by James Meek
The lights were green at Angel and Alex sped across into Pentonville Road, racing and dodging buses, jumping lanes, knocking against the sides of cars with his handlebar ends. He crested the hill, saw the long slope down to King’s Cross ahead of him, made a dash for the bus lane, lowered his head, added his pedalling to gravity and built up speed till the slipstream buffeted his face. Just short of the Thameslink station he was boxed in by buses and railings. He jumped off the bike, lifted it over the railings, threw it down with a crash on the far side, clambered over after it, got back on the saddle and sped along the pavement, half riding, half scootering, one foot on the pedals, one hopping off the ground.
Nine-thirty, the clock on King’s Cross station said, and the clock on the great red spire of St Pancras far above agreed. Alex kicked on past the British Library. It began to rain. Sirens shrieked around him. He dived steeply into the tunnel at Warren Street Tube, toiled up the far side and with a whoosh smashed through the membrane dividing east from west London. He passed the first white crescents of the ultra-rich. Nine-thirty-six said the clock on the Landmark Hotel. He belted past the Western Eye Hospital, jumped the lights, veered off down the Harrow Road, rocketed between a column of taxis and the vaulting concrete of the Westway, took the bridge over the tracks and entered the flow of black cabs streaming into Paddington station. He cut in front of a middle-aged couple heading for the taxi queue and they braked their luggage trolley and a suitcase slid off and span like a curling stone towards Alex’s rear wheel and he dodged it and rode between the grey and white columns into the station, past the statue of Brunel, into the roar of a west country express heading out and the smell of diesel under the far-off roof arches. His tyres glided smoothly over the beige tiles, passengers leaped for safety, coffee spilled, cries rang to the girders and Alex rode past McDonald’s, WH Smith, Ladbrokes, the West Cornwall Pasty Co. and Costa Coffee, ting-tinging his bell, round the corner, past the ticket barriers, a policeman with a raised hand and a shout that had to be obeyed, but Alex didn’t obey until he saw the yellow snout of the next Heathrow train, looked up at the clock on the far wall, stopped and got off his bike with sixteen minutes to spare.
Breathing heavily, flushed through with heat, his heart hammering, his legs tingling, he walked alongside the train, looking in through the windows and over his shoulder in case she was coming up behind him. He went the length of the train without seeing her, thinking how jealous he’d been the night before, watching her dance with other men, and how he’d felt, when she hesitated on the steps of Harry’s house before leaving, that she wanted him to give her a reason not to go. He turned round and at the far end of the train saw someone who could have been Bec hurrying to get on board. He ran back and saw her through the glass, sitting at a window seat. She saw him, gave a puzzled smile and got up. Whistles sounded and by the time Alex and Bec reached the train door it was locked and couldn’t be opened.
‘I left Maria!’ shouted Alex through the glass. Bec shook her head and pointed to her ears. She took out her phone, keyed in numbers and held the screen up to the glass. Alex dialled the number and Bec answered.
‘I left Maria,’ said Alex.
‘Not for me, I hope,’ said Bec.
‘Only for you.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that. I never promised you anything if you did. I’m not a homebreaker.’
‘It was already broken.’ He put his palm against the glass.
Bec shook her head. ‘I’ll write to you,’ she said. The train began to move and Alex got back on his bike and cycled alongside it, still holding the phone to his head and trying to speak to her.
‘Stop!’ said Bec into the phone. The train pulled out of the station and she lost sight of him.
Alex had been silenced. Bec wondered if he’d flown off the end of the platform chasing her train. How lost he’d looked with his hand against the glass. She would have opened the doors to let him in if she could. She waited for him to call again; he didn’t.
There were no texts or calls waiting for her when she landed and she sent him a message saying: I WILL write to you. A moment later he messaged back What will you write?
35
In the days after Val threatened him Ritchie would wake up moaning in the night and reach for Karin, or she would shake him out of his sleep. He found the sound of his own moan in his ears, half actual, half dreamed, worse than the nightmare that caused it. Karin made him tell her what he had dreamed. When he could remember, he gave her a toned-down version of the horrors, missing out Dan’s, Ruby’s and her dismembered corpses stacked neatly on the corner of a street next to the bins, compressed and bound with string like old newspapers. Or menace came unattached to specifics and he felt a merciless force set against him, as omnipotent as it was without form.
Worst were the nights when he dreamed sweetly or not at all, woke up purged of memories and felt the terror of exposure materialise in him; it would linger, stuck in his gullet like a box with sharp corners.
Gradually the acid of time softened the corners. As the months went by after meeting Val, the intensity of the impression faded, even though that same passage of time must, it seemed, bring the moment when he would be exposed as a cheat and a sex criminal closer; when his family, his home and his work would be taken away.
Ritchie drank. A bottle of strong red wine and three fingers of whisky was standard fare for an evening. He mixed it with ideas of how Val might die. In the first weeks after the meeting with the editor he took shy thought-steps towards murder. He wished Val did not exist; he hated Val; Val didn’t deserve life; how much better if he died! But how to kill him in such a way that Ritchie could be absolutely certain he would never be found out? It was impossible. Val was full of blood, and overcrowded England was full of witnesses. What if he could discover when Val went on holiday abroad, to some place where killers could be hired cheaply and anonymously? The Caribbean, perhaps. Without knowing whether Val ever went to the Caribbean, Ritchie tapped the words Barbados hitman into Google and pressed the return key. In the instant it took the search engine to return the results he saw he’d incriminated himself. The project of murdering another man, even one as loathsome as Val Oatman, was too complex and time-consuming. It was too much like the unattached dread of his more diffuse nightmares.
One evening at dinner Karin asked him what was wrong and he realised that he’d screwed his eyes tightly shut, bared his teeth and clenched his jaw because it’d occurred to him that he was about to meet a murderer, O’Donabháin, and he couldn’t prevent the thought coming up, so close to the surface that it almost formed the precursor of spoken words: He might do it. He owes me a favour, after he killed Dad. The grimace in front of Karin and the children was the least he could manage. He would sooner have stood up and howled at the ceiling. He would sooner still have jumped out of himself, like a man jumping away from a poisonous snake. He couldn’t bear to be that Ritchie.
From then on he restricted himself to fantasising about Val having a heart attack, or a car accident, or being on a plane that crashed. It was unlikely, but it happened. Why should it not happen to Val? One night before going to bed Ritchie climbed the stairs to his study and instead of turning on the lights lit a candle. He kneeled on the floor in the glow of the flame, clasped his hands together, turned his face upwards and whispered: Our Father
Who art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come
Thy Will be done
In Earth, as it is in Heaven
Deliver us from Evil
Deliver us from Val
For Thine is the Kingdom
The Power and the Glory
For ever and ever
Amen.
He stood up and blew out the candle. ‘Thank you,’ he added in the darkness.
Against Ritchie’s fears Ruby’s demand to be on television was a challenge he enjoyed. He forgot that Ruby had used her knowledge of the phone to force him to act against his will. In i
ts intimacy, in the opportunity to show his family the skills of reward, firmness and persuasion he wielded so effectively in Rika Films, the project consoled him. He talked the commissioning editors of the O’Donabháin project into including a title song from him. He explained to Ruby that instead of being on Teen Makeover, when she wasn’t a teen, and would be with other people, she could sing solo in a special video, a special song about her granddad, which would be on television and the Internet, and maybe even in the cinema!
He’d never loved Karin more, and she’d never been so kind to him. It was as if she knew that he was troubled, and knew not to ask why. She spent her days with the children and split her evenings with them, Ritchie and the stable-block studio. There were times when he wondered what she and the music were up to; when he thought back to the days when it had been the three of them together, the music, Karin and Ritchie. But the thought that Karin and the music might be closer to each other than either was to him was intolerable and Ritchie could not take it seriously. Karin was always around on Saturdays, when the family made trips to the coast or the forest. They would sit side by side at the top of the beach, knees drawn up, watching Dan and Ruby run, halt and whirl by the sea’s edge, Karin deep in thought, Ritchie watching her, forgetting his fears for a while.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Ritchie would ask.
Karin would look at him and smile. ‘So many things,’ she would say. And Ritchie, who’d only wanted to drink her affection, was glad that she didn’t try to tell him what those things were.
Christmas in Spain passed safely. Bec had been in a good mood, drinking a lot of wine to help, she said, resist the temptation to work. She wanted to sit with him and their mother late on the terrace, to talk about the old days. She’d spent a great deal of time sending and receiving text messages and when he asked her who was on the other end, she laughed and said she’d tell him later, but she never did. In the new year she went back to Africa.
Ritchie marked Bec’s emails from Tanzania when they came in, meaning to reply to them, but he didn’t, and they slipped down the list of the unanswered. The arrival of the emails troubled him more than the contents. The thought that his sister was in a faraway country, pure and isolated among needy Africans, was comforting, as if Bec were safely locked in a convent. Each email reminded him that she was not far away at all. As long as Bec was in Africa she was dear to him. When he thought of a returning Bec, he seemed to hear a cacophony of angry male voices yelling phrases like ‘I love my sister!’ ‘Bec is a good woman!’’My sister is one of the finest people I know!’ When he thought about Bec coming back, he knew he could never betray her, and knew she would always be too virtuous and too obscure to be betrayable. It never seemed to him that there was a difference between these two certainties; and his mind turned again to the hope that Val would die.
One morning after a night of little sleep Ritchie drove to London, blinking and squinting, his head throbbing. As he entered the southern suburbs, he heard Alex’s voice on the radio. A headline about British scientists claiming a breakthrough in the understanding of human lifespan had been read out several times in the first part of Ritchie’s journey but it was only when he heard Alex being interviewed that he realised who the principal scientist was. As far as Ritchie could understand it was related to some kind of cancer treatment. Ritchie’s spirits rose, and his head cleared a little, when he heard Alex’s clear, confident voice fill the car.
The interviewer said: ‘Now at the moment the treatment you’re talking about, and I think it’s fair to say it was a breakthrough when it came along, it only helps people suffering from one fairly rare type of cancer, doesn’t it?’
‘That’s right,’ said Alex. ‘But what makes this latest discovery exciting is the potential for a similar approach with other cancers. We don’t want to raise people’s expectations, because it’s early, but now that we’re starting to understand the chronase complex, expert cell therapy could be a great game-changer in medicine.’
‘And not just for cancer? Because your research involves some astonishing ideas about how this approach, if that’s the right word, could actually enable human beings to live longer – considerably longer?’
‘Haha!’ shouted Ritchie, and drummed his hands on the steering wheel.
‘That’s on the furthest fringe of possibility,’ said Alex. ‘We need to work one step at a time, and start by giving extra years of good health to people who are in their fifties and suffering now.’
‘Alex Comrie –’
‘It’s important to remember that our success vindicates the pioneering work of –’
‘Alex Comrie –’
‘– Harry Comrie, who discovered the properties of expert cells twenty-five years ago.’
‘Professor Alex Comrie, thank you.’
Alex was in the news. He was on TV. Val’s paper had made it the main story on the front page – SCIENTIST FINDS FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH was the headline – and Alex’s name was all over the Internet.
Ritchie was glad people like Alex existed, even if his own circumstances didn’t allow him to be as good a person as his friend, as good a person as he would like to be. Ritchie felt he, Ritchie, had the misfortune to know the reality of life, which was that people were always trying to fuck you over, and sometimes you had to fuck them back. He found it comforting to know that there were good, hard-working, self-sacrificing geniuses like Alex out there; Alex cloistered in his institute, doing good works and guarding the fire of knowledge, like an abbot in his monastery, like Bec in the convent of Africa.
If only she wouldn’t come back, thought Ritchie.
Ritchie saw the limits of Alex’s means as the price he paid for the great honour of being virtuous, and his own success as compensation for being punished with the necessity to lie and deceive. He felt a seigneurial sense of tribute in all that Alex had done since he’d drummed for him at college. Yet here was his unworldly Scottish friend, with his eggheaded jottings, being quoted for twenty-four hours around the world. I hope it won’t turn his head, thought Ritchie. He has no idea how evil men like Val are, how they only make people famous in order to destroy them later, them and their families. He remembered Alex’s partner Maria; how well Alex had done to land her! Neither had the slightest idea of the danger they were in by creeping out of obscurity.
He called Alex from his office and congratulated him.
‘I shouldn’t have hyped it like that,’ said Alex.
‘Nonsense,’ said Ritchie. ‘You’re a media natural.’
‘Where did I get that expression “game-changer”? I hyped it up for Harry’s sake,’ said Alex.
‘You worry too much,’ said Ritchie, who had no idea who Harry was.
‘Did Bec tell you about me going out there?’ said Alex.
Ritchie felt a tingling behind his ears.
‘What?’ he said.
‘I’m going to Tanzania to visit your sister. Did she tell you?’
‘With Maria?’
‘Maria and I separated three months ago.’
God.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Was it …’
‘Just …’
‘I mean … God.’
‘Just not working out.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘We’re still friends.’
‘Why are you going to Africa?’
‘Why not?’ said Alex. ‘You introduced us.’
‘What are you up to?’ said Ritchie roughly. ‘She’s bloody busy, you know.’
‘Ritchie, are you all right?’
Ritchie couldn’t speak.
‘I don’t know what you mean by “up to”,’ said Alex. He laughed uneasily. ‘She invited me.’
‘Fucking hell, Alex, I really don’t know if you should be doing this,’ said Ritchie, and ended the call. He was trembling. He switched the phone off, dropped it on his desk, picked up the pile of newspapers, jammed them into the bin and kicked the bin across the room, where it s
mashed the glass door of a cabinet holding some of his awards.
36
Alex succeeded his uncle as director of the Belford Institute, limping in on his first day with a bruised foot from his bicycle flying off the end of the platform at Paddington. In emails to Bec he told her he’d become the senior of a small group of well-paid people who held unending meetings to pass judgement on the hard work and good ideas of badly paid people.
Bec texted him: It’s called ‘management’.
When he applied for Harry’s job Alex had his uncle’s version of the institute in his head. The cancer researchers of Harry’s legends were always fighting, always on the front line – there were no other lines. There were battles, victories, advances, breakthroughs; there were arsenals and armouries, with ammunition and weapons, including silver bullets and the occasional smoking gun. There was glory, sacrifice, heroism. There was faith, belief, heresy, blasphemy, anathema, schism. There were holy grails. In his pitch to the trustees Alex spoke passionately about the Belford Institute as if its scientists were an elite group of warrior saints. But the trustees didn’t recognise the institute he talked about. Listening to Alex describe the past institute of Harry’s memory they thought Alex was describing the future institute of his brilliant plans. As far as they were concerned the place had degenerated into a random clump of incompatible research teams whose members spent more time spying on and bitching about each other than they did coming up with the kind of discoveries they wanted, the kind that would, as they told each other, make people look up from their morning coffee. They assumed Alex knew that after the triumphs of his early discoveries, Harry had become a bureaucrat, and not a good one. But Alex did not know, until he took the job, and found his first task was to chair a meeting of the Landscaping Committee.