beer tables. After a moment I see Gareth surging to his feet, raising a pale hand in triumph at the gathered crowd, beatified by his brush with death, still drunk, still happy.
A Box of Birds Page 5
