by James Meek
Alex’s cousin Matthew, Bec knew, didn’t believe in evolution. He didn’t believe humans and apes were descended from a common ancestor. He thought God had made the world a few thousand years ago. Bec wondered what Matthew would say if she told him that humans and malaria parasites had a common ancestor millions of generations back. That the cousin cells had gone their separate ways, some to be animals, some to be plants, some to be moulds and slime and parasites. ‘You just go ahead and evolve,’ said the malaria parasite ancestor to Bec’s ancestor. ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’ But the parasite had been lazy. It’d gone to some red algae and said: ‘I like your genes. Can I have them? Save me all that evolving.’ And the red algae said: ‘OK.’ Bec and the parasites were alienated now. Not really kin. It was her species against theirs.
Bec didn’t like it when Alex told her he’d been asked to make a TV documentary about the genetics of ageing, and that he wanted to do it. What about his work, she asked him? Was he going to drop it, when he’d gone so far, and there were still so many pathways to discover? If he had to give up his job as director, they’d have to leave the house; where would they live?
‘I won’t have to give up the job,’ he said. ‘The trustees are keen. They think it’ll be good PR for the institute. They’ll give me three months’ unpaid leave.’
‘Then you won’t be a scientist, you’ll be someone who talks about science,’ said Bec. ‘They already have people for that. It’s as if people think the highest form of anything in this country’s not doing it, it’s going on television and talking about doing it.’
Next day Alex told her that he’d cancelled the project. She was right, he said. It was a distraction, when there was so much work to do.
Now that Alex had done what Bec told him she wanted, she hated herself. Why, she wondered, had she stopped him? Who was she to bully him out of following his desires? It wasn’t as if he would be giving his research up. It hadn’t occurred to her that if she asked him to change his mind about something so important he would do it. The realisation that he would do such a thing for her, so lightly and quickly and with such sincerity, made her want to reward him. She told Alex she was sorry.
‘I was jealous,’ she said.
‘You convinced me,’ said Alex. ‘What you said made sense.’
‘It didn’t. Really it didn’t. Go back and tell them you want to do it. I’d like to see your mug in TV land.’
So Alex went back and looked forward to his film. Bec thought her envy was not about her being office-and lab-bound while he was free; it was envy in advance, of her being pregnant and then a mother with a baby to look after while Alex was less tethered. Her anger towards him for turning his back on his work for the sake of television was anger in advance at her own turning away from the defence of the malarial lands for her selfish, childbearing purposes.
Maddie asked to see her. They had lunch in an Italian place with a bowl of enormous pink meringues in the window and heavy white furniture moulded as single pieces of plastic. Tiny waitresses with porcelain faces served them precise salads of small, brightly coloured elements, like boxes of watercolours.
Maddie began talking to Bec about the fate of her vaccine, now that it had left the realms of research and was in the hands of manufacturers, bureaucrats and politicians. In the director’s severe cheekbones, the swing of her bulbous terracotta earrings and the dark shadows of her eyes, which would avoid, avoid, avoid, then suddenly meet hers, Bec felt a great care and purpose. Feet, Maddie said, were being dragged. Heads needed to be knocked together, but nobody wanted to stick their neck out. There was talk of an ambassador, a charismatic, eloquent, knowledgeable figure who could be the go-between to roll the vaccine out in Africa.
‘Your name’s been mentioned,’ said Maddie.
‘Is it because I haven’t come up with a new line of research?’
Maddie put down her cutlery and lifted one corner of her mouth by a couple of millimetres. ‘You make it sound as if I’m suggesting a punishment. You’re not fastidious about power, are you?’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Bec.
Maddie began telling a story of the future in which Bec was the main character. She was flying from city to city, from meeting to meeting. She was making speeches; she was bringing people together. She was the one who was taking the philanthropists inside the huts of the malaria victims, and taking the malaria survivors to the counsels of the wise and coaching them into telling their story. It was Bec who was bringing the scientists together with the politicians, the politicians with the vaccine makers, the African bureaucrats with the European bureaucrats. And all the while, as she was enduring the cocktail parties, the dinners, the small talk, the tedious glamour of fundraisers in Hollywood one night, Hong Kong the next, she was learning how power works, how deals are done, how countries talk to each other, the body language and cryptic signs of the international healthocracy.
Bec tried to think what Maddie had published since she became director. There wasn’t much. She had a grown-up daughter and an ex-husband who had taken pride in moving for her career, then become bitter about it.
‘Women in London are good at frightening themselves into being pragmatic,’ said Maddie. ‘It becomes all or nothing. Research or admin. Responsibility or freedom. Work or motherhood.’
‘Why do you mention motherhood?’
‘You can switch pages on your screen when I come to your office,’ said the director. ‘But down the side I can see the last half dozen pages you’ve been reading.’
Bec blushed. ‘I have been distracted,’ she said.
She began to think that perhaps she could have all she wanted. Still, by November, nine months after she’d come off the pill, she wasn’t getting pregnant.
Harry had been of that generation that reckoned one bathroom in a house was enough. One dark frosty morning Bec stood leaning against the wall in her dressing gown, hands behind her back and one bare foot pressed against the cool white plaster, waiting for Alex to finish in the shower. She heard the water lashing the enamel and Alex whistling monotonously and cheerfully. She tried to work out, from the splashes, which part of his body he was working on, and how long it would be before he finished. It seemed to her that he was washing his whole body three times, and still he whistled.
She pushed the door open and stood on the threshold with her arms folded. Alex looked round from behind the shower screen, grinned and went back to washing, as if he thought she’d come to watch.
‘Why are you whistling the same four notes over and over again?’ she shouted.
Alex switched off the water and asked her to repeat herself. ‘It’s Philip Glass,’ he said. ‘Akhnaten. That’s how he writes.’ He stood there naked with the water pouring off him, clapped his hands together rhythmically, pedagogically, and began singing the same four rising notes. La la la la, La la la la, La la la la, La la la la —
‘I want to see the test results from when you were trying to have a baby with Maria,’ said Bec.
Alex stopped clapping and singing, stepped out of the shower and took a towel, his shoulders and head slightly hunched, as if she’d struck him and he was bracing himself for her to do it again.
‘They couldn’t find anything wrong,’ he said, tucking the towel in around his waist and looking at her bravely.
‘I know, but all the same.’
57
Bec liked having Dougie around. He was a reminder of the early months in the house when they’d lived a less encumbered life. Since he’d tried to kiss her, he’d become a quieter presence. He found a job at the local sorting office and paid Alex two hundred pounds a month in rent, which Bec thought it mean of Alex to accept. He’d go out drinking several evenings a week; he didn’t eat with them often. He took on the weeding of the garden and the skimming of the pond. At weekends he would visit one of his daughters, who lived near London, or so Bec thought, till she caught him at five one Saturday morning leaving the house with a backpack and a
fishing rod. He sometimes took a bus into the country, he told her. He liked to fish.
‘My Dad used to go fishing in the stream at the bottom of our garden,’ said Bec. ‘But there was a heron that took all the fish.’
She asked Dougie whether he’d ever taken Alex fishing and he said it had never occurred to him. He hadn’t thought Alex would like roughing it overnight in a field. Bec told him to try and a few weeks later she was woken up while it was still dark by Alex, fully dressed with a small rucksack on his back, kissing her goodbye.
Alex and Dougie took a bus north into a county that Alex thought had long since been swallowed up by London but which turned out to have hedge-lined lanes, woods and streams in the spaces left between motorways and commuter bungalows. They changed buses and got out in a coldly charming village and walked for half an hour down a lane, along the edge of a field, over a fence, through nettles and hogweed to a meadow by a deep green stream. A slow current engraved an endless curl on the surface under a screen of willow branches.
Dougie asked Alex where his rod was and Alex said he didn’t have one and it put Dougie out.
‘I asked you to come fishing, not to come talking,’ he said.
‘I thought you were going to teach me.’
‘Aye, that’d be a novelty, me teaching you.’
Alex put up the tent and stowed their gear inside while Dougie boiled water from the stream on a small gas cooker and made tea. Dougie put his rod together, baited his line, cast it and took up his station on a tiny folding stool by the water’s edge.
‘What now?’ said Alex.
Dougie shook his head. Alex put his hands in his pockets. Dougie hunched on the stool, not moving. Alex went into the tent with a book and read thirty pages. He looked out of the tent. His brother was in exactly the same position.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ Alex said. Dougie looked at him and nodded. Alex walked upstream. Wind stirred the branches of the trees and the dried leaves crept round his feet like insects.
There was a splash behind him. Dougie was lifting a live thing out of the water. Alex went back and asked if he could help. The fish was about the length of his hand, thrashing like an escapologist trying to free itself from a silver sack. Dougie reached out with his left hand, took the fish off the hook and threw it into the water. Alex asked what it was.
‘Dace,’ said Dougie. He sat down, rebaited the hook, cast it and settled again, climbing back into silence and stillness as if he were climbing back into bed.
‘I wonder if it’ll live,’ said Alex.
‘Fishing’s no really about the fish,’ said Dougie. ‘It’s about quietness and knowing how to wait.’
Alex didn’t say anything for half an hour. He sat on the grass next to Dougie, with the bait and tackle box between them, trying to be patient, trying to lose himself in the circles on the water and the bubbles in the eddies or to follow the floating leaves describing the swirl of the current beneath the willow. But his mind churned. He asked Dougie about his children and when Dougie said that they were fine Alex told him that he and Bec were trying for one and Dougie said: ‘Good for you.’
‘It’s not happening,’ said Alex.
‘Patience,’ said Dougie. ‘It hasn’t been long.’
‘I tried with Maria, and now Bec. It doesn’t look good.’
‘Patience.’
‘You’ve never had any trouble.’
‘You think two wee daughters at opposite ends of the country’s no trouble? I never even wanted kids.’
‘That doesn’t make me feel better.’
‘It was no wearing a condom that did it for me.’
‘You think I forgot to take the lens cap off?’
‘I’m saying I was totally irresponsible. Being that thoughtless is a knack, buddy boy. How come I slept with those women if I didn’t like them? I gave in to myself. It’s no like that with you and Bec. You’re in love with her and she loves you. She’s one in a million. Remember, there’s options.’
Alex did think he was in love with Bec, and yet it still seemed to him that the word ‘love’ was like a flat heavy stone that people hauled over disarray to keep it hidden in the dark.
‘What options?’ he said.
‘You’re the scientists. I don’t know. IVF again. Adoption. The old turkey baster.’
‘No,’ said Alex.
‘How d’you mean, no?’
Alex stared into the opaque water. ‘I think it’s me,’ he said. ‘Maria and Bec, it’s too much of a coincidence.’
‘Patience.’
‘I don’t want somebody else to father my children, I don’t want to adopt somebody else’s children, I don’t want Bec to have her eggs harvested and frozen and be fertilised in a dish. I want to know that me and her belong in nature.’
Dougie looked him up and down. ‘Nature?’ he said. ‘You?’
‘The chain of time reaching back to the first things,’ said Alex doggedly.
‘Too late for nature, buddy boy,’ said Dougie. ‘Where would you start? Give up your clothes and shoes, your house, your books, the shops, then you can start talking about the natural way. Making sick people better, or making people, what’s the difference? What’s natural in medicine? What’s natural in science? What’s natural in anything you do? You can’t even catch a fish.’
‘What I do in science is try to understand,’ said Alex. ‘If other people want to use that for medicine, it’s up to them.’
‘You gave Harry a dose before he went.’
‘Oh well, that was Harry,’ muttered Alex.
‘I don’t get you, brother.’
‘It’s not about fairness. It’s the way the universe is set up. Every generation there’s a sorting out, and there are those who get picked to go forward, and those who don’t get picked. And if I’m not picked, fine. I accept it. The universe can go on without me.’
Dougie bent forward on the stool. For a moment Alex thought he was going to topple into the water. He looked at Alex, blinded by tears of laughter. ‘Aha. Ahahaha. I get it now. There was me thinking I had a chip on my shoulder, and it turns out it’s just a bit of fluff compared to yours. Pride!’
He moved his fishing rod gently from side to side. In the water the line hardly stirred, as if it had caught on something. ‘If you sit around all day waiting for evolution to make you a bicycle, you’ll end up walking. It’s no just you now. You haven’t said to Bec what you’ve just said to me?’
Alex shook his head.
‘That’s good. Don’t. Less thinking and more making love to your beautiful girlfriend. Why not marry her?’
Alex bent his head quickly, frowned and tightened his mouth. ‘I’d stay with her whatever happens,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t stand in her way if she wanted children I couldn’t give her.’
‘I shouldn’t be giving you advice,’ said Dougie. ‘Don’t pay attention to anything I say. Look how far you’ve got and look at me.’
‘That’s not the way it is. You have a few setbacks and you make a fake failure personality for yourself.’
‘The personality came before the failure. It goes way back. You know what happened when Harry tried to help about that cunt Bridgeman giving me a hard time at school.’
‘Bridgie?’
‘Aye, Bridgie.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘You were off on that school trip to Paris. Bridgie was getting money off us and if I didn’t cough up he’d twist my arm behind my back and it hurt like fuck. Harry finds out about it and the next thing is I come home and there’s Bridgie sitting at the kitchen table, our kitchen table, trying not to laugh. Harry’s set up a peace conference for us. He’s made flags for us, cards with our names on, and he gives us this talk about conflict resolution, and starts quoting Noam Chomsky.’
‘And you were how old?’
‘Eleven. So there’s Uncle Harry, he’s done all this, he’s set up a peace conference, all the trimmings, little flasks of water on the table, gives us an
agenda, and we have to go through it, make an agreement, then make a joint statement and shake hands while he takes a picture of us. He was making this huge effort and trying to do the right thing for me and stick to his ideals about humanity, and all I knew was my own uncle had brought my worst enemy into my own house. I threw a glass of water in Bridgie’s face and went and hid in my room. I wouldn’t come out till he’d gone.’
Dougie’s rod bent. An underwater force was pulling on the line and Dougie pulled sideways. The line quivered. Dougie fought, tried to play it, stood up, lifted the rod sharply and turned the reel. The line snapped and rippled free in the air. Alex thought of one of Bec’s long hairs that he’d found on his jacket when he was walking through a faraway town and how he’d lifted it off and held it up and watched it drift in the wind, caught in the sun, then let it go.
‘There’s something big there,’ said Dougie. He fixed a new hook to the line, baited it and cast.
He said: ‘What do I still owe you?’
‘A hundred and nineteen thousand pounds.’
‘Pounds, eh,’ said Dougie. The rod bent again and Dougie braced his heels against the bank. ‘Here,’ he said, and passed the rod to Alex. Alex could feel a powerful living energy yanking at the line. He could feel the anger and fear in the muscles of the creature in the stream.
‘What should I do?’ he said.