by James Meek
‘Fashion,’ said Shane.
‘Excellent,’ said Harry, who fancied he knew something about clothes.
‘I went straight back to work after my treatment.’
‘Splendid.’
‘I design luxury coats for dogs.’ Shane opened the bag and took out a handful of leather and metal. ‘I made this for your Jack Russell. It’s a present for the two of you.’
‘For my Jack Russell?’
‘I guessed the size, but if it doesn’t fit, I’ll alter it.’ He unfolded the garment on the bench between them. ‘The back piece, we call it the saddle, it’s made of kid, and the star emblems are made of brass. The side pieces are hand-stitched and it buckles on underneath with these Lycra straps.’
‘That’s incredible,’ said Harry.
‘It was the least I could do.’
‘Let me be sure I understand,’ said Harry. ‘All over the country there are dozens of dogs who’d be walking around without luxury hand-made coats if we hadn’t saved your life?’
‘All over the world.’
Harry turned the coat over in his hands, rubbing the different textures with his thumb. He heard the voices of a man and a woman, and feet on the gravel. Through the columns and vine leaves he saw Carol leading his son towards him. He sensed Matthew’s pity from thirty yards away.
His son had learned how to aggravate him as a boy by feeling sorry for him because he couldn’t believe. Matthew would look at his father with sad eyes and pity him and Harry would shout that he was happy without Jesus, and Matthew would grieve and shake his head and tell him that he couldn’t be happy if he was shouting, and Harry would ask his son how he learned to be an expert manipulator of emotions. Were his Hebrew prophets psychoanalysts in waiting, marking time till they could start charging by the hour? And Matthew pitied him more. Now that Harry was ill, the old man was stepping into the vessel of filial lamentation Matthew had been preparing for him since he was fourteen.
Harry hadn’t seen his son for the best part of a year. He put a sinister interpretation on Matthew’s patience. It seemed to him that Matthew was quietly and humbly waiting for him to be damned, and this altered Matthew’s substance in his memory to an ominous shadow. Yet the anxious man in the crumpled suit coming towards him now, the two ends of his tie at twenty-five past seven and care lines around his eyes, was his son. Harry didn’t resist when Matthew leaned down and put his arms round him. His son’s strength surprised him. Years seemed to have passed since he’d been held and felt the warmth of another body on his own. They began to speak, the four of them; introductions, medical matters, English awkwardnesses. While he talked Harry wondered why he hadn’t treated Christianity as an affliction beyond his son’s control, like a stammer or a limp. When he, Harry, was so sure that Matthew’s religion was a lie, how could he allow himself to feel enveloped in his son’s pity? He should have swamped Matthew’s delusions with compassion.
It came to his mind to tell his son that it was good to see him, but he thought: Later, I’ll work up to it. Let him earn it. ‘You look tired,’ he said.
‘I got up at six to get here,’ said Matthew. ‘What happened to your hair? Have you started your treatment?’
Harry stroked his scalp. ‘Shedding some ballast. How are my grandchildren?’ It seemed to him that the question made Matthew’s eyes narrow a fraction. How can my son be my enemy when he is still a child? he thought. They’d exchanged bitter words, and yet he was glad Matthew had come. His son was familiar. He thought again of saying to Matthew that it was good to see him. But why say it out loud, if he knew that it was true? He slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and fingered the lock of hair.
‘Lettie and the children send their love,’ said Matthew.
Shane said that it was time to go, shook everyone’s hands, thanked Harry again, wished him luck and left. Harry, Carol and Matthew watched him walk away, a stranger to all of them, yet leaving them with the sense that they’d lost the kindest and gentlest member of their party. Carol said she would leave you two to catch up.
‘Why did you tell him I had a dog?’ Harry asked her.
‘I think you should have a dog,’ said Carol. ‘You shouldn’t be alone in that big house.’
‘I have a housekeeper,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll have a nurse. Then there’ll just be the house.’
‘You should get a nice dog,’ said Carol. ‘A Jack Russell. I know one, already housetrained. I liked Shane. He wanted to give you a coat. I knew he’d be disappointed if I said you couldn’t use one.’
‘And now I have this.’ Harry held up his gift, which clinked softly.
‘He seemed to be a good man,’ said Matthew.
‘He’s alive because of Harry,’ said Carol. She shivered; she was wearing a thin blouse and it was a grey September day.
‘Go, go,’ said Harry.
‘It comes with a basket,’ said Carol over her shoulder as she walked away.
Matthew sat down next to his father.
‘You’re glad he’s still alive?’ said Harry. ‘Shane the dog couturier?’
‘Of course.’
‘According to your people, when he does die, he’s going to rot in hell for ever, damned for sodomy.’
‘Don’t talk about that now, Dad,’ said Matthew.
‘I thought it was interesting.’
‘You spend so much time talking about what other people believe when you could be asking yourself if you live a good life,’ said Matthew. ‘We don’t argue about religion all the time like atheists do. We don’t think about it. We just live.’
I gave him a chance, thought Harry. He’s so touchy. ‘I don’t want you to stop my grandchildren thinking.’ He raised his voice. His anger and the joy he’d felt on seeing his son seemed part of the same flow. It was all nostalgia now. He wanted Matthew to stay and submit to being ridiculed, and then for him to hug his father again. But the boy was proud.
‘I could come north at the weekend,’ Harry said.
‘You shouldn’t travel in your condition.’
‘The doctor didn’t say I couldn’t travel.’
‘We’ve got so much on, so many things coming up. It’s incredible how busy the children are.’
‘Give me a date.’
‘I’ll have to talk to Lettie about it.’
‘Why did you come here?’
‘You’re my father, and I care about you, in spite of everything.’
‘Magnanimous of you.’
‘On the phone you sounded frightened.’
‘I wasn’t frightened. I was drunk. Are you sure you know what you care about? You and Lettie care about getting the house. If you cared about me you’d let me see my grandchildren.’
‘That’s a question of trust.’
‘You don’t trust your father?’
‘You said you’d take Chris and Leah to the zoo and you took them to a two-hour film about the Inquisition.’
‘I didn’t know it would be realistic.’
‘You offered Peter a pound for every inconsistency he found in the Bible.’
‘If you’re going to attack me all over again for trying to help open your children’s minds you might as well go home.’
‘On my way here I thought, He can use this for love, or he can use it for leverage. Everything would be all right if you’d accept the way we are. Even if you don’t, I want you to let me look after you.’
‘Do you honestly think that after Shane dies he’s going to be tortured for an infinite amount of time because he lifts another chap’s shirt to get his kicks?’
‘That’s the path he chose,’ said Matthew. ‘I’m not saying I understand it. If it was up to me, I’d save everyone.’
‘I already saved him!’ said Harry, jingling the coat of his nonexistent dog in his son’s face. ‘I saved that man. Not God. Me!’
22
Alex flew over the nucleus of a human cell, looking up along the shafts of microtubules that vaulted towards the distant, quivering sphere en
closing the cytoplasmic ocean, turning back to see the curving ridges of the Golgi apparatus release flocks of glittering proteins, each closing in on itself, like millions of open hands curling into fists. He delved inside them and each protein revealed itself as a form on the cusp of life and chemistry, a device of exquisite intricacy and precision, and he counted the revolutions of the atoms as they twisted and aggregated, key biting key biting key. He saw it partly as a vision, as through murky water lit by shafts of sunlight, partly as biomathematical values and partly by the physical mnemonics under his fingertips. It took him great effort to get there and he could never hold it for long – for less time now, when there was so much change in the world outside his head.
On the threshold of Alex’s study, Maria watched him. He sat hunched with his back to her, a pen in his left hand, making sharp, short strokes that didn’t look like writing. With his right hand he lifted, turned and rearranged a set of objects on the desk: a child’s watering can, a toy rooster, a pair of interlocking wooden rings, an egg timer, a clockwork dolphin. Scattered in front of him, around and on top of his computer keyboard, were the brightly coloured spheres and metal rods of a molecular modelling kit.
He came to the surface, singing a transition jingle he didn’t know he sang.
Imagine for a moment
Real fruit as chewy as Fruitella
He realised Maria was in the room.
She said: ‘I’ve got an idea. We could separate and look for other partners while we’re young enough.’
Alex’s forehead creased and he smiled and leaned towards her. ‘I can see the advantages of that, and I can see three things against it,’ he said. ‘First, I’d miss you. Second –’
‘I wish you’d stop making cases when I try to talk to you,’ said Maria. ‘And I don’t like that expression. Can’t you pay attention to me without putting on that hawk face? You smile and frown at the same time.’
‘You don’t want to separate?’ said Alex.
‘You obviously do.’
‘You brought it up.’
‘I wanted to see what you thought. Now I know.’
The realisation that he’d wounded his lover there and then seemed more painful to Alex than the possibility of future regret. He agreed easily to Maria’s idea that they should stay together, living in Maria’s house in Mile End as they had for eight years, sleeping in the same bed, having sex as before, until one of them found somebody else. It would be easier that way, said Maria. They wouldn’t be lonely, and it was well known that people with partners were more attractive to others than people who were by themselves.
A month of peace and serenity went by on these terms, as if they’d solved something, and Alex lost his way, then found it, in the shoals and narrows of the cell. But when he finished the draft of his paper and sent it to his colleagues at Imperial and to Harry to see what they made of it, it seemed to him that he and Maria were worse off than before. They still had no child and no prospect of having one. The theory of togetherness, tenderness and solidarity while they waited for one of them to be struck by love’s thunderbolt was good, but what did it mean in practice? He suspected Maria wasn’t really looking. Since he and Maria had been together, he’d met women he liked, but did he want to live with them for the rest of his life? Most women he met and liked were in the possibly-love category, but how, he wondered, could he bring possibly-love home to Maria? I’ve met someone I might fall in love with. Let me have a week in France with her and if it works out I won’t come back; if it doesn’t, see you Sunday.
He wondered if Maria had given him a licence to cheat and lie, or if she’d challenged him to have the guts to leave her, and concluded she’d done neither of these things. If before he could have made friends with women without her being suspicious, any new woman friend he mentioned now would be assumed to be a candidate lover, a threat. She’d given him the illusion of freedom and by doing so clutched him closer.
He’d been unwise about money, too, he realised. Maria had told him so from the start. He spent and gave and didn’t invest. It seemed to him he was paid too much. His salary came in each month and it felt like plenty. He hadn’t thought it meant anything to her until he told her he’d lent his entire savings to his brother, a hundred and twenty thousand pounds, to pay off a gambling debt. How furious she’d been, as if he’d robbed them. She was right, Alex supposed. She was right to think about the future, to be ruthless towards brothers-of-lovers who got themselves in trouble, to protect what they had so that their children would grow up safe, well fed, knowledgeable, in light and greenness. The look in her eyes when he told her, just as the IVF was starting, that had been something: savage as an animal whose mate had just eaten her young. And yet, it seemed to Alex, it was only money. He paid Maria rent each month, and had never asked for a share of the house; she’d never offered one.
One of the trustees from the Belford Institute asked Alex to help draw up the guest list for Harry’s valedictory pre-Christmas party. When he’d almost filled his quota Alex called Ritchie and asked for Bec’s email address.
‘She’s in Africa,’ said Ritchie.
Alex thought back over what he’d said, working out if he’d been rude. He thought he must have caught Ritchie at a bad moment.
‘I want to invite her to a party in December,’ he said. ‘It’ll be mainly science people there.’
There was silence on the end of the line before Ritchie said warily that his sister returned from Tanzania on the tenth.
‘Perfect,’ said Alex.
‘Scientists have parties, do they?’ said Ritchie. ‘Yes, we do.’
After another long silence Ritchie gave up the information.
‘How is she?’ said Alex.
‘Busy.’
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Bec’s very dear to me.’
‘Have you two fallen out?’
‘As a matter of fact we’re closer than ever. She’s a special girl. She’s doing important work. I don’t want her to be …’ He didn’t say what he didn’t want her to be.
‘Should I invite her boyfriend?’
‘She hasn’t got a boyfriend. No time.’
Alex’s heart speeded up. ‘She was going out with a newspaper editor,’ he said.
‘Oh no. That’s finished, ages ago, all over, nothing to do with him any more. Didn’t work out. It’s just the vaccine for her now. Back to London for a few days, then Africa for the long haul. I doubt she’ll have time for parties. Don’t bother her. Really, Alex, best not. Listen, I’ve got to go, but let’s catch up soon, yeah?’
23
Harry had come at the boy Alex with the confident glow of the big city, an impatient, sceptical Londoner trampling through the thistly intellects of a small Scottish town on his way to the rare orchid of his nephew’s mind. He wore pink shirts with white collars, took phone calls from America in the middle of the night and brought a rich gush of aftershave, cognac and tobacco to Alex’s underheated home, with its thick stone walls and condensation on the inside of the windows. Alex’s parents had an out of tune piano in the living room that only Harry played. When he came to stay Harry would sit there in the evenings playing jazz, letting the ash from his cheroot fall on the keys, singing in a cracked voice and looking over his shoulder at Alex’s mother. Alex despised jazz. At that time there was only The Smiths for him. But sometimes the sound of Harry singing It’s The Rhythm In Me would sneak into Alex’s room from downstairs, Harry’s squat fingers hammering the low keys, and Alex wouldn’t be able to resist riding along with it, picking up his sticks and joining in.
Harry told Alex that there was no mystery science wouldn’t penetrate. Wonder in the face of natural marvels was all very well, he said, but it was no substitute for understanding. He would turn up on Saturday mornings off the sleeper from Euston and take Alex and Dougie on walks in the Grampians or along the Angus coast, lecturing them, according to what they came across, on the genetics of heather flowers, the prismatic q
uality of the rainbow and why natural selection made the hare’s coat turn white in winter. He disparaged the local churches as monuments to ignorance and, with rhetoric so loud and abrasive that sheep looked up from their grazing in alarm and moved closer together, demolished a series of silent, invisible opponents attempting to prove the existence of God. The walks ended with a search for Dougie, who would wander away by himself while Harry answered Alex’s close questions and would be found fishing for sticklebacks with his fingers, pelting rocks with rowan berries or skimming stones off the waves.
In Alex’s fifth year at the high school Harry invited him to stay with his family in London for a week. On the eve of his journey south Alex saw his uncle on TV talking jauntily about his work, about taking cells from cancer patients’ bodies, altering their genes and putting them back. He wasn’t like the scientists Alex was used to seeing on television, stiff, nervous and suspicious. Harry laughed, leaned back in his chair and silenced the interviewer with a clever riposte. He seemed to Alex to be a master of life, shaping other people’s will as lightly as he shuffled the molecules determining how long they lived. And yet when Alex sat at the supper table with Harry’s wife Jenny and his son Matthew, his uncle was tense and curt. Aunt Jenny was a massive, gloomy woman who barely spoke and never smiled, her face half-covered by long black hair interspersed with crinkled strands of white. On the first night Matthew, who was Alex’s age, wore a t-shirt with the words JESUS DIED FOR OUR SINS printed on it in fat red letters. He had a chunky Celtic cross on a thong around his neck and was trying to grow a beard. Before the meal he asked Alex if he wanted to say grace and Harry told his son sharply: ‘I told you, your cousin’s an atheist.’
‘Are you?’ Matthew asked Alex.
‘I think so,’ said Alex.
‘You must let Jesus into your life,’ said Matthew, dropping his eyes to the table and picking up a piece of bread.
‘Why should he?’ said Harry, and said to Alex: ‘Don’t pay attention to Matt, he’s been brainwashed.’