by James Meek
‘I’m crazy too,’ Ruth assured her, laughing her squeaky laugh for credentials. ‘But you don’t want to hang out there. There are rascals about. They’d kill you for your shoes.’
Hefting a microbiology kit of field microscope, slides and powdered solutions on her back Bec trekked with the Nickells and their local guides up the trails to the cloudy mountain tops. They spent their first night in the hills in a broad green meadow sloping gently down from the trees to a fast-running river. The guides pitched the tents close together; one for themselves, one for Bec and one for Franz and Ruth.
At sunset Ruth took Bec aside. ‘I hope Franz and I won’t keep you awake with our lovemaking tonight,’ she said. ‘When he’s inside me I can’t hold back. I’m kind of loud.’
Bec looked across the meadow, which stretched for several hundred yards to the tree line. ‘It seems a shame the tents have to be pitched so close together,’ she said.
‘Rebecca, we’ve got to keep you safe,’ said Ruth.
Bec lay awake that night, unable to sleep, waiting, but she heard only insects and birds. She dozed off. At around midnight she was woken by a woman’s cry. She heard Ruth shriek ‘Holy shit!’ Bec opened her eyes and waited for more. After a minute, the darkness was ripped by a tumultuous male snore.
Franz snored intermittently through the night, falling silent long enough for Bec to believe he’d stopped and get to the threshold of sleep only for him to start up again.
‘I hope we didn’t keep you awake,’ said Ruth next morning.
‘After last night, I know you must really love him,’ said Bec.
‘It’s always tough being the single girl around a couple of lovebirds,’ said Ruth, putting her hand on Bec’s arm. ‘He’s hot, but don’t get tempted.’ She winked.
‘I’ll take cold showers,’ said Bec.
‘I think we’re going to be buddies,’ said Ruth. ‘Today we’re going to get you a shitload of blood.’
Franz behaved as if Bec didn’t exist. He treated her as permanently temporary, as if she’d always just arrived and was always just about to leave, like someone delivering a package, to whom there was no point forming the slightest attachment. He planned their programme and decided their route and he controlled Pete, the chief guide and interpreter. He led them through the list of villages and bird species he’d worked out in advance, and Ruth and Bec followed in his wake, identifying insects, taking blood samples and questioning the locals as best they could. At breakfast and supper Franz spoke to Ruth or Pete, looked down at his food and scratched himself. When Bec spoke he didn’t respond. When she asked him a question or spoke about their work he would wince and look at Ruth, who would answer for him.
‘Did you notice those strange birds they keep in the shanty town?’ said Bec one evening.
Franz widened his eyes and nodded at his wife.
‘We don’t want to hurt your feelings, honey,’ said Ruth to Bec. ‘There’s not a bird species on this planet Franz doesn’t know. We’re not trying to teach you what a plasmodium looks like.’
It seemed to Bec that whenever Franz made one of his long, late-night satellite phone calls to his son’s lawyers, parole officers or psychotherapists in the States, he would position himself in such a way that she couldn’t help overhearing everything he said, and hearing how patient he was, and how concerned about his son. Each night, she heard the same sounds from their tent, a cry of ecstasy from Ruth, followed by Franz’s snoring. One time she left her tent in the small hours, pulled out the dozen pegs fixing it to the ground and manhandled it a hundred yards away. In the morning, when she unzipped her flap and came out into the sunshine, she tripped over the guy of the Nickell tent, which had somehow followed hers in the darkness and nuzzled up against it.
‘Franz,’ said Bec at breakfast, biting off a piece of muesli bar, ‘did you notice how your tent moved in the night?’
Franz shook his head and looked at Ruth. ‘Got to stay safe, Rebecca,’ said Ruth. ‘Bet you we’re going to find that fever bird today.’
In the mountains Bec was soaked, steamed and bitten. She told herself her father had been through worse. At night she stuffed her ears with cotton wool and in the morning, when it was cool and she watched the rising sun pick its way between the tree trunks like a hunter, when the air scratched and creaked and hooted with song, she was grateful and glad to be alive. Sometimes, when the rain beat on the canvas, she remembered a far-off episode with her brother’s friend Alex, who had, it seemed, fallen for her once, then gone away.
They scaled ridges and descended into isolated valleys and jabbed prickers into the necks of scores of jungle fowl, their gaudy feathers marred by whatever avian plague afflicted them, and delved into their blood without finding anything new. Bec took blood from hundreds of Papuans and found no strange parasites living there. None of the locals reported immunity to malaria other than what they’d built up from childhood episodes. There was no trace of the Japanese base, neither in the forest nor in the memories of the hill people. Franz crossed off candidate bird species and areas on his map and Ruth ruled out this or that bloodsucker. ‘We’re closing in,’ she said.
After six weeks they took their first break from the field. Bec took Pete to the shanty town and asked the squatters where they’d come from and why they kept sick birds as pets. It seemed that most of them had chronic episodes of blurred vision. She visited the town clinic and talked to the doctor. She was trying to find the courage to ask Ruth to come with her to take samples from the squatters and their birds when Ruth told her she’d have to go back to the States for a while. Their son was up for parole violation, she said, some DUI bullshit.
‘You and Franz will have to fill in,’ she said. ‘You’re OK with bugs, right?’ She cupped Bec’s cheek in her hand and stroked it with her thumb. A tear fell from her eye. ‘So bright, so pretty.’
‘Who will I talk to without you?’ said Bec, on the brink of tears herself.
‘Oh, I know it’s going to be hard,’ said Ruth. ‘My husband’s got so much charisma and so much charm. Try to resist, yeah? For me? Whenever you’re tempted to give yourself to him, just say to yourself, “He’s Ruth’s guy, Ruth’s guy.”’
Next day Ruth drove Franz and Bec to the foot of the trail they would take into the mountains. Pete and the porters were supposed to come in another car but it broke down. Ruth embraced Bec and her husband and drove away. She’d be gone for at least a month. As soon as she was out of sight Franz turned to Bec and grinned. His eyes shone.
‘Let’s not wait for the others,’ he said. ‘What a great day for a hike.’
‘Where’s Franz?’ said Bec. ‘What have you done with his body?’
Franz laughed and began to walk up the trail. ‘You don’t know what jealousy is until you’ve seen Ruth when another female steps into the mung.’
‘I’m not another female,’ said Bec, panting as she lugged her heavy pack after him.
‘All women are rivals,’ said Franz.
They picked their way up the muddy path, studded with stones and broken up by mossy tree roots. Bec kept her anger sullenly alight, ignoring the new Franz’s cheerful comments and compliments about her work, with which he was, she learned, well acquainted. But when they stopped for lunch in the meadow where they’d camped on Bec’s first night in the hills, she told him he was the rudest man she’d ever met. He laughed and said he was glad she thought he was exceptional.
‘Why are you taking off your shirt?’ she said.
‘It’s ninety degrees plus. I need vitamin D. You should take yours off.’ The hairs on Franz’s back lay in flat waves, like barley in the wind.
‘So what are those birds in the squatter camp?’ she said, sitting cross-legged on the grass. ‘Did you know that the squatters never go to the clinic?’
‘That’s cause they’re broke.’ Franz reclined on his side, propping himself up on his elbow, his big belly, half taut, half dead weight, not quite reaching the ground. Some of his chest hairs we
re pure white. ‘Jesus, I don’t want to talk about fucking squatters. I want to hear about your malaria work. Sex among the parasites. How do the female gametocytes pick out the males they want?’
‘The females discourage the ones they don’t want,’ said Bec.
‘Keeping themselves free for Mr Right.’
‘Mr Fit.’
‘It sounds kind of uptight. I like the way the girl birds do it. They check out the guy birds, see who’s got the biggest thing, you know, and that’s who they go for.’
‘Don’t you think birds might be able to look past the size of their boyfriends’ tail feathers?’
‘You’re thinking of the cute little cock bird with the big personality, aren’t you, the cute little cock bird who’s never going to make you even a liiiiitle bit frightened. And maybe what you really want’s the big bad cock bird, the big guy who owns the lek.’
‘Birds don’t make promises to be faithful, and break them.’
‘What do you know about birds?’
‘Enough to know that’s not what we’re talking about.’ She shaded her eyes with her hand and looked up at the sky. ‘I hope Ruth helps your son out.’
‘You’re so fucking demure,’ said Franz. ‘It’s a turn-on.’ He stood up and brushed grass seeds and insects off his shorts. ‘If the system decides to take him down, it’ll take him down,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the tents up.’
Peter and the other guides wouldn’t arrive until the evening. Saying she was tired, Bec went into her tent and lay down, wondering how she might endure a month of Franz coming on to her. Before long she heard a rustling of grass outside, a shadow fell across the tent door and the zip was torn downwards. Bec propped herself up on her elbows and saw a long, girthy penis enter the orange tent-light and hang there for an instant, bobbing gently, before its owner began preparations to follow his member inside.
‘Oh,’ said Bec.
Pushing herself into a sitting position, she glanced at the two books she’d brought with her – Zelda: A Biography and Volume 2 of the World Class Parasites series (the Geohelminths). She picked up the first, raised it high above her head and whacked Franz Nickell’s squinting Cyclops with half a pound of Zelda. There was a sound such as a film extra makes when, playing a sentry, he is unexpectedly stabbed in the back, and the beaten organ withdrew.
Bec waited and when she could no longer stand the silence she went outside. Franz stood ten yards away with his back to her, up to his knees in flowering weeds, watching the sun go down over the forest. In different circumstances Bec would have taken a photograph. Franz appeared natural and humble there, naked before the sun. It was a scene of beauty, apart from a single detail.
‘Franz,’ she said, not going closer. He didn’t answer. ‘Franz,’ she repeated. ‘Are you OK? Professor Nickle?’
‘Nickell,’ he said, without turning round.
‘Professor Nickell, a leech is sucking the blood from your right buttock.’
Some weeks later, after Bec had left the Nickell project and begged a little charity money for ad hoc research in the shanty town, Ruth came by to see her. Bec had moved out of the Nickell villa and was rooming with a geologist a few streets away. Ruth was friendlier than ever. She couldn’t touch Bec enough, stroking her elbows, shoulders, waist, head. Her son was still at liberty.
‘Well done,’ said Bec.
‘Oh, we do what we can. I had to let them medicate him. That’s supposed to stop him getting messed up and self-medicating with narcotics. Everyone knows that, right? It’s drug against drug in America. Everyone knows it, and when everyone knows something, nobody does anything. So now Mom’s back in the jungle, trying to find something to help kids in Mozambique live long enough to contract marketable mood disorders. I’m sorry you left us.’
‘I am too,’ said Bec. ‘Personalities, you know.’ She wasn’t sure what Franz had told Ruth about what happened.
‘And now you’re working with the squatters,’ said Ruth.
‘Those birds they keep are sick birds of paradise,’ said Bec, joyful to have someone to tell. ‘The squatters say having them around protects them from malaria. They came from the hills where the Japanese were. I think this is it. I wish you could help me.’
Bec had the impression Ruth wasn’t listening.
‘Good luck, honey,’ said Ruth, fiddling with her car keys. ‘I gave you such a chance. I can’t believe you turned him down. I’m so in love with that man. I hate to see him disappointed.’
‘I told myself, “He’s Ruth’s guy.” There’s a rule that says you shouldn’t fool around with other women’s husbands.’
‘Are you saying there’s something wrong with me?’ said Ruth, and her voice was a little louder and higher, like a bad-tempered child’s. ‘How could you fail to break that rule? How could you resist him?’
10
The sick fowl of the shanty town, Bec discovered, were a species called von Hausemann’s bird-of-paradise. The immunity to malaria of the squatter tribe that kept them had remained secret; health workers didn’t visit much, and they didn’t lack diseases, including the chronic vision problems of the adults. Bec found the Japanese scientist’s biting fly in the camp in abundance. All she was missing was the parasite. She’d drawn up a plan to take blood samples from the squatters when she got infected.
One day her head began to ache and though it was hot and humid in town she shivered with cold. She took some paracetamol and went to bed. A lurid, feverish dream chased its tail in a night that had the weight of weeks. In the morning she peeled off the damp sheets and got up. The dizziness made it hard to stand. She drank two glasses of water, meaning to call the hospital, but the water made her feel better, and by the time she sat down at the microscope, she was left with a blocked nose and a sore throat.
She examined hundreds of fields of her blood. She found nothing non-human. That night the fever returned. She went to bed with a temperature of forty.
She woke up at dawn with her head swimming. She slipped out of bed onto the floor and crawled on her hands and knees to the part of the house she used as a lab. While she was making a blood slide her body shook with fever and she pressed her wrists against the table to keep them still. A drop of sweat ran down onto the top of her lip and she licked it off. She got the slide ready, put it on the microscope stage and passed out. When she woke up, hours had gone by. Her head had cleared and she was hungry and thirsty. She made a jug of coffee and sat down at the microscope.
On the third field, she saw that one of her red blood cells had been invaded by an alien creature. The parasite was smaller than the plasmodium that caused the local version of malaria. It looked like a species of haemoproteus, but not one she could identify.
The fever didn’t come back. Bec flew to Australia for tests and consultations with other scientists and between them they worked out that she’d been infected with an unknown species of haemoproteus; that the parasite seemed to have entered a dormant stage and become a hypnozoite. The doctors suggested drugs to flush the parasite from her system. She declined.
Bec sent details of her find out to committees and one evening she got an email with the last approval she’d been looking for. She called her mother and told her that she’d discovered a new species.
‘That’s wonderful, darling,’ said her mother. ‘What does it look like?’
‘You can’t see it with the naked eye,’ said Bec.
‘Oh.’
‘You have to have a microscope.’
‘I saw a documentary about PNG last week. They found a new kind of tree kangaroo. It was adorable. It had fruit in its paws and it was eating it, like a little boy with an apple. Perhaps you’ll find something like that.’
‘I named it after Dad,’ said Bec. ‘It’s going to be called Haemoproteus gregi.’
‘What?’
‘Haemoproteus gregi. As in Greg. As in Dad.’
‘Your father was only really interested in dogs and horses. And fish, I suppose.’
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bsp; Bec bit her lip. ‘They don’t find a new species of invasive parasite every day,’ she said.
‘You named a parasite after your father?’ said her mother. ‘How could you do such a horrible thing?’
Bec had stopped taking malaria pills, and let her wrists, ankles and neck lie bare in the evening. The mosquitoes feasted on her, and she didn’t get malaria.
When Bec came back to London, the centre wasn’t sure what to do with her. They obtained money for her, an important-sounding title and a lab of her own, but told her they couldn’t support her infecting healthy people – young children! – with one live parasite in order to ward off another. To show how effective gregi was, Bec sat in the centre’s secure, windowless insectarium and let herself be bitten and infected with the more vicious African version of malaria. It caused her nothing more than a runny nose, but she only made the director angry.
‘You’re lucky not to be in permanent quarantine,’ Maddie, the director, told Bec. ‘You have no idea what that thing’s capable of.’
‘Stopping malaria,’ said Bec.
‘Look what it’s doing to your eyes.’
‘They go a bit blurry once in a while. It’s nothing.’
Maddie told her it was ethically, politically and medically unacceptable, and Bec was obliged to take a different route, to create a vaccine out of parasites that had been carefully killed. It was this, six years later, her group was testing in Africa. It half-worked, but then so did many things.
Bec had met Val after the newspaper he edited interviewed her about her malaria work. She was flattered by the article the reporter wrote about her and her group; the journalist got it more or less right, even if he exaggerated what they might achieve and the number of lives they might save. She liked herself in the photo they took. The smiling Bec in the picture seemed like a smarter, prettier twin, the one Bec could never be as good as but who’d do her best to help her sister along.