by James Meek
He turned forty as he approached the end of his research, his explanation for why Harry’s expert cells worked, which other, more practical scientists could use to lengthen lives. His colleagues, and Harry, told him that if he pulled it off it would make him famous and change medicine. Alex laughed and said that he hoped the beauty of the answer would be worth more than its use, and they thought he was being pretentious, or joking.
He’d read about Bec infecting herself to test her hypothesis, and wanted to have a woman like her beside him. He tried to understand what it was about her, in their short acquaintance, that had left such a mark, and came to the certainty he’d picked up – he had no idea how – that she had a spacious mind. Once this notion lodged in him he found himself noticing how people he met, even young people, seemed able to let a handful of ideas crowd their consciousness. They seemed glad of it, as if the aim had been to fill the cupboards and block the windows of their minds as quickly as possible with the minimum of material. Finished! Bec, he was sure, didn’t want to be finished.
In the herding of his theories to their end he summarised the architecture of the human cell and was distracted by the crisp prose of Bec’s description, in a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, of how her parasite got inside a human blood cell. It was as if his cell coasted along, serene in the microscopic cosmos, only to be struck by Bec’s haemoproteus, tearing into the membrane like a runaway asteroid and throwing it out of kilter.
20
Through the shop window, between the red and white strokes of the letters making up the words UNISEX HAIRDRESSER, Harry Comrie saw Erkin standing alone with his hands clasped in front of him and his shoulders bowed, staring at the point where the wall joined the floor. Harry pushed the door open, tripping the bell and bringing Erkin back to the there and then. The barber smiled, shook a towel and gestured Harry towards the chair.
Erkin was a dainty, short-legged man in a blue surcoat, with deep eyes and a sharply lined face that gave him the appearance of having lived through shocking events, though he had been a barber in north London all his life. His shop was a shrine to neatness. Fingerworn utensils of antique plastic and scratched stainless steel were laid out around the Barbicide like a memory game. There was a warm smell of shampooed roots and, though it was early, sheaves of hair already lay on the worn linoleum tiles under the footrest.
Erkin draped Harry in a dark cape and stood back, meeting Harry’s eyes in the mirror. It seemed to Harry that his head had been severed and laid carefully on a cloth-covered stump. An American friend had told him once that he looked like David Hume. The eighteenth century had been a time of fairness, Harry thought, when any philosopher, egg-smooth, balding or shaggy, wore a wig. Harry considered how his fleshy, thick-lipped, sixty-four-year-old face would look commemorated in marble. The trustees were too small-minded to come up with the notion of a bust by themselves. He would have to plant it.
‘I want it all off,’ he told Erkin.
Erkin took Harry’s head between his fingertips and tilted it from side to side so that the light danced on the broad bald track of his client’s scalp. Twists of white hair poked out from above Harry’s ears and, Harry supposed, ran crazily down the back of his neck, over his collar.
‘Would you like a number one, sir, or shall I shave it?’
‘Get your razor out. I’m making a fresh start.’
‘A lot of gentlemen like yourself do the same thing, sir. When you get to a certain age it looks better. I’ve seen men come in with half their hair gone and walk out with no hair at all, looking ten years younger.’ He lifted Harry’s gold-rimmed glasses off his face and placed them by the basin. He took the clipper off its hook, fitted a guard, held the clipper up and revved it. He asked Harry if he was sure.
‘Go ahead,’ said Harry. With a few strokes Erkin sliced off the white locks on either side of Harry’s head. That’s better, thought Harry, fighting the instinct to go down on his knees to rescue his fallen hairs from the dark mass below.
‘On holiday today, sir?’ said Erkin, raising his voice over the buzz of the clippers. Harry felt hairs being torn off the back of his neck. Half the morning had already gone.
‘I’m the boss,’ said Harry. ‘I go to work when I like. My job’s to think, and I’m thinking now, so I’m working. Cogito ergo laboro.’
‘I didn’t mean to offend you, sir.’
‘The fact is I had a skinful last night.’
‘Celebration, sir?’
‘There was a lot of laughing and singing.’
‘Nice to have a get-together, sir.’
‘I was alone.’
Physically alone, thought Harry. He’d told Alex about his diagnosis, and then everyone had been on the phone, his son and daughter-in-law, his eldest granddaughter, his brother, his sister-in-law. He’d been solidly drunk by the time Maureen came on the line. He couldn’t remember what he’d said to her. She hadn’t been able to talk for long. She didn’t cry, he remembered that; she was stoical. Or perhaps she’d cried for him later. He liked to think so.
Erkin swivelled the chair, kicked a catch and lowered Harry’s head back till his neck fitted into the groove of the basin. He ran hot water over Harry’s scalp, shampooed the remnant fuzz, rinsed it, wrapped Harry’s head in a towel, brought him back round and lathered him up. He took a cutthroat razor and began to shave.
‘Do you mind me asking what your line of work is, sir?’ he said.
‘I run a medical research institute. The Belford Institute. Up in St John’s Wood.’
Erkin stepped back from his work and regarded his client, foamy razor held at attention. ‘Is it Harry?’ he said.
‘That’s right.’
‘I don’t know why I didn’t recognise you.’ Erkin smiled as he went back to work. ‘You’ve been here a few times.’
‘I have. I know your name.’
‘Harry, yes, Professor. I don’t know why I forgot.’ He bumped his forehead with the side of his razor hand. ‘My memory. And you know me.’
‘Erkin.’
‘That’s right.’ He shook his head. ‘I should remember because we had a conversation about my aunt.’
‘Oesophagus, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh Professor!’ Erkin wagged the razor at Harry’s reflection in the mirror. ‘You make me look bad. You remember everything. And now I think of it, I told you I was going to make a donation to your institute, and I never did.’
‘We don’t work on the oesophagal side.’
‘No, but …’ Erkin frowned. ‘It’s all part of the what’s, the battle, isn’t it.’
‘Yes!’ said Harry. ‘Yes! Exactly!’ Under the cape he clenched his fists in excitement.
‘My aunt, she passed away. Terrible, terrible.’ Erkin drew in breath between his teeth, shook his head and gave out a pattering of tut-tuts. ‘It’s harder on the ladies when their hair falls out. And then she couldn’t swallow properly, you know? Before she got ill she used to love aubergine, roasted and mashed up with a bit of garlic and olive oil, but she couldn’t look at it in the end. The family all made their aubergine and brought it over and she’d have to say thank you and eat some. She was a kind lady, but she was on so many drugs at the end. My mother held the bowl while she throwing up and said “Oh, these doctors with their terrible medicine,” and my aunt said “It’s not the doctors, it’s your bloody aubergines!”’
Harry began to sweat.
‘I remember, you made a cure,’ said Erkin. ‘It was why I mentioned my aunt, I think. You’re a famous scientist, right?’ He laughed as if the word ‘scientist’ embarrassed him.
‘There are no famous scientists any more,’ said Harry. ‘Thirty years ago I found something out about cells and ten years later we had one of the cancers on the run. It was almost a cure. But it was just one little cancer.’
‘Careful, sir. If you wouldn’t mind keeping your head still.’
‘One measly little cancer. A few hundred cases a year. And all the big cancers st
ill laughing at us. Do you know what I mean?’
‘You want to cure all the cancers, and you only cured one.’
‘Yes,’ said Harry curtly. Erkin had grasped exactly the point he’d been trying to make, yet in the barber’s words he sounded like a failure.
‘When it’s your time, it’s your time, isn’t it,’ said Erkin. ‘It’s in God’s hands.’ Harry hissed. Erkin didn’t notice as he pressed Harry’s head forward to shave between the fold at the back of his neck. ‘I’m not much of a Muslim. I like my beer and cigarettes and I only go to the mosque on holidays. And my aunt, she used to say it was all rubbish. But in the end, you can’t hide, isn’t it. God makes his move and there’s nothing you can do.’
‘Bullshit!’ said Harry. He felt a sting in his neck.
‘Aa,’ said Erkin. He put the razor down, soaked a pad of cotton wool in alcohol and pressed it against the cut. ‘Just a nick, sir. You moved your head and when you spoke like that you startled me.’
‘You’re too fatalistic,’ said Harry mildly. He couldn’t bring the same sceptical zeal to Muslims that he could to Christians, which made him, he realised with sadness, a bigot.
Erkin rinsed and dried his shorn pate. ‘My nephew Alex understands my work better than I do,’ said Harry. ‘He’ll take up the torch. One day we’ll understand it, the whole human machine, and work out how to make an old body good as new. Don’t lose faith. There are wonders to come. I spoke to Alex yesterday and he told me such a marvellous thing about his work. He’s really found the simplicity in the heart of things.’ In his face in the mirror Harry saw the boastfulness of a child lying about the wealth of his parents.
Erkin took the cape from Harry’s shoulders and gave him a tissue. He handed Harry his glasses and held up the hand mirror for Harry to inspect the back of his head. With his glasses on Harry didn’t need to see the back. The front was enough. Whatever he asked Erkin to do to him, the barber would not contradict him, and would explain how it was a good choice, and how a lot of gentlemen did the same, and how well it looked. Now that it was done and Harry’s head was shaven he did not look clean, streamlined and younger. Nor did he look, with his bumps and veins exposed, like bust material. He looked like an old conscript, the kind of old man who gets called up for the army when a war is almost lost. He looked like a convict, an experimental subject, one of a batch: a half-processed human, ready for the last stage.
Harry was out of the chair and Erkin was at the till with his back to him. Harry squatted down, plucked one of his white curls out from the mess on the floor, slipped it in the pocket of his jacket and stood up. Erkin was looking at him. Harry had moved quickly and he wasn’t sure whether Erkin had seen what he’d done.
‘How’s business?’ he asked the barber.
‘Good,’ said Erkin suspiciously. ‘It will grow back, you know.’
21
It was after midday when Harry reached the institute. The receptionist in the lobby bulged eyes at him, picked up the phone and said into it: ‘He’s arrived,’ as if Harry wouldn’t hear. His assistant Carol was waiting for him outside the door to his office, one hand resting on the doorknob, the other free to cover her mouth when she saw him.
The room smelled of whisky. The bottle of Macallan was open on the desk where he’d left it the night before. He’d only drunk half. The letter he’d brought from the hospital was still there. He hadn’t explained to the staff why he’d locked himself in his office and begun boozing but before leaving he’d made a copy of the letter, scrawled Please close diary after March, might be late tmw and dropped it on Carol’s keyboard.
‘You could’ve rinsed the glass,’ he said.
‘We didn’t know where you were,’ said Carol. ‘You didn’t come to the ten-year survival do.’
‘Oh, him,’ said Harry.
‘Your phone was switched off. You weren’t at home this morning.’
‘I went out for breakfast. I went to the barber’s.’
‘We didn’t know. We thought we should leave everything as it was in case the police came.’
‘Has the survivor gone?’
‘He’s having lunch with everybody in meeting room one. He was disappointed not to see you at the presentation. He said he understood.’
‘You told the survivor? Is there anyone who doesn’t know? Has my tumour got more friends on Facebook than me?’
‘Oh, Harry.’
‘We need to reorganise,’ said Harry with an appearance of determination. ‘The institute’s drifting. We’ve got too many research groups. We’re supposed to be curing cancer here and all we do is screw around seeing who can create the most fucked-up mouse. I want all the PIs in here for a meeting this afternoon.’
‘Amir called,’ said Carol. ‘He said you should start your treatment tomorrow.’
‘Once my nephew’s paper comes out it’s going to shake things up. We need to be ready.’
‘Amir said the sooner you start the better. He said it was the difference between six months and eight.’
Harry ran his hand over the alien smoothness where the remnant of his hair had been, skin that hadn’t been exposed since he was a baby. His mother had kept a lock of his infant hair in an envelope, still blond after half a century. Where had it gone when she died? In with her old letters? Or gone to landfill in the clearout of the old house?
‘It smells like a distillery in here,’ he said. ‘What’s the survivor’s name?’
‘Shane.’
Downstairs, Harry stopped and listened at the door marked Meeting in Progress. He pressed his ear to the wood, heard the earnest hubbub and strained to hear his name. He went in. The room stopped talking and stared at him. It had paper plates in its hands loaded with triangular sandwiches that looked glued together with some kind of brown paste. A flotsam of grey faces bobbed with wineglasses containing orange juice and still or sparkling water. In the midst of the round-shouldered, baggy-jacketed, joke-starved crew of scientists Harry saw a stranger, tall, slim, tanned, with glossy black hair, in an elegant purple shirt; he was in his late thirties.
‘Shane, I presume,’ said Harry. He shook the survivor’s hand. Shane smiled, looking Harry in the eye. He had a gold stud in one ear and his well-shaped nails reflected the light. He had fine features and an intelligent expression. This one I don’t mind saving, thought Harry.
‘We had to press on in your absence,’ said Robert, Harry’s deputy, raising and lowering a half-eaten sandwich as if he were playing a fish with it. He ran his tongue over his teeth and frowned at Harry’s hairlessness. ‘Glad to see you. We sent out search parties.’
Two dozen medical researchers laughed in nervous sympathy and Harry’s eyes skimmed their faces. He looked at Shane curiously and took Robert by the elbow. ‘Come and see me this afternoon, Bob,’ he said. ‘I’ve had some ideas. We need to take the institute in a new direction.’
Robert pushed up his lips encouragingly. ‘That sounds great,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we wait until your first round of treatment? You only found out yesterday.’
‘I’ll decide when I have treatment.’
‘Your son’s on his way to London. He’ll be here soon. Now’s not the time to be thinking about work. You need to spend time with your family, with your friends.’
Robert said more like this and Harry stopped listening. He looked at Shane and asked if he would like to see the institute’s gardens. Shane picked up a leather sports bag and followed Harry outside.
One year Harry had chiselled money out of the trustees to make a miniature park behind the building. A scruffy lawn and hedge had been dug up and replaced by a radiating pattern of columns, trellises and arbours. He’d consulted Maureen about the plants. Vines had woven their tendrils through the interstices and, at intervals along the avenues, enamelled pots sprouted rosemary and lavender. Robert had told him it was a waste of public money.
‘You should see it in spring,’ Harry told the survivor. ‘When the vines flower it’s really quite pretty. Look.
’ He lifted a cluster of nearly ripe grapes in his hand. ‘The money we spent could have paid a researcher’s salary, but saving people isn’t enough. You have to make the world you’re saving them for worth it.’ He gave Shane a sidelong look. The survivor had a muscular feline swagger, an aura of ease and potency. Harry’s head was strewn with old hopes. What if the expert cells could do more than quench cancer? What if they made their recipients young and strong?
‘It is you, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You’re the survivor? Sometimes the survivor can’t make it and they send a relative.’
Shane smiled his white-toothed smile. ‘It’s me. Diagnosed ten years ago, treated with expert cells, complete remission, no recurrence. A miracle.’
‘I don’t care for that word.’
‘I’d be long gone otherwise.’
Harry sat down on a bench. Shane sat next to him. They watched a blackbird strike chips of gravel from the path with its beak.
‘You look in good shape,’ said Harry. ‘How old are you?’
‘Forty-one next birthday. I work out. I kind of feel I have an obligation to look after myself.’ He fidgeted with the handle of the bag. ‘I probably would anyway.’
‘Wife and kids?’
‘I live with my boyfriend.’
‘Aha!’ barked Harry.
Their eyes were caught by movement on the third floor of the institute and they watched a white-coated figure shuffle across a window, holding a flask.
‘My deputy’s mistress,’ said Harry conversationally, pointing at the window. ‘She spies on us to make sure we don’t steal the public’s lavender.’
‘They told me,’ said Shane. ‘About your diagnosis. To explain why you didn’t come.’
‘Mmm.’
‘I’m sorry. I hope they come up with something for you, like you did for me.’
‘My nephew Alex …’ Harry’s mind raced and he forgot what he was going to say. He asked Shane what line he was in.