by James Meek
Jenny looked from face to face and a whimper came from her, like an animal in pain.
Matthew clasped his hands together, bowed his head, closed his eyes and said: ‘Dear Lord, we thank you –’
‘Some wine, Alex?’ said Harry, getting up and lifting the wine bottle towards his nephew, making it clink noisily against his fork and plate.
‘– for the food and drink you have given us to eat today. Amen.’
‘Abracadabra,’ muttered Harry.
‘I will have some wine,’ said Alex.
Jenny sighed, sniffed and in a tiny squeaky voice said, ‘Oh God.’
Harry mentored Alex far into his career, through his masters, his doctorate and beyond, swallowing his feelings each time his nephew surpassed Harry’s understanding of his work. Harry thought his nephew had no politics. He thought Alex’s contemplative self, which seemed dreamy and aloof, and his enthusiasms, which came so unpredictably, made him a bad collaborator and a useless leader. But when Alex came back to London from America in his late twenties, preceded by whispers out of Johns Hopkins that post-grads had started calling him the sage of cell function, other scientists in his field sought him out and listened to what he had to say. They were mired in grant applications, slide-show presentations, meetings, panels, conferences, committees and the gnawing, competitive hedonism of London, and the appearance of a man who seemed to do nothing except think, write and teach, with occasional outbursts of quaint philosophising, was like the coming of a visionary, even before they paid attention to his theories. His Scottishness gave him a touch of otherness to which the London scientists, clumped together from big cities around the world, were susceptible, as if he had drunk some special water up there. A rumour spread that Alex had taught himself maths and cell chemistry as a child.
In the ten years following his nephew’s return, Harry had misinterpreted Alex’s reputation as power, and confused his authority over scientific theory with authority over people. Now that his diagnosis only gave him a short time to live he became preoccupied with passing his job on to his nephew. He began a campaign at the institute to be sure the trustees’ wariness of nepotism wouldn’t stop Alex being head-hunted to succeed him. He didn’t meet much resistance. The trustees agreed that Alex was the obvious candidate.
The trustees told Harry that they thought his illness was terribly unfair.
‘Not getting cancer is just as unfair,’ said Harry. ‘But nobody complains about that.’
24
Outside Whitechapel Tube station, under the striped awning of a vegetable stall, a woman in full-on niqab ran her fingers, sheathed for modesty in black gauntlets, over the puckered skin of a bitter gourd. The stallholder watched. He’d zipped his leather jacket to the neck and pushed his hands deep into his pockets, pawing the ground with frozen feet. The awning flapped in the wind and the air ambulance clattered overhead towards the roof of the Royal London. The stallholder didn’t suppose the woman would buy his vegetables. She was a gourd-stroker, a melon-tapper; she wanted to draw his attention to her fingers, knowing that the more she hid her skin, the more it turned him on.
His eye wandered to the Tube entrance, where a little dog appeared, dressed like a gladiator. Close to his ear a ripped young preacher of the Qur’anic word in a black army-surplus jacket, combat trousers and laced boots, fronting up in his first full beard, kept calling out, ‘No running away from death!’ A cluster of teenage seminarians loitered by the edge of the pavement, thin, nervy and big-eyed like deer, in ankle-length tunics, parkas and white filigree skullcaps. The preacher, who’d positioned himself so that anyone trying to cross Whitechapel Road to get to the hospital would have to pass him, was handing out one-page tracts printed on the madrasah inkjet.
‘No running away from death!’ he yelled. An old kafir slaphead in a mohair coat with a fleshy, pear-shaped face strode importantly towards him. The preacher looked down at the animal the kafir had on a lead, a small white and brown dog, dressed in a studded leather jacket.
‘I am not running away,’ said the kafir, who had stepped to within six inches of his face while the preacher was distracted by the dog. ‘D’you think I’d set foot in that charnel house if I was afraid of death?’ He nodded at the grimy yellow brick of the hospital, and set off towards it.
‘Listen to what we’ve got to say, then, bruv!’ called the preacher, thinking how boldly the kafir had come to him, and how forlorn he looked now from behind, walking alone with his dog trotting all pimped out beside him.
The preacher turned back to the crowd pouring out of the mouth of the Tube. ‘No running away from death!’ he shouted, and a tall kafir looked intensely at him and took one of his tracts as he passed. In his eyes the preacher saw something of the old slaphead who’d just gone by. Were they all beginning to look the same? ‘Lot of distressed kafirs today,’ he said, and the seminarians giggled, repeated the word ‘distressed’ and danced on and off the edge of the pavement.
Alex folded the sheet of paper the preacher had given him, crossed the road, passed through the portico of the hospital and asked at reception for Harry, who’d been due for an appointment that morning. They said they couldn’t help: patient confidentiality.
Alex looked around the almost empty waiting room and went through the swing doors on the far side to a small public garden with a bench, a handful of scrubby trees and a bronze statue on a high plinth. The garden was overlooked by brown-brick hospital buildings covered in netting. He was clumsy and half-blind with anger.
Deep in a cranny in the human cell, Alex’s Swiss collaborators had discovered a set of enzymes whose purpose he had, after a decade of work, understood: they were time counters, measuring the speed of change on the microscopic level. In the paper Nature was about to publish he called it the chronase complex. The reason Harry’s expert cells worked, Alex found, wasn’t that they sensed the different appearance of cancer cells; they spotted that cancer cells were working at the wrong speed, and marked them for death. It opened up new worlds for medicine, but it was the intricacy of the chemical mechanism that delighted Alex, and the notion that every human being contained sixty trillion clocks, counting units of time too small for any man-made machine to measure. He ended the paper by speculating that the system wasn’t necessarily reset to zero at conception; that the count might have continued, unbroken, from the moment evolution set it in motion, a billion or two years ago. This was already going out on a limb. Now Harry, who’d seen an early draft, was trying to make him go further. It seemed to him that Harry had violated his inner world.
Maria told Alex he spent too much time in that world. He had no ordinary adulthood, she said; he only came out of himself as a child, distracted by a trivial novelty, some bright colour or pattern or catchy tune, or as a worried old man, shaken to his heart by an emotion that seemed to him like the end of the world – love, anger, jealousy, the longing for an heir. ‘I don’t know who you’ll shack up with after me,’ she said, ‘but if she wants your attention I’d advise her to have a kazoo and a shotgun handy.’
‘It’s work,’ said Alex. ‘I’m exploring. I’m paid for my mind to be elsewhere.’
Alex sat down on the bench and unfolded the piece of paper the preacher had given him. A man doesn’t die of diabetes, he read, or from drowning; he dies because the lifespan allocated to him by Allah has come to an end. The tract quoted the Qur’an: When their time (Ajal) comes they will not be an hour late or an hour early … Wherever you may be, death will find you, even if you are in fortified towers.
Alex looked up. A young man in a satin-effect bomber jacket was squatting down under the trees, trying to use the flame of a lighter to burn off loose threads wisping out from the hem of his jeans, but the gas wouldn’t catch. He straightened up and walked over to the plinth, asking if he could borrow the lighter of someone Alex couldn’t see. A small dog yapped and a Jack Russell dressed like a Roman soldier came out from behind the plinth and skipped towards Alex.
‘Gerasim!’
shouted a voice, and Harry appeared, a lit cigar and a lead in one hand, a lighter in the other. He gave the lighter to the young man and the garden filled with the smell of cigar smoke and burning cotton. The dog trotted towards Harry, who put the cigar between his lips and held the lead out to his nephew.
‘Put the lead on him, will you, Alex? I can’t bend down.’ He looked around as if he were seeing his surroundings for the first time. ‘They sent me to the wrong hospital. I should be in Barts.’ He’d lost weight.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ said Alex.
‘It’s not the smoking that’s habit-forming, it’s the going into hospitals. Once you start you can’t stop.’
‘I got a phone call this morning,’ said Alex.
‘Look at this,’ said Harry. He led Alex to the plinth and showed him a bronze relief. ‘There’s Queen Alexandra,’ he said, pointing to the image of a corseted, bonneted woman with her hands in a muff, bending over a patient. ‘Do you know what that is?’ He tapped his finger against the representation of a barrel-shaped object with telescopic tubes projecting from it. Edwardian nurses were applying the ends of the tubes to patients’ heads. ‘That’s a Finsen lamp. They used it to treat lupus. Alexandra gave them one in 1900, first in Britain. This Finsen, you know, he got a Nobel prize for that, and he was only forty-two. Not much older than you. You look peeved. What were you saying about a phone call?’
‘I got a phone call this morning from the editor of Nature.’
‘He’s a friend of mine.’
‘He said you told him I was being coy. That I was hiding the meaning of my paper, that I didn’t want to spell it out.’
‘The Columbus of the human cell,’ said Harry. ‘He set out to find India, and he discovered a new world. But he still insisted it was India.’
‘He talked as if I was trying to cheat him out of a scoop. He said you told him I’d discovered a way to stop ageing and was too embarrassed to say so. I wish you hadn’t done that. I wrote what I meant to write and I didn’t show it to you so you could go behind my back to get it changed.’
‘Your paper explains why cells die. People are made of cells. Ergo, you explain why people get old and die.’
‘I do no such thing.’
Fear glittered in Harry’s eyes. ‘You’re not making the connection between what you’ve discovered and extending human lifespan. It’s all there! You’ve written it! You’re not joining the dots.’
‘I’m not trying to extend human lifespan,’ said Alex. ‘It’s long enough already.’
‘Mine isn’t,’ said Harry.
‘I want to understand how it all works,’ said Alex. ‘That was what you always told me I should do.’
Harry pointed at his midriff, where his tumour lay. ‘I’m sick of understanding,’ he said. ‘It’s time to interfere.’
‘There was never going to be anything in my work that would help your condition, not until they’ve slogged away in the lab for another ten years.’
‘What’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to heal the sick? Why shouldn’t we live to be two hundred?’
‘Our lives can’t be long enough to make us happy,’ said Alex. ‘We can only live for ever by replacing ourselves.’
‘Can we all replace ourselves?’
Alex’s cheeks burned. ‘I’m working on it,’ he said.
‘You told me you’d found the key to immortality.’
‘I got carried away. I said I’d seen the key to immortality, not found it.’
‘Even a weasel would have trouble getting through that semantic hole. You thought you’d say something nice to me because I told you I was about to kick the bucket. You thought I’d snuff it before I read your bloody paper.’ Harry smiled a sugary smile and cocked his head. ‘Why don’t you add a final phrase to your paper, just a signpost: “… and has potential to delay or suspend human ageing”. Isn’t that where your findings take you?’
‘Maybe, if the whole planet worked on nothing else for a generation.’
‘You act as if fame doesn’t matter to you, but I know you’re proud,’ said Harry.
‘Don’t you ever stop manoeuvring?’ said Alex.
‘I can’t help it,’ said Harry. ‘The need to be strong, to want advantage and fame, these are natural instincts. Men are born with them. They make men men. That’s how they know they belong in the world.’
‘I’m not like you.’
‘I’m only thinking out loud,’ said Harry mildly. ‘Whatever happens, you still have your mind. As for the human instincts, you either have them or you don’t. I’d always thought you wanted to be in the great rhythm of things and not be a man set apart. It’s up to you. But why not take the fame? Why not be a king?’
Gerasim barked, a high, piercing yelp, and Harry shushed him.
‘He always wants to be the centre of attention,’ said Harry. ‘Come on, a last favour. “And has potential to delay or suspend human ageing.”’
‘If Nature publishes that the headlines will say “Scientists find fountain of youth.” And I haven’t found it, and I don’t want to live forever.’
‘Forever is a long time to draw a pension,’ said Harry, tugging on Gerasim’s lead. ‘But I’m not even sixty-five. I’m too young to die.’
25
That night in a village in the forest south of Iringa, half a day’s walk from asphalt roads, the three-year-old son of Batini, Bec’s housekeeper in Tanzania, was ill. Huru lay on a blanket on a wood and reed bedstead, panting and shaking and making a sound like a bird. His skin was clammy and hot to the touch and his eyes were glassy. Batini wasn’t there; she was far away with Bec on the other side of the country.
Huru’s father had left Batini in the city soon after the boy was born and gone back to his home village, taking their baby son with him. He married another woman. Batini sent money and visited her son when she could, knowing the stepmother, Eshe, was wary of Huru. Eshe had children of her own. She wasn’t wicked, Batini told Bec, just an ignorant country woman who believed Huru was cursed with coldness by the demons of the city. Huru’s father took the money Batini sent for the boy and spent it on drink and bar girls when he was supposed to be looking for work in Mbeya.
‘Why doesn’t your ex let Huru stay with you?’ asked Bec when Batini first told her the story.
‘He would rather have his son hungry in his house than well fed with me,’ said Batini. ‘His grandmother Akila, my former husband’s mother, loves Huru. She helps him.’
The village wasn’t in Bec’s original group of vaccine trial locations but it was close to others that were and she added it to the list. She’d gone there six months earlier with Batini and the vaccination team and met her housekeeper’s son. Huru didn’t cry when the needle pricked him. A momentary expression of betrayal appeared on his face and he squeezed his mother’s thumb. Bec met the stepmother. Eshe turned out to be a petite, pretty young woman, barely twenty-one, with two small children of her own to look after besides Huru. With Bec, she was smiling and obsequious; with Batini she was defensive.
‘The vaccine won’t protect the children completely,’ Bec told Eshe through Batini, who translated. ‘They must sleep under nets and you must keep treating the nets.’
The village had no mobile signal. The nearest coverage was on a ridge a couple of hours’ walk along the forest road. After Huru fell ill the family didn’t contact Batini until his convulsions were so severe that his grandmother took him from the traditional healer and carried him on foot to the nearest clinic. Batini got the call in the middle of the night when Akila had carried him a third of the way and the first bar appeared on the phone she’d borrowed. Bec, who was preparing to fly to London, was woken at two in the morning by her housekeeper wailing. Bec roused one of the drivers and she and Batini set off for the clinic together.
It was a seven-hour drive. The women talked in the darkness, bending their heads towards each other to be heard over the roar of the car on the rough blacktop.
In her
messages Akila told Batini that Huru’s father was away in the north. Huru had degedege, Akila texted, not malaria, but the healer hadn’t made him better, so she’d taken him to the clinic.
‘She says it is degedege, not malaria,’ said Batini to Bec in the car, gesturing vaguely with the phone. ‘They took him to the healer?’ said Bec. ‘Yes, but he did not get better.’
‘The healer burned elephant dung, that sort of thing? Herbs?’
‘I do not know.’ Batini sniffed and leaned her temple against the window. ‘Is degedege and malaria the same disease?’
Bec didn’t reply, and Batini looked at her and said: ‘Is degedege malaria?’
‘Yes,’ said Bec.
Batini wrapped her arms around herself with a soft whimper and folded herself in two. Bec put her hand on her housekeeper’s back.
‘Akila did the right thing, taking him to the clinic,’ she said.
‘It is too far,’ said Batini, her face muffled in her lap.
Later Bec fell asleep against Batini, her cheek on her ribs, and dreamed that she was carrying a boy through a forest at night. The moon lit her way, making the potholes and loose stones on the track stand out. Lightning flickered on the horizon and the bird sound coming from the child’s mouth became fainter, till she could hardly hear it over the slap of her flip-flops on the dirt. In her dream Bec panicked, dipped her hand in a stream and tried to make the boy suck the moist tips of her fingers. He wouldn’t suck and she moistened his dry, sticky lips. He moved his head and began to cough and open his mouth and Bec saw a beak emerging from his throat and after it the glistening eyes, the head and neck of a heron. She woke up with her heart hammering.
It was day. The sun wasn’t long up and the soft gold light on farmers’ solid concrete walls and tin roofs and banana trees made it impossible for Bec to imagine that anyone who’d been alive in the darkness when she fell asleep could have died since.
She congratulated the driver for staying awake and he said that it was nothing and that they were nearly at the clinic. There was a strange high-pitched humming. Bec looked around and saw that it came from Batini, who’d hunched herself up in the corner, her face hidden in her clothes. Bec touched her shoulder and Batini lifted her head and looked at her. Her mouth was open, her face wet, and a high, steady moan came from it. She spoke some words in Swahili and beat her thigh with the phone. She threw the phone onto the floor of the car and screamed and twisted violently from side to side, banging the back of the driver’s seat with her fists and trying to tear the tough cotton of her dress with her hands and teeth.