And yet, there were compensations. The boathouses were located amidst a cluster of wharves, where the Thames sweeps south from Hammersmith. They were only a brisk walk from Fulham Broadway and the King’s Road, and not more than a stone’s throw from the heart of London. At the end of the main boathouse, wide double doors twenty feet high opened out on to the river. Thrown open, and assuming a warm summer’s day instead of the miserable February weather that actually surrounded them, the view would be spectacular, the far side of the Thames a mass of elderflower and rosebay willowherb, tumbling down the cobbled bank into the water.
‘You know, it’s not so bad. My brother’s a builder and he’ll help sort this out. He won’t charge much, and besides, buildings are easy. We’ve got a much more immediate problem.’
‘We have?’ said Cameron. ‘Do I want to know?’
‘You certainly do,’ said Bryn, and told her.
3
‘Pick a disease, pick any disease.’
It was certainly an excellent selection that the young man had to choose from. A small cupboard tinkled with glass-stoppered ampoules, each one labelled with an acronym denoting the killer disease inside.
‘We’ve got a good range of retro-viruses in at the moment,’ continued Cameron. ‘Our spuma viruses are a little short, but we’ve got all the herpetic viruses, filoviruses, a very nice O’nyong-nyong fever … How about the arbovirus? You get some really interesting brain diseases, you know, generally fatal. I can offer you a wonderful Venezuelan equine encephalitis, some Russian spring-summer encephalitis, a pretty fair Japanese –’
The young man began to look pale as Cameron rambled on. He was a venture capitalist called Malcolm Milne and Bryn was hoping that Milne, or one of his competitors, would be able to solve the young company’s most immediate need – funding. But while there was every reason to impress Milne, there was no need to terrify him.
‘Why don’t you choose, Cameron? This one, for example.’ Bryn grabbed an ampoule at random.
‘Kuru virus!’ she exclaimed in delight. ‘New Guinea laughing sickness. Ex-cellent choice. Slow-acting. Fatal. Virtually wiped out the poor old Foré tribe. Not something we see so much now. Transmitted exclusively via cannibalism, you know. All those raw brains lying around. Mm-mmm. Very tempting.’
Jiggling the ampoule in pleasure, she bounded off to the temporary microscopy bench set up in Bryn’s living room. Cameron’s scientific clutter looked incongruous amidst Cecily’s carefully chosen furniture and costly paintings. On the whole, Bryn knew which he preferred, and he watched contentedly as Cameron drew blood from Milne, and added it to the virus solution. When she was done, Kati took the tube and slid it into the white dome of the Schoolroom, checking the connections into her PC. They were short of tables, so the Schoolroom just sat on the Persian carpet, like a mosque in miniature. ‘OK to start,’ she said.
‘OK,’ said Cameron, ‘get this. Inside the Schoolroom now, in that tube of blood, there are good cells and bad cells. The good cells are going to munch up the kuru virus, the bad cells are going to sit on their butts.’ She moved to the PC monitor, where a crowded data panel was being continually updated. ‘Look here. The Schoolroom is calculating your percentage of successful cells. This number here shows your score.’
Milne looked. ‘Two per cent?’ he said, obviously gutted. ‘Isn’t that awful?’
‘Against a real nasty kuru virus? No, no, I’d say that wasn’t bad at all. But, OK, you need to do better. Now, tell me, what would you do about it?’
‘What would I do?’
‘Sure. Think of your immune cells as soldiers, as a miniature army. What would you do?’
Milne thought about it. ‘I guess an army needs guns and ammunition. It needs equipment. Food, obviously …’ He shrugged. What do armies need? ‘Boots?’
Cameron was nodding vigorously, as though Milne was expounding some brilliantly technical scientific theory. ‘Pre-cise-ly,’ she enthused. ‘That’s it. Guns, ammo, food, boots. And that’s what your immune system needs. Vitamins, minerals, amino acids, antioxidants, catalysts, enzymes, co-factors. You name it. The right amounts, in the right mixtures.’
‘That’s your technique?’ said Milne, disappointed. ‘You dole out vitamins?’
Cameron shook her head. ‘No. Think about the army again. You’ve got it equipped, rested, fed. What next?’
‘Next? You attack the enemy, I suppose. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”’
Shakespeare hadn’t been on the Harvard med school syllabus and Cameron looked momentarily puzzled. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Exactly. You attack. But how? You’ve got tanks, planes, infantry – I don’t know, what do they have in armies? – artillery, missiles, all kinds of stuff, but do you just blaze off with everything, or is there some sequence you’re meant to follow? Do you just charge in, or do you co-ordinate things?’
Now it was Milne’s turn to look puzzled. ‘Well, you have a commander-in-chief, I suppose. He gets information, develops a strategy, sends out orders …’ He shrugged again.
Once again, Cameron looked radiant, as though one-to-one with Einstein. ‘Pre-cise-ly. Exactly right. Communication. Armies use radio, computers use program code. The human body uses – well, a whole bunch of stuff, but among other things, it uses peptides.’
Milne began to nod. ‘Peptides, right … program code. This is the Immune Reprogramming part, correct?’
Cameron nodded and tapped the Schoolroom on its baby-smooth dome. ‘Now watch.’
Cameron nodded to Kati, who hit some keys on the PC and threw a switch on the Schoolroom. The Schoolroom’s hum increased, and its faint vibration could be felt working its way through the thick carpet on the floor, creeping out towards Cecily’s expensively tasteful wallpaper.
‘Like I say, we can’t promise much,’ said Cameron. ‘The peptide sequences are very specific. We don’t know the code for humans, and we certainly don’t know the code for kuru viruses in humans.’
‘So what are you doing?’
‘We can get your army properly equipped. Vitamins, minerals, all the rest of it. And we know some parts of the code, peptides which seem to be associated with a generalised performance in immune activity. It’s kind of basic, like getting your plan of attack from a training manual. But still, at this stage it’s as good as we can do.’
Milne nodded.
The Schoolroom hummed in the surrounding silence. On screen, the percentage of good cells ticked slowly upwards: 3%, 4%, 5%, 6%, 6.5%. The rate of increase slowed to a halt. It stopped. Cameron glanced across at Kati, who caught her intention and instructed the Schoolroom to stop. The hum died away. A grey cardboard tray of needles stopped its tiny glassware chatter.
‘That’s it?’ said Milne.
Cameron peered intently at the screen, reading the hundred-and-twenty or so data parameters caught and measured by the Schoolroom. ‘This virus pretty much wiped out the Forés of New Guinea. I told you it was nasty.’
‘And don’t underestimate what we’ve just done,’ added Kati. ‘Your immune system was at two per cent competence. It’s now at six and a half per cent. You’re already three times better at fighting this disease, and that’s our most basic possible treatment programme.’
‘We could try to juice things up a little,’ said Cameron. ‘Now, if you were a rat, of course …’ She spoke briefly with Kati, discussing the on-screen data, and they agreed on some changes. Kati removed one tray of fluids from the Schoolroom and slotted another one home.
Their guess seemed to be an accurate one. The percentage of reprogrammed cells began to creep upwards once again: 7%, 8%, 10%. Then, all of a sudden, the numbers shot upwards: 25%, 67%, 98%. Error messages flashed on-screen and Cameron and Kati sighed in simultaneous disappointment.
‘Isn’t that good?’ asked Milne. ‘Ninety-eight per cent? That virus is dead meat.’
‘True,’ said Cameron, ‘but so are you. We overcharged your immune system and it’s gone crazy. Your army
isn’t just attacking the enemy, it’s attacking you. You’ve now got a highly serious auto-immune disease. If you were a patient, you’d be dead.’
Kati typed an instruction on the PC, and the Schoolroom’s hum died away. A little click of glassware indicated the arrival of a bottle in a dispensing chamber. Cameron withdrew it and shook it up against the light from the broad sash windows, then dropped it regretfully into a clinical waste bin.
‘OK. We failed. Shame you’re not a rat.’
‘And if I were?’
‘Then instead of throwing away that bottle, I’d have injected it back into your arm.’
‘Reprogrammed cells only, right?’
‘Right. We chuck the bad ones. And we wouldn’t take a little ten-millilitre sample from you, we’d take half a pint. Every day. Until you’d licked the disease.’
‘And it’s OK just to throw away the cells that don’t make it?’
‘It’s not OK, it’s actually good. It stimulates the body to grow more cells. And since we’re saving the good ones and chucking the bad ones, you head towards a situation where most of the cells in your immune system are highly trained at destroying kuru viruses.’ She raised her hands, as though to show that she could do no more. ‘There’s no way you can stay ill under those circumstances. None at all.’
Silence fell.
Bryn looked at Milne. Milne looked at Bryn.
‘OK,’ said Milne, at last. ‘I’m interested.’
4
‘Ha, ha, ha, Bryn, you’re a right berk, you are.’ Dai, Bryn’s brother, the former glory of the Pontypridd rugby pack, swung his leg back and kicked a hole right through the collapsing timber. ‘I must be a bloody ghost, like,’ he said, crashing against the side of the shed with all his weight and emerging in a shower of rotten wood on the other side. ‘I can walk through walls. Here, look here.’ He was about to give another demonstration of his supernatural powers, when Bryn intervened.
‘OK, OK, Dai, I can see the wall’s rotten, thank you. I was wondering whether you might be able to fix it up as well as knocking it down.’
Dai clambered back through the hole he’d made, meditatively ripping off another chunk of planking on his way.
‘That all depends on the load-bearing timber.’
He used a pocket knife to scrape at one of the main timbers supporting the roof. There was a layer of green slime on top, but underneath the wood was hard and good. He walked along the wall, testing the thick oak pillars. ‘Seems OK. Have you looked in the roof?’
‘Yes. The beams and roof trusses are basically fine. The rest of it’s a disaster.’
‘Ha, ha, ha, by God, Bryn, it’s a good job you didn’t get really drunk, otherwise God knows what you’d have bought. Dad’s cow barn looks a bloody palace compared.’
He laughed, but all the time his eye was assessing what needed to be done. It wasn’t long before he delivered his verdict. ‘I’d say we can clean up the main structural timbers, rip away the rest of it – that’ll be a short bloody job, and all – and just put up a new shell, tongue and groove, shiplap, whatever. Then the roof basically the same. What do you want? Cheapest would be sheets of ply with weather-proofing. ‘Course, you’d have to –’
‘Insulation.’ Kati had appeared from one of the rooms to the side of the main boathouse. She was wearing gumboots and was wadded like a doughnut in fleece-and-down jackets. Her perfect curls were stuffed away into a woolly hat and her cheeks shone pink and clear with the cold. ‘Insulation,’ she said. ‘Lots of it.’
Insulation, Bryn? I’ll use eighteen-mill tongue and groove. Can’t see you wanting insulation as well.’
Kati opened her mouth to protest, but Bryn waved her quiet. ‘My brother’s idea of a joke. We’ll stick in a ton of fibreglass.’
‘Mineral wool’s better,’ said Kati. ‘Non-carcinogenic.’
She explored the building’s timbering with her hands, trying to visualise how the insulation would work, and Bryn stepped close to her, not touching, but working alongside her, their breath forming one cloud which rose above them into the vastness of the roof. ‘Mineral wool it is,’ he said, without stepping away from her side.
‘Eh, eh, Ewan,’ said Dai. ‘We need to sort out some rooms in here. No point putting in insulation if you’ve got a thirty-foot ceiling. And what d’you want to do about the observation tower? Rip it down or fix it up?’
Bryn reluctantly left Kati’s side and continued round the derelict buildings with his brother, identifying problems, suggesting solutions. He was a good builder, Dai, and his business would have done well even if it hadn’t been the automatic choice of every Pontypridd fan within forty miles.
‘We going to use local labour, or d’you want me to bring my men?’
‘Use yours,’ said Bryn. ‘I don’t want to pay London wages if I can help it.’
‘I’ll tell that to my lads, see if they want to come.’
‘They’ll come.’
‘And they’ll have to stay somewhere.’
‘They can stay with me.’
‘I’ll try, I promise, but no guarantees.’
‘How many men d’you need!’
Dai looked around. ‘Half a dozen, plus trades. Sparky, plumber, decorator.’
Bryn pulled three wads of tickets from his pocket. ‘Six Nations rugby,’ he said. ‘England-Wales at Twickenham, Ireland-Wales at Lansdowne Road, Wales-France at the Millennium Stadium. I’m still trying to get Wales-Scotland, and the Italy game. Transport and beer thrown in as well.’
‘By damn,’ said Dai, fanning out the tickets in admiration. ‘You’re right, they’ll come. Bloody hell, Bryn, we’d even get Dad up to London for this, except he’s under the weather all the time now.’
After Dai had left, notebook crammed with notes, rugby tickets cosseted like the Crown Jewels in his breast pocket, Kati spoke to Bryn.
‘Nice guy, your brother.’
‘Salt of the earth, and just as thirsty.’
‘He called you Ewan. Why?’
‘We had a sheepdog called Ewan when we were lads. It’s just a nickname.’
Ewan was the name of a sheepdog, alright, but not just any old dog. Of all the many collies bred and trained by Bryn’s dad, Ewan was without question, beyond a doubt, and past dispute the randiest of them all. Dai had noticed Bryn’s not-so-casual closeness to Kati, and the nickname was invoked by either brother when they saw the other in pursuit of a skirt.
Kati nodded solemnly as though Bryn’s bland explanation made sense, knowing that it didn’t. Later that day, when Bryn took advantage of Cameron’s absence to take a meal alone with Kati, she laughed at his jokes, was merry and outgoing, was happy to talk about herself and her family, and showed a warm interest in Bryn and his family. But when the meal ended, she refused a ‘cup of coffee at my place’, kissed Bryn high on the cheek, and took a separate cab home to her Notting Hill flatshare.
‘Eh, eh, Ewan,’ said Bryn to himself as he watched her go, ‘never give up, boy, never give up.’
5
Starting in business is like jumping a ravine. Getting it right is terrific. Getting it nearly right is so bad, you’d better not have jumped at all.
Bryn knew that. He’d seen businesses take the run up, make the jump, lose their footing ever so slightly on take off – and then sail through the air, destined never to make the other side, destined to fall in appalled slow motion a thousand feet to the boulders and thorn bushes strewing the canyon floor.
He didn’t want to be like that. He took precautions, and one night he drew up a contract and brought it to Cameron, who was sitting in Bryn’s living-room-turned-laboratory.
‘Hey there, Money Man,’ she greeted him.
‘Hey there, Medicine Woman.’
‘Found me my money yet?’
‘Nope. Still looking. Found a cure for AIDS yet?’
‘Nope. Still looking.’
They laughed. Because he was laughing, Bryn spilled his coffee (Jamaican roast, double espre
sso, a hint of sugar). The coffee splurged out on to the sofa, staining the pale yellow silk. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said as Cameron leaped up, ready to mop it up. ‘Leave it.’
‘You don’t like the sofa? It’s kind of nice to spoil.’
‘It’s OK.’ Bryn shrugged. ‘But Cecily wants it back. As well as that,’ he said, pointing to a little Venetian chess table. ‘And that, that, that and that,’ he said, pointing to most of the other objects in the room.
‘She’s cleaning you out, huh?’
‘She’s helping herself to the contents of one pocket. The business is taking the contents of the other.’
‘So what does that leave you?’
Bryn laughed. ‘I don’t know. My trousers? Here. I’ve got a contract.’ He handed it over.
Before she took it, she held his gaze a little longer. ‘Don’t drive yourself too hard,’ she said. ‘You need to look after yourself.’
‘Don’t worry, I will. I am.’
She dropped her eyes and peered at the agreement. ‘I thought I already signed a contract.’
‘An employment contract, yes. This is an assignment of intellectual property rights. It transfers your research to the company. It’s required for insurance purposes. Doesn’t mean anything.’
‘If it doesn’t mean anything, why do it?’
‘Because it’s required for insurance purposes.’
‘I hand over everything I’ve worked on for the last five years, because some damn insurance company wants me to?’
‘Cameron, there’s no problem in signing this. I won’t stop you doing what you want with your research, absolutely anything that’s reasonable.’
‘I can still publish what I like?’
‘If you want to tell Corinth what’s going on, you can.’
‘But in principle. If I wanted, I could publish?’
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